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  1. Expressing first-person authority.Matthew Parrott - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2215-2237.
    Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a novel agency-based account (...)
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  • Active belief.Matthew Boyle - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary 35 (S1):119-147.
    I argue that cognitively mature human beings have an important sort of control or discretion over their own beliefs, but that to make good sense of this control, we must reject the common idea that it consists in a capacity to act on our belief-state by forming new beliefs or modifying ones we already hold. I propose that we exercise agential control over our beliefs, not primarily in doing things to alter our belief-state, but in holding whatever beliefs we hold. (...)
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  • Introspection and inference.Nicholas Silins - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (2):291-315.
    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 (...)
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  • Judgment as a Guide to Belief.Nicholas Silins - 2012 - In Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness. , US: Oxford University Press.
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  • (2 other versions)Expresión, descripción y creencia consciente.Javier Vidal López - 2014 - Ideas Y Valores 63 (154):85-106.
    Se trata de revisar el expresivismo respecto a emisiones de la forma "Creo que p". El expresivista sostiene que una emisión de "Creo que llueve" es una expresión, y no una descripción, de la creencia de que llueve. Se propone una variación del expresivismo según la cual una emisión así expresa la creencia consciente de que llueve, en el sentido de la teoría de la conciencia de Brentano: una creencia consciente de que llueve tiene el contenido de que llueve y (...)
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  • Privileged access without luminosity.Giovanni Merlo - forthcoming - In Giovanni Merlo, Giacomo Melis & Crispin Wright (eds.), Self-knowledge and Knowledge A Priori. Oxford University Press.
    Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument has been thought to be in tension with the doctrine that we enjoy privileged epistemic access to our own mental states. In this paper, I will argue that the tension is only apparent. Friends of privileged access who accept the conclusion of the argument need not give up the claim that our beliefs about our own mental states are mostly or invariably right, nor the view that mental states are epistemically available to us in a way that (...)
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  • Is there a persuasive argument for an inner awareness theory of consciousness?Daniel Stoljar - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1555-1575.
    According to (what I will call) an inner awareness theory of consciousness, you are in a (phenomenally) conscious state only if you are aware, in some sense, of your being in the state. This theory is widely held, but what arguments are there for holding it? In this paper, I gather together in a systematic way the main arguments for holding the theory and suggest that none of them is persuasive. I end the paper by asking what our attitude to (...)
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  • Being Familiar with What One Wants.Uku Tooming - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (4):690-710.
    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 (...)
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  • A Euthyphro Dilemma for Higher-order Theories of Consciousness.Daniel Stoljar - forthcoming - In G. Rabin (ed.), Grounding and Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    Abstract: According to a higher-order theory of consciousness, you are in a conscious (psychological) state if and only if you are conscious of being in that state. This paper develops and discusses a Euthyphro dilemma for theories of this sort; that is, a dilemma which asks whether the state is conscious because you are conscious of being in it, or, alternatively, whether you are conscious of being in it because it is conscious. I focus on two different versions of the (...)
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  • Armstrong's Just-so Story about Consciousness.Daniel Stoljar - 2021 - In Peter R. Anstey & David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.), Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Abstract: In chapter 15 of A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M.Armstrong offers an account of what he calls “the biological value of introspection”, namely, that “without information…about the current state of our minds, purposive trains mental activity would be impossible.” This paper examines and assesses Armstrong’s “Just-so story about introspective consciousness”—as W.G.Lycan later called it. One moral will be that appreciating this aspect of Armstrong’s view blurs the difference between his own perceptual model of introspection, and the anti-perceptual models (...)
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  • The evil demon in the lab: skepticism, introspection, and introspection of introspection.Nicholas Silins - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9763-9785.
    In part one, I clarify the crucial notion of “introspection”, and give novel cases for the coherence of scenarios of local and global deception about how we access our own minds, drawing on empirical work. In part two, I evaluate a series of skeptical arguments based on such scenarios of error, and in each case explain why the skeptical argument fails. The first main upshot is that we should not over-estimate what it takes to introspect: introspection need not be accurate, (...)
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  • Belief as an act of reason.Nicholas Koziolek - 2018 - Manuscrito 41 (4):287-318.
    Most philosophers assume (often without argument) that belief is a mental state. Call their view the orthodoxy. In a pair of recent papers, Matthew Boyle has argued that the orthodoxy is mistaken: belief is not a state but (as I like to put it) an act of reason. I argue here that at least part of his disagreement with the orthodoxy rests on an equivocation. For to say that belief is an act of reason might mean either (i) that it’s (...)
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  • The Regress Objection to Reflexive Theories of Consciousness.Daniel Stoljar - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (3):293-308.
    According to a reflexive theory of consciousness, a person is in a conscious state only if they are conscious of, or aware of, being in the state. This paper reconsiders the well-known regress objection against theories of this sort, according to which they entail that if you are in one conscious state, you are in an infinity of such states. I distinguish two versions of the reflexive theory, a cognitive version and a phenomenal version, and argue that, while the cognitive (...)
