Abstracta 5 : 1, pp. 3 – 15, 2009 EVANS AND FIRST PERSON AUTHORITY Martin Francisco Fricke Abstract In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans describes the acquisition of beliefs about one's beliefs in the following way: 'I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p.' In this paper I argue that Evans's remark can be used to explain first person authority if it is supplemented with the following consideration: Holding on to the content of a belief and 'prefixing' it with 'I believe that' is as easy as it is to hold on to the contents of one's thoughts when making an inference. We do not, usually, have the problem, in going, for example, from 'p' and 'q' to 'p and q', that one of our thought contents gets corrupted. Self-ascription of belief by way of Evans's procedure is based on the same capacity to retain and re-deploy thought contents and therefore should enjoy a similar degree of authority. However, is Evans's description exhaustive of all authoritative self-ascription of belief? Christopher Peacocke has suggested that in addition to Evans's procedure there are two more relevant ways of self-ascribing belief. I argue that both methods can be subsumed under Evans's procedure. In Chapter 7 of The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans discusses how we can acquire knowledge of what we believe and what we experience. His main concern is to show that such self-knowledge is not based on a form of perception, involving "an inward glance at the states and doings of something to which only the person himself has access". 1 By providing an alternative account, Evans aims to show that the self-ascription of mental states is compatible with his account of self-reference according to which we have to conceive of ourselves as persisting subjects, located in space and time, in order to be able to refer to ourselves. In this paper, I am not concerned with Evans's account of self-reference, although serious objections can be brought forward against it. Furthermore, I am not concerned with Evans's explanation of the self-ascription of experiences. Instead, I wish to discuss Evans's well-known remarks about the self-ascription of belief. Evans spends just two paragraphs on this topic; but it seems to me that they contain an important idea for the explanation of first person authority. In what follows I shall present the idea, show why it is 1 Evans (1982: 225). M.F. Fricke 4 incomplete as an explanation of the authority in question and attempt to complement it so that the explanation is no longer incomplete. 2 First person authority is that authority which we enjoy in beliefs about, and knowledge of, certain of our own mental states. We are generally less likely to be mistaken in these beliefs than we are in our beliefs about other people's mental states of the same kind. The mental states in question are beliefs, other propositional attitudes and certain sensations. The remark of Evans's that I wish to discuss here concerns just our knowledge of our own beliefs. However, if the explanation of our authority in this knowledge is correct, it might be possible to expand it to cover our authoritative knowledge of our other propositional attitudes as well. In the Varieties of Reference, Evans describes the following procedure for acquiring beliefs about one's beliefs: If someone asks me 'Do you think there is going to be a third world war?', I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question 'Will there be a third world war?' I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p. 3 Evans thinks that if a subject is following this procedure for obtaining beliefs about his beliefs we can conclude two things: First, the subject is not gazing inwards at an internal state; he is not having a perception of a special kind of internal object. And second, applying this procedure, the subject will necessarily gain knowledge of his beliefs; a sceptic could not doubt that the subject's belief-ascription is correct. Since a similar procedure for ascribing beliefs is not available from the third-person point of view, we can say that, according to Evans, if a subject applies the procedure he describes, he will necessarily enjoy first person authority in his self-ascription of belief: 2 Other recent accounts of first person authority that are inspired by Evans's remark include Moran (2001), Heal (2003) and Fernández (2003). 3 Evans (1982: 225). Evans and First Person Authority 5 If a judging subject applies this procedure, then necessarily he will gain knowledge of one of his own mental states: even the most determined sceptic cannot find here a gap in which to insert his knife. 4 Is this a convincing argument? Why does this procedure entail first person authority? The thought behind the argument seems to be that the procedure is so simple that it cannot go wrong. It just involves what Evans at one point calls "the prefixing of a sentence 'p' with 'I believe that'". 5 The subject thinks "p" and now all she has to do is to proceed to "I believe that p". The judgment "I believe that p" will always be correct because it is based upon the prior thought "p", which is an expression of the belief which the second-order judgment ascribes. All the subject has to do in going from "p" to "I believe that p" is to retain the content (or thought) "p". 6 It seems difficult for "even the most determined sceptic" to argue that in following this procedure the subject could get her belief-ascription wrong. 