Kant’s moral philosophy both enjoins the acquisition of self-knowledge as a duty, and precludes certain forms of its acquisition via what has become known as the Opacity Thesis. This article looks at several recent attempts to solve this difficulty and argues that they are inadequate. I argue instead that the Opacity Thesis rules out only the knowledge that one has acted from genuine moral principles, but does not apply in cases of moral failure. The duty of moral (...) self-knowledge applies therefore only to one’s awareness of one’s status as a moral being and to the knowledge of one’s moral failings, both in particular actions and one’s overall character failings, one’s vices. This kind of knowledge is morally salutary as an aid to discovering one’s individual moral weakness as well as the subjective ends for which one acts, and in this way for taking up the morally required end of treating human beings as human beings. In this way, moral self-knowledge can be understood as a necessary element of moral improvement, and I conclude by suggesting several ways to understand it thereby as genuinely primary among the duties to oneself. (shrink)

Nietzsche believes that we do not know our own actions, nor their real motives. This belief, however, is but a consequence of his assuming a quite general skepticism about introspection. The main aim of this paper is to offer a reading of this last view, which I shall call the Inner Opacity (IO) view. In the first part of the paper I show that a strong motivation behind IO lies in Nietzsche’s claim that self-knowledge exploits the same set (...) of cognitive capacities as well as the same folk-psychological framework involved in outward-directed mind-reading. In the second part I turn to Nietzsche’s view of agency and argue that he sees a fundamental discrepancy between the conscious attitudes we have introspective access to, on the one hand, and the subpersonal processes and states occurring at the unconscious level of the drives, on the other hand. (shrink)

Self-knowledge presents a challenge for naturalistic theories of mind. Peter Carruthers’s (2011) approach to this challenge is Rylean: He argues that we know our own propositional attitudes because we (unconsciously) interpret ourselves, just as we have to interpret others in order to know theirs’. An alternative approach, opposed by Carruthers, is to argue that we do have a special access to our own beliefs, but that this is a natural consequence of our reasoning capacity. This is the approach of (...) transparency theories of self-knowledge, neatly encapsulated in Byrne’s epistemic rule (BEL): If p, believe that you believe that p (Byrne 2005). In this paper, I examine an objection to Carruthers’s theory in order to see whether it opens up space for a transparency theory of self-knowledge: Is it not the case that in order to interpret someone I have to have some direct access to what I believe (cf. Friedman and Petrashek 2009)? (shrink)

According to Kant, the opacity of human motivation takes two distinct forms – a psychological form: man ‘can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind [his] covert incentives’ – and a social form: ‘everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely’. In other words, first, men's ‘interior’ cannot be entirely revealed to themselves and, second, they tend not to reveal their ‘interior’ to others. A number (...) of Kant scholars have acknowledged the importance of the first form of opacity in Kant's thought and have attempted to draw out from it implications for moral deliberation and ethics in general. The aim of this paper is to examine the second, social form of opacity and draw out its anthropological implications, an issue that has been overlooked in the literature. To do so, I focus on Kant's contrast between men and beings that I would like to call ‘sincere aliens’. These sincere aliens are beings who have the opposite features of man's opacity, namely beings who cannot but reveal their ‘interior’ both to others and to themselves. (shrink)

Materialism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, dynamic systems theory and computationalism are popular views, but they were shown by Wittgenstein to be incoherent. The study of behavior encompasses all of human life but behavior is largely automatic and unconscious and even the conscious part, mostly expressed in language (which Wittgenstein equates with the mind), is not perspicuous, so it is critical to have a framework which Searle calls the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR) and I call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order (...) Thought (DPHOT). After summarizing the framework worked out by Wittgenstein and Searle, as extended by modern reasoning research, I show the inadequacies in Carruther’s views, which pervade most discussions of behavior including contemporary behavioral sciences. I maintain that his book is an amalgam of two books, one a summary of cognitive psychology and the other a summary of the standard philosophical confusions on the mind with some new jargon added. I suggest that the latter should be regarded as incoherent or as a cartoon view of life and that taking Wittgenstein at his word, we can practice successful self therapy by regarding the mind/body issue as a language/body issue. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

