The Authority of Reflection

Kriterion, 2022

This essay aims to motivate an epistemic non-individualistic conception of reflection. The proposal is non-individualistic because (a) it addresses more than individual metacognitive performance and (b) it refers to a situation in which two or more people are in dialogical disagreement about the same subject matter or target proposition; (c) their dispute is based on conversational space and they are entitled to expect one another to be engaged in attempts at truth, avoidance of error, and understanding. I call this proposal a Dialectical account of Reflection (DaR). According to (DaR), reflection is a conscious and intentional intellectual operation through which an individual becomes aware of the contents of disputed beliefs in a dialogical or interpersonal exchange, involving both her own beliefs and the beliefs of her interlocutors. In (DaR), reflection produces the epistemic good of avoiding epistemic vices and promoting epistemic moderation.

The Philosophical Review, 2004

European Journal of Philosophy, 2003

Metaphilosophy, 2020

According to a tradition going back to Socrates, an agent should thoroughly examine the grounds of her judgments before settling on what she has reason to do or believe. According to contemporary metaethical constructivism, which I assume, reflective scrutiny is also central to assessing a judgment’s claim to justification. In this paper, I argue against the injunctions to thoroughly examine oneself and seek ultimate reasons for one’s normative judgments. In other words, I argue against the ideal of the philosophical way of life. I show that in most cases the agent does not have reason to question the practical conclusion of her initial deliberation. It is only under very limited conditions, which I specify, that the agent is justified in engaging in further reflection. Furthermore, I argue that, if the agent does go for full self-examination, the consequences are most likely to be bad for her, given her practical interests.

[Excerpts from the penultimate draft. Includes the front matter, the first section of the preamble, and chapter 1.] *Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind* attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in “epistemic bad faith” in light of what psychology tells us. For the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting “ego-threatening” thoughts à la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts—e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However: Self-reflection presupposes an ability to know what one thinks in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just show naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are infallible in a (limited) range self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a “foundation” for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

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.

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.

Crítica (México D. F. En línea)

In this paper I deal with Richard Moran’s account of self-knowledge in his book Authority and Estrangement. After presenting the main lines of his account, I contend that, in spite of its novelty and interest, it may have some shortcomings. Concerning beliefs formed through deliberation, the account would seem to face problems of circularity or regress. And it looks also wanting concerning beliefs not formed in this way. I go on to suggest a diagnosis of these problems, according to which they would arise out of a view of agents too strongly dependent on the will.

Erkenntnis, 2020

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection (understood as second-order mental states). According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and creativity that is helpful in newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive (animal) form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option.

In his reply to our article “The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence”, Dan Zahavi formulates objections on the definition of “reflective consciousness” and on the role of language in first-person reports. We address his concerns by trying to answer three questions about the act of reflection: (i) are there other types of reflection beyond the one that fits our immanentist characterization (contact with experience and defocused unfolding of it), (ii) does this latter type of reflection (in which there is no “self-fission” between a reflecting and a reflected subject) really exist, and (iii) if this kind of immanent reflection indeed exists, does it afford us knowledge ?