7 However, here we should look a bit closer. To say that it is difficult to get this procedure wrong is not to say that it is impossible and that knowledge obtained by applying this procedure is infallible, as Evans seems to suggest. 8 It seems that the procedure could go wrong in the following way: the subject thinks "p" and now tries to prefix this thought with the operator "I believe that". But in trying to do so, somehow the original thought content "p" alters to "q" so that the resulting belief-ascription is "I believe that q". So the subject proceeds from "p" to "I believe that q" rather than to "I believe that p". In consequence her 4 Ibid.: 225. 5 Ibid.: 226 [footnote 36]. 6 Christopher Peacocke argues that this is an instance of a "general explanatory principle about the role of concepts in the ascription of attitudes" (Peacocke (1996: 118)) – the "Redeployment Claim: The concepts (senses, modes of presentation) that feature in first-level thoughts not involving propositional attitudes are the very same concepts which feature in thoughts about the intentional content of someone's propositional attitudes" (Peacocke (1996: 131)). 7 Evans also wants to "encapsulate this procedure for answering questions about what one believes in the following simple rule: whenever you are in a position to assert that p, you are ipso facto in a position to assert 'I believe that p'." (Evans (1982: 225f.).) To avoid circularity (knowing that I can assert that p is already knowing that I believe that p) it might be better to formulate impersonally: Whenever 'p' is assertable, so is 'I believe that p'. This rule does not imply omniscience on the part of the believer (whenever somewhere something is assertable, I believe that it is the case) because it applies only to what the believer herself finds assertable. The fact that the believer herself finds 'p' assertable is a consequence of the fact that she herself applies the rule; it is not something that she has to know about (this would imply a circularity). 8 Cf. Evans (1982: 229), where he speaks of an "infallibility [...] which arises in the case of the self-ascription of belief". M.F. Fricke 6 belief-ascription would be false. 9 Is this unimaginable? It is perhaps difficult to imagine, but it does not seem impossible. So we might agree with Evans that the sceptic cannot doubt the truth of the subject's belief-ascription if Evans's procedure is applied correctly – but the sceptic does have room to doubt whether or not the subject does indeed apply the procedure correctly. If first person authority is to be explained – which, admittedly, is not among Evans's explicit aims – then it is not enough to say that the correct application of Evans's procedure necessarily leads to true belief-ascriptions. If there is a procedure for the acquisition of some knowledge and if this procedure is applied correctly and in appropriate circumstances by some subject, then it is always necessary that the subject end up with knowledge. If we want to explain first person authority by appeal to the procedure through which we acquire beliefs about our own beliefs, we have to explain what makes this procedure special, why it is different from other procedures of knowledge-acquisition. One way to do this would be to try to make it plausible that it is easier correctly to follow the procedure for second-order belief-ascriptions than correctly to follow the procedures for the acquisition of other beliefs. So are there any reasons for assuming that Evans's procedure for the acquisition of beliefs about one's beliefs is less prone to failure than other procedures of belief or knowledge-acquisition? It seems to me that there are such reasons. Evans's procedure requires the subject to go from the thought "p" to the thought "I believe that p" without on the way "corrupting" the thought content "p". Such a "holding on" to thought contents while going from one thought to the next is in fact a very common phenomenon in our everyday reasoning. We think "p" at some point, and a bit later "q", and yet a bit later "p and q". In such an inference the thought contents "p" and "q" are preserved through time and "redeployed" at a later stage. I think "It's a hot day today", but after entering the house and feeling the cold air inside I say, "It's such a hot day, but inside the house it's still cold". 9 The ascription might turn out to be true because, as it happens, the subject also has a belief that q. Furthermore, Tom Stoneham suggests that a second-order belief such as "I believe that p" is necessarily true because it has at least all the commitments and consequences which characterise the belief that p. (Cf. Stoneham (1998).) In either case, the truth of the second-order belief is not due to an application of Evans's procedure. (I have argued elsewhere that even though Stoneham is probably right with his suggestion, this fact does not provide an adequate explanation of first person authority because it does not show how we get from a prior belief that p to an authoritative belief "I believe that p". Cf. Fricke (2001: 164-9). Evans and First Person Authority 7 No one is surprised in such contexts that the speaker's thought contents are preserved in such reasoning. There is commonly no danger that the thought "It's a hot day today", on the way to forming a further belief, transforms into some other thought such as, say, "It will be a hot day tomorrow" so that the resulting thought might be "It will be such a hot day tomorrow, but inside the house it should still be cold." An example more directly related to Evans's procedure, involving