The history of philosophy risks a self-opacity whereby we overestimate or underestimate our proximity to prior modes of thinking. This risk is relevant to assessing Hegel’s appropriation by McDowell and Priest. McDowell enlists Hegel for a quietist answer to the problem with assuming that concepts and reality belong to different orders, viz., how concepts are answerable to the world. If we accept Hegel’s absolute idealist view that the conceptual is boundless, this problem allegedly dissolves. Priest enlists Hegel for (...) a dialetheist answer to the problem with assuming that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive, viz., how certain sentences are both true and false. If we accept Hegel’s dialectical view that certain contradictions are necessary, this problem allegedly dissolves. For both McDowell and Priest, we find a true friend in Hegel. I argue that McDowell’s and Priest’s appropriations of Hegel overestimate Hegel’s affinity with quietism and dialetheism. McDowell reads Hegel as a quietist who silences metaphysical claims and the skeptical questions they raise against commonsense, but neglects Hegel’s adaptation of ancient skepticism against commonsense. Priest reads Hegel as a dialetheist who subordinates formal logic to dialectical logic by affirming the truth of certain contradictions, but neglects Hegel’s commitment to resolving contradictions for the sake of truth qua whole. I diagnose their misreadings in terms of what Hegel regards as the three moments of logic and argue that while McDowell jumps to its third moment, Priest stalls at its second moment. According to Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, logic has three “moments”: the abstractive moment of the understanding, which “stops short” at fixed categories; the negative moment of dialectic, which discovers the “genuine nature” of the categories, viz., that each “passes over, of itself, into its opposite”; and the positive moment of speculation, which grasps the “unity” of categories through the “dissolution” of their inner opposition. Hegel warns that if these moments are “kept separate from each other […] they are not considered in their truth”. I suggest that quietist and dialetheist readings of Hegel fail to consider truthfully the unified moments of his logic. In his quietist critique of metaphysics, McDowell enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of concept and reality. But McDowell helps himself directly to the third moment of logic, where the unity of the categories, and hence the boundlessness of the conceptual, would be fully articulated. Since he arrives at the third moment prematurely, ignoring its prior moments, he obscures its truth (§1). In his dialetheist critique of formal logic, Priest enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of truth and falsity. But Priest restricts himself gratuitously to the second moment of logic, where contradictions within the categories are not yet resolved. Since he stalls at the second moment, severed from its final moment, he obscures its truth (§2). I argue we can extricate Hegel from quietist and dialetheist misreadings only if we grasp the truth of the three moments of logic. (shrink)

Psychedelic ingestion and meditative practice are both ancient methods for altering consciousness that became widely known in Western society in the second half of the 20th century. Do the similarities begin and end there, or do these methods – as many have claimed over the years – share some deeper common elements? In this chapter I take a neurophilosophical approach to this question and argue that there are, indeed, deeper commonalities. Recent empirical studies show that psychedelics and meditation modulate overlapping (...) brain networks involved in the sense of self, salience, and attention; moreover, psychedelics can occasion lasting increases in “mindfulness-related capacities” for taking a non-reactive stance on one’s inner experience (e.g. Sampedro et al. 2017). The self-binding theory of psychedelic ego dissolution (Letheby and Gerrans 2017) offers a plausible explanation of these findings: by disrupting self-related beliefs implemented in high-level cortical networks, both psychedelics and meditation can “unbind” mental contents from one’s self-model, moving these contents along the continuum from phenomenal transparency to opacity (cf. Metzinger 2003). In other words, both psychedelics and meditation can expose and weaken our foundational beliefs about our own identity, allowing us to disidentify with these beliefs and see them as “just thoughts”. There are connections between these ideas and recent arguments suggesting that psychedelic use may have epistemic benefits consistent with philosophical naturalism (Letheby 2015, 2016, 2019). I conclude with a proposal: these connections may help in thinking about the putative epistemic benefits of meditation practice from a naturalistic perspective. (shrink)

