According to the method of transparency, genuine self-knowledge is the outcome of an inference from world to mind. A. Byrne has developed a theory in which the method of transparency consists in following an epistemic rule in order to form self-verifying second-order beliefs. In this paper, I argue that Byrne’s theory does not establish sufficient conditions for having self-knowledge of first-order beliefs. Examining a case of self-deception, I strive to show that following such a rule might not result in self-knowledge (...) when one is involved in rational deliberation. In the case under consideration, one precisely comes to believe that one believes that p without coming to believe that p. The justification for one’s not forming the belief that p with its distinctive causal pattern in mental life and behaviour, is that one already had the unconscious belief that not-p, a belief that is not sensitive to the principles governing theoretical and practical reasoning. (shrink)

Knowledge of a language is a kind of knowledge, the possession of which enables a speaker to understand and perform a variety of linguistic actions in that language. In this paper, I pursue an agency-oriented approach to knowledge of language. I begin by examining two major agency-oriented models of knowledge of language: Michael Dummett's Implicit Knowledge Model and Jennifer Hornsby's Practical Knowledge Model. I argue that each of these models is inadequate for different reasons. I present an Acquaintance Knowledge Model, (...) in which a speaker's knowledge of a language is a combination of the speaker's first-order linguistic ability and second-order acquaintance with his ability and actions. (shrink)

Discussion of the challenge that acquaintance with the nature of experience poses to physicalism.

Self‐ascriptions of desire seem to differ in their epistemic security. There are easy cases in which a sincere self‐ascription immediately counts as knowledgeable, and there are hard cases in which it is an open question whether an agent actually knows that they have the desire that they take themselves to have. In this paper, I suggest an explanation according to which whether a self‐ascription of desire is easy or hard depends on whether one is familiar with the content of the (...) self‐ascribed desire. (shrink)

How should we account for self-knowledge of our inner lives? Some have argued that just as we have various senses that allow us to perceive the environment, we have an inner sense that allows us to perceive our inner lives. But others find such a view implausible and think that there are other ways to account for self-knowledge. With respect to all-or-nothing beliefs, some have held that we may account for self-knowledge by appealing to the claim that such beliefs are (...) transparent--that we may answer the question 'Do you believe p?' by answering the question 'Is it the case that p?' But surprisingly, little or no attention has been paid to the question of whether partial beliefs are transparent. In this paper, I clarify the question of whether partial beliefs are transparent. I also consider various attempts to answer the question in the affirmative. To anticipate, my verdict is pessimistic: I argue that such attempts fail. (shrink)

Judgment internalism about evaluative judgments is the view that there is a necessary internal connection between evaluative judgments and motivation understood as desires. The debate about judgment internalism has reached a standoff some time ago. In this paper, I outline a new argument for judgment internalism. This argument does not rely on intuitions about cases, but rather it has the form of an inference to the best explanation. I argue that the best philosophical explanations of how we know what we (...) desire require that judgment internalism is true, which gives us a good reason to believe that judgment internalism is true. (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)

There is an emerging consensus that human behavior is governed by two types of processes: System 1 processes, which are quicker, automatic, and run in parallel, and System 2 processes, which are slower, more conscious, and run in serial. Among such “dual-process” theorists, however, there is disagreement about whether the premises we use in our conscious, S2 reasoning should be considered as beliefs. In this exchange, one facet that has been largely overlooked is how conscious beliefs are structurally and functionally (...) similar to episodic memories. This article will argue that the similarities between beliefs and episodic memories, specifically in light of Daniel Schacter’s widely influential constructive memory framework, highlight a heretofore unexamined empirical weakness of dispositional accounts of S2 beliefs. In addition, this perspective helps situate beliefs within our broader understanding of how information is encoded and retrieved in the brain. (shrink)

The standard approach to the core phenomenology of thought insertion characterizes it in terms of a normal sense of thought ownership coupled with an abnormal sense of thought agency. Recently, Fernández (2010) has argued that there are crucial problems with this approach and has proposed instead that what goes wrong fundamentally in such a phenomenology is a sense of thought commitment, characterized in terms of thought endorsement. In this paper, we argue that even though Fernández raises new issues that enrich (...) the topic, his proposal cannot rival the version of the standard approach we shall defend. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper relates Kant’s account of pure apperception to the agential approach to self-knowledge. It argues that his famous claim ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my represent...

