Pre-Print Excerpt from "Origins and Future of Self-Knowledge: Epistemic Agency, 4E Metacognition, and Artificial Intelligence" (10%)

Description

Abstract

How did humans come to know themselves—not just to have thoughts, but to reflect on those thoughts and ask whether they’re true or justified? And as our world slowly integrates a new kind of intelligence—non-human, non-animal, and increasingly entangled with our thinking—what might this mean for the future of self-knowledge? What is the relationship between artificial intelligence and our capacity to justify what we believe? Are AI-curated information environments enhancing this capacity—or hijacking it? Could machines themselves ever acquire self-knowledge one day, making it no longer a uniquely human achievement?

This book explores the origins and future of self-knowledge, arguing that our ability to evaluate beliefs in light of justification and truth depends on embodied feelings—like confidence and doubt—that guide how we monitor our thinking. Far from being private or internal, these feelings are shaped by social interactions and play a key role in how we learn to reason, justify, and take responsibility for our beliefs.

At the heart of this story is the idea that self-knowledge isn’t something we’re born with, nor something we achieve in isolation. It emerges through social scaffolding: the shared practices, expectations, and forms of accountability through which communities cultivate epistemic agency. Drawing from neuroscience, comparative and developmental psychology, philosophy of mind, and the ethics of technology, the book traces how these processes make self-knowledge possible—and where they might be leading us next: toward a more intellectually virtuous or ignorant society, or perhaps even toward a world in which machines come to know themselves.