a sentence-operator, would be this: Someone looks at a photograph and reports "There are three people, dressed in black tie and jumping off Magdalen Bridge." A minute later she tells someone else "On that photo you can see that there were three people, dressed in black tie and jumping off Magdalen Bridge." Again, if the time between the two statements and the associated thoughts is appropriately short no one will accept the idea that the retained thought might during the process of retention and incorporation into another thought change its content – e.g. so that the three men become five. The phenomenon we are dealing with here is a form of memory – very short-term memory. If someone is to transform the thought "p" into "I believe that p", she has to remember or retain the original thought "p" in order to be successful. It would seem then that it should be no more surprising that we can follow Evans's procedure correctly and acquire true second-order beliefs through it than it is surprising that we can redeploy thought contents in new contexts such as the ones I have described. Second-order beliefs acquired through Evans's procedure should be as authoritative as we are in redeploying the thought content "p" in a new thought of the form "p and q". This is, I think, a pretty high degree of authority and one which is higher than that of most other beliefs we form. We often have reason to wonder whether we made a mistake in the acquisition of our ordinary perceptual beliefs. But we hardly ever wonder whether we have correctly redeployed a thought content in a later (perhaps more complex) thought. Retention of thought contents is easier than perception of the world. It follows that second-order beliefs which are acquired through retention of thought contents as Evans's procedure describes it are more authoritative than second-order beliefs which are acquired through perception. My explanation of first person authority, then, is this. Those second-order beliefs in which we enjoy such authority are based on the first-order beliefs which they are about. M.F. Fricke 8 They are formed through a retention of the content of the first-order belief and an "embedding" of that content in a new belief of the form "I believe that p". We might say that the retained thought content of the first-order belief is just "prefixed" with "I believe that". This procedure of acquiring second-order beliefs yields more authoritative results than most other procedures for the acquisition of beliefs about the world because the correct redeployment of thought contents is easier than correct perception of the world. 10 Three remarks remain to be made. First, my explanation of first person authority does not assume that the authority is infallible. If the explanation is correct then we are dealing with an authority that is higher than that of beliefs based on perception or inference. We do not have to make correct perceptions nor valid or strong inferences to apply Evans's procedure, although we do have to be able to hold on to and redeploy thought contents. My claim is that this ability is more reliable than our ability to perceive truthfully or to make good inferences. (The ability is necessary, but not sufficient for making good inferences.) We might say that the authority is as strong as our rationality, for clearly a failure in our capacity for conceptual redeployment is a failure of rationality. 11 10 Here is an idea for generalising this explanation to knowledge of other propositional attitudes: I get myself into a position to answer the question whether I desire/hope/fear/doubt that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether it is desirable/to be hoped/to be feared/to be doubted that p. Assuming that a positive answer to the first-order question expresses my own attitude, we can form a correct second-order belief by exchanging the impersonal sentence-operator "It is desirable/to be hoped/to be feared/to be doubted" with the first-person operator "I desire/hope/fear/doubt that", while retaining and redeploying the operated content. As in Evans's procedure, we start with an impersonal question about the world and use the response that we find us with to answer a question about ourselves. But could there not be a divergence between what we believe should be desired/hoped/feared/doubted and what we in fact desire/hope/fear/doubt? It seems that such divergences frequently occur. To accommodate them within the suggested framework we would have to characterise them as failures of rationality of some kind. It seems to me that we would not only have to assume an incoherence between the subject's beliefs of, say, "It is not to be feared that p" and "I fear that p" (first-order and second-order level), but also between "It is not to be feared that p" and "It is to be feared that p" (beliefs on the first-order level, in this case perhaps associated with different levels of coolheadedness or temporal distance to the occurrence of the fact that p). Knowledge of such propositional attitudes might also be associated with knowledge of one's own sensations. I am not saying anything in this paper about how knowledge of one's own sensations might be acquired and why it might be authoritative. 