I distinguish two ways of explaining our capacity for ‘transparent’ knowledge of our own present beliefs, perceptions, and intentions: an inferential and a reflective approach. Alex Byrne (2011) has defended an inferential approach, but I argue that this approach faces a basic difficulty, and that a reflective approach avoids the difficulty. I conclude with a brief sketch and defence of a reflective approach to our transparent self-knowledge, and I show how this approach is connected with the thesis that we must (...) distinguish between a kind of self-knowledge that is of oneself as agent and another kind that is of oneself as patient. (shrink)

It has been claimed in the literature that collective intentionality and group attitudes presuppose some “sense of ‘us’” among the participants (other labels sometimes used are “sense of community,” “communal awareness,” “shared point of view,” or “we-perspective”). While this seems plausible enough on an intuitive level, little attention has been paid so far to the question of what the nature and role of this mysterious “sense of ‘us’” might be. This paper states (and argues for) the following five claims: (1) (...) it is neither the case that the sense in question has the community (or “us”) in its content or as its object nor does the attitude in question presuppose a preexistent community (or “us”) as its subject. (2) The “sense of ‘us’” is plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (3) Plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the individual mind. (4) The most important conceptions of plural subjects, collective persons, or group agents in the current literature fail to recognize the nature and role of plural self-awareness, and therefore fall short in important respects. (5) In spite of the striking similarities between the plural and the singular mind, there are important differences to consider. The authority of the singular first person point of view has no equivalent in the plural case. (shrink)

Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. The paper addresses two questions: Q1. What are these similarities (and differences)? Q2. How does one tell that one is recalling (and so not perceiving or imagining)?

This paper critically examines currently influential transparency accounts of our knowledge of our own beliefs that say that self-ascriptions of belief typically are arrived at by “looking outward” onto the world. For example, one version of the transparency account says that one self-ascribes beliefs via an inference from a premise to the conclusion that one believes that premise. This rule of inference reliably yields accurate self-ascriptions because you cannot infer a conclusion from a premise without believing the premise, and so (...) you cannot infer from a premise that you believe the premise unless you do believe it. I argue that this procedure cannot be a source of justification, however, because one can be justified in inferring from p that q only if p amounts to strong evidence that q is true. This is incompatible with the transparency account because p often is not very strong evidence that you believe that p. For example, unless you are a weather expert, the fact that it will rain is not very strong evidence that you believe it will rain. After showing how this intuitive problem can be made precise, I conclude with a broader lesson about the nature of inferential justification: that beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by evidential relationships between the facts or propositions which those beliefs represent. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? The question is neglected by epistemologists. This paper attempts an answer.

The purpose of this essay is to account for privileged access or, more precisely, the special kind of epistemic right that we have to some beliefs about our own mental states. My account will have the following two main virtues. First of all, it will only appeal to those conceptual elements that, arguably, we already use in order to account for perceptual knowledge. Secondly, it will constitute a naturalizing account of privileged access in that it does not posit any mysterious (...) faculty of introspection or "inner perception" mechanism. (shrink)

Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for philosophy (...) of mind, whereas the more radical and interesting versions of externalism are quite difficult to support. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that what I call the simple theory of introspection can be extended to account for our introspective knowledge of what we believe as well as what we consciously experience. In section one, I present the simple theory of introspection and motivate the extension from experience to belief. In section two, I argue that extending the simple theory provides a solution to Moore’s paradox by explaining why believing Moorean conjunctions always involves some degree (...) of irrationality. In section three, I argue that it also solves the puzzle of transparency by explaining why it’s rational to answer the question whether one believes that p by answering the question whether p. Finally, in section four, I defend the simple theory against objections by arguing that self-knowledge constitutes an ideal of rationality. (shrink)

Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self-knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson’s account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self-ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation”. It has also been claimed that Davidson’s account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation”. I will (...) argue that not only are these explanations of self-knowledge implausible, but Davidson himself has already rejected them. Thus, neither can be attributed to Davidson as his suggested account of self-knowledge. I will then introduce and support what I take to be Davidson’s official and independent account of self-knowledge, that is, his “Transcendental Explanation”. I will defend this view against certain potential objections and finally against the objections made by William Child. (shrink)

