Abstract
The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for extending the idea of transparent introspection to wishes. First, I elucidate the notion of transparent introspection and highlight its advantages over rival accounts of self-knowledge (Sect. 1). Then I pose several problems that seem to obstruct the extension of transparent introspection to wishes (Sect. 2). In order to overcome these problems, I call into question the standard propositional attitude analysis of non-doxastic attitudes (Sect. 3). My considerations lead to a non-orthodox account of attitudes in general and wishes in particular in light of which the problems presented in Sect. 2 disappear (Sect. 4).
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Notes
It might be asked why an account of self-knowledge that works fine with some mental states should be extended to all mental states. See Byrne (2012, p. 172) for a convincing argument in favor of “unified” accounts of self-knowledge.
I intend to use the notion of wish to refer to the elements of a certain subset of what Davis (1986) calls “volitive desires.” Wishes in this sense are ascribed by sentences of the form “S wishes that p”—as in “I wish that Fred would reply to my letter,” “Bob wishes that he knew what was going on,” or “Angela wishes that she had never bought this smart phone.” Sometimes, “wish” is used to refer to the action that is carried out, say, by a child blowing out birthday candles. This action does not qualify as a wish in my sense. However, the child’s activity of making a wish can be regarded as a behavioral manifestation of a wish in the proper sense of that word. Like many volitive desires, wishes seem to be directed at proposition-like objects, since the verb “to wish” typically takes a sentential complement. Yet utterances like “I wish for chocolate cookies after dinner” are not ungrammatical. In such cases, however, “wish” is used as a stylistic variant of “would like to have.” The corresponding paraphrase “I would like to have some chocolate cookies after dinner” shows that the wish in question is not simply directed toward chocolate cookies, but toward a more complex entity that involves, besides chocolate cookies, the speaker and the relation of eating, having, or being offered. In contrast to many volitive desires, wishes do not necessarily go hand in hand with dispositions to act in a certain way. For this reason, it is sometimes said that wishes are not desires at all. I will not take a stand on this classificatory issue, however, since nothing in what I argue depends on it.
This claim is often dubbed “experiential transparency” and it can be traced back to two short passages in Moore (1903, p. 446 and p. 450). There is a lively discussion about whether Moore’s observation provides support for “strong representationalism,” i.e., the view—most prominently held by Dretske (1995) and Tye (1995)—that the qualitative character of our phenomenal mental states is reducible to their intentional content. See Kind (2007) for a critique of strong representationalism based on a thoroughgoing analysis of experiential transparency. Hellie (2009) provides a useful annotated bibliography of the discussion about experiential transparency. In order to forestall possible misunderstandings, let me emphasize that endorsing TI does not commit one to strong representationalism. It merely commits one to the view that all mental states—at least those mental states that are introspectively accessible—have intentional content. This is a view that is promoted, for example, by Crane (1998), who describes it as, compared to Tye’s view, “a weaker form of intentionalism, which says that all mental states are intentional, regardless of whether these states also have non-intentional properties” (p. 234).
Cf. Evans (1982, p. 225).
Byrne (2005, p. 96).
However, see McGeer (1996) for an attempt to account for the phenomenon of privileged access within a neo-Rylean framework.
This is Gertler’s (2008) term. It is supposed to cover certain accounts that hold that we gain introspective knowledge about our own mental states by observing them. In contrast to proponents of inner sense theories, however, a proponent of the Unmediated Observation model maintains that “these ‘inner’ observations differ from ordinary perceptual observations in that nothing mediates, epistemically or metaphysically, between the observational state and the state observed.” (Gertler (2008, Sect. 2.1)) For a recent formulation of this view, see Gertler (2001, 2012).
Though I am sympathetic with these points I am not, as indicated in footnote 4, willing to go as far as Dretske and Tye and claim that phenomenal content can be reduced to intentional content.
In order to forestall possible misunderstandings, let me add that I do not think that direct realism—understood as the claim that we directly perceive (or think about) ordinary material objects, i.e., that we perceive (or think about) them without mediation by some intermediary entities—is plausible or even correct. There are far too many phenomena—illusion and hallucination in the case of perception, referential opacity and intensionality in the case of thinking—that suggest that direct realism is untenable. However, I do think that direct realism would be a wonderful thing if only it were true. If I had the choice, I certainly would prefer to be in direct perceptual (or cognitive) contact with the things that matter most to me. Thus, in my view, any theory that has a touch of direct realism deserves some amount of appreciation.
