Such statements can also be reports about emotions or internal experiences.
Such arguments are plausible, and perhaps sometimes even persuasive. How can I correct someone who makes statements like:
I’m in pain.
I’m happy.
I’m sad.
I think that John is in the office.
I believe that Susan is in the museum.
I hope to be in Pittsburgh tomorrow.
I’m driving to Detroit this afternoon.
I want to quit smoking cigarettes.
I desire to finish my graduate degree.
My left foot hurts.
Reports of pain or emotion seem to be such that they can indeed be false, but not corrigible. The man who says, “I want to quit smoking” or “I’m in pain” may be correct, or may be mistaken, or may be lying. But on what basis can the listener correct the man’s statement?
The doctrine of the incorrigibility of first-person reports can be defended differently, depending on underlying assumptions about the philosophy of mind.
For those “substance dualists” willing to embrace a rich metaphysical ontology, the mind is an object, such first-person reports are descriptions of that object. Such reports can be accurate or inaccurate as they correspond to that object.
If and when such statements are not correct, they can be corrected by comparing them to the object in question. But the only person with direct access to that object is the speaker.
Questions about first-person reports are questions about other minds.
Someone with fewer ontological commitments than a ‘substance dualist,’ i.e., someone not committed to asserting the existence of a ‘mental substance’ out of which the mind is constructed, or someone who conducts his philosophy mind without reference to the possibility of metaphysical entities, will look the doctrine of incorrigibility differently.
One might, e.g., reduce such first-person reports of mental states to truth conditions for those statements, and the experiences which confirm or deny situations or events which would fulfill such truth conditions might be accessible only to the speaker.
Although the incorrigibility of such statements is a widely-accepted doctrine, there are some examples which cause difficulty for it.
There are, in fact, concrete examples of situations in which one person will say or write a sentence of the form “I want …” or “I believe …” or “I feel …” and a second person will reply, “No, you don’t want …” or “No, you don’t believe …” or “No, you don’t feel …”
Imagine, e.g., a married person who’s recently had an argument with her or his spouse. She or he might exclaim to a friend, “I want a divorce.” The friend, knowing that the outburst is a reaction to a transient emotion, might reply, “No, you don’t.”
Although the view that first person reports of mental or emotional states or events is plausible, attractive, and widely-accepted, it is nonetheless susceptible to questioning, and will ultimately need to be defended.