Strawson (1994) and Peacocke (1992) introduced thought experiments that show that it seems intuitive that there is, in some way, an experiential character to mental events of understanding. Some (e.g., Siewert 1998, 2011; Pitt 2004) try to explain these intuitions by saying that just as we have, say, headache experiences and visual experiences of blueness, so too we have experiences of understanding. Others (e.g., Prinz 2006, 2011; Tye 1996) propose that these intuitions can be explained without positing experiences of understanding. (...) Call this the debate between Realism and Anti-Realism about experiences of understanding. This paper aims to advance that debate in two ways. In the first half, I develop more precise characterizations of what Realists and Anti-Realists propose. In the second half, I distinguish the four most plausible versions of Anti-Realism and argue that Realism better explains the target intuition than any of them does. (shrink)

In philosophical inquiry into the mind, the metaphor of ‘transparency’ has been attractive to many who are otherwise in deep disagreement. It has thereby come to have a variety of different and mutually incompatible connotations. The mind is said to be transparent to itself, our perceptual experiences are said to be transparent to the world, and our beliefs are said to be transparent to – a great many different things. The first goal of this essay is to sort out the (...) different uses of the notion of transparency in the context of the philosophy of mind. The remainder of the essay will then be devoted to examining so-called Transparency theories of self-knowledge, or how we know our own minds. This type of theory has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years, but its prospects hinge on answers to unresolved questions concerning the epistemological details of the account and the scope of its ambitions. (shrink)

Gareth Evans famously affirmed an explanatory connection between answering the question whether p and knowing whether one believes that p. This is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that judging that p constitutes an adequate basis for the belief that one believes that p. This paper formulates and defends an alternative, more modest interpretation, which develops from the suggestion that one can know that one believes that p in judging that p.

A number of recent accounts of our first-person knowledge of our attitudes give a central role to transparency - our capacity to answer the question of whether we have an attitude by answering the question of whether to have it. In this paper I raise a problem for such accounts, by showing that there are clear cases of first-person knowledge of attitudes which are not transparent.

Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding Moore's paradox might be marshaled to support rational (...) requirements to know one's beliefs, and finds that none succeed. (shrink)

Gareth Evans famously observed that he can answer the question ‘Do you think there is going to be a third world war?’ by attending to “precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question ‘Will there be a third world war?’”. I argue that this observation follows from two independently plausible ideas in philosophy of mind. The first is about rationality and consciousness: it is that to be rational is in part to be (...) required to believe that you are in a conscious state if you are in one, at least if various background conditions are met. The second is about consciousness and attention: it is that consciousness in a belief state consists in its subject engaging, to a sufficient extent, in a certain sort of world-directed attention. I also argue that this suggestion is superior to others that have been made in the literature regarding Evan’s observation. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Transparency, Belief, Intention’, Alex Byrne (2011) argues that transparency—our ability to form beliefs about some of our intentional mental states by considering their subject matter, rather than on the basis of special psychological evidence—involves inferring ‘from world to mind’. In this reply I argue that this cannot be correct. I articulate an intuitive necessary condition for a pattern of belief to count as a rule of inference, and I show that the pattern involved in transparency does not (...) meet that condition. As a result, I conclude that transparency does not involve inference. (shrink)

Cogito-like judgments, a term coined by Burge, comprise thoughts such as, I am now thinking, I [hereby] judge that Los Angeles is at the same latitude as North Africa, or I [hereby] intend to go to the opera tonight. It is widely accepted that we form cogito-like judgments in an authoritative and not merely empirical manner. We have privileged self-knowledge of the mental state that is self-ascribed in a cogito-like judgment. Thus, models of self-knowledge that aim to explain privileged self-knowledge (...) should have the resources to explain the special self-knowledge involved in cogito judgments. My objective in this paper is to examine whether a transparency model of self-knowledge can provide such an explanation: granted that cogito judgments are paradigmatic cases of privileged self-knowledge, does the transparency procedure explain why this is so? The paper advances a negative answer, arguing that the transparency procedure cannot generate the type of thought constitutive of cogito judgments. (shrink)