Russell’s account of sense perception might serve as an illustration of this claim. Cf. Russell (1912, p. 74): “[T]he sense-data which make up the appearance of my table are things with which I have acquaintance, things immediately known to me just as they are. My knowledge of the table as a physical object, on the contrary, is not direct knowledge. Such as it is, it is obtained through acquaintance with the sense-data that make up the appearance of the table.” However, Russell’s account of sense perception is not the only illustration of the claim that we could not know anything about o if we were not aware of at least those elements of Ψ in virtue of which o is presented to us. Think of a broadly Fregean conception of knowledge according to which one cannot know that a is F unless one “grasps” a proposition which in turn consists of a mode of presentation of a and the concept of being F. To be sure, there are important differences between a Russellian account and a Fregean: the former is about sense perception, the latter about knowledge; sense data are concrete mental individuals, propositions are abstract objects; sense data present material objects, whereas propositions present state of affairs; while sense data are typically caused by the external items they present, propositions are not so caused (as abstract objects, propositions are not caused by nor do they cause anything); etc. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities between the two views. It seems, for example, that sense data and propositions play a similar role in the respective framework: both present a certain external item to the subject who entertains them. Moreover, it seems that Russell’s notion of acquaintance is similar to Frege’s notion of grasping: both relate me to some proxy entities such that the latter are, as Russell puts it, “immediately known to me just as they are.” Thus, I would say that the broadly Fregean view about knowledge is likewise an illustration of the claim that we could not know anything about o if we were not aware of at least those elements of Ψ in virtue of which o is presented to us.
Cf. Woodruff Smith and McIntyre (1982, p. 96): “[T]o ‘bracket’ [the thesis of the natural attitude] is to refuse to make or to use the assumption that there is a real, natural world to which our intentions relate. And bracketing this general assumption entails making no use of the more particular beliefs that presuppose it; beliefs about particular objects and all the theories of natural science are thereby bracketed as well… The purpose of bracketing… is to turn our attention away from the objects of the natural world so that our inquiry may focus instead on the most fundamental evidences on which our naturalistic beliefs about these objects are based. And for Husserl, as for Descartes, this turn to evidences is a turn toward the conscious subject and his experiences.”
This point is sometimes alternatively put as follows: when one tries to turn one’s attention on the intrinsic features of one’s mental state one seems to end up again concentrating on what is outside (cf. Tye 1995, p. 30).
To be sure, this claim can be doubted as well and has, in fact, been rejected by many contemporary philosophers. It is for this reason that I say “it might be true.” I mention this claim nonetheless, since it is part and parcel of the traditional view. Moreover, without this claim the metaphors of priority and equality would not be intelligible.
Here, I presuppose a traditional view concerning the relation between propositions and states of affairs: a given proposition determines one and only one state of affairs—it is true only when the state of affairs it determines obtains.
Gertler (2008, Sect. 2.3). This is not to say that Gertler endorses this idea. On the contrary, as indicated in footnote 23, she is one of the most prolific critics of TI in general.
See also Byrne (2012, p. 177) for a similar example. According to Byrne (2012), the reason one does not believe that one wants to ϕ, even though one deems ϕ desirable, is that “one believes (a) that one intends to ψ, (b) that ψing is incompatible with ϕing, and (c) that ψing is neither desirable nor better overall than ϕing” (p. 182). However, Ashwell (2013, p. 253) puts forth a convincing argument that, in the cases under discussion, one has to know what one wants in order to know what one intends. So Byrne’s explanation fails.
For similar arguments concerning non-doxastic attitudes, cf. Nichols and Stich (2003, p. 194), Finkelstein (2003, p. 161), Goldman (2000, pp. 182–183). I owe these references to Byrne (2012, p. 174). See also Shoemaker (1988, pp. 204–207) for some skeptical remarks about the prospects of assimilating the introspection of one’s desires to the introspection of one’s beliefs.
Cf. Ryle (1949, p. 181 ff).
Two minor complications are noteworthy. First, even in unstudied talk, people sometimes choose formulations that rather disguise than reveal the content of their attitude. For example, a frequently observed phenomenon is that people express their belief that it will rain tomorrow by uttering the sentence “I believe that it will rain tomorrow.” This sentence, however, does not give adequate expression to their belief, since an utterance of this sentence expresses the proposition that the person in question believes that it will rain tomorrow––which is not the proposition that is accepted by someone who believes that it will rain tomorrow. Thus, we sometimes do not even take the unstudied talk of a person at face value, but rather model intentional content on a sentence that expresses the attitude in question in a less ambiguous way than the sentence the speaker actually utters. Secondly, we are able to make well-founded reports of attitudes even if we lack unstudied talk that we could use as evidence—be it because there are no such utterances or because we missed them. In these cases, we often invent a sentence that the person in question would have uttered if she had spoken spontaneously, frankly and unpreparedly. In order to provide for these contingencies, I will say that, in modeling the intentional content of someone else’s attitude, one is guided by those sentences that the person in question would utter if she were to express her attitude unambiguously.
Surely there is more than one way to express the wish in question unambiguously. Instead of “If only it would rain tomorrow!” one might utter, “May it rain tomorrow!” or, perhaps, “Why couldn’t it rain tomorrow?” as well.
Of course, it is not entirely correct to speak of an optative mood in connection with English, since English, in contrast to other languages, has no morphological optative. There are, however, several constructions in English which imitate a morphological optative. So, in order to avoid splitting hairs, I will continue to speak of optative sentences.
Cf. Dummett (1973, p. 307).
