Analytic Existentialism, edited by Marusic and Schroeder (OUP 2024), 2024
The paper is a close reading of the section on 'The Look' from Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness', ... more The paper is a close reading of the section on 'The Look' from Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness', contrasting it with the Classic epistemological problem of 'other minds'.
In moral psychology, the human capacity for self-consciousness is often seen as central to critic... more In moral psychology, the human capacity for self-consciousness is often seen as central to critical reflection and with that, to the difference between being simply moved to act and acting on reasons. In many representations of this capacity, however, self-consciousness is described as a form of self-division or self-multiplication. On Christine Korsgaard’s view, self-consciousness is the capacity to “distance oneself” from the part of oneself one is self-conscious of, and it is this space opened up that makes it possible to act on reasons affirmed by the agent as such. This paper raises some questions about the conception of self-consciousness as form of separation or self-division that is shared by both Korsgaard and some of her critics, and argues that we can abandon this picture while still retaining what is important in the first-person perspective of the practical agent.
Throughout the history of philosophy, relations to oneself have been modeled on intersubjective r... more Throughout the history of philosophy, relations to oneself have been modeled on intersubjective relations, as the “internalization” of possible relations with others. Plato describes thought itself as a kind of internal dialogue, and Kant grounds normativity on “self-legislation” and the possibility of obligations to oneself. The conscience is pictured as an “internalized other.” This chapter argues for “self-other asymmetries” governing speech and interlocution which limit the sense in which a person can be her own interlocutor, or treat either a part of herself or a temporal stage of herself as such a conversational partner (Korsgaard, Dummett). The chapter revisits the related claims of Anscombe and Cavell that “believing someone” does not have a first-person reflexive form, and develops the idea of the two forms of agency expressed in speech.
Grice pictures the speaker as in one way too passive in the communicative encounter, insofar as i... more Grice pictures the speaker as in one way too passive in the communicative encounter, insofar as it centers on the speaker’s manifestation of her belief state, which is only contingently related to any act of hers; and in another way as active in the wrong way, since the speaker is pictured as having a basically unilateral, instrumental relation to producing an effect on the belief state of her audience. The chapter describes three “commonplaces” about the norms of ordinary testimony: (1) the speaker is assumed to be speaking sincerely, (2) the speaker is aware of and understands what she is saying, and (3) the speaker counts as having asserted or told her audience that P whether or not she is sincere. Showing how these commonplaces reinforce each other leads to a different conception of the meaning of sincerity, and a distinction between two forms of knowing what one is doing.
The chapter returns to the idea of two forms of agential knowledge, as that applies to “social ac... more The chapter returns to the idea of two forms of agential knowledge, as that applies to “social acts of mind,” and act-descriptions which only apply to what is done intentionally (Anscombe). This leads to a discussion of the first person in illocution and the meaning of “hereby,” and Tugendhat’s idea of the “relativization of the distinction between speaker and hearer.” It is argued that the focus of much epistemological work on testimony is exclusively on the “consumer’s” perspective on testimony, which favors the “Indicative” model, but this misses the complementarity of the speaker’s and interlocutor’s perspectives. The meaning of mutuality in communication is examined in connection with the “third clause” of Grice’s formulation, recent criticisms of the need for that clause, and Strawson’s notion of communication that is “essentially avowable.”
From Normativity and Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard, 2022
An examination of the role of self-consciousness in the moral psychology of Christine Korsgaard, ... more An examination of the role of self-consciousness in the moral psychology of Christine Korsgaard, with special attention to the idea of 'stepping back' (from an inclination or a perception). I argue that we should avoid talk of 'self-division' to preserve the assertion of self-identity in the relevant form of self-consciousness, and that for this we need to distinguish what is first-personal in the practical point of view from the Cartesian idea of a mental interior.
An examination of the pursuit of knowledge in Proust, in connection with the metaphysical and sel... more An examination of the pursuit of knowledge in Proust, in connection with the metaphysical and self-imposed obstacles to knowledge, and the obstacles imposed by others, especially in the context of erotic relationships and what I call the 'social dynamics of knowledge'.