The attitude of intention is not usually the primary focus in philosophical work on self-knowledge. A recent exception is the so-called “Transparency” theory of self-knowledge, which attempts to explain how we know our own minds by appeal to reflection on non-mental facts. Transparency theories are attractive in light of their relative psychological economy compared to views that must posit a dedicated mechanism of ‘inner sense’. However, it is argued here, focusing on proposals by Richard Moran and Alex Byrne, that the (...) Transparency approach to explaining knowledge of our intentions fails. Considerations of economy therefore recommend an alternative approach: the Rylean Theory Theory. The particular view defended here is that one way of coming to know what we intend is to self-ascribe an intention on the basis of making a conscious decision about what to do. This view requires that there are such things as conscious decisions, and so the existence of conscious decisions is defended against skeptical worries raised by Peter Carruthers. The conclusion is that we know of our intentions by theorizing about ourselves, but that this knowledge can still be first-personally privileged, authoritative, and non-alienated. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether it can be known a priori that a particular term, such as water, is a natural kind term, and how this problem relates to Putnams claim that natural kind terms require an externalist semantics. Two conceptions of natural kind terms are contrasted: The first holds that whether water is a natural kind term depends on its a priori knowable semantic features. The second.

It is widely held that the meaning of certain types of terms, such as natural kind terms, is individuated externalistically, in terms of the individual's external environment. Recently a more radical thesis has emerged, a thesis we dub 'a posteriori semantics.' The suggestion is that not only does a term's meaning depend on the external environment, but so does its semantics. One motivation for this is the aim to account for cases where a putative natural kind term fails to pick (...) out a natural kind: The term may have a standard externalist semantics (if it picks out a natural kind) or a more descriptivist one (if it does not). Knowing which semantics applies will therefore require detailed empirical knowledge. This move has also been employed in cases where a singular term, such as a name, fails to have a reference. We argue that a posteriori semantics is inherently implausible, since the type of semantics common terms should be given ought not to be conditional on details of chemistry or physics. A number of difficulties for the position—'metaphysical,' epistemological, and methodological—are articulated. Finally, we suggest that a posteriori semantics misconstrues the way in which semantics is empirical. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for extending the idea of transparent introspection to wishes. First, I elucidate the notion of transparent introspection and highlight its advantages over rival accounts of self-knowledge. Then I pose several problems that seem to obstruct the extension of transparent introspection to wishes. In order to overcome these problems, I call into question the standard propositional attitude analysis of non-doxastic attitudes. My considerations lead to a non-orthodox account of attitudes in general (...) and wishes in particular in light of which the problems presented in Sect. 2 disappear. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of self-knowledge of beliefs by investigating the relationship between self-knowledge of beliefs and one's knowledge of other people's beliefs. It introduces and defends a new account of self-knowledge of beliefs according to which this type of knowledge is developmentally interconnected with and dependent on resources already used for acquiring knowledge of other people's beliefs, which is inferential in nature. But when these resources are applied to oneself, one attains and subsequently frequently uses a method for (...) acquiring knowledge of beliefs that is non-inferential in nature. The paper argues that this account is preferable to some of the most common empirically motivated theories of self-knowledge of beliefs and explains the origin of the widely discussed phenomenon that our own beliefs are often transparent to us in that we can determine whether we believe that p simply by settling whether p is the case. (shrink)

We need to distinguish two sorts of natural kinds, scientific and common NKs, because the notion of NK, which has to satisfy demands at three different levels—ontological, semantic and epistemological—, is subject to two incompatible sets of constraints. In order to prove this, I focus on the much-discussed case of jade. In the first part of the paper, I show that the current accounts are unsatisfactory because they are inconsistent. In the process, I explain why LaPorte’s analysis of “jade” as (...) a vernacular NK-term with an open-texture meaning does not offer a way out. Using a reductio ad absurdum argument, I conclude that according to the main tenets of NK-term theories, today’s “jade” has to be an NK-term, and jade thereby an NK. In the second part of the paper, I argue for this conclusion in a positive manner. First, I present a series of thought experiments demonstrating that today’s “jade” has the specific features of an NK-term. Then, I show that the kind that we presently call “jade” exhibits the typical ontological and epistemological features of an NK. More generally, I expound on why common NKs are more than mere classes, and why categories such as “jade” are useful in many inferences and explanations. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide an account of introspective knowledge concerning visual experiences that is in accordance with the idea of transparent introspection. According to transparent introspection, a person gains knowledge of her own current mental state M solely by paying attention to those aspects of the external world which M is about. In my view, transparent introspection is a promising alternative to inner sense theories. However, it raises the fundamental question why a person who pays attention (...) to something extra-mental should be epistemically justified in holding a belief about something intra-mental. In his Naturalizing the Mind, Fred Dretske solves this problem by conceiving of introspection concerning visual experiences as an inference based on a connecting belief. Although Dretske's account proves defective upon closer inspection, its essence can be salvaged by looking upon introspection as being a game of make-believe. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...) given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

