First-Person Authority and Self-Knowledge as an Achievement

2018

This dissertation attempts to explain the nature and limits of first-person authority—the thesis that our first-person ascriptions about what mental states we are in are more likely to be true, compared to the ascriptions that others make about our mental states. My central claim is that the limits of first-person authority are the limits of introspection. After offering a general theory-neutral account of what it takes for a process to be introspective I address the question: ‘What mental states can be introspected?’ In so doing I first argue against sceptical accounts of self-knowledge which claim that we cannot introspect our propositional attitudes. I then defend a positive account of introspection for propositional attitudes, a view of self-knowledge called the Transparency Method.

2008

It is a natural, commonsense assumption that human beings who are competent in their understanding and use of folk-psychological concepts (e.g. ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘intention’, ‘fear’, ‘hope’, ‘jealousy’ and the like) have a special kind of authority with respect to claims they make about their own minds, in particular about their own intentional attitudes. One way to capture this special sense of authority is to argue that such claims are subject to a ‘default hypothesis’ of correctness (e.g. Wright 1991: 143–4). If I claim to be upset or happy about something or to have a yearning for plum pudding, then, all things being equal (i.e. assuming I am sane, and sincere, and not deeply distracted), the appropriate default presumption is that such claims are true. This presumption must be carefully understood, of course. On the one hand, it does not amount to endorsing a person’s infallibility or even incorrigibility with respect to the claims they make about their own minds; others may ...

Philosophical Topics, 2000

P. Pedrini, J. Kirsch (eds.), Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative, Contributions To Phenomenology 96, 2018

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the ways in which hermeneutics might contribute to understanding third-person self-interpretation. This chapter proceeds as follows: First, we showed that the "persons" form of analysis is used differently in linguistic, literary, and philosophical contexts. Second, we made the whole structure more complex by recognizing that there are different applications we can have for this "persons" form, and in particular, the goal of providing reliable epistemology for self-construction is different from providing self-understanding, in the hermeneutic sense. Third, we looked at the Truman Show Delusion, which is a case in which there seems to be a systematically mistaken third-person self-understanding. I argued there that the Golds are looking to provide an actual mechanism to account for this form of delusion, instead of just a symptomology as has been done in the past. Fourth, I argued that the real issue is navigating between regimes of knowledge, and that we require forensics to accomplish this. The result of these steps is to maintain that incommensurabilities in the regimes of knowledge, for instance between first-person and third-person accounts (or between multiple third-person accounts) might be ways of checking the reliability of a narrative, but they might also end up being part of the construction of the self. Holding accounts at different regimes of knowledge is not necessarily the sign of a deficiency in one's epistemology, or even the sign of a delusion. We might simply be highlighting the inadequacy of a forensics between two forms of reason, and that could be a creative moment for the self, rather than a dissolution of the self. Finally, I introduce the idea that the second-person can be an element of the forensics of self, in particular the openness to the voice of the other, which makes the third-person self-understanding possible.

In Self-Knowledge for Humans (2014), Cassam defends a quite broad inferentialist theory of substantial third-person self-knowledge, which he promises to extend to virtually all mental states, including the so-called " internal promptings " (Lawlor, 2009). Internal promptings are spontaneous, self-intimated experiential episodes that may not always be phenomenologically salient, or conceptually clearly subsumed, to the extent that the subject may not always be able to identify them. According to Cassam, however, their spontaneous surfacing does not preclude our access to them actually being inferential. I question the claim that internal promptings can really be covered by an inferentialist theory of self-knowledge. While I agree with Coliva (2016) that an inferentialist theory of self-knowledge does not in fact apply to self-knowledge of internal promptings, I show that this failure does not depend on lacking a story about how inferentialism can be extended to first-person self-knowledge, as Coliva diagnoses. Rather, Cassam's theory is flawed by an independent, and precedent, amphiboly fallacy affecting the concept of self-knowledge he makes use of. That is why Coliva's objection may not apply immediately, even if her verdict on the non-extensibility of an inferentialist theory of self-knowledge to internal promptings is unaffected. I also raise and discuss the issue of under-determination of inner experience with respect to conceptual schemes. Finally, by taking stock of the intrinsically

Acta Analytica-international Periodical for Philosophy in The Analytical Tradition

In Values and the Reflective Point of View (2006), Robert Dunn defends a certain expressivist view about evaluative beliefs from which some implications about self-knowledge are explicitly derived. He thus distinguishes between an observational and a deliberative attitude towards oneself, so that the latter involves a purely first-person point of view that gives rise to an especially authoritative, but wholly non-observational, kind of self-knowledge. Even though I sympathize with many aspects of Dunn's approach to evaluative beliefs and also with his stress on the practical significance of self-knowledge, I argue that his proposal seriously misinterprets the role of observation and evidence within the first-person point of view and, derivatively, in the formation of evaluative beliefs.

Teorema, 2011

Janus Head, 2001