Abstract
In this paper, I develop and defend a novel account of Moore’s paradox, which locates its source in self-reference (or “indexicality” or “de se”). The main insight comes from Gareth Evans’s discussion of Transparency, which says that a normal person takes p to be directly relevant to the truth of “I believe that p.” It has been noticed by many philosophers that Moore’s paradox is closely related to Evans’s Transparency. However, Evans’s claim that Transparency is constitutively related to self-reference has received relatively little attention from those philosophers. I claim that once we get the two links straight and join them, a novel and plausible account of Moore’s paradox emerges. According to this account, the absurdity involved in Moore’s paradox is traceable to a constitutive relation between Transparency and self-reference. Asserting “p but I do not believe that p” sounds absurd, because the use of “I” indicates that the subject thinks of the individual referred to as herself, while her failing to conform to Transparency implies the opposite.
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Notes
To bar a potential misunderstanding, let me be clear at the outset that what I call an Evansian account of Moore’s paradox is quite different from the sort of account that is often associated with Evans’s name, according to which Moore’s paradox arises because of the status of Transparency as a norm. I will briefly discuss, and criticize, such an account in Sect. 2.
For a helpful overview of Evans’s account of self-reference, see Bermúdez (2005).
What I have presented is the so-called omissive version of Moore’s paradox. Asserting a sentence of the form “Not-p but I believe that p” is supposed to raise the same problem, and is called the commissive version of Moore’s paradox. Except for the remarks in fn. 4, I will restrict my attention to the omissive form.
I think that Transparency as just formulated captures only half of Evans’s observation. (Note that Evans says that one knows whether he believes that p by determining whether p.) The other half is this: a normal person takes the falsity of p to be directly relevant to the falsity of “I believe that p.” That is, if a person judges p to be false (or “not-p” to be true), he is disposed to deny that he believes that p (or judge that he does not believe that p). Call it Negative Transparency. I think that Transparency is to the omissive form of Moore’s paradox what Negative Transparency is to the commissive form of Moore’s paradox (see fn. 3). Everything I will say about the first pair will apply to the second pair mutatis mutandis.
Transparency as formulated above should be distinguished from the following epistemological thesis: following this procedure, one comes to have knowledge of one’s own belief, or one can legitimately determine whether he believes that p, by determining whether p. Unlike Transparency construed as an empirical thesis, the epistemological thesis does need philosophical justification. As Richard Moran says, “the claim of Transparency [construed as an epistemological thesis] is something of a paradox: how can a question referring to a matter of empirical psychological fact about a particular person be legitimately answered without appeal to the evidence about that person, but rather by appeal to a quite independent body of evidence?” (Moran 2003, 413). Evans himself is apparently committed to the epistemological claim too. But, as we shall see in the next section, I think that the context makes it clear that Evans’s main focus is on the empirical part. For a distinction between Transparency as a psychological thesis and as an epistemological thesis, see also Paul (2014).
Moran’s account faces a similar problem. He thinks that Transparency is a “normative ideal” of which an ordinary person (e.g. an analysand) can fall short. But even when asserted by such an analysand, Moore-paradoxical statements would sound no less absurd. For an objection to his account along this line, see Shoemaker (2003), 393.
One might insist that Transparency is a very special kind of norm, so that unlike other norms, the violation of it should be ipso facto absurd. (For example, Mitchell Green and John Williams say, “Extreme failures of theoretical rationality may be absurd” (Green and Williams 2007, 9).) As I said, it is a nontrivial task to establish that Transparency is an epistemic norm; showing that it is such a special kind of norm would be a far more difficult task.
The example is from Anscombe (1975), 50.
I think the issue is whether it is built into the semantic meaning of “I” that it is used for self-reference. If its semantic meaning is exhausted by something like its Kaplanian “character” (Kaplan1989) (which I find very reasonable), I am inclined to think, that it is used for self-reference is not a part of its semantic meaning.
Frege famously says, “everyone is presented to himself in a special and primitive way, in which he is presented to no one else” (Frege1919/1997, 333).
See Perry (1979).
In the passage and the surrounding paragraphs, Evans is also voicing discontent with the influential approach to self-reference taken by Perry (1977, 1979). According to Evans, Perry is simply bypassing the substantial question about the nature of self-reference. More recently, Jason Stanley raises a similar problem with David Lewis’s influential view in Lewis (1979). Lewis’s strategy is to make all thoughts self-referential, by seeing the contents of thought and speech as properties one “self-ascribes.” But as Stanley points out, Lewis’s account leaves the notion of self-ascription as primitive, and owes a substantial account of it. See Stanley (2011), 89.
