Does Saying "I'm Thinking of a Pink Elephant" Make It True?
Suppose I say "I'm thinking of a pink elephant". I'm sincere and there's no linguistic mistake. Does merely thinking such a thought or reaching such a judgment, silently or aloud, make it true? Tyler Burge and Jaakko Hintikka (among many others) have endorsed this idea; and it has often been thought key to understanding introspective self-knowledge.
I'll grant this: Certain things plausibly follow from the very having of a thought: that I'm thinking, that my thought has the content it has. Any thought that manages to assert the conditions or consequences of its existence will necessarily be true whenever it occurs.
But, indeed, anything that's evaluable as true or false, if it asserts the conditions or consequences of its existence, or has the right self-referential structure, will necessarily be true whenever it occurs: the spoken utterance "I'm speaking" or "I'm saying 'blu-bob'"; any English occurrence of "this sentence has five words"; any semaphore utterance of "I have two flags". This is simply the phenomenon of self-fulfillment. This kind of infallibility is cheap.
If I utter an infallibly self-fulfilling sentence, or if I have an infallibly self-fulfilling thought, it will be true regardless of what caused that utterance or thought -- whether introspection, fallacious reasoning, evil neurosurgery, quantum accident, stroke, indigestion, divine intervention, or sheer frolicsome confabulation. If "I'm thinking of a pink elephant" is of this species, then despite its infallibility, no particular introspective capacity, no remarkable self-detection, is required. And very little follows in general about our self-knowledge.
But I'm not sure that it is really necessary to think of a pink elephant to utter sincerely and comprehendingly, "I'm thinking of a pink elephant". Surely I needn't have a visual image of a pink elephant. Nor need I have, it seems, a sentence in inner speech to that effect (especially if the thought is uttered aloud). What is it to "think of" something? Is it merely to refer to it? To include it in a silent or spoken judgment? That seems a rather thin notion of "thinking"; and if we do adopt that notion, the vacuity of the infallibility claim becomes even more obvious. It becomes tantamount to "this thought makes reference to the following object: a pink elephant". Then it really is structurally no different from the utterance "I'm saying 'blu-bob'".
So, despite some philosophers' quest for and emphasis on the infallible in self-knowledge of the mind, to me the matter seems rather trivial, unimportant, and in fact utterly unconnected to the issue of the trustworthiness of introspection. (Take that, Descartes!) Or am I missing something? Maybe a fan of the importance of self-verifying thoughts can help me out?