Online research in philosophy

In the first part of my essay I will argue that there is a strong relationship between our view of authority and the desirability of preemptive reasons. More specifically, we have strong reasons to regard legal norms as preemptive reasons only if we accept the service conception of authority. I suggest, however, that an alternative account of authority - which I shall call the arbitrator model - gives us a better account of what legal authority demands and how it works. In the second part of my essay I suggest that we should recast the debate between Dworkinian law as integrity and normative positivism as a debate between two different attempts to put flesh on the bones of the arbitrator model of authority.

This paper examines Moran’s argument for the special authority of the first-person, which revolves around the Self/Other asymmetry and grounds dichotomies such as the practical vs. theoretical, activity vs. passivity, and justificatory vs. explanatory reasons. These dichotomies qualify the self-reflective person as an agent, interested in justifying her actions from a deliberative stance. The Other is pictured as a spectator interested in explaining action from a theoretical stance. The self-reflective knower has authority over her own mental states, while the Spectator does not. I highlight the implications of this construal for a theory of action, and call attention onto some other interesting normative relations between the self-reflective agent and the Other that escape both the first-person and the third-person approach. My contention is that the authority of self-reflection (and of reason) is best understood as a relation of mutual recognition between self and others, hence from a second-person stance.

Donald Davidson's explanation of first-person authority turns on an ingenious account of speakers' knowledge of meaning. It nonetheless suffers from a structural defect and yields, at best, expressive know-how for speakers. I argue that an expressivist strand already latent in Davidson's paratactic treatment of the semantics of belief attribution can be exploited to repair the defect, and so to yield a plausible account of first-person authority.

Externalism in the philosophy of mind is threatened by the view that subjects are authoritative with regard to the contents of their own intentional states. If externalism is to be reconciled with first-person authority, two issues need to be addressed: (a) how the non-evidence-based character of knowledge of one's own intentional states is compatible with ignorance of the empirical factors that individuate the contents of those states, and (b) how, given externalism, the non-evidence-based character of such knowledge could place its subject in an authoritative position. This paper endorses a standard strategy for dealing with (a). The bulk of the paper is devoted to (b). The aim is to develop an account of first-person authority for a certain class of intentional states that is capable of explaining (1) why knowledge of one's own intentional states is peculiarly authoritative, and (2) why such authority is compatible with externalism.

This paper offers a critical examination of the notion of epistemic authority in Plato. In the Apology, Socrates claims a certain epistemic superiority over others, and it is easy to suppose that this might be explained in terms of third-person authority: Socrates knows the minds of others better than they know their own. Yet Socrates, as the text makes clear, is not the only one capable of getting the minds of others right. His epistemic edge is rather a matter of first-person authority: while others falsely think they are wise, Socrates is in a position to realize he is ignorant. By contrast with, say, a Cartesian picture, for Plato third-person authority with regard to the mind is relatively commonplace, whereas first-person authority is as rare as Socrates. I discuss the basis for this view, and some of its implications for the notion of a distinctively first-person mode of access.

Joseph Raz's 'normal justification thesis' is that the normal way of justifying someone's claim to authority over another person is that the latter would comply better with the reasons that apply to him anyway were he to treat the former's directives as authoritative. Darwall argues that this provides 'reasons of the wrong kind' for authority. He turns then to Raz's claim that the fact that treating someone as an authority would enable one to comply better with reasons that apply to him anyway can ground the claim that the putative authority's directives provide 'pre-emptive' and 'exclusionary reasons' for acting. Raz is right that authoritative directives create such reasons, but that is because genuine authority entails accountability for compliance. Practical authority is internal to the concepts of authority and legitimate demand, and the pre-emptive and exclusionary character of reasons created by legitimate demands cannot be understood independently of their second-personal character.

Social Externalism is the thesis that many of our thoughts are individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of the thinker’s community. After defending Social Externalism and arguing for its broad application, I turn to the kind of defeasible first-person authority that we have over our own thoughts. Then, I present and refute an argument that uses first-person authority to disprove Social Externalism. Finally, I argue briefly that Social Externalism—far from being incompatible with first-person authority—provides a check on first-personal pronouncements and thus saves first-person authority from being simply a matter of social convention and from collapsing into the subjectivity of “what seems right is right.”.

In this paper I characterize the problem of first-person authority as it confronts the proponent of the belief box conception of belief, and I develop the groundwork for a belief box account of that authority. If acceptable, the belief box account calls into question (by undermining a popular motivation for) the thesis that first-person authority is not to be traced to a truth-tracking relation between first-person opinions themselves and the beliefs which they are about.

Lawlor argues that social psychological studies present a challenge to the authorship account of first-person authority. Taking the deliberative stance does not guarantee that self- ascriptions are authoritative, for self-ascriptions might be based on elusive reasons and thus lack agential authority (i.e. they are no guide to the subject's future conduct). I argue that Lawlor's challenge is not successful. I claim that we can make sense of the nature and importance of agential authority only within the framework of the authorship account. Agential authority is part of the regulative ideal of the deliberative stance, but its lack does not undermine the first-person authority of self-ascriptions, since first-person authority is primarily a matter of deliberative authorship.