11 There are several writers who argue, in different ways, that rationality requires first person authority, for example McGinn (1982), Shoemaker (1990), Burge (1996) and Moran (2001). My claim is not that rationality cannot exist without first person authority, but rather that a particular capacity needed for making inferences should also enable us to have authoritative knowledge of our own beliefs. However, I do not wish to argue that rationality necessarily requires the capacity to make inferences or to have the concept of belief. Evans and First Person Authority 9 Second, as Evans pointed out, mastery of his procedure for the acquisition of second-order beliefs "cannot constitute full understanding of the content of the judgement 'I believe that p'". 12 If a subject knows nothing else about the concept of believing, she will only have a "purely formal" 13 understanding of the concept. For a full understanding it is required that the subject know that the concept could be applied to others than herself and that for such an application to be correct certain evidence must be given – a kind of evidence which also bears on the truth of her own self-ascriptions. In addition, the subject has to know that the judgment "I believe that p" might be true, although "p" is not. So the judgment does not have to be declared a mistake when "p" turns out not to be the case. However, as Evans remarks, "adding the background makes no difference to the method of self-ascription". 14 I have to know what a belief is in order to make a self-ascription of belief. But this is quite compatible with the claim that such ascriptions are based on a redeployment of the content of the belief to be ascribed. Adding the background just means adding the framework in which the content is to be redeployed. Third, to evaluate the suggested explanation of first person authority we should ask whether all our authoritative second-order beliefs are acquired in the way described. If the explanation applies only to a limited range of cases, there will be some authoritative second-order beliefs whose authority requires a different explanation. So how universally is Evans's procedure applied in the acquisition of our second-order beliefs? To start with, let me clarify that we are only asking how our authoritative beliefs about our own beliefs are formed. So first person authority in knowledge of other propositional attitudes or in knowledge of our own sensations is not under consideration. But do we acquire all authoritative beliefs about our own beliefs in the Evansian manner? 15 Let me consider a 12 Evans (1982: 226). 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Up to this point my principal interest was in the question of what it is that confers special authority on Evans's procedure. This does not mean, however, that I have only investigated how authoritative secondorder beliefs could be acquired. Clearly, Evans's original remark is intended to highlight how we actually do arrive at self-ascriptions of belief, not just how we could arrive at them. In this respect, the remark and my paper differ from the approach taken by Donald Davidson, who apparently claims that authoritative selfascriptions of belief could be the result of an inference based on our knowledge of which utterances we hold true and what we mean by our own words (cf. Davidson (1984 and 1987)). Since I do not think that this is how we arrive at self-ascriptions of belief (the idea is phenomenologically inadequate) and since Davidson M.F. Fricke 10 possible challenge to this view. In an exchange with Tyler Burge, Christopher Peacocke has described three different ways in which self-ascriptions of propositional attitudes are made: First, the self-ascription might be based on an "intermediate conscious state" 16 such as a memory which we take at face value. Peacocke's example is that of someone who seems to remember that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, takes this (apparent or real) memory at face value, and, on the basis of this conscious state, makes the first-person self-ascription "I believe that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo". 17 Second, the ascription might be based on an "underlying state", 18 which is similar to the intermediate state in the first case, only that it is not conscious. Peacocke mentions knowledge of "your name, your address, your phone number, your job". 19 Such knowledge can be self-ascribed, "I know that my phone number is xyz", without having to be based on a conscious memory that the number is xyz. It is based on an underlying, unconscious state with the same content. Third, "the process leading up to the self-ascription is one of making up your mind". 20 In this case, there is no pre-existing state. Rather, the self-ascriber forms the attitude, which she then self-ascribes, at the same time as making the self-ascription. This is Peacocke's example: When you are asked 'Do you intend to go to next year's Joint Session?', you may be considering that question for the first time. You can answer the question by putting into operation whatever procedure you have for deciding whether to go to next year's Joint Session, and answering 'I do intend to go' if and only if you do then decide to go. 21 Peacocke's formulation is, of course, analogous to Evans's remark about the self-ascription of belief, and he says that his case "includes that in which you follow the procedure for self-ascription of belief described by Evans". 22 It is not quite clear whether Peacocke regards those self-ascriptions which are based on underlying states as authoritative. But he explicitly includes self-ascriptions based on himself does not say that this is how we actually do acquire our authoritative second-order beliefs, I shall not discuss his theory in this paper. (For a detailed discussion see Fricke (2007).) 