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  • (1 other version)Reasoning and Self-Knowledge.Martin Francisco Fricke - 2018 - Análisis Filosófico 38 (1):33-55.
    What is the relation between reasoning and self-knowledge? According to Shoemaker (1988), a certain kind of reasoning requires self-knowledge: we cannot rationally revise our beliefs without knowing that we have them, in part because we cannot see that there is a problem with an inconsistent set of propositions unless we are aware of believing them. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. A second account, versions of which can be found in Shoemaker (1988 and 2009) and Byrne (...)
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  • The Evil Demon Inside.Nicholas Silins - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):325-343.
    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 (...)
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  • Evans on transparency: a rationalist account.Daniel Stoljar - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (8):2067-2085.
    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 (...)
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  • Faith, Belief, and Control.Lindsay Rettler - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (1):95-109.
    In this paper, I solve a puzzle generated by three conflicting claims about the relationship between faith, belief, and control: according to the Identity Thesis, faith is a type of belief, and according to Fideistic Voluntarism, we sometimes have control over whether or not we have faith, but according to Doxastic Involuntarism, we never have control over what we believe. To solve the puzzle, I argue that the Identity Thesis is true, but that either Fideistic Voluntarism or Doxastic Voluntarism is (...)
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  • Introspection and Necessity.Daniel Stoljar - 2018 - Noûs 52 (2):389-410.
    What is the connection between being in a conscious mental state and believing that you yourself are currently in that state? On the one hand, it is natural to think that this connection is, or involves, a necessary connection of some sort. On the other hand, it is hard to know what the nature of this necessary connection is. For there are plausible arguments according to which this connection is not metaphysically necessary, not rationally necessary, and not merely naturally necessary. (...)
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  • Knowing our degrees of belief.Sinan Dogramaci - 2016 - Episteme 13 (3):269-287.
    The main question of this paper is: how do we manage to know what our own degrees of belief are? Section 1 briefly reviews and criticizes the traditional functionalist view, a view notably associated with David Lewis and sometimes called the theory-theory. I use this criticism to motivate the approach I want to promote. Section 2, the bulk of the paper, examines and begins to develop the view that we have a special kind of introspective access to our degrees of (...)
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  • Transparency and the KK Principle.Nilanjan Das & Bernhard Salow - 2018 - Noûs 52 (1):3-23.
    An important question in epistemology is whether the KK principle is true, i.e., whether an agent who knows that p is also thereby in a position to know that she knows that p. We explain how a “transparency” account of self-knowledge, which maintains that we learn about our attitudes towards a proposition by reflecting not on ourselves but rather on that very proposition, supports an affirmative answer. In particular, we show that such an account allows us to reconcile a version (...)
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  • Embedded mental action in self-attribution of belief.Antonia Peacocke - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (2):353-377.
    You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental (...)
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  • Inferential Justification and the Transparency of Belief.David James Barnett - 2016 - Noûs 50 (1):184-212.
    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 (...)
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  • Authority As (Qualified) Indubitability.Benjamin Winokur - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Self-ascriptions of one's current mental states often seem authoritative. It is sometimes thought that the authority of such self-ascriptions is, in part, a matter of their indubitability. However, they do not seem to be universally indubitable. How, then, should claims about self-ascriptive indubitability be qualified? Here I consider several such qualifications from the literature. Finding many of them wanting, I nevertheless settle on multiple specifications of the thesis that self-ascriptions are authoritatively indubitable. Some of these specifications concern how other agents (...)
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  • A limitation on agency in judgment.Matthew McGrath - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-21.
    To many, judgment has seemed a locus of cognitive agency, a kind of cognitive mental act. In one minimal sense, judgment is something one does. I consider whether judgment is more robustly agential: is it a kind of action done with an aim? The most attractive version of this sort of position takes judging that p to affirming that p with an alethic aim, an aim such as affirming truly. I argue that such views have unacceptable consequences. Acts done with (...)
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  • Modes of Introspective Access: a Pluralist Approach.Adriana Renero - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (3):823-844.
    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, (...)
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  • Cryptonormative Judgments.Alex Worsnip - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (1):3-24.
    A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non-normative, but that is in fact normative. The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from everyday life are most naturally diagnosed as (...)
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  • II—Matthew Boyle: Transparent Self-Knowledge.Matthew Boyle - 2011 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1):223-241.
    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 (...)
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  • Belief and Self‐Knowledge: Lessons From Moore's Paradox.Declan Smithies - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):393-421.
    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 (...)
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  • ‘‘In My ‘Mind’s Eye’: Introspectionism, Detectivism, and the Basis of Authoritative Self-Knowledge.Cynthia Macdonald - 2014 - Synthese 191 (15).
    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 (...)
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  • How to commit to commissive self‐knowledge.Benjamin Winokur - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (1):210-223.
