Dennett argues that we can be mistaken about our own conscious experience. Despite this, he repeatedly asserts that we can
or do have unchallengeable authority of some sort in our reports about that experience. This assertion takes three forms.
First, Dennett compares our authority to the authority of an author over his fictional world. Unfortunately, that appears
to involve denying that there are actual facts about experience that subjects may be truly or falsely reporting. Second, Dennett
sometimes seems to say that even though we may be mistaken about what our conscious experience is, our reports about “what
it’s like to be us” must be correct. That view unfortunately requires a nonstandard and unremarked distinction between facts
about consciousness and facts about “what it’s like.” Third, Dennett says that reports about experience may be “incorrigible.”
However, that claim stands in tension with evidence, highlighted by Dennett himself, that seems to suggest that people can
be demonstrably mistaken about their own experience. Dennett needlessly muddies his case against infallibilism with these
unsatisfactory compromises.
Key words introspective infallibility - fictionalism - “what it’s like” - incorrigibility