Alex Byrne and Jordi Fernández propose two different versions of a transparency theory of self-knowledge. According to Byrne, we self-attribute beliefs by an inference from what we take to be facts about the world (following a rule he calls BEL). According to Fernández, we self-attribute the belief that p on the basis of a prior mental state, a state which constitutes our grounds for the belief that p (thereby realizing a procedure he calls Bypass). In this paper, I present the (...) two theories in outline and discuss various objections concerning their normative (Can the procedure give us knowledge?) and metaphysical aspects (Is the procedure functional?). I conclude that especially the metaphysical objections against Bypass are somewhat more difficult to counter than those against BEL and that the modifications required of Fernández’s theory make it very similar to Byrne’s. -/- Alex Byrne y Jordi Fernández proponen dos diferentes versiones de la teoría de la transparencia del autoconocimiento. Según Byrne, para autoatribuir creencias inferimos qué es lo que creemos a partir lo que tomamos como hechos sobre el mundo (siguiendo una regla que Byrne llama BEL). Según Fernández, autoatribuimos la creencia de que p con base en un estado anterior a esta creencia, un estado que fundamenta la creencia de que p (realizando un procedimiento que él llama Bypass). En este artículo expongo las dos teorías y discuto objeciones que conciernen su aspecto normativo (¿puede el procedimiento darnos conocimiento?) y metafísico (¿es funcional el procedimiento?). Concluyo que en especial las objeciones metafísicas son más graves en el caso de Bypass que en el de BEL y que las modificaciones requeridas de la teoría de Fernández la asemejan mucho a la de Byrne. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that introspective beliefs about one’s own current visual experiences are not immediate in the sense that what justifies them does not include other beliefs that the subject in question might possess. The argument will take the following course. First, the author explains the notions of immediacy and truth-sufficiency as they are used here. Second, the author suggests a test to determine whether a given belief lacks immediacy. Third, the author applies this test (...) to a standard case of formation of an introspective belief about one’s own current visual experiences and concludes that the belief in question is neither immediate nor truth-sufficient. Fourth, the author rebuts several objections that might be raised against the argument. (shrink)

We examine how Frege’s contrast between identity judgments of the forms “a=a” vs. “a=b” would fare in the special case where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are complex mental representations, and ‘a’ stands for an introspected ‘I’-thought. We first argue that the Fregean treatment of I-thoughts entails that they are what we call “one-shot thoughts”: they can only be thought once. This has the surprising consequence that no instance of the “a=a” form of judgment in this specific case comes out true, let (...) alone a priori true. This further reinforces Glezakos’s objections against the set-up of Frege’s puzzle, while also raising what we think is an acute problem for Fregeans, insofar as I-thought (and indexical thinking more generally), understood in their way, turns out to be incompatible with some basic features of rationality. (shrink)

This paper concerns content externalism and privileged access. I argue that externally-individuated concepts are not just subject to a causal constraint, but are also subject t an epistemic constraint. Their possession requires not merely that certain background presuppositions be true but, further, that the subject be in possession of true justified beliefs concerning their referents.

To qualify as a fully rational agent, one must be able rationally to revise one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence. This requires, not only that one revise one’s beliefs in the right way, but also that one do so as a result of appreciating the evidence on the basis of which one is changing one’s mind. However, the very nature of belief seems to pose an obstacle to the possibility of satisfying this requirement – for, insofar as one (...) believes that p, any evidence that not-p will strike one as misleading and, on the face of it, believing that a certain piece of evidence is misleading is incompatible with appreciating the fact that such evidence should bear on the question at hand. Call this the ‘Paradox of Belief Revision’. This paper introduces the Paradox of Belief Revision, compares it with Kripke’s Dogmatism Paradox, and suggests that we may be able to see a way out of the former if we assume that rational agents are systematically aware of their own beliefs as beliefs they have. (shrink)

O modelo causal de introspecção tem recebido muitas críticas e, de fato, nos últimos anos, tem caído em desuso no mundo filosófico. Neste artigo defendo o modelo e sustento que ele é um excelente candidato, dado um compromisso realista para com o mental, para explicar o nosso acesso introspectivo peculiar, mas contingente, às crenças.