Evans doesn’t simply rely on an enumeration of particular examples to characterize these special ways of gaining knowledge about ourselves that are constitutive of self-reference; he also gives a general characterization of them. They are ways of knowing that are “immune to error through misidentification.” That is, if one comes to be in a position to say, “I am F” by exercising one of those ways, asking “Are you sure that it is you who is F?” does not make sense.
It is in this connection that Evans says, “nothing is easier than to test for the existence of this disposition: we can stimulate the subject in various ways, and see how his evaluation of the relevant sentences is affected” (Evans 1982, 233).
In case the reader asks for more textual evidence that Evans is committed to the constitutive claim, here are some more quotations: “We clearly do have ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves, and ‘I’-thoughts are thoughts which are controlled, or are disposed to be controlled, by information gained in these ways” (Evans 1982, 207); “… the bearing of the relevant information on ‘I’-thoughts rests upon no argument, or identification, but is simply constitutive of our having an ‘I’-Idea” (Evans 1982, 220).
One reason for this will be that there are other ways of gaining knowledge about oneself. But there is another reason why Evans thinks this. He thinks that the way one uses τ has to conform to what he calls “Generality Constraint.”
Compare this with the following remark by Moran: “If we assume a subject with mastery of the first-person pronoun,… it will only be in conditions of compromised rationality that a person could believe that it is raining, possess the concept of belief, and yet be unable to know her belief through reflection on the weather” (Moran 2012, 232, my emphasis).
For a recent attempt to defend the constitutive claim from a quite different angle, see Kwon (2017).
Indeed, I think that this is precisely the way in which Evans himself viewed his own project. In a footnote comparing his approach with those of Perry and Lewis, he says: “This [action] element in an account of ‘I’ is stressed in much recent work…. Neglect, in this work, of the other element produces a strangely one-sided effect—‘strangely’, because the other element is just as striking, and clearly parallel, and also because the dominant conception of the identification of empirical content concentrates exclusively on the input or evidential side of things. This chapter will partly redress the balance by rather neglecting the action component” (Evans 1982, 207, fn. 4).
Interestingly, Perry’s more recent account of self-reference in Perry (2002), as I understand it, comes quite close to Evans’s, in his emphasis on the importance of the ways of knowing about ourselves to understand self-reference.
I don’t think that the essential involvement of self-reference in Moore’s paradox has gone unnoticed in the literature. But I do think it is fair to say that it has only been in the background of the discussion. What I am trying to do here is to show that by bringing it to the foreground, we can make significant progress. I know of only one philosopher who emphasizes the role of self-reference in Moore’s paradox; see Chan (2010).
I think that one influential type of account of Moore’s paradox fails to meet this test. According to some philosophers (e.g. Hintikka 1962), the following principle is logically true as a matter of logic of belief: if X believes that p, then X believes that Y believes that p, when X = Y. Hence, according to this account, believing what is expressed by a Moore-paradoxical sentence goes against this logical truth. But the case of Alice in (2) is a counterexample to this principle. For Alice believes that it is raining, while she doesn’t believe that that person believes that it is raining, where Alice = that person. It will be useful to think of how we can amend this principle to accommodate such a case. For that, we may introduce the device of quasi-indicator “*” in the sense of Castañeda (1967). If we write “Alice believes that she* is hungry,” then we imply that Alice takes the individual referred to by “she” to be herself. (Note, as Castañeda points out, that there is no such linguistic device in English.) Now I think that a correct logical principle should look like this: if X believes that p, then X believes that Y* believes that p.
See, for example, Moran (2001), 68.
One might wonder how my view developed here compares with another sort of account that purports to explain the intuition of “alienation.” Shoemaker at one point says that “there can be a functional division of someone’s mind such that there are in effect two mental subjects there” (Shoemaker 2003, 394). The idea is that a person who is ready to assert a Moore-paradoxical sentence suffers from a “division of mind” (Shoemaker 2003, 394). I am not sure whether my view can be seen as a species of this account or not, partly because I do not clearly understand what a division of mind amounts to. But in any case, I think it should be clear that the divided mind view by itself does not give a solution to the problem. For it remains to be said why conforming to Transparency is necessary for the “unity” of mind. Thanks an anonymous referee for pressing me to address this point.
Cf. P. F. Strawson writes: “It would make no sense to think or say: This inner experience is occurring, but is it occurr ing to me?” (Strawson 1966, 165).
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Kwon, H. Moore’s Paradox: An Evansian Account. Erkenn 86, 585–601 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00121-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00121-6