Abstract
Robert Dunn (2006) and Richard Moran (2001) have emphasized the importance of deliberation to account for the privileged authority of self-ascriptions. They oppose a theoretical attitude toward oneself to a deliberative attitude that they regard as more intimate, as purely first-personal. In this paper, I intend to challenge Dunn’s and Moran’s understanding of how the deliberative attitude is to be conceived of and, in particular, I will call into question their claim that this attitude is wholly non-observational. More positively, I will elaborate on the sort of self-observation that must play a central role in an agent’s deliberation if she is to recognize a certain belief, decision, or intention as genuinely her own and, therefore, as expressing a purely first-person point of view. In the elaboration of my argument, I will rely on a number of situations as they are described in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda.
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Notes
In this respect, Moran claims: “There is one kind of evasion in the empty denial of one’s facticity (e.g., one’s history of weakness and fallibility), as if to say ‘Don’t worry about my actual history of letting you down, for I hereby renounce and transcend all that.’ But there is also evasion in submerging oneself in facticity, as if to say, ‘Of course, whether I will in fact disappoint you again is a fully empirical question. You know as much as I do as to what the probabilities are, and so you can plan accordingly.’” (Moran 2001, p. 81)
In fact, Dunn and Moran defend a hybrid model of self-knowledge (Gertler 2011, p. 167), since they both assume that a theoretical attitude towards oneself also delivers self-knowledge. It is essential to their view, however, that these two varieties of self-knowledge are not on equal terms, since only the deliberative attitude allows us to articulate a purely first-person point of view. This is why Gertler herself refers to this model as the rationalist theory as opposed to an empiricist view (Gertler 2011, Chaps. 6, 8).
The transparency condition was first introduced by Gareth Evans with regard to beliefs and, in particular, to highlight how we do typically answer the question “Do I believe that P?” by exploring a world and, therefore, by looking for an answer to the question “Is P true?” It follows that whatever reason an agent may have to answer the latter question in a certain way will also ground a similar answer to the former one (Evans 1982, p. 225). Dunn and Moran defend the view, however, that a similar procedure applies to desires as well, that is, they argue that there is a way of raising the question “Do I desire P?” that calls for an examination of the question as to whether P is worth-desiring rather than for an exploration of one’s actual psychological dispositions.
As Dunn repeatedly puts it: “Some first-person self-knowledge is wholly observational, as when I am consciously in pain. Some first-person self-knowledge is crucially observational, as when I self-ascribe a present, conscious propositional attitude because, in crucial part, of what it feels like to have it. Of special interest, in the present context, is a third kind of case of first-person knowledge: first-person knowledge of one’s own current, conscious propositional attitudes, which is wholly non-observational. This is the kind of first-person self-knowledge that I call purely first-personal. It is the kind of self-knowledge that I typically have of my own current, conscious beliefs and intentions and that I sometimes have of my own current, conscious desires and emotions. It is also, I contend, the kind of knowledge I have, as agent, of my own future action.” (Dunn 2006, p. 38. See 37)
And, similarly, Moran claims: “The authority of the agent does speak from (when he does) as well as the fact that his declaration is made without observation of himself both stem from the fact that the person’s own relation to his attitudes and his intentional actions must express the priority of justifying reasons over purely explanatory ones.” (Moran 2001, p. 128. See 94–99)
The question “What kind of awareness can have a healing effect in psychoanalytic therapy?” plays a crucial role in Moran’s approach (Moran 2001, pp. 83–94. See Finkelstein 2003, pp. 114–126). The use of the transparency condition to identify the goal of psychoanalytic therapy is one of the ways in which Moran remarkably succeeds at connecting the standard debate about self-knowledge with our ability to lead a meaningful life: “And part of what made the account I develop seem promising to me is that answering this question about how and when Transparency is possible seemed to provide a unified framework for understanding features of self-knowledge that are commonly thought to be fundamental to it, but which are normally discussed in isolation from each other; namely: immediacy and the independence of evidence, the special authority of the first-person, the centrality of the ‘subject-use’ of the pronoun ‘I’, and the importance of ordinary self-knowledge to the rationality of the person.” (Moran 2003, p. 406. See Finkelstein 2003, pp. 153–168; Gardner 2004, p. 250; Moran 2001, p. 107; O’Brien 2003, p. 375; Shoemaker 2003, p. 391) This paper seeks to pursue this endeavor by defending the importance of a certain kind of self-observation for our ability to articulate a genuinely first-person point of view.
The deliberative model acknowledges the dispositional aspect of our agency. There are a number of dispositions that must be shaped in light of our decisions for an agent to be identified as healthy, but a minimum of permeability is required to be an agent at all and, consequently, to have beliefs, to form intentions or to make decisions. The deliberative model owes us an account, however, of why we are entitled to assume that such a minimum is met and it seems that the most that Dunn and Moran can say in reply is that it follows from the assumption that we are agents with a capacity to deliberate (Burge 1996, pp. 98, 110–111, Moran 2003, p. 405, O’Brien 2003, pp. 378–381; Shoemaker 2003, p. 398), since any appeal to a process of self-observation would allegedly take us away from a purely first-person perspective.
Byrne (2005, pp. 92–98), Gertler (2011, pp. 190–194, 258), and Fernández (2003, p. 365) have defended the dispensability of this transcendental argument and articulated the transparency condition in empiricist terms. I am not sure they have succeeded in their purposes, since it is hard for me to see how the agent’s application of the transparency condition could make sense regardless of some assumptions about her deliberative capacities similar to those posited by Dunn and Moran. This is not, however, an issue I need to take sides on in the present paper.
We can safely leave aside here the issue about the privacy of the Cartesian mind. What matters to Dunn and Moran is to oppose the deliberative and the theoretical attitudes, not so much the details as to how the latter could be construed to avoid the traditional concerns with a private mind. In any event, the engaged sort of self-observation I intend to sketch in this paper can hardly be conceived of as private, given that its deliverances are claimed to form a pattern of intelligibility with the situation the agent faces.
Thus, Blackburn claims: “… In the sense in which it is right, it means only that one can stand back from a particular desire or impulse, and accept or reject its pressure on one. Certainly we can do this, in the light of other desires and concerns. What is not thereby given is that we can do it from a standpoint independent of any desire or concern: independent of a desire for our own good, or for the happiness of humanity; or respect for this or that, or the myriad other passions that make up our individual profiles of concern and care.” (Blackburn 1998, p. 252)
In a similar vein: “… It surely is a mistake to suppose that our desires ