As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean (...) perspective—a perspective according to which attitude states are generally relations to structured Fregean thoughts composed of senses. The Fregean view faces a challenge of compositionality here. This essay describes the challenge and offers a response on the Fregean's behalf. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between phenomenal properties and intentional properties. In recent years a number of philosophers have argued that intentional properties are sometimes necessitated by phenomenal properties, but have not explained why or how. Exceptions can be found in the work of Katalin Farkas and Farid Masrour, who develop versions of reductionism regarding phenomenally-necessitated intentionality (or "phenomenal intentionality"). I raise two objections to reductive theories of the sort they develop. Then I propose a version of primitivism regarding phenomenal (...) intentionality. I argue that primitivism avoids the pitfalls of reductionism while promising broad explanatory payoffs. (shrink)

Alex Byrne (2005; 2011a; 2011b; 2018) has argued that we can gain self-knowledge of our current mental states through the use of a transparency method. A transparency method provides an extrospective rather than introspective route to self-knowledge. For example, one comes to know whether one believes P not by thinking about oneself but by considering the world-directed question of whether P is true. According to Byrne, this psychological process consists in drawing inferences from world-directed propositions to mind-directed conclusions. In this (...) article, I consider whether this ‘Inferential Transparency Method’ can provide us with the self-knowledge that some philosophers have thought we require in order to “critically reason” (Burge 1996), and I conclude that it cannot provide such self-knowledge. The force of this objection depends on how much stock we should place in our status as critical reasoners. However, I conclude by suggesting a more general worry for Byrne’s account. (shrink)

The question of whether content externalism poses a threat to the traditional view of self-knowledge has been much debated. Compatibilists have tried to diffuse the threat by appealing to the self-verifying character of reflexive judgments about our own thoughts, while incompatibilists have strenuously objected that this does not suffice. In my paper I argue that this debate is fundamentally misconceived since it is based, on both sides, on the problematic notion of ‘knowledge of content’. What this shows, I argue, is (...) not that content externalism is unobjectionable, but that the real challenge to content externalism is not an epistemological one. The real difficulty concerns the content externalist’s seemingly necessary commitment to the idea that individuals have an incomplete grasp of the concepts that go into their own thoughts. This idea poses a threat not to self-knowledge, I argue, but rather to our first- and second-order reasoning abilities. (shrink)

The comparator-model, originally developed to explain motor action, has recently been invoked to explain several aspects of the self. However, in the first place it may not be used to explain a basic self-world distinction because it presupposes one. Our alternative account is based on specific systematic covariation between action and perception. Secondly, the comparator model cannot explain the feeling of ownership of thoughts. We argue—contra Frith and Campbell—that thoughts are not motor processes and therefore cannot be described by the (...) comparator-model. Rather, thoughts can be the triggering cause (intention) for actions. An alternative framework for the explanation of thought insertion in schizophrenics is presented. (shrink)

Stephen Schiffer 2003 presents six arguments against the Fregean model of propositions, according to which propositions are the referents of that-clauses and structured entities made out of concepts. Schiffer advances an alternative view: propositions are unstructured pleonastic entities. My purpose is to argue in favour of the main tenets of the Fregean model by countering each of Schiffer’s arguments and sketching the guidelines for a theory of concepts as basic components of propositions.

This article is concerned with the question of the nature of the epistemic liaison between experience and belief. The problem, often known as the problem of nondoxastic justification, is to see how a causal transition between experience and belief could assume a normative dimension, that is, how perceptual experience serves to justify beliefs about the world. Currently a number of theories have been proposed to resolve this problem. The article considers a particular solution offered by Tyler Burge which, among other (...) things, introduces a new type of positive epistemic status or warrant, namely, entitlement. It contends that Burge's notion of entitlement cannot be of any help in resolving the problem of nondoxastic justification. Burge's account is compared and contrasted with other, similar, approaches to the problem of nondoxastic justification. (shrink)

This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology – the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative.¹ At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?

There are a number of strands to the knowledge we have of our own minds; two strands are these: we often know with ease what we are thinking and we often know with ease what it is we believe. This paper concerns the knowledge of what we are thinking; it pursues questions as to what kind of judgment subjects make about their own thoughts, how those judgments are formed and why they constitute knowledge; it also asks how these judgments relate (...) to the judgments subjects make about their own beliefs when they know with ease what they believe. It focuses on the account developed by Tyler Burge as part of his project of reconciling externalism about thought content with privileged self-knowledge. Burge's account is well known and influential; as such it is a fitting target for examination and criticism. (shrink)

Content externalism implies first, that there is a distinction between concepts and conceptions, and second, that there is a distinction between thoughts and states of mind. In this paper, I argue for a novel theory of self-knowledge: the partial-representation theory of self-knowledge, according to which the self-ascription of a thought is authoritative when it is based on a con-scious, occurrent thought in virtue of which it partially represents an underlying state of mind.

