In Julian Barnes’s novel Staring at the Sun, teenage Jean Serjeant is struck by the firmness of her parents’ moral views. Their opinions seem to her like ‘honking frogs’ compared with her own ‘twitching, vulnerable tadpoles’. How can people be so sure of what they think, Jean wonders: ‘How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place?’ It seems almost circular, putting Jean in mind of ‘a dog circling in pursuit of its own cropped tail’.[1]

Jean’s questions provoke further questions. How do we discover what we think? If we must use our minds to discover our minds, then can we make mistakes about them? Can you be wrong about what you think, just as you can be wrong about what somebody else thinks? I express liberal views on most political and social issues, but can I be sure I really believe the things I say? Perhaps I just say them to fit in and get my friends’ approval?

The suggestion that we might make mistakes about our own minds runs against common sense. We assume that our minds are, as it were, transparent to us -- that we can tell what’s in them directly and infallibly. Yet there are reasons to doubt that common sense is right about this. It is possible to have a thought without knowing that you have it. Infants and non-human animals have beliefs (for example, that Daddy is close by or that there is food on the table), without knowing that they have them. They have beliefs but do not have beliefs about their beliefs. Some further process is required (some ‘use of the mind’) to gain that self-knowledge, and the process might not always be reliable. Moreover, there is experimental evidence that we do in fact make mistakes about our own minds. It is well established that people’s choices can be influenced by factors of which they are not consciously aware. For example, if offered a choice of identical items, people tend to opt for the one furthest to the right. But if asked why they chose this item, they do not mention its position but offer some plausible reason, such as that they thought it was the best quality. Similar effects have been observed in other experimental situations. It seems that when people do not know why they performed an action, they unconsciously confabulate an explanation for it, attributing to themselves mental states they do not really have.[2]