Abstract
Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic self-knowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the baseless, no-‘how’ and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge.
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Notes
‘Unstudied’ is used by Ryle (1949/2009: 162) to characterize avowals. As will become clear, “avowal” (as I understand it) does not simply refer to the comprehending production of a (type of) mental self-ascription in context. A competent speaker of English does not avow feeling sad just in virtue of producing a token of “I’m feeling sad”, any more than one who says “It’s snowing outside” merely to, say, test a microphone, or when reciting a poem, ipso facto claims that it’s snowing outside.
I here follow common usage in the literature, according to which “basic self-knowledge” refers to the ordinary, effortless yet authoritative, ‘first-person’ knowledge we are said to have of our mental states. I avoid talk of “introspective” self-knowledge or self-beliefs to avoid the implication – controversial in the present context – that our ordinary mental self-beliefs are the epistemic product of a special introspective mechanism.
See Hampshire (1953: 235 f.). For a dissenting view, see, e.g., Cassam (2009). Wright, who in earlier writings claimed that basic self-beliefs are “groundless” (cf. 1998, 2001), later (2015) concedes to Snowdon (2012) that where there is knowledge there must – “obviously” – be some way that one knows. I disagree. What may be obvious is only the causal claim that all beliefs – including beliefs one simply finds oneself with – must have some causal origin. But the no-‘how’ claim considered here pertains to the epistemology of beliefs, not their causal origins. With others, I deny that all beliefs must be arrived at on some epistemic basis, let alone a basis that is reflectively accessible to the believer. (Terminological point: I use ‘baseless’ instead of Wright’s ‘groundless’ to allow for the possibility of beliefs that are grounded – and thus warranted – yet are made on no basis. See Sect. 4 below.)
Thus, the beliefs articulated in avowals, which are first-person attribution of present mental states to oneself, are accorded a more secure status than all other beliefs – not only ‘third-person’ attributions of mental states, but also, inter alia, nonevidential self-attributions of bodily states. For discussion, see e.g. Bar-On (2004) and (2009).
Epistemic internalists hold that being “in a position to claim knowledge in the appropriate circumstances” requires being able to answer the ‘How do you know?’ question (Wright, 2015: 22). Rylean inferentialist views seem to allow that we have reflective access to the basis of our basic self-beliefs, in keeping with this requirement. By contrast, contemporary ‘inner sense’ views typically adopt epistemological externalism, arguing that we need have no reflective access to the introspective mechanisms that render our self-beliefs especially reliable, and thus knowledgeable. Byrne (2018) rejects ‘inner sense’ views on the grounds that they are ‘extravagant’ and opts for a neo-Rylean inferentialist yet externalist view. (For a different rejection of ‘inner sense’ views, see inter alia Shoemaker 1996, Wright 1998, Bar-On 2004: Ch. 4, and Bar-On 2009).
See Gertler (2011: Ch. 6) and Coliva (2016: Ch. 7) for surveys and references. I focus on certain ontological versions of constitutivism, setting aside conceptual versions of the sort canvassed in Wright (1998) and (2001), as well as a ‘judgment-dependence’ version of constitutivism considered by Wright (in, e.g., 1989, Sect. 3, discussed in Bar-On 2004 and 2012).
I here set aside a variety of ‘rationalist’ views (e.g., Burge 1996, Moran 2001, Bilgrami 2006, Boyle 2009), since they only apply to a limited range of basic self-beliefs: ones that concern ‘judgment-sensitive’, or evaluative mental states. This means that such views are not genuine competitors to standard epistemic-basis views. (See Bar-On 2004 and 2012 for discussion).
See Wright (2015: 66) for the point that actual concept application is required for distinguishing actually having authoritative self-knowledge from merely being in a position to know.
Though, NB, in keeping with ‘baselessness’, being in cognitive contact should not be understood as entailing making an observation, or inference, etc. which serves as the epistemic basis for one’s self-belief. For present purposes, a person who hazards a wild guess “I bet the yard is empty right now” on no basis whatsoever can still count as having cognitive contact with the relevant fact (assuming it is a fact), insofar as they have passed a judgment to the relevant effect.
Self-attributions of ‘long-term’ attitudes (e.g. “I am a proponent of gender equality”) shade into self-attributions of standing psychological features (“I am a patient person”) or character traits (“I am brave”). They are typically not taken to be as authoritative as avowals of occurrent mental states, in that they are much more open to correction or challenge, requests for reasons, etc. (See e.g. Bar-On 2015). But even when it comes to self-attributions of long-standing attitudes that are taken to enjoy first-person authority (perhaps, e.g., “I’d like to become a doctor”), actually knowing that one has the relevant attitude seems to depend on one’s having engaged at some point in an episode of attributing the attitude to oneself.
For relevant discussion, see Evans (1985). The case of semantic knowledge raises difficult issues that cannot be adequately addressed here. For one thing, it may be questioned whether the knowledge here is genuinely factual knowledge – as opposed to some variety of practical knowledge – perhaps precisely because there is no expectation of an episode of cognitive contact! For this same reason, many theorists treat semantic competence as different from propositional knowledge of contingent facts. (See Bar-On 1996).
Compare, again, Wright (2015: 66).
Shoemaker (2009) defends a constitutivist view on which we have privileged self-knowledge of some standing attitudes, insofar as they must be “available” to be known. However, availability only vouchsafes knowability; actually knowing these attitudes may still require something episodic. (See Engel 2010 for a related point regarding Shoemaker’s notion of availability.) Thanks to Ben Winokur.