It is typically assumed that while we know other people’s mental states by observing and interpreting their behavior, we know our own mental states by introspection, i.e., without interpreting ourselves. In his latest book, The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-knowledge, Peter Carruthers (2011) argues against this assumption. He holds that findings from across the cognitive sciences strongly suggest that self-knowledge of conscious propositional attitudes such as intentions, judgments, and decisions involves a swift and unconscious (...) process of self-interpretation that utilizes the same sensory channels that we employ when working out other people’s mental states. I provide an overview of Carruthers’ book before discussing a pathological case that challenges his account of self-knowledge and mentioning empirical evidence that undermines his use of a particular kind of data in his case against introspection of conscious attitudes. (shrink)

In examining Judith Butler's treatment of Spinoza insofar as it reflects the tenacity of a commitment to the need to "honor the death drive," a need often justified by the ethical and political resources it provides, this essay asks about the basis of this need for feminist theory. From whence does it come? What ethical and political work does a primary vigilance toward our destructive and death-bent urges do? Thus, I begin with a review of Butler's treatment of Spinoza, and (...) proceed to make some suggestions about what motivates her creative appropriation of his principle of conatus. Finally, without demanding that Butler represent Spinoza's philosophy accurately, I propose that Spinoza's philosophy allows a very strong acknowledgment of destruction, including self-destruction, without conceding the necessity of an ethics or politics of anxiety. Like Butler, and perhaps even more radically, Spinoza insists upon our opacity to ourselves, our irreducible and original multiplicity and constitutive relationality, as well as the inability finally to demarcate the boundaries of the self. Yet his ethics culminates in what he calls a "remedy for the affects," in an endeavor to displace and minimize sad passions, like anxiety. In concluding, the question for feminist theory remains: Which are the best fictions, models of selfhood, and modes of speculation for the displacement of anxiety, aggression, and the passions that trigger violence agianst ourselves and others in a misogynist, homophobic, and racist culture? If I am not able to answer these questions in the course of this brief essay, I hope to underline the importance of asking them. (shrink)

Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems currently used for decision-making are opaque, i.e., the internal factors that determine their decisions are not fully known to people due to the systems’ computational complexity. In response to this problem, several researchers have argued that human decision-making is equally opaque and since simplifying, reason-giving explanations (rather than exhaustive causal accounts) of a decision are typically viewed as sufficient in the human case, the same should hold for algorithmic decision-making. Here, I contend that this argument (...) overlooks that human decision-making is sometimes significantly more transparent and trustworthy than algorithmic decision-making. This is because when people explain their decisions by giving reasons for them, this frequently prompts those giving the reasons to govern or regulate themselves so as to think and act in ways that confirm their reason reports. AI explanation systems lack this self-regulative feature. Overlooking it when comparing algorithmic and human decision-making can result in underestimations of the transparency of human decision-making and in the development of explainable AI that may mislead people by activating generally warranted beliefs about the regulative dimension of reason-giving. (shrink)

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves (...) in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral (...) beauty in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

Advancements in machine learning have fuelled the popularity of using AI decision algorithms in procedures such as bail hearings, medical diagnoses and recruitment. Academic articles, policy texts, and popularizing books alike warn that such algorithms tend to be opaque: they do not provide explanations for their outcomes. Building on a causal account of transparency and opacity as well as recent work on the value of causal explanation, I formulate a moral concern for opaque algorithms that is yet to receive (...) a systematic treatment in the literature: when such algorithms are used in life-changing decisions, they can obstruct us from effectively shaping our lives according to our goals and preferences, thus undermining our autonomy. I argue that this concern deserves closer attention as it furnishes the call for transparency in algorithmic decision-making with both new tools and new challenges. (shrink)

