The Cognitive Science of Self-Awareness

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该项目的目标是开发一种新的心理模型，用于我们对自己的命题态度（我们的信念、欲望、意图、判断、决定、假设等）的访问，整合了认知科学的广泛结果。根据这个模型，我们对自己态度的认识总是可解释的，与我们对他人态度的了解没有什么不同。（然而，这种模式允许我们更直接地接触到自己的经历和感受。）这项研究的主要成果将是一本跨学科的书。传统上，哲学家们假设我们有直接的，非推理的，内省的？获取我们自己的命题态度，和大多数普通人都是一致的。即使大多数认知科学家也认为这种传统模型是部分正确的。然而，来自认知科学不同领域的大量证据表明，人们往往会在自省的印象中臆想态度的归因。也有大量其他类型的科学数据挑战了我们对自我认知特征的传统描述。这些形式的证据将被调查和评估，提出的模型将被开发，与一系列相关的替代方案进行比较，并根据证据进行辩护。该项目将收集大量的科学证据，以支持一个清晰而大胆的假设，这个假设与常识以及几乎所有哲学家（活着的或死去的）的观点存在根本冲突。由于很少有认知科学家认识到他们自己的发现的理论意义和革命性意义，该项目也将对认知科学做出重要贡献。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The goal of the project is to develop a new psychological model of our access to our own propositional attitudes (our beliefs, desires, intentions, judgments, decisions, supposings, and the rest), integrating a wide range of results from across cognitive science. According to this model, our knowledge of our own attitudes is always interpretative, and is no different in kind from the access that we have to the attitudes of other people. (The model allows, however, that our access to our own experiences and feelings is more direct.) The main result of this research will be an interdisciplinary book.Philosophers have traditionally assumed that we have immediate, non-inferential, ?introspective? access to our own propositional attitudes, and most ordinary folk agree. Even most cognitive scientists believe that this traditional model is partially correct. Yet there is extensive evidence from different areas of cognitive science that people will often confabulate attributions of attitudes to themselves while remaining under the impression that they are introspecting. There is also plenty of scientific data of other sorts that challenges the traditional account of the character of our self-knowledge. These forms of evidence will be surveyed and evaluated, and the proposed model will be developed, compared with a range of relevant alternatives, and defended in the light of the evidence.The project will marshal a wide array of scientific evidence in support of a clearly delineated and bold hypothesis, which is radically in conflict with common sense and with the views of virtually all philosophers (alive or dead). Since few cognitive scientists have appreciated the theoretical significance and revolutionary implications of their own discoveries, the project will also make an important contribution to cognitive science.