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)

This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued---we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view (...) about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of introspection need to talk---each has much to learn from each other. (shrink)

In this paper I develop the idea that, by answering the question whether p, you can answer the question whether you believe that p. In particular, I argue that judging that p is a fallible yet basic guide to whether one believes that p. I go on to defend my view from an important skeptical challenge, according to which my view would make it too easy to reject skeptical hypotheses about our access to our minds. I close by responding to (...) the opposing view on which our beliefs themselves constitute our only source of first-person access to our beliefs. (shrink)

Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to act. Moreover, (...) it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases. (shrink)

People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as ‘in-between’ cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right (...) to say that the person lacks the belief. (shrink)

Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories in the philosophy of mind are offered as explanations of what it is that makes a mental state a conscious state. According to HOP, a mental state is conscious just in case it is itself represented in a quasi-perceptual way by an internal monitor or scanning device. We start with one of the more popular objections to HOP and a seemingly innocuous concession to it: identifying the internal monitor with the faculty of attention. We show how (...) this concession undermines HOP. (shrink)

Gareth Evans has observed that one merely needs to ‘look outward’ to discover one’s own beliefs. This observation of what has become known as belief ‘transparency’ has formed a basis for a cluster of views on the nature of introspection. These views may be well suited to account for our introspective access to beliefs, but whether similar transparency-based accounts of our introspective access to mental states other than belief can be given is not obvious. The question of whether a transparency-based (...) account can be generalized beyond beliefs is part of the larger issue whether introspection of different mental states can receive broadly the same account—whether introspection is unified. My aim is to examine one particularly thorough attempt at generalizing a transparency-based account of introspection due to Alex Byrne. I argue that the resulting view does not offer a unified account of introspection, even across a handful of mental states. In doing so, I highlight two difficulties most views on introspection that try to offer a unified account would have to face, even if they are not based in belief transparency. The subsequent move away from introspective unification has ramifications for several other philosophical debates, such as the architecture of the mind and our rationality. (shrink)

It is a common intuition that I am in a better position to know my own mental states than someone else's. One view that takes this intuition very seriously is Neo-Expressivism, providing a “non-epistemic” account of first-person privilege. But some have denied that we enjoy any principled first-person privilege, as do those who have the Third-Person View, according to which there is no deep difference in our epistemic position with regard to our own and others' mental states. Despite their apparently (...) deep differences, I argue that Neo-Expressivism and the Third-Person View differ in their location of first-person privilege. This difference in the source of first-person privilege allows the key elements of each of these views to be compatible, and can even be combined into a single view about the nature of introspection and self-knowledge. The compatibility of these two views that otherwise appear to be in direct opposition is methodologically significant, highlighting several dialectical lessons that clar.. (shrink)

People often act in ways that appear incompatible with their sincere assertions. But how might we explain such cases? On the shifting view, subjects’ degrees of belief may be highly sensitive to changes in context. This paper articulates and refines this view, after defending it against recent criticisms. It details two mechanisms by which degrees of beliefs may shift.

ABSTRACT I propose a middle-ground between a perceptual model of self-knowledge, according to which the objects of self-awareness are accessed through some kind of causal mechanism, and a rationalist model, according to which self-knowledge is constituted by one's rational agency. Through an analogy with the role of the exercises of sensorimotor abilities in rationally grounded perceptual knowledge, self-knowledge is construed as an exercise of action-oriented and action-orienting abilities. This view satisfies the privileged access condition usually associated with self-knowledge without entailing (...) an insurmountable gap between self- knowledge and knowledge of other minds. RESUMO Proponho um meio-termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento, segundo o qual os objetos de autoconhecimento são acessadas mediante um tipo de mecanismo causal, e um modelo racionalista, segundo o qual o autoconhecimento é constituído pela agência racional. Por analogia ao papel que o exercício de habilidades sensório-motoras desempenham no conhecimento perceptual racionalmente fundado, autoconhecimento é entendido como um exercício de habilidades que são orientadas pela e orientam a ação. Essa imagem satisfaz a condição de acesso privilegiado que geralmente é associada ao autoconhecimento sem implicar uma lacuna intransponível entre autoconhecimento e conhecimento de outras mentes. (shrink)