Boisvert and Ludwig (2006), McGinn (1977), Pendlebury (1986), and Segal (1990) propose a view along these lines. See also Hanks (2007), who distinguishes between “assertive propositions,” “interrogative propositions,” and “imperative propositions.” Moltmann (2003, 2010) can also be counted as holding a variant of the view in question. Yet she dismisses propositions altogether in favor of what she calls “attitudinal objects.”
However, Frege’s treatment of non-indicatives is not uniform. While Frege denies that imperatives and optatives express thoughts, he claims that interrogative sentences—insofar as they belong to the type of what he calls sentence-questions—do express thoughts. Cf. Frege (1956, pp. 293–294).
Frege (1956, p. 293).
Cf. Frege (1960, p. 68).
This is not to say that I advocate Platonism. I adopt Frege’s perspective for heuristic purposes only. If propositions, postulations, and their ilk could be reduced to entities more respected from the naturalist’s point of view, I wouldn’t back away from such an analysis. I will revisit this issue at the end of my paper.
Cf. Barz (2012, pp. 188–206), where the idea of postulation is developed in a similar way. However, the way this idea is used to explain the introspection of wishes in the current paper is quite different from and, in my view, much better than the account in my book.
I beg the reader’s pardon for using a rather broad brush here. I am well aware that there is an ongoing discussion about whether propositions have inner structure at all and, if they have, what exactly this inner structure amounts to. For an overview of that discussion, cf. King (2011). However, I am not interested in giving a detailed account of propositions here. My aim is just to make plausible the claim that there is a difference between propositions and postulations and to give some indication as to where this difference lies.
Cf. Castañeda (1974). I owe this reference to Neil Roughley, who drew my attention to the fact that the abstract entities that I call postulations are similar to what Castañeda calls practitions. As far as I can see, however, practitions differ from postulations in that practitions always comprise a person who has an obligation to do something and an action which she or he is obligated to do. As becomes clear by my example “If only it would rain tomorrow!”, postulations are not so restricted. They can comprise any object someone wishes to have a certain property and any property someone wishes that object to have.
This is not to say that it is possible to eliminate facts from the world. On the contrary, eliminating facts from the world is obviously impossible. So some lacunae are impossible to iron out. Therefore, some wishes, like Julia’s, are impossible to fulfil.
For the sake of simplicity, I ignore that the corresponding judgment has a conditional structure.
Here, I draw heavily on Ashwell (2013), who argues that proponents of transparent introspection who want to “have a plausible answer to the problem of how we can fail to judge that we desire something that we nevertheless judge to be valuable” (p. 254) should base their account on appearances of value rather than judgments of value. Ashwell uses the example of the Müller–Lyer illusion in order to illustrate the difference between value judgments and appearances of value. What I call “endorsement of a postulation” seems similar to what Ashwell calls “appearance of value.” However, there are differences. For example, while Ashwell suggests that appearances of value are caused by desires (cf. Ashwell 2013, p. 255) and, hence, are mental states that are different from desires, I claim that wishes just are endorsements of postulations.
The picture I draw here of the formation of wishes and beliefs might seem a bit too voluntaristic. In particular, my formulations might suggest that we can choose to form wishes or beliefs. Let me emphasize that I do not approve of such a form of voluntarism. Moreover, although some of my formulations might suggest such a view, nothing in what I say in this paper commits me to such a form of voluntarism.
Cf. Evans (1982, p. 227).
Did I not say earlier in this paper that postulations and propositions are abstract objects that reside in Frege’s “third realm”? How on earth could one transform an abstract object of one ontological category into an abstract object of another? I think that this problem is just an artifact of the Platonic stance that I have adopted up to this point. I am optimistic that the problem will disappear once a naturalistically acceptable explanation of the idea of accepting a proposition and endorsing a postulation—to which I point in the following paragraph—is found.
Cf. footnote 42.
For a recent account of emotions that is compatible with the idea of transparent introspection, see Mendelovici (2014).
The idea is that forming an intention involves making a decision about what to do. Decisions about what to do can be mimicked by sentences of the form “It’s settled. Do x now!” considered as uttered in silent soliloquy. I take the idea that intentions involve decisions from Paul (2012). However, though Paul stresses the close relation between intentions and decisions, she doubts that our knowledge of our own intentions is transparent.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my former colleagues at the University of Bielefeld, Ansgar Beckermann, Rüdiger Bittner, Frank Esken, Bruno Haas, Ulrich Krohs, Maria Kronfeldner, Johannes Lehnhard, Michaela Rehm, Thorsten Wilholt, and Veronique Zanetti, each of whom read a previous version of this paper and provided extremely valuable comments. Furthermore, I am grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal for his or her constructive criticism and insightful suggestions. My special thanks to Jessica Laimann, who helped in preparing a first draft of this paper, and Tobias Steinig, who edited the final revisions. Work on this article was supported by research grant BA 2269/2-1 from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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Barz, W. Transparent introspection of wishes. Philos Stud 172, 1993–2023 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0386-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0386-9