When someone consciously believes, wants or intends something it seems she is in a position to acquire knowledge of her belief, want or intention that differs in kind from the knowledge she has of things without her mind, including the beliefs, desires or intentions of others. You need to rely on observation to tell what I consciously believe, desire or intend. I do not. Following Elizabeth Anscombe, we may say that my knowledge of my conscious beliefs, desires or intentions is non-observational.

Beliefs, desires and intentions are states with propositional content. Such states are commonly referred to as propositional attitudes. Generalizing, the claim that provides the focus of this book is that we can have non-observational knowledge of our consciously held propositional attitudes. Can we have non-observational knowledge of our propositional attitudes? If we can, how are we in a position to acquire such knowledge? These are the questions I attempt to answer here. Of course, giving an affirmative answer to the first implies that there is something special about the knowledge we can have of, at least, many of our psychological states. A number of philosophers, anxious to avoid what they see as a discredited Cartesian view of the mind, deny that there is any fundamental asymmetry between the self-knowledge that is the topic of this book and other varieties of knowledge. I will not attempt to defend a Cartesian view of the mind. Instead, I will argue for the following. Having the capacity to form a rational picture of a mind-independent world depends, in a sense to be explicated, on having the capacity to non-observationally self attribute consciously held propositional attitudes.