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 discuss Burge's argument that our entitlement to self-knowledge consists in the constitutive relation between the second-order review of thoughts and the thoughts reviewed, and defend it against Peacocke's criticism. I then argue that though our entitlement to self-knowledge is neutral to different environments, as Burge claims, the consideration of Burge's own notion of brute error shows that Burge's effort to reconcile externalism and self-knowledge is not successful.

Kit Fine (2007) outlines an account of semantic coordination, an account motivated by the role of semantic coordination in cognition. Actually, Fine outlines two accounts of semantic coordination, one in terms of co-reference and another in terms of synonymy. I argue, first, that Fine's two accounts are not equivalent, with one being logically stronger than the other, but second and more importantly, that neither account is correct. I outline an alternative account of semantic coordination – the epistemic conception of semantic (...) coordination – that links semantic and epistemic aspects of cognition more directly. The most surprising result of my alternative account of semantic coordination is that semantic coordination is a relation that can hold between elements of thought and language of different semantic types. I close the paper by briefly outlining some applications of the idea that semantic coordination is a relation that can hold across semantic types. (shrink)

Does the epistemology of disagreement have significant consequences for theories of conceptual understanding? I argue that it does. I argue that the epistemology of disagreement manifests the existence of a special kind of concept, perspectival modes of metarepresentation, a kind of concept instances of which figure in the thinking about thoughts that occurs in deep disagreement. These perspectival modes of metarepresentation are de re modes of presentation of thoughts themselves – hence de re modes of metarepresentation – in which one (...) and the same thought is presented to higher‐order thinking about thoughts in different ways. These modes or ways are de re and perspectival because they are individuated by facts about whether the thought being thought about is the grasped or understood propositional object of one's own or another's thinking. I outline a broadly Fregean framework for theorizing conceptual understanding and draw out three significant consequences of the existence of perspectival modes of metarepresentation for theories of conceptual understanding: they (1) constitute a new philosophical motivation for a restricted fragment of what Terence Parsons calls a “libertine” hierarchy of Fregean sense; (2) provide, against David Chalmers, examples of a priori equivalences that are nevertheless cognitively significant; and (3) constitute a novel and pervasive example of Kripkean ‘Paderewski’‐type designators. (shrink)

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

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)

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 (...) action is both a judgment that p and a self-attribution of a belief that p. The notion of embedded mental action is introduced here to explain how this can be so and to provide a full epistemic explanation of the transparency method. That explanation makes sense of first-person authority and immediacy in transparent self-knowledge. In generalized form, it gives sufficient conditions on an attitude’s being known transparently. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own states (or processes) in an indexical mode of presentation. The philosophical debate is concentrating on mental states (or processes). If we characterize self-knowledge by natural language sentences, the most adequate utterance has a structure like “I know that I am in mental state M”. This common sense characterization has to be developed into an adequate description. In this investigation we will tackle two questions: (i) What precisely is the phenomenon referred to by “self-knowledge” and (...) how can we adequately describe a form of self-knowledge which we might realistically enjoy? (ii) Can we have self-knowledge given the fact that the meaning of some words which we utter depends on the environment or the speech community? The theory we defend argues that we have to distinguish the public meaning of utterances, on the one hand, and the mental representations which are constituting a mental state of an individual, on the other. Self-knowledge should be characterized on the level of mental representations while the semantics of utterances self-attributing mental states should be treated separately. Externalism is only true for the public meaning of utterances but not for beliefs and other mental states including self-knowledge. (shrink)

Some psychological states—paradigmatically, beliefs and intentions—are rationally evaluable: they can be rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. Other states—e.g. sensations and gastrointestinal states—aren't: they're a‐rational. On a familiar but hard‐to‐make‐precise line of thought, at least part of what explains this difference is that we're somehow responsible for (having/being in) states of the former sort, in a way we're not for the others. But this responsibility can't be modeled on the responsibility we have for our (free, intentional) actions. So how should (...) it be understood? In this paper I address that question. The overall shape of my answer is in line with tradition: I take the responsibility to be grounded in certain capacities for reflection and control. Answers in this family have recently been subjected to an interesting challenge. But the version I defend meets that challenge. (shrink)

What is knowledge of one's own current, consciously entertained intentional states a form of inner awareness? If so, what form? In this paper I explore the prospects for a quasi-observational account of a certain class of cases where subjects appear to have self-knowledge, namely, the so-called cogito-like cases. In section one I provide a rationale for the claim that we need an epistemology of self-knowledge, and specifically, an epistemology of the cogito-like cases. In section two I argue that contentful properties (...) in such cases have two features in common with observational properties of objects. In section three, I develop a quasi-observational account of self-knowledge for the cogito-like cases by considering various accounts of the nature of observational properties and by applying them to these cases. I conclude by addressing some important objections to the account. (shrink)

In this paper I outline and defend an introspectionist account of authoritative self-knowledge for a certain class of cases, ones in which a subject is both thinking and thinking about a current, conscious thought. My account is distinctive in a number of ways, one of which is that it is compatible with the truth of externalism.

