Abstract
You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental action is both a judgment that p and a self-attribution of a belief that p. The notion of embedded mental action is introduced here to explain how this can be so and to provide a full epistemic explanation of the transparency method. That explanation makes sense of first-person authority and immediacy in transparent self-knowledge. In generalized form, it gives sufficient conditions on an attitude’s being known transparently.
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Notes
Here I follow Burge (1996) in taking “warrant” to be a broad term that covers epistemic entitlement, inferential justification, evidentiary support, and so forth (see pp. 93–94).
There is naturally far more to say on this point to make proper sense of an explanation of Moorean absurdities. Note, too, that not all those philosophers aiming to explain the absurdity of Moorean assertions and judgments accept that an epistemic explanation is the right kind to give. See Green and Williams (2007) for arguments on both sides of this divide.
Gallois (1996) names these “Moore inferences” because reasoning in this way explicitly avoids commitment to the Moorean absurdity “p, but I don’t believe that p” (p. 46).
This is related to the distinct point that knowledge cannot be gained by way of false lemmas. Some take that to be the lesson of Gettier’s (1963) famous thought experiment. Byrne (2011, p. 207) correctly points out, however, that one need not draw that lesson from Gettier; instead, we might restrict knowledge to safe cases. Moore inferences are, as he points out, as safe as it gets.
See Barnett (2015) for extensive careful discussion of the epistemological ramifications of accepting Moore inferences as such. He also points out two further disanalogies between Moore inferences and inferences in general which, for reasons of space, I have omitted here.
It is worth noting that self-knowledge of reasons might be transparent in a way directly analogous to self-knowledge of belief: you may well know your own considerations for or against believing that p by considering what in fact provides evidence for (or logically implies that) p. Yet this observation cannot alone complete Moran’s explanation. The same issues that motivate this paper—questions about why judging that p leads to knowing you believe that p—would then apply in analogous ways for knowledge of your considerations for and against belief that p.
This challenge is sharpened by the fact that subjects can apparently fail to know their own beliefs. Boyle (2011) is constrained to deny this. He writes: “when a belief is present but not consciously accessible, so too is the knowledge of that belief” (p. 229). This is a deeply counterintuitive conclusion. It certainly seems to be the case that you can discover, with surprise, that you have some belief that you previously never knew you had—not even tacitly.
Compare Heal (2002) and O’Brien (2005). Heal argues that the judgment that I believe that p as made in the course of the transparency method is also a judgment that p, because it shares the “long-term consequences” of the judgment that p (p. 17). Yet it is not clear why meeting this condition requires identification of these judgments. O’Brien may also have a no-move view about self-knowledge of judgment, if not belief. She writes: “concluding that ‘P is true’, on considering whether P is true, is … equivalent to the subject realising the practically known possibility of judging that P” (p. 594). This practical knowledge just is the knowledge that one is judging that P. However, O’Brien explicitly avoids extending this account to belief (pp. 599–600).
There is one delicacy here. Below, I suggest that deciding what to do (which implies forming an intention) can be intentional. If so, and if something’s being intentional is partly a matter of having an intention to do it, then not all intention formation can be intentional, on pain of vicious regress. Sometimes you must be able to decide what to do without doing that (so deciding) intentionally. An anonymous reviewer drew my attention to this subtle point.
In personal communication, Christopher Peacocke has suggested that there could be intentional mental actions with unconscious contents. Though I disagree, I leave this subtle controversy aside for now. Even if some intentional mental actions lack conscious contents, certainly some mental actions have conscious contents. That weaker claim is all that is strictly required for the purposes of the epistemic explanation provided in Sect. 3 below.
In order to make best sense of my asking you this question when you yourself do not report to me what you are doing, assume that I have insight into what you are currently doing in thought just by watching you: I know that particular scowl you make when looking at your rival’s portrait is caused by your plotting, or I know that your crestfallen expression while watching your daughter’s tennis match is a result of a real judgment that she has no future at Wimbledon.
See Williams (1976) for a related argument against doxastic voluntarism.
Broader classes of mental actions I will call “kinds”: thus judging is a kind of mental action.
