 Shoemaker has also argued for the conceptual impossibility of introspective self-blindness with respect to one’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, and for somewhat different reasons one’s pains (1988, 1994b). A self-blind creature, by Shoemaker’s definition, would be a rational creature with a conception of the relevant mental states, and who can entertain the thought that she has this or that belief, desire, intention, or pain, but who nonetheless utterly lacks introspective access to the type of mental state in question. A self-blind creature could still gain “third person” knowledge of the mental states in question, through observing her own behavior, reading textbooks, and the like. (Thus, strict self/other parity accounts of self-knowledge of the sort described in Section 2.1 are accounts according to which one is self-blind in Shoemaker’s sense.) Shoemaker’s case against self-blindness with respect to belief turns on the dilemma of whether the self-blind creature can avoid “Moore-paradoxical” sentences (see Moore 1942, 1944 [1993]; Shoemaker 1995) like “it’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining” in which the subject asserts both P and that she doesn’t believe that P. If the subject is truly self-blind, Shoemaker suggests, there should be cases in which her best evidence is both that P and that she doesn’t believe that P (the latter, perhaps, based on misleading facts about her behavior). But if the subject asserts “P but I don’t believe that P” in such cases, she does not (contra the initial supposition) really have a rational command of the nature of belief and assertion; and thus it’s not a genuine case of self-blindness as originally intended. Alternatively, perhaps the creature can reliably avoid such Moore-paradoxical sentences, self-attributing belief in an apparently normal way. But then, Shoemaker suggests, it seems that she is indistinguishable from normal people in thought and behavior and hence not self-blind. For desire, intention, and pain, too, Shoemaker aims to reveal incoherences between having a rational command of the concepts in question and behaving as though one were systematically ignorant of or mistaken about those states. Shoemaker uses his case against self-blindness as part of his argument against self-detection accounts of introspection (described in Section 2.2 above): If introspection were a matter of detecting the presence of states that exist independently of the introspective judgment or belief, then it ought to be possible for the faculty enabling the detection to break down entirely, as in the case of blindness, deafness, etc., in outward perception (see also Nichols and Stich 2003, who argue that schizophrenia provides such a case).