Online research in philosophy

This article develops a constitutive account of self-knowledgethat is able to avoid certain shortcomings of the standard response to the perceived prima facieincompatibility between privileged self-knowledge and externalism. It argues that ifone conceives of linguistic action as voluntary behavior in a minimal sense, one cannot conceive ofbelief content to be externalistically constituted without simultaneously assuming that the agent hasknowledge of his beliefs. Accepting such a constitutive account of self-knowledge does not, however,preclude the conceptual possibility of being mistaken about ones mental states. Rather, self-knowledgehas to be seen as only a general constraint or as the default assumption of interpreting somebodyas a rational and intentional agent. This is compatible with the diagnosis of a localized lack of self-transparency.

I argue that indirect quotation in the first person simple present tense (self-quotation) provides a class of infallible assertions. The defense of this conclusion examines the joint descriptive and constitutive functions of performative utterances and argues that a parallel treatment of belief ascription is in order. The parallel account yields a class of infallible belief ascriptions that makes no appeal to privileged modes of access. Confronting a dilemma formulated by Crispin Wright for theories of self-knowledge gives an epistemological setting for the account of infallible belief ascription.

knowledge. His proposal relies on the claim that first-order mental..

No account of self-knowledge is satisfactory, I claim, unless it explains how we might truly attribute *failures* to possess self-knowledge. We can make progress towards a satisfactory account, then, by asking, What sorts of self-knowledge could be at issue in true attributions of such failures? It might seem that it can’t be the sort of self-knowledge whose possession conditions Tyler Burge and Donald Davidson have described. I argue that it can be, once we generalize Burge’s and Davidson’s accounts along a certain dimension along which propositional attitude-types can differ. For the sort of self-knowledge required to have attitudes of one type can differ from the sort of self-knowledge required to have attitudes of other types.

What is involved in the consciousness of a conscious, "occurrent" propositional attitude, such as a thought, a sudden conjecture or a conscious decision? And what is the relation of such consciousness to attention? I hope the intrinsic interest of these questions provides sufficient motivation to allow me to start by addressing them. We will not have a full understanding either of consciousness in general, nor of attention in general, until we have answers to these questions. I think there are constitutive features of these states which can be identified by broadly philosophical investigation, and in the early part of this paper I will try to do some of that identification.

Beyond the intrinsic interest of the topic, the nature of such conscious attitudes is highly pertinent to a philosophical account of psychological self-knowledge. So I will also say something about the significance of the constitutive features of these conscious attitudes for a philosophical account of how it can be that a thinker has a distinctive kind of knowledge of some of his mental states. The general challenge in this area is to find anything intermediate between the unexceptionable but uninformative, on the one hand, and the absolutely unbelievable on the other.

A familiar claim is that knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs and other attitudes is normally immediate, that is, not normally based on observation, inference or evidence. One explanation of the possibility of immediate self-knowledge turns on the transparency of the question ‘Do I believe that P?’ to the question ‘Is it the case that P?’ This paper explains why occurrent mental states such as passing thoughts do not fall within the purview of the transparency account and proposes a different account of how we know our own passing thoughts. It is also argued that the transparency account fails to explain how knowledge of our own beliefs can be psychologically or epistemically immediate. Finally, questions are raised about the presumption that knowledge of our own beliefs is epistemically immediate.

According to the increasingly popular knowledge account, assertion is governed by the rule that speech acts of that kind require knowledge of their content. Timothy Williamson has argued that this knowledge rule is the constitutive rule of assertion. It is argued here that it is not the constitutive rule of assertion in any sense of the term, as it governs only some assertions rather than all of them. A (qualified) knowledge rule can in fact be derived from the traditional analysis of assertion according to which assertion is the linguistic expression of belief. Because it is more informative, this analysis provides a better point of departure for defending the knowledge account than Williamson’s view according to which the knowledge rule is part of the analysis of assertion.

Abstract: This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to be mistaken about the content of our first-order intentional states. For proponents of the rational agency model of self-knowledge, such failures might seem very difficult to explain. On this model, the authority of self-knowledge is not based on inference from evidence, but rather originates in our capacity, as rational agents, to shape our beliefs and other intentional states. To believe that one believes that p, on this view, constitutes one's belief that p and so self-knowledge involves a constitutive relation between first- and second-order beliefs. If this is true, it is hard to see how those second-order beliefs could ever be false.I develop two counter-examples which show that despite the constitutive relation between first- and second-order beliefs in standard cases of self-knowledge, it is possible to be mistaken, and even self-deceived, about the content of one's own beliefs. These counter-examples do not show that the rational agency model is mistaken—rather, they show that the possibility of estrangement from one's own mental life means that, even within the rational agency model, it is possible to have false second-order beliefs about the content of one's first-order beliefs. The authority of self-knowledge does not entail that to believe that one believes that p suffices to make it the case that one believes that p.

Abstract In the contemporary literature on self-knowledge discussion is framed by and large by two competing models of self-knowledge: the observational (or perceptual) model and the constitutive model. On the observational model self-knowledge is the result of ?cognitively viewing? one's mental states. Constitutive theories of self-knowledge, on the other hand, hold that self-knowledge is constitutive of intentional states. That is, self-ascription is a necessary condition for being in a particular mental state. Akeel Bilgrami is a defender of the constitutive model. I argue that the constitutive model gives rise to a regress problem. This paper will focus on that problem as well as its application to Bilgrami's version of the constitutive model.