    At least some of your beliefs are commitments. When you believe that P as a commitment, your stance on P is such that you believe it on the basis of your considered judgement. Sometimes, you also believe that you believe P. Such self‐beliefs can also be commissive in a sense, as when they are reflective endorsements of your lower‐order commissive beliefs. In this paper I argue that one's commissive self‐beliefs ontologically constitute one's lower‐order commissive beliefs because one's commissive self‐beliefs instantiate (...)
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  • The Transparency of Mind.Sarah K. Paul - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (5):295-303.
    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 (...)
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  • Hay muchas cosas que creo de mí mismo sin saber que las creo.Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2017 - Critica 49 (146):37-60.
    En un artículo publicado recientemente en esta revista, Javier Vidal argumenta que toda creencia de primera persona es una creencia consciente, una conclusión que pone en jaque ciertas teorías de la consciencia, como él mismo expone. El razonamiento de Vidal se basa en un argumento que muestra que uno conoce toda creencia de primera persona que tiene y en un principio que vincula conocimiento y consciencia. Mi objetivo en este trabajo es mostrar que el razonamiento de Vidal no es sólido. (...)
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  • Semantic Knowledge, Semantic Guidance, and Kripke's Wittgenstein.Derek Green - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (2):186-206.
    Saul Kripke's influential ‘sceptical paradox’ of semantic rule-following alleges that speakers cannot have any justification for using a word one way rather than another. If it is correct, there can be no such thing as meaning anything by a word. I argue that the paradox fails to undermine meaning. Kripke never adequately motivates its excessively strict standard for the justified use of words. The paradox lacks the resources to show that its standard is truly mandatory or that speakers do not (...)
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  • (1 other version)Beliefs’ self-knowledge: an objection to the method of transparency.Javier Vidal - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:429-448.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Razonamiento y autoconocimiento.Martin F. Fricke - 2018 - Análisis Filosófico 38 (1):33-55.
    What is the relation between reasoning and self-knowledge? According to Shoemaker, a certain kind of reasoning requires self-knowledge: we cannot rationally revise our beliefs without knowing that we have them, in part because we cannot see that there is a problem with an inconsistent set of propositions unless we are aware of believing them. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. A second account, versions of which can be found in Shoemaker and Byrne, claims that we can (...)
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  • The metaphysics of responsible believing.David Hunter - 2018 - Manuscrito 41 (4):255-285.
    Contemporary philosophy of mind has tended to make the believer disappear. In response, Matt Boyle and Pamela Hieronymi have argued that believing is an act or activity, not a mental state. I argue that this response fails to fully critique contemporary accounts of believing. Such accounts assume that states of believing are particulars; with semantic properties; that we attend to in reflection and act on in inference; and with a rich causal life of their own. Together, these assumptions leave no (...)
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  • Die Spontaneität des Verstandes bei Kant und einigen Neokantianern.Matthew Boyle - 2015 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 63 (4).
    Kant famously characterizes our human understanding as a “spontaneous” faculty, but what can this mean? I criticize some recent interpretations of Kant’s claim and suggest that we can only understand what Kant means by “the spontaneity of understanding” if we recognize certain basic differences between how Kant conceived of cognition and how philosophers commonly think of it today. I go on to argue that Kant’s conception of cognition represents an appealing alternative to the unsatisfying options that contemporary ways of thinking (...)
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  • Respuesta a Sebastián: en defensa de la naturaleza de las creencias de primera persona.Javier Vidal - 2018 - Critica 50 (150):65-89.
    En esta revista, argumenté en favor de la naturaleza consciente de las creencias de primera persona. En un artículo más reciente, Miguel Ángel Sebastián trata de mostrar que tal argumento no es sólido. Aquí procedo a lidiar con sus tres críticas principales. En primer lugar, sostengo que el argumento es válido si conocer una creencia de primera persona consiste en creer que uno la tiene. Defiendo también que no hay ninguna regresión al infinito de creencias conscientes de orden superior que (...)
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  • (1 other version)Knowing Your Own Beliefs.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (S1):41-62.
    To believe is to possess a wide variety of dispositions pertinent to the proposition believed. Among those dispositions are self-ascriptive dispositions. Consequently, being disposed to self-ascribe belief that P is partly constitutive of believing that P. Such self-ascriptive dispositions can be underwritten by any of a variety of mechanisms, acting co-operatively or competitively. But since self-ascriptive dispositions are only partly constitutive of belief, there can be cases in which the self-ascriptive dispositions splinter away from the remaining dispositions. It is then (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Expresión, descripción y creencia consciente.Javier Vidal López - 2014 - Ideas Y Valores 63 (154):85-106.
    Se trata de revisar el expresivismo respecto a emisiones de la forma "Creo que p". El expresivista sostiene que una emisión de "Creo que llueve" es una expresión, y no una descripción, de la creencia de que llueve. Se propone una variación del expresivismo según la cual una emisión así expresa la creencia consciente de que llueve, en el sentido de la teoría de la conciencia de Brentano: una creencia consciente de que llueve tiene el contenido de que llueve y (...)
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