Many recent discussions of self-consciousness and self-knowledge assume that there are only two kinds of accounts available to be taken on the relation between the so-called first-order (conscious) states and subjects' awareness or knowledge of them: a same-order, or reflexive view, on the one hand, or a higher-order one, on the other. I maintain that there is a third kind of view that is distinctively different from these two options. The view is important because it can accommodate and make intelligible (...) certain cases of authoritative self-knowledge that cannot easily be made intelligible, if at all, by these other two types of accounts. My aim in this paper is to defend this view against those who maintain that a same-order view is sufficient to account for authoritative self-knowledge. (shrink)

In Emotions, Values, and Agency, Christine Tappolet develops a sophisticated, perceptual theory of emotions and their role in wide range of issues in value theory and epistemology. In this paper, we raise three worries about Tappolet's proposal.

It is well known that Frege was an extensionalist, in the following sense: he held that the truth-value of a sentence is always a function only of the references of its parts. One consequence of this view is that expressions occurring in certain linguistic contexts – for example, the that-clauses of propositional attitude ascriptions – do not have their usual references, but refer instead to what are usually their senses. But although a number of philosophers have objected to this result, (...) no one has yet attempted to see what happens to Frege's views – and, in particular, to his theory of sense and reference – if his extensionalism is abandoned while his other views are maintained. This paper thus does two things. First, it clears the way for such an attempt, by arguing that recent defences of Frege's extensionalism – by Tyler Burge, Saul Kripke, Terence Parsons and Christopher Peacocke – fall short. Second, it sketches a positive proposal for a non-extensionalist application of Frege's theory of sense and reference to sentences of indirect discourse and ascriptions of propositional attitude. (shrink)

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 (...) frequently satisfy the well-motivated competitor I offer. So the paradox fails. (shrink)

With this provocative book, Quassim Cassam aspires to reorient the philosophical study of self-knowledge so as to bring its methodology and subject matter into line with recognizably human concerns. He pursues this reorientation on two fronts. He proposes replacing what he sees as the field’s standard subject, an ideally rational being he calls Homo Philosophicus, with a more realistic Homo Sapiens. And he proposes shifting the field’s primary focus from ‘narrow epistemological concerns’ to issues reflecting ‘what matters to humans’, such (...) as knowledge of one’s own character and the moral significance of self-knowledge. Cassam also contributes to this field: he advances an inferentialist account of self-knowledge and a moderate instrumentalism about self-knowledge’s value. (shrink)

A commonplace in contemporary philosophy is that mental content has normative properties. A number of writers associate this view to the idea that the normativity of content is essentially connected to its social character. I agree with the first thesis, but disagree with the second. The paper examines three kinds of views according to which the norms of thought and content are social: Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations, Davidson’s triangulation argument, and Brandom’s inferential pragmatics, and criticises each. It is argued that (...) there are objective conceptual norms constitutive of mental content, but that these are not essentially social. (shrink)

Among recent theories of the nature of self-knowledge, the rationalistic view, according to which self-knowledge is not a cognitive achievement—perceptual or inferential—has been prominent. Upon this kind of view, however, self-knowledge becomes a bit of a mystery. Although the rationalistic conception is defended in this article, it is argued that it has to be supplemented by an account of the transparency of belief: the question whether to believe that P is settled when one asks oneself whether P.

This paper begins with the thought that there is something out of place about offloading inquiry into one's own mind to AI. The paper's primary goal is to articulate the unease felt when considering cases of doing so. It draws a parallel between the use of algorithms in the criminal law: in both cases one feels entitled to be treated as an exception to a verdict made on the basis of a certain kind of evidence. Then it identifies an account (...) of first‐person authority that can make good on this: agentialism. Thus, the paper constitutes an argument in favor of an agentialist treatment of self‐knowledge and first‐person authority. (shrink)