By integrating Bernard Williams’s internalism about reasons with his later thought, this article casts fresh light on internalism and reveals what wider concerns it speaks to. To be consistent with Williams’s later work, I argue, internalism must align with his deference to the phenomenology of moral deliberation and with his critique of ‘moral self-indulgence’. Key to this alignment is the idea that deliberation can express the agent’s motivations without referring to them; and that internalism is not a normative claim, (...) but an example of sense-making from ‘the ethnographic stance’. This leaves a worry over whether moral conviction can coexist with an internalist understanding of reasons. Here too, however, Williams’s later thought provides an answer. Differentiating corrosive from corroborative sense-making, it elucidates how internalism, though not normative, can nonetheless affect our confidence in reason statements, thereby informing how we deliberate and how we address those whose motivations differ from our own. (shrink)

The present study aimed to examine how to improve the effectiveness of moral exemplar-applied interventions based on the pillars of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Past research has mainly focused on the relatedness and attainability of moral exemplars for predicting motivation outcomes. The data for this study consisted of synthesized data sets from previous studies examining the motivational impacts of distinct moral exemplars and intervention methods. The main syntheses for these data sets used Multilevel Modeling (...) (MLM) focusing on relatability, attainability, and intervention methods, corresponding to relatedness, competence, and autonomy in the SDT, respectively, as predictors. In general, there was a significant interaction effect between the attainability or relatability, and the intervention method. Autonomous instruction methods, which support autonomy, were demonstrated to boost motivational outcomes. Implications from this study support the employment of SDT to examine the use of moral exemplars in moral education and were consistent with previous exemplar studies. (shrink)

In this dialogue, Anna and Alan talk about consciousness and its relation to self-consciousness. Could there be consciousness without self-consciousness? If not, what are the consequences? If it is possible, what are the consequences? How can we know of consciousness without self-consciousness?

In reasoning, we draw conclusions from multiple premises. But thinkers can be fragmented. And if there is no single fragment of the agent that thinks all of the premises, then the agent cannot draw any conclusions from them. It follows that reasoning from multiple premises depends on their being thought together. But what is it to think premises together? What is the condition that contrasts with fragmentation? This paper provides an answer to this question that is simple but compelling: to (...) think premises together is to attribute those very thoughts to one and the same self. The ability to reason depends on the ability to attribute the thoughts from which one reasons to oneself. Reasoning—at least the sort of reasoning that we do—requires de se thought. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to see how mental and language representations are unique from a video-game perspective, using two main criteria. First, I will posit that the level of being both an interactive work of fiction and a self-involving interactive fiction belongs to a fuzzy interval and that some works – and, therefore, some video games – are more immersive than others. Second, I will observe how propositions tie the player’s representations of the real world and the (...) game world. Starting from psychological theories of pretense in children’s make-believe games, I will then expand Nichols and Stich’s cognitive theory of pretense to include an extra layer related to the game world, i.e., player-specific representations that govern player-specific propositions. The representations dealing with the work world are the socially shared ones, while the possible-world representations, dealing with most of the game world, are player-specific and tied to unique language use. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that the right of self-determination confers to states a right to exclude would-be migrants. Drawing on the case of anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century, I argue that self-determination should be thought of as fundamentally a claim against intergroup hierarchy. This means that self-determination only grants a right to exclude in cases where immigration poses a genuine oppressive threat. Cases involving immigration into wealthy and powerful states rarely meet this criterion, and so talk of (...) self-determination as grounding a right to exclude in such cases is misguided. (shrink)

I offer an explanation of how subjects are able to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects, given that subjects always perceive from a particular location. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that a conception of space is necessary to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects. This conception of space is spelled out by showing that perceiving intrinsic properties requires perceiving objects as the kind of things that are perceivable from other locations. Second, I show that (...) having such a conception of space presupposes that a subject represent her location in relation to perceived objects. More precisely the thesis is that a subject represents her location as the location from which she both perceives objects and would act in relation to objects were she to act. So I argue that perception depends on the capacity to know what it would be to act in relation to objects. (shrink)

