There is both some actual fact of what it is like to experience your own mind, and then there is the way you make sense of it to explain it to yourself and others that has been reified into concepts. Just because the reification of the experience of our own thinking is flawed in a lot of ways doesn’t make it not evidence of our thoughts, it only makes it noisy, unreliable, and “known” in ways that have to be “unknown” (we have to find and notice confusion).
You worry that asking people who they think will tell us more about their understanding of how they think rather than how they actually think, and that’s probably true, but also useful, because they got that understanding somehow and it’s unlikely to be totally divorced from reality. Lacking better technology for seeing into our minds, we’re left to perform hermeneutics on our self reports.
There is both some actual fact of what it is like to experience your own mind, and then there is the way you make sense of it to explain it to yourself and others that has been reified into concepts. Just because the reification of the experience of our own thinking is flawed in a lot of ways doesn’t make it not evidence of our thoughts, it only makes it noisy, unreliable, and “known” in ways that have to be “unknown” (we have to find and notice confusion).
You worry that asking people who they think will tell us more about their understanding of how they think rather than how they actually think, and that’s probably true, but also useful, because they got that understanding somehow and it’s unlikely to be totally divorced from reality. Lacking better technology for seeing into our minds, we’re left to perform hermeneutics on our self reports.