The first explicit argument for the incompatibility of externalism in the philosophy of mind and a priori self-knowledge is Boghossian’s discrimination argument. In this essay, I oppose the third premise of this argument, trying to show by means of a thought experiment that possessing the “twater thought” is not an alternative, a fortiori not a relevant alternative, to having the “water thought.” I then examine a modified version of Boghossian’s argument. The attempt is made to substantiate the claim that the (...) standard incompatibilist support for its second premise is untenable. Furthermore, a third Boghossian-style argument is rejected on the ground that either its second premise cannot be warranted in the way suggested by incompatibilists or its third premise is mistaken because having the “twater thought” instead of the “water thought” is not relevant. Finally, it is argued that the discrimination argument cannot be saved by invoking closure. The upshot of my discussion is that a compatibilist can dismiss Boghossian-style arguments for incompatibilism without having to deal with fundamental issues concerning self-knowledge and the nature of slow switching. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Dans un article récent, Victoria McGeer a proposé une conception de la connaissance de soi, qui se présente comme une alternative au modèle du rapporteurprédicteur selon lequel confesser des croyances consiste à rapporter des «états sousjacents» de soi-même. McGeer met l’accent, à la place, sur une approche actantielle: la connaissance de soi, selon elle, est engendrée par les actions responsables que l’agent entreprend pour rendre vrais ses propres aveux quant à ses croyances. Le présent article est une discussion critique (...) de cette conception de McGeer. Une première objection a rapport à l’explication du comportement, et une seconde concerne la tentative du modèle actantiel pour rendre compte du caractère d’autorité de la connaissance de soi. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉDans un article récent, Victoria McGeer a proposé une conception de la connaissance de soi, qui se présente comme une alternative au modèle durapporteur prédicteur selon lequel confesser des croyances consiste à rapporter des «états sous-jacents» de soi-même. McGeer met l'accent, à la place, sur une approche actantielle: la connaissance de soi, selon elle, est engendrée par les actions responsables que l'agent entreprend pour rendre vrais ses propres aveux quant à ses croyances. Le présent article est une discussion critique de (...) cette conception de McGeer. Une première objection a rapport à l'explication du comportement, et une seconde concerne la tentative du modèle actantiel pour rendre compte du caractère d'autorité de la connaissance de soi. (shrink)

The question I am interested in is this. What exactly is the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of knowledge on the basis of perception? The problem here, as I see it, is to solve simultaneously for the nature of this experience, and its role in acquiring and sustaining the relevant beliefs, in such a way as to vindicate what I regard as an undeniable datum, that perception is a basic source of knowledge about the mind-independent world, in a (...) sense of ‘basic’ which is also to be elucidated. I shall sketch the way in which I think that this should be done. In section I, I argue that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs. In section II, I explain how they do so. My thesis is that a correct account of the sense in which perceptual experiences are experiences of mind-independent things is itself an account of the way in which they provide peculiarly basic reasons for beliefs about the world around the perceiver. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the widespread view whereby a second-order judgment of the form ‘I believe that p ’ qualifies as self-knowledge only if the embedded content, p , is of the same type as the content of the intentional state reflected upon and the self-ascribed attitude, belief, is of the same type as the attitude the subject takes towards p . Rather than requiring identity of contents across levels of cognition self-knowledge requires only that the embedded content of the second-order (...) thought be an entailment of the content of the intentional state reflected upon. And rather than demanding identity of attitudes across levels of cognition self-knowledge demands only that the attitude of the intentional state reflected upon and the attitude the subject self-attributes share certain features such as direction of fit and polarity. (shrink)

Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic self-knowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the baseless, no-‘how’ (...) and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge. (shrink)

Suppose, as I stare at a glass in front of me, I say or think: There.

Against philosophical orthodoxy, Hilary Kornblith has mounted an empirically grounded critique of the epistemic value of reflection. In this paper, I argue that this recent critique of the epistemic value of reflection fails even if we concede that (a) the empirical facts are as Kornblith says they are and (b) reliability is the only determinant of epistemic value. The critique fails because it seeks to undermine the reliability of reflection in general but targets only one of its variants, namely individual (...) reflection, while neglecting social reflection. This critique comprises two arguments which have a common structure: they both impose a requirement on the reliability of reflection, but deny, on empirical grounds, that the requirement is met. One argument imposes an introspection requirement, which I reject as superfluous. I show how reflection can proceed without introspection. The other argument imposes an efficacy requirement. This requirement concerns whether reflection is causally efficacious i.e., whether it leads us to change our minds for the better. I accept this as a genuine requirement. Even if we concede that individual reflection fails to meet this requirement, I argue that we have not been given sufficient evidence to believe that social reflection is bound to fail this requirement. Furthermore, my analysis of the conditions under which social reflection works best provides us with prima facie grounds for optimism regarding the reliability of social reflection. Ultimately, then, these arguments fail to undermine the epistemic value of reflection in general. (shrink)