16 Peacocke (1996: 120). 17 Cf. Peacocke (1996: 120). 18 Peacocke (1996: 121). 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.: 121f. 22 Ibid.: 122. Evans and First Person Authority 11 conscious intermediate states among the "near-infallible" ones. 23 So if Peacocke is right we should complement the Evansian procedure at least with that one where the acquisition of the second-order belief is based on an intermediate conscious state, an apparent memory state, which is accepted at face value. Note that this complementation would not seem to affect the explanation of first person authority presented above. Suppose you seem to remember that p and take this memory at face value. All that is then needed to arrive at a correct self-ascription of belief is that you retain the content of your memory and redeploy it in a new belief of the form "I believe that p". Why are we good at retaining and redeploying contents in this way? Again, it could be pointed out that this is no more surprising than the fact that we are able to draw simple inferences without corrupting our thought contents. Even where the self-ascription is based on an underlying, unconscious state, the basic mechanism of arriving at the self-ascription should be similar. The underlying state has a specific content and this content has to be retained and redeployed by the subject in order to make a correct self-ascription. So to the extent to which this "redeployment of first-order concepts and contents" 24 can be assimilated to that of which we are capable for example in simple inferences, we should also enjoy first person authority in self-ascriptions that are based on underlying states of belief. 25 Perhaps Peacocke's two additional ways of acquiring knowledge about one's own beliefs, viz. by way of an intermediate conscious state or based on an underlying state, can be construed as different versions of Evans's procedure. The main distinction Peacocke draws between Evans's procedure and the two other ways of self-ascribing belief seems to be that, on his view, the latter involves a process of "making up your mind" 26 about the first-order issue ("Is it true that p?"). The result of this process is then self-ascribed ("I 23 Cf. Peacocke (1996: 147f.). 24 Peacocke (1996: 121). 25 Peacocke develops in some detail the idea that ascriptions of propositional attitudes redeploy the same concepts and contents as are used in the first-order states ascribed. In the paper cited, he defends this "Redeployment Claim" in the face of Fregean objections and develops some general consequences from it. In addition, he shows how the presumption of such redeployment helps us to explain, even within an externalist theory of mental content, the "near-infallibility of a thinker's knowledge of the content of his conscious beliefs" (Peacocke (1996: 147)). But why are we good at retaining and redeploying contents in our selfascriptions of belief and why are we better at it than at perceiving the world? My paper aims to present some ideas as to how this question, on which Peacocke remains silent, might be answered. 26 Peacocke (1996: 121). M.F. Fricke 12 believe that p"). In this procedure, the first-order question is considered for the first time on the occasion of making the self-ascription. Peacocke's two additional ways of self-ascribing beliefs, on the other hand, involve pre-existing states, either a memory state which is accepted at face value or an underlying unconscious state. However, it seems to me that Evans's formulation – "putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p" 27 – does not necessarily mean dealing with, and answering, the question for the first time. It seems to me that such a procedure might well consist in consciously or unconsciously "reaching back" to an already existing belief. Evans's point seems to be that, in self-ascriptions, we are not occupied with internal objects, which we identify as beliefs of a certain kind. If self-ascriptions of belief required such internal identifications, we could go wrong in determining the object in question as a belief or in determining the belief as the belief that p. 28 However, no such identification needs to be involved in consciously or unconsciously reaching back to existing beliefs. Asking myself whether p, I might come up with the answer, "Yes", simply because I believe that p – neither because I have worked out the answer from other information, nor because I have identified an existing belief. I simply "find myself" with the answer. The answer might either be based directly on what Peacocke calls an underlying state, or it might be based directly on an intermediate memory state. If I then proceed to the self-ascription "I believe that p", then it seems that I have followed Evans's procedure. I have put into operation a procedure for answering whether p, which here involved reaching back to existing beliefs, and prefixed the answer with "I believe that". So it seems to me that we should regard Peacocke's account as a more detailed explication of the procedure Evans describes. Rather than specifying further procedures of self-ascribing beliefs in addition to Evans's, Peacocke is illustrating in more detail the three ways in which Evans's procedure might be put into practice by us. Perhaps the point of Peacocke's differentiation is that, ordinarily, we do not explicitly ask ourselves whether p before making the self-ascription "I believe that p". Here Peacocke's analysis might seem closer to the phenomenology of the acquisition of self- 27 Evans (1982: 225). 