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The facts about what I believe or hope for) that is not based on observation of some kind? And in what sense is this knowledge supposed to be essentially or exclusively first-personal? To many philosophers, these worries have suggested that so-called introspective judgment cannot be construed as the genuine “detection” of some independent psychological fact, and that the logic of “avowals” must be given an analysis that explains away their appearance as expressive of first-person judgments. There are a number of different forms such a “deflationary” account may take, but I want first to say something about what motivates the search for an account of this type.

THE IMAGE OF SEL F-KNOWLEDGE 17 that the first possibility cannot be right. If introspective awareness is anything at all—that is, anything distinct from the knowledge of the mental life of others—then it seems it must be something different from any knowledge based on inference. ” To reject a substantial epistemology for self-knowledge is to reject any form of the idea that it involves the awareness of some independently obtaining state of affairs. Boghossian briefly discusses some examples of what he means by “insubstantial” knowledge, such as the indexically grounded judgment that “I am here now,” all of which examples share the feature that the appearance of knowledge is grounded purely logically (or transcendentally), and hence that the denial of any such statement would involve some kind of immediate incoherence.

At this point, we encounter various difficulties in applying this picture, and instead of challenging the picture, philosophers may be more prepared to deny the substantiality of introspection itself. The first such difficulty is the original embarrassment of the “inner eye” and the concern that it cannot be cashed out as anything other than a misleading metaphor. There is no perceptual organ of introspection, in anything like the way there are identifiable organs of sight and hearing and the like.