Title Pending 4539

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The question whether introspection can be conceived of as a species of perception is one of the most divisive in the current philosophical debate on self-knowledge. Here, I argue for a qualified positive answer to that question. The paper starts off by considering a simple case of self-knowledge of what one sees. The first part of the paper argues that, in cases of this kind, we can explain self-knowledge in terms of a familiar phenomenon involving beliefs acquired through perception – a phenomenon that I shall call perceptual free-riding. The second part of the paper suggests that the same approach can be applied, with some provisos, to other instances of self-knowledge of 'passive' (or 'receptive') mental states. On the resulting view, much, but not all, introspection is perceptual and, among the cases of introspection that can be classified as perceptual, at least some are best regarded as 'limiting cases' of perception. The paper ends by comparing this view of self-knowledge with other prominent accounts of which it is, or may seem, a close relative.