In the Critique of Gotha Programme, Karl Marx famously argues that a communist society will be characterised by the principle, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’ I take up a question about this principle that was originally posed by G.A. Cohen, namely: what makes communism (so conceived) possible for Marx? In reply to this question, Cohen interprets Marx as saying that communism is possible because of limitless abundance, a view that Cohen takes to be (...) implausible for ecological reasons. I develop a new interpretation of Marx's position. On this interpretation, people in communist society achieve self-realisation through providing others with the goods and services required for their self-realisation. Coupled with a reasonably high (but not immense) development of productive power, self-realisation generates conditions in which people can produce according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. I defend this view as an interpretation of Marx and I argue that it represents a more plausible account of what makes communism possible than Cohen's interpretation in which technological advance and limitless abundance play the predominant role. (shrink)

Our cultural situation is to seek a moral form of self-constitution, rather than an ontological or epistemological foundation. Such a moral ground lies in the paradox of willing surrender of the will to do wrong or dysfunctional acts in order to enter temporally-extended processes of moral change. But the paradox of willing surrender of the will requires analysis. The propositional form of it cannot be sustained and must instead give way to willingness as an ongoing choice. The self-reflexivity (...) of the will with which we accomplish this turns out to be a core activity of human activity that seeks openness to moral growth through humility. The paper suggests that self-constitution in this manner this is what freedom is for us and is therefore the source of our hope. (shrink)

Real human agents, even when they are rational by everyday standards, sometimes assign different credences to objectively equivalent statements, such as “George Orwell is a writer” and “Eric Arthur Blair is a writer”, or credences less than 1 to necessarily true statements, such as not-yet-proven theorems of arithmetic. Anna Mahtani calls this the phenomenon of “opacity” (a form of hyperintensionality). Opaque credences seem probabilistically incoherent, which goes against a key modelling assumption of probability theory. I sketch a modelling strategy (...) for capturing opaque credence assignments without abandoning probabilistic coherence. I draw on ideas from judgment-aggregation theory, where we face similar challenges of defining the “objects of judgment”. (shrink)

In Rahul Banerjee and Bikas K. Chakrabarti (eds.), Progress in Brain Research, 168: 215-246. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Electronic offprint available upon request.

Parental involvement is one of the primary factors that affect children’s development and individuality. However, its effect on the academic motivation and self-concept of college students is not well understood, especially in the Philippines. The present study used the Ecological systems theory by Bronfenbrenner to investigate the effect of varying parental involvement on the academic motivation and self-concept of college students at Dr. Carlos S. Lanting College. Purposive sampling was used among 198 college students from Dr. Carlos S. (...) Lanting College who were identified using a purposive sampling technique. Statistical instruments including descriptive, correlation, and regression analysis were used to examine the data collected and investigate the link between the variables. Based on the regression analysis, it was found that parental involvement only has a significant relationship with academic motivation and not with self-concept. In conclusion, college students have a sense of independence and their self-concept is not affected by parental involvement; nonetheless, parents providing essential support influence their academic motivation. -/- . (shrink)

This study developed and validated E-learning Self-directed Interactive Modules (E-SelfIMo) for Earth Science. The study employed Research and Development method, using the Borg and Gall development procedure, in creating eight e-modules using Kotobee software, evaluating them by experts and students, and determining their effectiveness in terms of students' conceptual understanding. Experts agreed that E-SelfIMo met the DepEd standards for non-printed learning materials, and students attested to their high validity in content, format, and usefulness. Pretest and posttest results for the (...) effectiveness of E-SelfIMo revealed that students exposed to the E-SelfIMo have progressed from “Near Mastery” to “Near Full Mastery” in the chosen Earth Science topics, showing more significant improvement in their conceptual understanding than the control group. This study concludes that E-SelfIMo supports interactive, active, and self-directed learning thereby, improving students’ motivation, engagement, interest, and performance. The E-SelfIMo could be used with technology integration as a teaching and learning tool. -/- . (shrink)

Desire-based theories of well-being claim that a person's well-being consists of the satisfaction of her desires. Many of these theories say that well-being consists of the satisfaction of desires that she would have if her desires were "corrected" in various ways. Some versions of this theory claim that the corrections involve having "full information" or being an "ideal observer." I argue that well-being does not depend on what one would desire if she were an “ideal observer.” Rather, it depends on (...) what she would desire if she had as much information as she could have and still maintain her identity as the particular person she is. The paper attempts to spell out this suggestion by constructing a notion of integrity. Roughly, integrity is preserved if one’s most central projects, commitments, and character traits are left in tact. I argue that desire-based theories of well-being should define well-being in terms of the satisfaction of those desires that one would have if one’s epistemic situation were idealized as much as would be consistent with maintaining her integrity. (shrink)