Can Hart's non-cognitivism be reconciled with his rejection of the predictive and sanction-based explanations of law? This paper analyses Hart's notion of the internal point of view and focuses on the notion of acceptance of a rule along the lines of a non-cognitivist understanding of intentional actions. It is argued that a non-cognitivist analysis of acceptance of rules is incomplete and parasitic on a more basic or primary model of acceptance that does not involve mental states. This basic or primary (...) model of acceptance explains actions in terms of other actions and in terms of reasons for actions that are both presented as good-making characteristics and transparent to the agent. If Hart's internal point of view is able to work as the key argument to reject predictive and sanction-based explanations of law, it needs to make the outward approach of intentional action basic or primary rather than rely on an inward approach such as the one advanced by non-cognitivism. (shrink)

This paper defends a Wittgenstein-inspired conception of the nature of mind and self-knowledge. Thus, it is claimed that the mind is to be conceived as expressive behaviour; and that knowledge of one’s own mind is not to be thought of as a matter of first-person access, i.e. a special sort of access available to oneself alone, but rather as a matter of ordinary access, similar to other people’s. It is also argued that this conception does not undermine the distinctness of (...) the first-person perspective, including the asymmetry with the third-person perspective, which should be construed semantically, rather than epistemically. As a result, an alternative to contemporary conceptions of mind and self-knowledge is provided. (shrink)

Psichologizmas yra loginių ir psichologinių terminų reikšmių tapatinimas. Husserlio Prolegomenai yra žymiausias psichologizmą kritikuojantis tekstas. Iki šiol buvo atviras klausimas, kas būtent juose įrodyta. Šio straipsnio tikslas yra į jį atsakyti. Pagrindinis straipsnyje ginamas teiginys yra toks: Prolegomenuose Husserlis įrodė, kad jei reliatyvizmas klaidingas, tai psichologizmas klaidingas, bet neįrodė reliatyvizmo ar psichologizmo klaidingumo, nes jis neįrodė, kad reliatyvizmas save paneigia. Pirmiausia nagrinėjami du kartais Husserliui priskiriami įrodymai: paremtasis prielaida, kad logika yra normatyvi, ir paremtasis prielaida, kad psichologija remiasi logika. Tvirtinama, (...) kad jie nesuderinami su logikos samprata Prolegomenuose. Tuomet nagrinėjami likę įrodymai ir parodoma, kaip iš jų plaukia, kad jei reliatyvizmas klaidingas, tai psichologizmas klaidingas. Galiausiai nagrinėjamas įrodymas, kad reliatyvizmas save paneigia vienu ar kitu būdu: ar savaime, ar tuomet, kai yra išreiškiamas, ar tada, kai įrodinėjamas kitam. Teigiama, kad reliatyvizmo klaidingumas juo neįrodytas. Straipsnio išvados reikšmingos bet kokiam logiką reliatyvizuojančiam požiūriui. (shrink)

Several contemporary philosophical theories of introspection have been offered, yet each faces a number of difficulties in providing an explanation of the exact nature of introspection. I contrast the inner-sense view that argues for a causal awareness with the acquaintance view that argues for a non-causal or direct awareness. After critically examining the inner-sense and the acquaintance views, I claim that these two views are complementary and not mutually exclusive, and that both perspectives, conceived of as modes of introspective access, (...) actually broaden the notion of introspection. I then propose a useful distinction between stimuli-induced introspection—i.e., a receptive process whereby some specific mental states induce introspection—and self-triggered introspection—i.e., a selective process whereby the individual’s own interest and volition initiates introspection. I argue that that distinction may eliminate the false dichotomy which claims that only one of those types of awareness, either the causal one or the direct one, is conducive to introspection or is defined as introspection. (shrink)

I shall argue, however, that there can be genuine ambivalence between a judgment that A is v and a judgment that A is not v. Such ambivalence may, moreover, be precisely of the kind that appears to be either impossible or destructive for ethics. Objectivist ambivalence, as we shall call it, is neither an accidental nor peripheral feature of our value discourse. At the same time it is not destructive to ethics or to value judgments in general, but only to (...) certain received philosophical conceptions of ethics and value. Once the phenomenon of objectivist ambivalence of value judgment is identified, it can be analyzed, and in conducting that analysis I shall set out three aspects that are involved in it. The analysis of the mental attitude of ambivalence will have consequences for the logic of values. We shall see that this logic allows and invites tensions in a non-mysterious way. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue against the claim that the term “belief”, as it functions in philosophical psychology, has natural-kind term semantics; this thesis is central to the famous Lycan–Stich argument against eliminative materialism. I will argue that the current debate concerning the discrepancy between the professed opinions and actions, especially the debate concerning the idea of aliefs, shows that the concept of belief is plastic and amenable to conceptual engineering. The plasticity and amenability to conceptual engineering (...) of the concept of belief give us, in turn, a reason to doubt that “belief” functions in a way that is presupposed in the Lycan–Stich argument. Finally, I point to an alternative to both eliminativism and the natural kind view, namely the idea that we should treat belief as a human kind. (shrink)