Boyle develops his view against the background of serious difficulties he finds with the so-called ‘transparency’ view adopted by Moran (2001) (inspired by Evans 1982). For a discussion of the limitations of that transparency view, see Bar-On (2004: Ch. 4), (2016), and Bar-On and Johnson (forthcoming).
Boyle (2019) appears to recognize the challenge posed in this section and explores the possibility of a Sartre-inspired account of tacit (‘non-positional’) awareness. However, Boyle’s revised account involves precisely denying that tacit awareness requires propositional beliefs about one’s state; it thus severs important continuities between (implicit) basic self-knowledge and other kinds of factual knowledge. And it does not offer satisfactory answers to questions (a)-(d) posed below. I note that Sartrian tacit awareness seems different in kind from the type of implicit knowledge Boyle invokes in his (2011). The latter presupposes mastery of the relevant concepts as deployed in propositional judgments that one is in the relevant state.
As often noted, one can issue a mental self-attribution in an act akin to a third-person evidential report – say, at the conclusion of a therapy session, or using a best friend’s astute observations – rather than in an act of avowing.
This falls short of claiming that all uses of an indicative sentence “p” necessarily constitute assertions that p, if by “assertion” one means a type of illocutionary act with felicity conditions that include, specifically, presenting oneself as having – and intending to communicate – a justified belief in the truth of what is asserted.
In Sect. 4 I briefly touch on the question how avowals can be warranted despite lacking epistemic justification, ordinarily understood.
Avowing as such, unlike offering a report or making a full-fledged assertion about your mental state, does not involve giving voice to your self-belief in order to communicate some piece of information about yourself to someone else. The latter seems to presuppose that you have an antecedent belief that you are in M and which you wish to convey. (See Bar-On and Wright, forthcoming, Ch. 10 and 11).
Thanks to Nadja-Mira Yolcu. For an illuminating discussion of thought articulation, see Alshanestky (2019).
See Evans (1981), Davies (1987), and Bar-On 1996.
Some constitutivists (e.g. Burge 1996) take privileged self-knowledge to be constitutively linked to our capacity for reasoning. However, as argued in Bar-On (2004: Ch. 9) and Bar-On and Wright (forthcoming, Ch. 4), these views at best yield reasons to suppose that, qua reasoners, we must be in a position to know our mental states. And this falls short of explaining why we must actually know our mental states in particular instances.
Again, basic self-knowledge is, in this respect, similar to perceptual knowledge concerning things in one’s environment and to proprioception. And this can help explain why the inner-sense model of basic self-knowledge continues to seem attractive to some.
Thus stated, the claim would clearly land one in a hopeless regress. In any case, the implausible suggestion runs roughshod over the a-expression/s-expression distinction, which is in part designed to allow the neo-expressivist to accommodate salient semantic differences among expressive vehicles (see 3.1).
Note that only my avowal could be subject to doxastic assessments pertaining to my self-belief. My utterance of “This is funny” cannot be rejected as false if it is somehow thought that I don’t find x funny.
For an argument along these lines, which appeals to a rather intellectualized view of expression, see Wright (2012: 443), discussed in Bar-On and Wright (forthcoming, Ch.s 9 and 11).
For a rejection of this conception as appropriate for all intentional action, see Hursthouse (1991), who portrays expressive acts, specifically, as a species of ‘arational action’. See also Hornsby (2005) for a rejection of this conception as applicable to all linguistic acts. And see Bar-On and Wright (fortchoming Ch. 11).
We must not confuse the plausible claim that if you believed that you were not in M you would not engage in the expressive act (unless you wanted to deceive or mislead), with the much stronger claim that you would not – and even could not – a-express your M had you not, antecedently, believed that you were in M.
My suggestion is not that, when (and only when) avowing M, a-expressing M as such does involve believing that you are expressing M. It is rather that only avowing meets a necessary doxastic requirement on basic self-knowledge, courtesy of the act of self-attribution.
Some constitutivists set aside the question of warrant; they take the only relevant epistemic question to be one of the ‘intelligibility from one’s subjective perspective’ of one’s having self-knowledge (see e.g. Boyle 2010, Campbell 2018, and Doyle 2019). But this seems to me to compromise important epistemic continuities between basic self-knowledge and other forms of factual knowledge.
See Zimmermann (2006) for a constitutivist account along these lines (inspired by Peacocke 1999). Some read McDowell (1995) as embracing such a view for simple perceptual beliefs, thereby committing to an epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge (the idea that relevant true and false cannot share their warrant). However, as argued in Bar-On and Johnson (2019), disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge is much less problematic than disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge; and, moreover, neo-expressivism (unlike constitutivism) has resources for identifying at least some element of warrant shared by true and false mental self-beliefs.
The view can also accommodate straightforwardly the possibility of false self-beliefs. See Bar-On (2004: Ch. 8).
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at two workshops on self-knowledge - at the universities of Stirling and Warwick - and at a special seminar at the University of Mannheim. Thanks to the audiences, and especially to Matt Boyle, Lucy Campbell, and Nadja-Mira Yolcu. Earlier drafts have benefitted from discussions with and comments by Casey Doyle, Bill Lycan, Ram Neta, Jack Spencer, and Crispin Wright. Special thanks to Rockney Jacobsen, Drew Johnson, Keith Simmons, and Ben Winokur for very helpful comments on several more recent drafts and to Erkenntnis’ anonymous referees for comments on the version submitted to the journal in August 2022.
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Bar-On, D. No-‘How’ Privileged Self-Knowledge. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00674-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00674-7