Numerous scholars, philosophers, and experts in aesthetics have underscored the profound significance of a life enriched by the presence of beauty. Consequently, the appreciation of aesthetic experiences is considered pivotal for achieving self-discovery and self-transcendence (Howell et al. 2017). Despite theoretical prominence, limited qualitative research has been conducted on this topic. To address this gap in research, this study’s objective emphasized two questions guiding the inquiry; What is the role of aesthetic encounters in aiding self-realization or individuation? (...) and, how do these experiences foster self-transcendence? -/- A thematic analysis was performed on the online interviews conducted (N=25), and their results revealed seven themes pertaining to self-realization: a) Losing Yourself to Find Yourself; b) Relatability and Self-Reflection in Art; c) Identity as a Collection of Skills; d) Art as a Medium for Self-Expression and Acknowledgment; e) Aesthetic Genres and Taste as Identity; f) Belonging and Social Identity through Art; and g) Personal Interests and Choices in Artistic Consumption. Furthermore, seven themes for the second research question of self-transcendence were also discovered: a) Mother Nature’s Beauty; b) Intense, Passionate, and Overwhelming Experiences of Heightened Consciousness; c) Sacred Symbolism, Archetypal Imagery, and the Collective Unconscious; d) Collective Effervescence, Social Connection, and Shared Meaning; e) The ‘Profound’ Found in the Mundane; f) Feelings of Spiritual Elevation and Wellbeing; and g) Self-Referential Meaning-Making through Art. These findings evidenced the transformative potential of aesthetic experiences, shedding light on the facets of personal growth and meaning that individuals derive from such encounters. (shrink)

In “On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem” (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl’s account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl’s work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas (...) and after of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being self-aware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell’s claim that “self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020). (shrink)

Self-determination theory, like other psychological theories that study eudaimomia, focuses on general processes of growth and self-realization. An aspect that tends to be sidelined in the relevant literature is virtue. We propose that special focus needs to be placed on moral virtue and its development. We review different types of moral motivation and argue that morally virtuous behavior is regulated through integrated regulation. We describe the process of moral integration and how it relates to the development of moral (...) virtue. We then discuss what morally virtuous individuals are like, what shape their internal moral system is expected to take and introduce moral self-concordance. We consider why morally virtuous individuals are expected to experience eudaimonic well-being. Finally, we address the current gap in self-determination theory research on eudaimonia. (shrink)

This paper looks at the debates between internalism and externalism in mind and epistemology. In each realm, internalists face what we call 'The Connection Problem', while externalists face what we call 'The Problem of Opacity'. We offer an integrated account of thought content and epistemic warrant that overcomes the problems. We then apply the framework to debates between internalists and externalists in metaethics.

Introduction: A general trend in the psychological literature suggests that guilt contributes to morality more than shame does. Unlike shame-prone individuals, guilt-prone individuals internalize the causality of negative events, attribute responsibility in the first person, and engage in responsible behavior. However, it is not known how guilt- and shame-proneness interact with the attribution of responsibility to others. -/- Methods: In two Web-based experiments, participants reported their attributions of moral culpability (i.e., responsibility, causality, punishment and decision-making) about morally ambiguous acts of (...) killing in different conditions. In Study 1 the vignettes were presented in the 1st person, while in Study 2 in the 3rd person. To test proneness to guilt and shame, we utilized the GASP scale, which differentiates between the affective and behavioral components of each emotion. Statistical analyses were performed in Matlab and R. -/- Results: We found that guilt- and shame-proneness were associated with the severity of attributions in both the first and the third person, but the effect was strong only in the guilt case (both subtypes) and shame-affect case, and not in the shame-behavior case. We call this the Moralizing Effect. -/- Discussion: We wonder whether our finding that guilt-prone people tend to attribute a higher degree of culpability to others is really consistent with the view that guilt motivates people to choose the “moral paths in life”. This echoes views about the harmful aspects of guilt, which have been expressed historically in philosophy, for example, by Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