The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (... more The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (anxiety toward the future, regret toward the past, etc.) and as illusory because they involve the failure to appreciate the primary reality of the present. Insofar as the diagnosis presents the suffering as dependent on the illusion, we will naturally be open to being free of both. The restricted point I hope to make in his lecture is that while there are certainly ways of being occupied with past or future times that we have reason to avoid, both as forms of suffering and as ways of losing perspective, such forms of criticism cannot base themselves on any metaphysical claim to the singular or exclusive reality of the present. The task of developing useful forms of describing and assessing the different ways we can go wrong in temporalizing our lives is hindered rather than helped by the suggestion that our concerns with the past and with the future are as such forms of attachment to the Unreal.
Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, 2019
It is of course a great honor for me to say a few words about Stanley on this occasion, and to sa... more It is of course a great honor for me to say a few words about Stanley on this occasion, and to say a few things about what he has brought to philosophy, what he has meant to me, and what his work contributes to American writing. And it is also clear that I have been given an impossible task, as anyone will know who has so much as an inkling of the variety and sweep of the texts, the questions, and the human phenomena that he has made available to philosophical reflection over the course of his many books.
In this article, I respond to the comments of six philosophers on my book Authority and Estrangem... more In this article, I respond to the comments of six philosophers on my book Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-knowledge. My reply to Josep Corbí mostly concerns the relation between the two modes of selfknowledge I call 'avowal' and 'attribution', and the sense of activity involved in self-knoweldge; in responding to Josep Prades I try to clarify my picture of deliberation and show that it is not 'intellectualist' in an objectionable sense; Komarine Romdenh-Romluc's paper enables me to say some things about the idea of unconscious beliefs, specifically in relation to the phenomenological tradition; the paper by Hilan Bensusan and Manuel de Pinedo helps me to clarify my sense of the relation of the first-person perspective to the specifically normative relation to one's beliefs and other attitudes; and Carla Bagnoli's paper provides an opportunity to explore some connections between the deliberative stance and the notion of recognition in Hegel and in contemporary philosophy.
This is a philosophical essay on the role of narrative autobiography in the effort of self-unders... more This is a philosophical essay on the role of narrative autobiography in the effort of self-understanding. It originated as the 2015 lecture in the annual series of Aquinas Lectures at Marquette University, begun in 1937.
Much of the discussion in The Exchange of Words is oriented around two broad distinctions. From T... more Much of the discussion in The Exchange of Words is oriented around two broad distinctions. From Thomas Reid I take the idea of “testifying a fact” as an example of what he calls a “social act of mi...
I am grateful to David Hills, Lizzie Fricker, and Adam Leite for the careful attention they have ... more I am grateful to David Hills, Lizzie Fricker, and Adam Leite for the careful attention they have given to my book and their stimulating comments at our APA session in February 2019. Before I get to my responses, I would like to spend some time giving a kind of overview of "The Exchange of Words," going over some of its main themes and how I see them hang together. This will put some of my specific replies in context. In doing so, I will run the risk of both being sketchy and occasionally sounding dogmatic, so I beg the reader's indulgence. When I wrote my first paper on testimony, I felt that the fact that human testimony is a linguistic affair was not being given the right emphasis in the discussions that I was familiar with. Not that this was ignored, of course, but it seemed to me that not enough was being made of the fact that speaking, and hence testifying, is a social practice, dependent on the institution of language, and that the way a person's claim that P can be a reason for her audience to believe that P depends on facts about speech that have no equivalent in the ordinary confrontation with evidence, such as the telltale footprint on the sandy path. In considering the person's utterance or the footprint as a reason to believe something, we may, in both cases, be said to be dependent on what some person does, but, in the case of being told something, we are dependent on the speaker in distinctive ways. Regarding the footprint in the sand, we may draw various conclusions on our own; there are many things we might learn from it, but when a speaker testifies to some fact she commits herself to, the truth of the particular proposition is affirmed. 