Abstract
I critically discuss the account of self-knowledge presented in Dorit Bar-On’s Speaking My Mind (OUP 2004), focusing on Bar-On’s understanding of what makes our capacity for self-knowledge puzzling and on her ‘neo-expressivist’ solution to the puzzle. I argue that there is an important aspect of the problem of self-knowledge that Bar-On’s account does not sufficiently address. A satisfying account of self-knowledge must explain not merely how we are able to make accurate avowals about our own present mental states, but how we can reasonably regard ourselves as entitled to claim self-knowledge. Addressing this aspect of the problem of self-knowledge requires confronting questions about the metaphysical nature of mental states, questions that Bar-On’s approach seeks to avoid.
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Notes
Not everything we intuitively classify as a mental state has this sort of tight connection with self-knowledge. Nevertheless, for certain kinds of mental states, it is tempting to suppose that such a connection holds. Even this much is not uncontroversial, of course, but philosophers who would controvert it are already advocating a way out of the puzzle I want to describe. Before accepting their suggestion, it is worth giving our ‘Cartesian’ intuitions a bit of scope here: only if we allow ourselves to consider them can we consider how much of a problem they actually pose.
Note that many of the standard counterexamples to mental ‘transparency’—unnoticed headaches, the perceptual states of long-distance truck-drivers as they drive ‘automatically’ along a familiar route, etc.—are really counterexamples to the claim that present mental states must be the objects of conscious attention, not to the claim that they must be known. Quite generally: to know something is one thing; to be consciously attending to it is another. Note also that to hold that the obtaining of a condition F involves its subject’s knowing it to obtain is not to deny that the subject may falsely believe himself to be in F when he is not: mental states may be self-intimating when they are present even though a person is not infallible in his judgments as to their presence.
Bar-On (2004). Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to this volume.
One question that might be raised at this point is whether Bar-On is right to assume that there must be a single account that covers all the kinds of avowals that exhibit some special security. I will not pursue this issue here, but for some grounds for doubting that we should expect a single, uniform account of all kinds of self-knowledge, see my ‘Two Kinds of Self-Knowledge’ (Boyle 2009).
Although I will not pursue the point here, I should remark that this distinction seems to me more problematic than Bar-On suggests. I grant the intelligibility of the idea of a particular act of avowing, and the idea of a certain sentence-type that is ‘tokened’ in such an act. But is there anything that is ‘the token’ of that type other than the act of avowing itself? What is the token supposed to be? If it is the utterance of the sentence in question, that is surely the act itself and not something produced by the act (and something similar will apply if we allow talk of avowals ‘in thought’). But if the token isn’t the utterance, then what is it? I think these questions point to a problem for Bar-On’s strategy of isolating the expressive character of the avowing ‘act’ from the semantic significance of the avowed ‘product.’
Quoted from Bar-On’s ‘Reply to Matt Boyle and David Rosenthal,’ delivered at the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, Baltimore, MD, December 28, 2007, p. 5.
References
Bar-On, D. (2004). Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boyle, M. (2009). Two kinds of self-knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 78(1), 133–164.
Finkelstein, D. H. (2003). Expression and the Inner. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Green, M. (2008). Self-Expression. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
For comments on an earlier draft, I am grateful to Rachel Cohen, Matthias Haase, Doug Lavin, Dick Moran, and Dorit Bar-On herself.
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Boyle, M. Bar-On on Self-Knowledge and Expression. Acta Anal 25, 9–20 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0075-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0075-z