The question of how we can be certain that we have an epistemic justification for our self-knowledge has been among a central debate in philosophy of mind. The basic idea of the immunity to error through misidentification thesis (IEM) in explaining self-knowledge is that certain self-ascriptions of mental states concerning first-person content are not prone to error for the self-conscious ‘I’-thoughts. One of the accounts that supports that claim is agentialism. According to this view, we can (...) have beliefs and intentions about ourselves because we exercise agency over them. However, irrational factors such as emotional interference, inconsistent subject affiliation, and different views on the mind leading to different self-references can call this claim to the subject’s rational agency into question. This paper examines the agentialism, identifies its flaws, and presents two alternative strategies to support a rationalist account of self-knowledge—which is generally weaker than agentialism. It argues that the agential approach to self-knowledge is too demanding on the subject’s consciousness thus a more moderate approach is required to satisfy both first-person authority and the epistemic reliability of self-knowledge. (shrink)

This is a reply to commentators in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport's special issue symposium on GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. I respond to criticisms concerning the value of achievement play and striving play, the transparency and opacity of play, the artistic status of games, and many more.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

The problem of self-knowledge has been thoroughly discussed in the context of traditional epistemology. In parallel to the traditional approach to epistemology, Radically Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) has emerged in the last 30 years as a genuine contender in its field. According to RECS, the unity of analysis of cognitive processes is the dynamics between brain, body and environment. In this paper, I advance a RECS approach to self-knowledge, which immediately suggests that knowing oneself is a matter of (...) knowing what one’s body can do. I then turn to resistance training, particularly weightlifting, and argue that it offers a paradigmatic case of self-knowledge in RECS’s terms. More precisely, resistance training allows the trainee to achieve knowledge of themselves in a fundamentally practical manner—and doing so is transformative of the kind of actions they are capable of. (shrink)

Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, (...) across four studies we investigated the extent to which people believe they have changed over time after recollecting their own moral or immoral behaviors from the personal past. Our results indicate that recollecting past immoral actions is associated with stronger impressions of dissimilarity and change in the sense of self over time than recollecting past moral actions. These effects held for diverse domains of morality (i.e., honesty/dishonesty, helping/harming, fairness/unfairness, and loyalty/disloyalty), and they remained even after accounting for objective, calendar time. Further supporting a motivational explanation, these effects held when people recollected their own past actions but not when they recollected the actions of other people. (shrink)

After briefly summarizing Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory of consciousness, I consider difficulties that arise for his account from the possibility of an ‘empty HOT’, a HOT that occurs in the absence of the mental state that it purports to represent. I criticize Rosenthal’s responses to this objection, and conclude that the difficulties that derive from the possibility of such misrepresentation are fatal to his HOT-theory.

Little is know about factors that influence the development of public self-consciousness. One potential factor is exposure to audiences: being repeatedly aware of one's object status could create a high disposition to focus on public self-aspects. To explore this hypothesis public self-consciousness was assessed in two groups of subjects: 62 professors and actors (high exposure to audiences) and 39 people without audience experience. Analysis show that significant differences exist for public self-consciousness in men only. Also, history (...) of frequent exposure to audience is significantly but weakly correlated with high public self-consciousness in men. This supports previous observations indicating that self-consciousness seems to develop differently for men and women. (shrink)

In a series of early essays, beginning with "Must We Mean What We Say?", Stanley Cavell offers a sustained response to the argument that ordinary language philosophy is nothing more than amateur linguistics, carried out from the armchair -- so that philosophers' claims about "what we say", and what we mean when we say it, are necessarily in need of proper empirical support. The present paper provides a close reading of Cavell and a defense of his argument that, since a (...) philosopher's descriptions of our use of words are supposed to be an expression of *self*-knowledge, they do not require, and indeed cannot possibly find, any empirical justification. This does not guarantee that these descriptions are immune to error, nor does it mean they describe a different range of facts from the ones that are the subject-matter of linguistics and lexicography. Nor, finally, does it follow from this argument that observation of the facts of ordinary usage, as revealed e.g. in linguistic corpora, is of no use to the philosopher of ordinary language. I close with a brief discussion of what the shared nature of linguistic communication shows about how to understand the "we" in "what we say". (shrink)