1 Her speech is not a brute phenomenon, which might mean anything or nothing, but rather the assertion of a particular proposition. And the act of telling or testifying is a particular kind of act of the person, one that the speaker specifically means to count as a reason to believe for her audience; she means it to be specifically informative. In this, it is different from her other actions, which are not addressed to anyone but from which an observer may be able to draw interesting conclusions. In writing the book, I wanted to understand the phenomenon of one person addressing another, and what that has to do with commitment in speech. And, from the beginning, I was struck by the fact that, as speakers, we each have our own perspective on what it is to make our words count for others, to make the difference between simply saying some words and actually telling someone something. In any act of telling, there are two perspectives at play: that of the speaker and that of her audience. But of course each of us adopts these different perspectives in turn. Every speaker is also an interlocutor. This duality of coordinated perspectives already seems different from the ordinary confrontation with evidence like the footprint, which is a phenomenon that has no perspective on itself or its status as a reason to believe something. To me, this seemed related to another puzzle about testimony: If my act of telling can be my interlocutor's reason for believing something, a genuine epistemic reason, could that same act be my own reason for believing the same thing? If it is a genuine epistemic reason, like the footprint in the sand, can it not count in the same way for both of us on the same occasion? If it was I who made that footprint on the sand, I could inspect it and draw conclusions from it in just the same spirit as any other observer. The fact that I was the one who produced it does not put me in a different epistemic position with respect to it than anyone else. Why does it seem different in the case of my claiming of that P? Can I not rely on my own claim the way I expect my interlocutor to do? If
Part IV of Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason is an extended meditation on the similarities and... more Part IV of Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason is an extended meditation on the similarities and differences between external world skepticism and skepticism about other minds. One contrast between the two forms of skepticism is the irreducible duality of perspectives with respect to minds (“inside” and “outside”) and the fact that the skeptical inquirer necessarily occupies both perspectives. Another aspect of this relation character of the problem of other minds is what Cavell calls the possibility for both “Active” and “Passive” directions for skepticism here; that is, skepticism with respect to the knowability of other minds, and skepticism with respect to the possibility of being known by any other mind. This paper argues that a lesson of this part of Cavell’s discussion is the importance of seeing these two directions for skepticism as comprising one single phenomenon which requires understanding them in terms of each other.
Analytic Existentialism, edited by Marusic and Schroeder (OUP 2024), 2024
The paper is a close reading of the section on 'The Look' from Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness', ... more The paper is a close reading of the section on 'The Look' from Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness', contrasting it with the Classic epistemological problem of 'other minds'.
In moral psychology, the human capacity for self-consciousness is often seen as central to critic... more In moral psychology, the human capacity for self-consciousness is often seen as central to critical reflection and with that, to the difference between being simply moved to act and acting on reasons. In many representations of this capacity, however, self-consciousness is described as a form of self-division or self-multiplication. On Christine Korsgaard’s view, self-consciousness is the capacity to “distance oneself” from the part of oneself one is self-conscious of, and it is this space opened up that makes it possible to act on reasons affirmed by the agent as such. This paper raises some questions about the conception of self-consciousness as form of separation or self-division that is shared by both Korsgaard and some of her critics, and argues that we can abandon this picture while still retaining what is important in the first-person perspective of the practical agent.
Throughout the history of philosophy, relations to oneself have been modeled on intersubjective r... more Throughout the history of philosophy, relations to oneself have been modeled on intersubjective relations, as the “internalization” of possible relations with others. Plato describes thought itself as a kind of internal dialogue, and Kant grounds normativity on “self-legislation” and the possibility of obligations to oneself. The conscience is pictured as an “internalized other.” This chapter argues for “self-other asymmetries” governing speech and interlocution which limit the sense in which a person can be her own interlocutor, or treat either a part of herself or a temporal stage of herself as such a conversational partner (Korsgaard, Dummett). The chapter revisits the related claims of Anscombe and Cavell that “believing someone” does not have a first-person reflexive form, and develops the idea of the two forms of agency expressed in speech.
