Sellars on Self-Knowledge

Abstract

Wilfrid Sellars had an elaborate theory of self-knowledge about one’s own thoughts that anticipates some crucial claims and topics of current work on self-knowledge. In this contribution, I reconstruct Sellars’s theory of self-knowledge, and explore connections with more recent work on the topic. I argue that Sellars’s account undermines Shoemaker’s and Burge’s influential arguments against “perceptual” accounts of self-knowledge, and I discuss whether Sellars’s position is apt to give a plausible account of the relation between self-knowledge and phenomenal consciousness.