Claims have long been made that introspection is special. I have a peculiar sort of knowledge about what is happening inside my own head. Descartes, Wundt, James all spoke to the issue of the epistemological status of introspection. They took three distinctly different views of it, but such august names indicate the importance of the idea.
In more recent years, one particular thread within this larger controversy has focused on the idea of immunity from error through misidentification (IEM).
Some authors, such as Sydney Shoemaker, [above] have stressed the notion that many propositions go wrong through misidentification. If I hear someone crying out in the next apartment I might say "My neighbor Joe is in pain." This might be wrong for several reasons (i.e. Joe might be practicing a part in a play, feigning pain.) But one way that I might go wrong is misidentification -- Joe might have moved out -- it may be my new neighbor who is in pain.
With introspective knowledge (I am in pain!) we cannot make this mistake.
Note this applies (if it applies at all) only to introspective claims, not to other claims one might make about one's self. I could see an image of a man, via my building's security camera footage. This man I see might look like me in the shadow or from the back. I might also see a bump on his head and say, "Hmmm, I have a bump on my head." This is a candidate for error through misidentification.
What is more, I could see the man in the video shaking and waving his arms frantically. I might conclude that this is a video of a moment (one I had mercifully forgotten) in which I was in pain. So the statement "I was in pain" at such-and-such a time, may be in error.
I will leave further discussion up to my readers. Can you think of cases where we would say both "X is an instance of (attempted) introspective knowledge" and "X fails through misidentification"? Or is the immunity. the impossibility of such a case, an analytic fact? Or ... what?
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