Grice pictures the speaker as in one way too passive in the communicative encounter, insofar as i... more Grice pictures the speaker as in one way too passive in the communicative encounter, insofar as it centers on the speaker’s manifestation of her belief state, which is only contingently related to any act of hers; and in another way as active in the wrong way, since the speaker is pictured as having a basically unilateral, instrumental relation to producing an effect on the belief state of her audience. The chapter describes three “commonplaces” about the norms of ordinary testimony: (1) the speaker is assumed to be speaking sincerely, (2) the speaker is aware of and understands what she is saying, and (3) the speaker counts as having asserted or told her audience that P whether or not she is sincere. Showing how these commonplaces reinforce each other leads to a different conception of the meaning of sincerity, and a distinction between two forms of knowing what one is doing.
The chapter returns to the idea of two forms of agential knowledge, as that applies to “social ac... more The chapter returns to the idea of two forms of agential knowledge, as that applies to “social acts of mind,” and act-descriptions which only apply to what is done intentionally (Anscombe). This leads to a discussion of the first person in illocution and the meaning of “hereby,” and Tugendhat’s idea of the “relativization of the distinction between speaker and hearer.” It is argued that the focus of much epistemological work on testimony is exclusively on the “consumer’s” perspective on testimony, which favors the “Indicative” model, but this misses the complementarity of the speaker’s and interlocutor’s perspectives. The meaning of mutuality in communication is examined in connection with the “third clause” of Grice’s formulation, recent criticisms of the need for that clause, and Strawson’s notion of communication that is “essentially avowable.”
From Normativity and Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard, 2022
An examination of the role of self-consciousness in the moral psychology of Christine Korsgaard, ... more An examination of the role of self-consciousness in the moral psychology of Christine Korsgaard, with special attention to the idea of 'stepping back' (from an inclination or a perception). I argue that we should avoid talk of 'self-division' to preserve the assertion of self-identity in the relevant form of self-consciousness, and that for this we need to distinguish what is first-personal in the practical point of view from the Cartesian idea of a mental interior.
An examination of the pursuit of knowledge in Proust, in connection with the metaphysical and sel... more An examination of the pursuit of knowledge in Proust, in connection with the metaphysical and self-imposed obstacles to knowledge, and the obstacles imposed by others, especially in the context of erotic relationships and what I call the 'social dynamics of knowledge'.
The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (... more The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (anxiety toward the future, regret toward the past, etc.) and as illusory because they involve the failure to appreciate the primary reality of the present. Insofar as the diagnosis presents the suffering as dependent on the illusion, we will naturally be open to being free of both. The restricted point I hope to make in his lecture is that while there are certainly ways of being occupied with past or future times that we have reason to avoid, both as forms of suffering and as ways of losing perspective, such forms of criticism cannot base themselves on any metaphysical claim to the singular or exclusive reality of the present. The task of developing useful forms of describing and assessing the different ways we can go wrong in temporalizing our lives is hindered rather than helped by the suggestion that our concerns with the past and with the future are as such forms of attachment to the Unreal.
Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, 2019
It is of course a great honor for me to say a few words about Stanley on this occasion, and to sa... more It is of course a great honor for me to say a few words about Stanley on this occasion, and to say a few things about what he has brought to philosophy, what he has meant to me, and what his work contributes to American writing. And it is also clear that I have been given an impossible task, as anyone will know who has so much as an inkling of the variety and sweep of the texts, the questions, and the human phenomena that he has made available to philosophical reflection over the course of his many books.