This phenomenon is not particularly circumscribed to mental actions rather than actions in general. Compare the following case in non-mental action (with thanks to John Campbell): conceptualizing what you’re about to do as aiming for target one partly makes it the case that what you go on to do, when you let fly, is attempt to hit target one. I focus here on mental action for simplicity and brevity, but it’s important to note that this point about embedded mental action proceeds from a more general point about action and how it is conceptualized in thought.
Conceptualizing these people in the right way would do the trick, but that is precisely the point being made here.
In this paper I follow the convention of using small capital letters to refer to concepts.
In fact, these conditions cannot quite be said to be sufficient for use of the transparency method, because they do not rule out deviant causal chains of the kind famously discussed by Davidson (1973/2001). Suffice it to say, for now, that the transparency method is used only if all the listed conditions are met and the intentions of the first two conditions cause the embedded mental action of the third and fourth conditions in the right way.
I do not, however, endorse the claim that judgment at some time t is sufficient for belief at any other time t’, or for any interval of time T.
I do not mean, here, simply to interdefine judgment and belief as (for example) Crane (2001) does: “judgment is the formation of belief” (p. 104). I take judgment that p to be possible when one already has the belief that p. If judgment just is, by definition, the formation of belief, then either this would not be possible, or one would have to be able to supplant a pre-existing belief that p with a new belief that p just by judging that p. Both options seem unattractive.
There is no in-principle limitation on how short-lived genuine beliefs can be. There is no absurdity in saying “I really believed that for just one moment.” Consider the following example. In a hurry to catch a flight, I rush through airport security and pause, uncertain which gate is mine. I glance at my boarding pass and see “34B.” I start towards gate 34B, before realizing, just one moment later, that “34B” is my seat and my gate is instead 11B. I pivot on my heel and take off in the opposite direction. In this situation, it is true that I believed that my gate was 34B—my taking a particular directed action to move towards the higher-numbered gates illustrates that—but I believed it just momentarily.
It’s not even obvious that we must deny that one has the relevant belief over the extended interval. This scenario might best be understood as a case of conflicting belief instead. If one judges that p at t, one must also believe that p at t. But one may also judge that p at t while believing that ¬p as well.
I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
For more on using the first-person in self-attribution of belief, see Boyle (2009b, pp. 153–4).
Here I do not mean to endorse the general principle that any inference or application of a concept whose availability to the subject is required for possessing that concept are inferences or applications to which the possessor is then entitled at any time. In its general form, this principle has interesting counterexamples. See Boghossian and Williamson (2003) for extended discussion.
Those who take content externalism to threaten self-knowledge (e.g. Boghossian 1989) may disagree that this is all that’s necessary by way of warrant here. I take the line endorsed by Burge (1996), Heil (1988), and Peacocke (1996) on this point: there is no such threat. Those still concerned about content externalism should at least note one nice feature of any given embedded mental actions: one and the same intentional mental action cannot enjoy two distinct environments that might contribute to the individuation of content. Cf. Burge (1996) on self-verifying judgments.
Some might argue that this is not even necessary; true warranted judgment could count as knowledge just as much as true warranted belief could. I simply accept this point.
See Cassam (2014), p. 5–6, for a helpful characterization of these intuitions. Compare Moran (2001, Section 4.5), and Heal (2002, p. 2). Russell’s (1912) claim that we are directly acquainted with our own mental states can also be understood as expressing the thought that our knowledge of our own beliefs is both epistemically and psychologically immediate.
See, however, Paul (2012) for an argument to the contrary.
I’m indebted to an anonymous reviewer of this paper for a careful presentation of this objection.
I’m grateful to Peter Epstein for expressing this point in a compelling way.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for invaluable commentary on an earlier draft. For earlier illuminating commentary and extensive discussion, I would also like to thank John Campbell, Barry Stroud, and Christopher Peacocke. Thanks also to Jackson Kernion, Eugene Chislenko, Jim Hutchinson, Julian Jonker, Philippe Chuard, Alex Kerr, Michael Martin, Melissa Fusco, Rachel Rudolph, Alex Kocurek, Ravit Dotan, Austin Andrews, Adam Bradley, Quinn Gibson, Peter Epstein, Umrao Sethi, Dylan Murray, Kathryn Grzenczyk Mantoan, Jeffrey Kaplan, Kirsten Pickering, and Ethan Jerzak.
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Peacocke, A. Embedded mental action in self-attribution of belief. Philos Stud 174, 353–377 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0685-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0685-4