We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent's hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things the environment's outputs are based on, we argue that for an agent to achieve on-average good performance across many such extended environments, it is necessary for the agent to self-reflect. Thus weighted-average performance over the space of all suitably well-behaved extended environments could be considered (...) a way of measuring how self-reflective an agent is. We give examples of extended environments and introduce a simple transformation which experimentally seems to increase some standard RL agents' performance in a certain type of extended environment. (shrink)

We explore the view that Frege's puzzle is a source of straightforward counterexamples to Leibniz's law. Taking this seriously requires us to revise the classical logic of quantifiers and identity; we work out the options, in the context of higher-order logic. The logics we arrive at provide the resources for a straightforward semantics of attitude reports that is consistent with the Millian thesis that the meaning of a name is just the thing it stands for. We provide models to show (...) that some of these logics are non-degenerate. (shrink)

Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people's minds. This seems incompatible with "privileged access"---the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that (...) Carruthers's new theory cannot clearly preserve the superior reliability of our beliefs about our own attitudes. (shrink)

Many libertarians assume that there is a close relation between an individual’s self-ownership and her freedom. That relation needs questioning. In this article it is argued that, even in a pre-property state, self-ownership is insufficient to protect freedom. Therefore, libertarians who believe in self-ownership should either offer a defense of freedom that is independent from their defense of self-ownership, make it explicit that they hold freedom as second to self-ownership (and defend that position), or reconsider (...) the moral basis of their political views. (shrink)

If an ethical theory sometimes requires that agents be motivated by features other than those it advances as justifications for the rightness or wrongness of actions, some consider this type of self-effacement to be a defeater from which no theory can recover. Most famously, Michael Stocker argues that requiring a divided moral psychology in which reasons are partitioned from motives would trigger a “malady of the spirit” for any agent attempting to live according to the prescriptions of modern ethical (...) theories. Stocker’s argument is tremendously influential, and the fact that he specifically links modern ethical theories to self-effacement leads advocates of virtue ethics to presume that their view is immune to the problem of self-effacement and that this immunity gives virtue ethics an advantage over its contemporary rivals. This immunity has been challenged by Thomas Hurka and Simon Keller, who maintain that virtue ethics is equally as vulnerable to the charge of self-effacement as its modern counterparts. I argue in this paper that recent attempts to reply to Hurka and Keller are not successful. Specifically, I argue that recent attempts to immunize virtue ethics from self-effacement do not adequately address the challenge from Keller that virtue ethics can only escape from self-effacement via measures that are also available to modern theories. Thus, even if virtue ethics can avoid self-effacement, one must give up the claim that virtue ethics is uniquely immune to self-effacement compared to its modern rivals. I close by noting that my aim is not to argue that virtue ethics is deficient in this respect. Instead, I suggest that advocates of virtue ethics ought to consider the possibility that self-effacement is a tolerable psychological challenge for any ethical theory that requires agents to reflect on the substantive normative guidance it provides. (shrink)

This paper explores why victims who provoke their aggressors seem to compromise their right to self-defence. First, it argues that one proposed answer – the victims are partially responsible for the threats they face – fails. It faces counterexamples that it cannot adequately address. Second, the paper develops the Protective Duty View according to which we incur protective duties towards others when we interfere with their reasonable opportunities to avoid suffering harm. Since provokers wrongfully interfere with prospective aggressors’ opportunities (...) to avoid posing a threat and thus to be defensively harmed, they incur protective duties towards the aggressors. This can require that they significantly limit or even refrain from using defensive force. The paper ends by drawing out some of the implications of the Protective Duty View for issues related to war and punishment. (shrink)