In this article, I respond to the comments of six philosophers on my book Authority and Estrangem... more In this article, I respond to the comments of six philosophers on my book Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-knowledge. My reply to Josep Corbí mostly concerns the relation between the two modes of selfknowledge I call 'avowal' and 'attribution', and the sense of activity involved in self-knoweldge; in responding to Josep Prades I try to clarify my picture of deliberation and show that it is not 'intellectualist' in an objectionable sense; Komarine Romdenh-Romluc's paper enables me to say some things about the idea of unconscious beliefs, specifically in relation to the phenomenological tradition; the paper by Hilan Bensusan and Manuel de Pinedo helps me to clarify my sense of the relation of the first-person perspective to the specifically normative relation to one's beliefs and other attitudes; and Carla Bagnoli's paper provides an opportunity to explore some connections between the deliberative stance and the notion of recognition in Hegel and in contemporary philosophy.
This is a philosophical essay on the role of narrative autobiography in the effort of self-unders... more This is a philosophical essay on the role of narrative autobiography in the effort of self-understanding. It originated as the 2015 lecture in the annual series of Aquinas Lectures at Marquette University, begun in 1937.
Much of the discussion in The Exchange of Words is oriented around two broad distinctions. From T... more Much of the discussion in The Exchange of Words is oriented around two broad distinctions. From Thomas Reid I take the idea of “testifying a fact” as an example of what he calls a “social act of mi...
I am grateful to David Hills, Lizzie Fricker, and Adam Leite for the careful attention they have ... more I am grateful to David Hills, Lizzie Fricker, and Adam Leite for the careful attention they have given to my book and their stimulating comments at our APA session in February 2019. Before I get to my responses, I would like to spend some time giving a kind of overview of "The Exchange of Words," going over some of its main themes and how I see them hang together. This will put some of my specific replies in context. In doing so, I will run the risk of both being sketchy and occasionally sounding dogmatic, so I beg the reader's indulgence. When I wrote my first paper on testimony, I felt that the fact that human testimony is a linguistic affair was not being given the right emphasis in the discussions that I was familiar with. Not that this was ignored, of course, but it seemed to me that not enough was being made of the fact that speaking, and hence testifying, is a social practice, dependent on the institution of language, and that the way a person's claim that P can be a reason for her audience to believe that P depends on facts about speech that have no equivalent in the ordinary confrontation with evidence, such as the telltale footprint on the sandy path. In considering the person's utterance or the footprint as a reason to believe something, we may, in both cases, be said to be dependent on what some person does, but, in the case of being told something, we are dependent on the speaker in distinctive ways. Regarding the footprint in the sand, we may draw various conclusions on our own; there are many things we might learn from it, but when a speaker testifies to some fact she commits herself to, the truth of the particular proposition is affirmed. 1 Her speech is not a brute phenomenon, which might mean anything or nothing, but rather the assertion of a particular proposition. And the act of telling or testifying is a particular kind of act of the person, one that the speaker specifically means to count as a reason to believe for her audience; she means it to be specifically informative. In this, it is different from her other actions, which are not addressed to anyone but from which an observer may be able to draw interesting conclusions. In writing the book, I wanted to understand the phenomenon of one person addressing another, and what that has to do with commitment in speech. And, from the beginning, I was struck by the fact that, as speakers, we each have our own perspective on what it is to make our words count for others, to make the difference between simply saying some words and actually telling someone something. In any act of telling, there are two perspectives at play: that of the speaker and that of her audience. But of course each of us adopts these different perspectives in turn. Every speaker is also an interlocutor. This duality of coordinated perspectives already seems different from the ordinary confrontation with evidence like the footprint, which is a phenomenon that has no perspective on itself or its status as a reason to believe something. To me, this seemed related to another puzzle about testimony: If my act of telling can be my interlocutor's reason for believing something, a genuine epistemic reason, could that same act be my own reason for believing the same thing? If it is a genuine epistemic reason, like the footprint in the sand, can it not count in the same way for both of us on the same occasion? If it was I who made that footprint on the sand, I could inspect it and draw conclusions from it in just the same spirit as any other observer. The fact that I was the one who produced it does not put me in a different epistemic position with respect to it than anyone else. Why does it seem different in the case of my claiming of that P? Can I not rely on my own claim the way I expect my interlocutor to do? If
Part IV of Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason is an extended meditation on the similarities and... more Part IV of Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason is an extended meditation on the similarities and differences between external world skepticism and skepticism about other minds. One contrast between the two forms of skepticism is the irreducible duality of perspectives with respect to minds (“inside” and “outside”) and the fact that the skeptical inquirer necessarily occupies both perspectives. Another aspect of this relation character of the problem of other minds is what Cavell calls the possibility for both “Active” and “Passive” directions for skepticism here; that is, skepticism with respect to the knowability of other minds, and skepticism with respect to the possibility of being known by any other mind. This paper argues that a lesson of this part of Cavell’s discussion is the importance of seeing these two directions for skepticism as comprising one single phenomenon which requires understanding them in terms of each other.