Chalmers (The character of consciousness, 2010) argues for an acquaintance theory of the justification of direct phenomenal beliefs. A central part of this defense is the claim that direct phenomenal beliefs are cognitively significant. I argue against this. Direct phenomenal beliefs are justified within the specious present, and yet the resources available with the present ‘now’ are so impoverished that it barely constrains the content of a direct phenomenal belief. I argue that Chalmers’s account does not have the resources for (...) explaining how direct phenomenal beliefs support the inference from ‘this E is R’ to ‘that was R.’. (shrink)

The Sellarsian dilemma is a powerful argument against internalistic foundationalist views that aim to end the regress of reasons in experiential states. Laurence BonJour once defended the soundness of this dilemma as part of a larger argument for epistemic coherentism. BonJour has now renounced his earlier conclusions about the dilemma and has offered an account of internalistic foundationalism aimed, in part, at showing the errors of his former ways. I contend that BonJour’s early concerns about the Sellarsian dilemma are correct, (...) and that his latest position does not adequately handle the dilemma. I focus my attention on BonJour’s claim that a nonconceptual experiential state can provide a subject with a reason to believe some proposition. It is crucial for the viability of internalistic foundationalism to evaluate whether this claim is true. I argue it is false. The requirement that the states that provide justification give reasons to a subject conflicts with the idea that these states are nonconceptual. In the final section I consider David Chalmers’s attempt to defend a view closely similar to BonJour’s. Chalmers’s useful theory of phenomenal concepts provides a helpful framework for identifying a crucial problem with attempts to end the regress of reasons in pure experiential states. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

A long-standing debate in group ontology and group epistemology concerns whether some groups possess mental states and/or epistemic states such as knowledge that do not reduce to the mental states and/or epistemic states of the individuals who comprise such groups (and are also states not possessed by any of the members). Call those who think there are such states inflationists. There has recently been a defense in the literature of a specific type of inflationary knowledge—viz., knowledge of facts about group (...) minds or group self-knowledge (GS-K). In this paper I address whether some groups do possess such knowledge. I argue that we have good reason to think they do not. I do so by exploring the most explicit defense of such knowledge in the literature—Lukas Schwengerer’s (2022) defense—as well as other ways of defending this thesis and arguing that such ways are problematic. In the latter part of the paper, I explain why the two most popular inflationary approaches to group knowledge simpliciter are incompatible with there being GS-K. In doing so I work to show why even inflationists should reject the view that there is inflationary group self-knowledge. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel puzzle about desire consisting of three independently plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions: all desires are dispositional states, we have privileged access to some of our desires, and we do not have privileged access to any dispositional state. Proponents of the view that all desires are dispositional states might think the most promising way out of this puzzle is to deny. I argue, however, that such attempts fail because the most plausible accounts of self-knowledge of desires (...) do not explain how we possess privileged access to dispositional desires. I conclude by offering what I take to be a more promising solution to the puzzle, one that involves the rejection of on the grounds that some desires possess phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to illuminate the significance of thought insertion for debates about the first-person concept. My starting point is the often-voiced contention that thought insertion might challenge the thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of psychological properties are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. In the first part of the paper I explain what a thought insertion-based counterexample to this immunity thesis should be like. I then argue that various thought insertion-involving scenarios do not give (...) rise to successful counterexamples to the immunity of the target class of self-ascriptions. In the second part of the paper I turn to defend a Metasemantic Explanation of why the immunity thesis holds. The Metasemantic Explanation rests on a reference-fixing story about the mental ‘I’ whose key contention is that introspective impressions play an essential role in fixing its reference. It is part of my argument in favour of the proposed reference-fixing story, as well as of the Metasemantic Explanation, that they respect the paradigmatic features of self-ascriptions of inserted thoughts. (shrink)

