A pragmatist perspective on self-state knowledge in the therapy context

Knowledge of our self-states seems to be characterized by two features: first-person authority - first-person statements about internal experience by someone can be used as grounds for making thirdperson claims about his/her self-state - and noninferentiality - we are not supposed to give reasons for justifying how we know that we are feeling e.g. sad, angry, happy. These features have been often accounted for by hypotesizing the existence of a faculty called introspection. In this paper we aim to develop an alternative approach that overcomes introspectionism and at the same time accounts for the two features of self-state knowledge outlined above. After a critical discussion of the introspectionist standpoint, we discuss the anti-introspectionist approaches of Peirce and Mead. In the attempt to corroborate Peirce's and Mead's views with empirical observations, we examine self-state knowledge in the specific setting of psychoterapy. We will propose that - in the context of psychotherapy - a third feature of self-knowledge should be considered, which we wish to term incompleteness. Incompleteness entails that the expression of self-states calls into question the active contribution of the interlocutor, who in turn helps the subject making meaning of the client's internal state. In the conclusion, we will discuss how the nature of first person authority and non-inferentiality should be reassessed when we consider the feature of incompleteness.