I am grateful for Krista Lawlor's response to my book and for the challenges she raises. I've ga... more I am grateful for Krista Lawlor's response to my book and for the challenges she raises. I've gained much from her Assurance book 1 , which takes up a very different set of issues from mine but is a brilliant model for bringing together perspectives from the philosophy of language with the communication of knowledge. Regarding Exchange, Lawlor raises various question about 1. the role of freedom, agency and self-knowledge in my account, about 2. the role played by the recognition of the interlocutor, and about 3. the relation of the idea of a 'social act of mind' to that of 'joint action'. I'll say a bit about each of these.
From Thomas Reid I take the idea of 'testifying a fact' as an example of what he calls a 'social ... more From Thomas Reid I take the idea of 'testifying a fact' as an example of what he calls a 'social act of mind', as contrasted with a 'solitary act' like seeing or remembering, and the former of which he says "can have no existence without the intervention of some other intelligent being, who acts a part in them" In the book I seek to understand the nature of the social act of testifying or telling, how the epistemic status of the speaker's utterance depends on the kind of act it is, what the distinctive form of such acts is and how to characterize the kind of mutual understanding that seems essential to them.
Abstract: In philosophy it is widely recognized that a person’s first-person perspective
on his o... more Abstract: In philosophy it is widely recognized that a person’s first-person perspective on his own thought and action is importantly different from the third-person perspective we may have on the thought and actions of other people. In daily life it is natural to ask someone what he is doing or what he thinks about something, on the assumption that he knows what he is doing or what he is thinking. Some philosophers, however, argue that it is impossible to speak of knowledge in this context because the idea of knowledge requires a kind of distance between subject and object, a distance that is not present in the first-person context. I argue that this denial of self-knowledge is a paradoxical conclusion that we can resist, while retaining what is distinctive about the first-person.
The French version of my contribution to a conference in honor of Vincent Descombes, 'Les catégor... more The French version of my contribution to a conference in honor of Vincent Descombes, 'Les catégories de l’esprit: Autour de la philosophie sociale de Vincent Descombes', École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,23-25 mai 2013. translation by Valerie Aucouturier.
My contribution to a conference in honor of Vincent Descombes, 'Les catégories de l’esprit: Aut... more My contribution to a conference in honor of Vincent Descombes, 'Les catégories de l’esprit: Autour de la philosophie sociale de Vincent Descombes', École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,23-25 mai 2013
Philip Pettit delivered his Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2015 under the title 'The Birth of Eth... more Philip Pettit delivered his Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2015 under the title 'The Birth of Ethics'. Unfortunately my comments here will not appear in the published version of the lectures.
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on his own thought and action is importantly different from the third-person
perspective we may have on the thought and actions of other people. In daily
life it is natural to ask someone what he is doing or what he thinks about something,
on the assumption that he knows what he is doing or what he is thinking.
Some philosophers, however, argue that it is impossible to speak of knowledge in
this context because the idea of knowledge requires a kind of distance between
subject and object, a distance that is not present in the first-person context. I
argue that this denial of self-knowledge is a paradoxical conclusion that we can
resist, while retaining what is distinctive about the first-person.