Recently, a view I refer to as “hypothetical continuism” has garnered some favour among philosophers, based largely on empirical research showing substantial neurocognitive overlaps between episodic memory and imagination. According to this view, episodically remembering past events is the same kind of cognitive process as sensorily imagining future and counterfactual events. In this paper, I first argue that hypothetical continuism is false, on the basis of substantive epistemic asymmetries between episodic memory and the relevant kinds of imagination. However, I then (...) propose and defend an alternative form of continuism, according to which episodic memory is continuous with a capacity I call “actuality-oriented imagination.” Because of the deep epistemic affinities between episodic memory and actuality-oriented imagination, it makes sense to think of them as cognitive processes of the same kind. (shrink)

Mental imagery often occurs during testimonial belief transmission: a testifier often episodically remembers or imagines a scene while describing it, while a listener often imagines that scene as it’s described to her. I argue that getting clear on imagery’s psychological roles in testimonial belief transmission has implications for some fundamental issues in the epistemology of testimony. I first appeal to imagery cases to argue against a widespread “internalist” approach to the epistemology of testimony. I then appeal to the same sort (...) of case to argue for an alternative, externalist view. (shrink)

This paper explains and defends a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On this view, credences are a species of beliefs, and the degree of credence is determined by the content of what is believed. We begin by developing what we take to be the most plausible belief-first view. Then, we offer several arguments for it. Finally, we show how it can resist objections that have been raised to belief-first views. We conclude that the belief-first view is (...) more plausible than many have previously supposed. (shrink)

While the causal contributions of so‐called ‘automatic’ processes to behavior are now widely acknowledged, less attention has been given to their normative role in the guidance of action. We develop an account of the normativity of automaticity that responds to and builds upon Tamar Szabó Gendler's account of ‘alief’, an associative and arational mental state more primitive than belief. Alief represents a promising tool for integrating psychological research on automaticity with philosophical work on mind and action, but Gendler errs in (...) overstating the degree to which aliefs are norm‐insensitive. (shrink)

We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one’s own (...) doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge. (shrink)

Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief? I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions. A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional). I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is a necessary (...) condition for belief. I appeal to two areas of research that seem to show that implicit attitudes fail spectacularly to satisfy this condition—although persistent gaps in the empirical literature leave matters inconclusive. I sketch an alternative account, according to which implicit attitudes are sensitive merely to spatiotemporal relations in thought and perception, i.e., the spatial and temporal orders in which people think, see, or hear things. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that knowledge of certain of one’s own mental states is authoritative in being epistemically more secure than knowledge of the mental states of others, and theories of self-knowledge have largely appealed to one or the other of two sources to explain this special epistemic status. The first, ‘detectivist’, position, appeals to an inner perception-like basis, whereas the second, ‘constitutivist’, one, appeals to the view that the special security awarded to certain self-knowledge is a conceptual matter. I (...) argue that there is a fundamental class of cases of authoritative self-knowledge, ones in which subjects are consciously thinking about their current, conscious intentional states, that is best accounted for in terms of a theory that is, broadly speaking, introspectionist and detectivist. The position developed has an intuitive plausibility that has inspired many who work in the Cartesian tradition, and the potential to yield a single treatment of the basis of authoritative self-knowledge for both intentional states and sensation states. (shrink)

Because of the privileged place of beliefs in explaining behaviour, mismatch cases—in which agents sincerely claim to believe that p, but act in a way that is inconsistent with that belief—have attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, I argue that some of these cases, at least, are at least partially explained by agents believing that they believe that p, while failing to believe that p. Agents in these cases do not believe that ~p; rather, they have an (...) indistinct first‐order, beliefy, representation that p. The indistinctness of this first‐order representation provides the leeway for the inconsistency seen in their behaviour. (shrink)

Rationalist accounts of self-knowledge are motivated in important part by the claim that only by looking to our reasons to discover our beliefs and desires are we active in relation to them and only thereby do we take responsibility for them. These kinds of account seem to predict that self-knowledge generated using third-personal methods or analogues of these methods will tend to undermine the capacity to exercise self-control. In this light, the insistence by treatment programs that addicts acknowledge that they (...) are addicts seems puzzling. I argue that because addicts—and perhaps ordinary akratics, to some extent at least, too—are vulnerable to losing control of their actions via losing control over their beliefs, advising them to look to their reasons for actions is counterproductive and facilitates loss of control. In contrast, an insistence on what I call impersonal self-knowledge, knowledge of some of one's states and dispositions generated by third-personal means, may help to reestablish control. (shrink)