28 Cf. Evans (1982: 225): "There is no question of my applying a procedure for determining beliefs to something, and hence no question of my possibly applying the procedure to the wrong thing." Evans and First Person Authority 13 knowledge. However, Evans's procedure does not have to be read as a phenomenological description. It is obvious that no-one explicitly uses a rule such as the one Evans gives for making self-ascriptions of belief. The point of Evans's procedure, as I suggest to read it, is to draw attention to the fact that to go from the belief that p to the belief that I believe that p only requires me to prefix an existing thought with "I believe that". This fact is quite independent of whether or not anyone explicitly answers, "Yes", to an internal question as to whether p and only then goes on to make the self-ascription "I believe that p". Whatever the exact relation between Evans and Peacocke might be, the additional analysis gives some support to the claim that now we have captured the ways in which we acquire authoritative beliefs about our own beliefs quite exhaustively. 29 It is of course possible to observe oneself "from the outside", from a third-person perspective, and to ponder what beliefs one would ascribe to oneself from such a perspective. However, most people would agree that such ascriptions do not enjoy first person authority. They are just as prone to failure as ordinary third person ascriptions, although perhaps supported by a special wealth of information. Those ascriptions that do enjoy first person authority seem to be captured by Evans's explanation, which we might regard as further explicated by Peacocke's account. I think it follows that the explanation of first person authority which I have suggested can be extended to cover all relevant ways of second-order beliefacquisition. If a second-order belief is formed on the basis of a conscious memory or on the basis of an underlying state, the basic mechanism of forming this belief is the same as in the case where the first-order state is only acquired on this occasion. The content of the state has to be retained and redeployed in the new belief of the form "I believe that p". There seems to be no reason to assume that this redeployment is any more difficult than in the case previously considered. So if it is true that our authoritative second-order beliefs are obtained in the three ways which I have described, then they are obtained through the 29 One challenge to this somewhat ambitious claim might come from Burge who asserts that there are "cogitolike judgments", such as "I am thinking that there are physical entities", which are "contextually selfverifying" (cf. Burge (1996: 92)). Burge thinks that understanding such judgments suffices for knowing that they are true. So no retention and redeployment of thought contents would seem to be required for making them. Whatever we think about this claim – it seems to me that, contrary to Burge, we are just dealing with a "philosophical curiosity" (cf. ibid.) – it is clear that most of our ordinary authoritative second-order beliefs are not contextually self-verifying. M.F. Fricke 14 retention and redeployment of the content of the first-order beliefs which they are about. There seem to be good reasons to assume that such retention and redeployment of contents is easier and more reliable than our ordinary perception of the world. It follows that the second-order beliefs which are based on it enjoy a special authority. 30 Martin Francisco Fricke Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) mfricke@filosoficas.unam.mx References Burge, T. (1996) 'Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96, 91-116. Davidson, D. (1984) 'First Person Authority', Dialectica, 38, 101-111. Davidson, D. (1994) 'Knowing One's Own Mind', in The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 60 (1987), 441-458. Evans, G. (1982) The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fernández, J. (2003) 'Privileged Access Naturalized', Philosophical Quarterly, 53, 352372. Fricke, M. F. (2001) A Phenomenological Theory of Self-Consciousness, (D.Phil. Thesis) University of Oxford. _____. (2007) 'Davidson y la autoridad de la primera persona', Diánoia, 52, 49-76. 30 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Joint Session in Belfast in 2003 and I am grateful for a question by Crispin Wright on that occasion, although I am sure that my paper does not answer it. The main ideas of the paper also formed part of several other presentations and discussions in Oxford, Boston, Berlin, Mexico City and Merida. I would like to thank the audiences for their comments, among them John Bengson, Carlos Pereda, Galen Strawson and Timothy Williamson. I am also grateful for the comments made by an anonymous referee for Abstracta. Special thanks go to Paul Snowdon for very helpful discussions. Evans and First Person Authority 15 Heal, J. (2003) 'On First-Person Authority', In Mind, Reason and Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGinn, C. (1982) The Character of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moran, R. (2001) Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Peacocke, C. (1996) 'Entitlement, Self-Knowledge and Conceptual Redeployment', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96, 117-158. Shoemaker, S. (1990) 'First-Person Access', Philosophical Perspectives, 4: 187-214. Stoneham: T. (1998) 'On Believing that I am Thinking', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 98, 125-144.