Self-consciously attempting to shape one's beliefs through deliberation and reasoning requires that one stand in a relation to those beliefs that might be signaled by saying that one must inhabit one's beliefs as one's own view. What does this amount to? A broad swath of philosophical thinking about self-knowledge, norms of belief, self-consciousness, and related areas assumes that this relation requires one to endorse, or be rationally committed to endorsing, one's beliefs. In fact, however, fully self-conscious adherence to epistemic norms (...) requires the ability to self-consciously hold a belief without endorsing that belief as true, as well-supported by the evidence, or as meeting some other epistemic standard, and there are cases in which no such commitment is rationally required. This ability is necessary if there is to be any such thing as a fully self-conscious process of changing one's mind. (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which rational requirements govern our attitudes like belief and intention. I argue that there is a tension between the idea that rational requirements govern attitudes understood as standing states and the attractive idea that we can directly satisfy the requirements by performing reasoning. I identify the tension by (a) illustrating how a dispositional conception of belief can cause trouble for the idea that we can directly revise our attitudes through reasoning by considering John Broome's (...) view, and (b) advancing a general argument that a standing state cannot be directly affected by reasoning. I then propose a solution: by recognizing the proper targets of rational requirements as occurrent, rather than dispositional attitudes, we can preserve the idea that we can directly satisfy rational requirements through reasoning. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of doubt in philosophy since Descartes, the published philosophical literature includes no extended treatment of the nature of doubt. In this paper, I summarize the main contributions that have been made to the subject and then develop a commonsense functionalist account of doubt by specifying the functional role of doubt that something is the case. After adding two further wrinkles, I show how the resulting account can be used to address the questions of how doubt is related (...) to belief and whether suspension of judgment can be identified with doubt. Although the account is partisan, it should hold interest for those who favor other positions in the philosophy of mind, since much of the account can be taken on board by those in other camps, and the paper demonstrates how a sufficiently detailed account of doubt can be put to work addressing longstanding questions of interest across philosophical sub-disciplines. (shrink)

Gertler argues that, in some introspective judgments about experience, phenomenal reality intersects with one's grasp of that reality to the effect that one can have knowledge by acquaintance. This new version of the acquaintance theory depends on the idea that some introspective judgments about experience can be justified by the fact that the phenomenal property of an experience is a component of the introspective judgment about the experience. The goal of this paper is to show that even this most promising (...) version of the acquaintance theory is not successful. For this goal, in particular, I argue that even if we grant that, in the relevant cases, the phenomenal property of an experience is a component of an introspective judgment, this fact can hardly play the epistemic role that Gertler envisions. I establish this on the basis of two internalist requirements for reasons, namely, the evaluability condition and the endorsement condition. On the former condition, a reason for justifying a judgment must be the kind of thing that can be evaluated as correct or incorrect. And on the latter condition, having a reason for justifying a judgment requires that the subject endorse the reason as correct. (shrink)

Recently influential “rationalist” views of self-knowledge about our rational attitudes hold that such self-knowledge is essentially connected to rational agency, and therefore has to be particularly reliable, immediate, and distinct from third-personal access. This approach has been challenged by “theory theory” or “interpretationist” views of self-knowledge: on such views, self-knowledge is based on the interpretation of information about ourselves, and this interpretation involves the same mindreading mechanisms that we use to access other persons’ mental states. Interpretationist views are usually dismissed (...) as implausible and unwarranted by advocates of rationalism. In this article, I argue that rationalists should revise their attitude towards interpretationism: they can, and ought to, accept themselves a form of interpretationism. First, I argue that interpretationism is correct at least for a substantive range of cases. These are cases in which we respond to a question ab.. (shrink)

I argue that the feeling that one is the owner of his or her mental states is not an intrinsic property of those states. Rather, it consists in a contingent relation between consciousness and its intentional objects. As such, there are (a variety of) circumstances, varying in their interpretive clarity, in which this relation can come undone. When this happens, the content of consciousness still is apprehended, but the feeling that the content “belongs to me” no longer is secured. I (...) discuss the implications of a mechanism enabling personal ownership for understanding a variety of clinical syndromes as well normal mental function. (shrink)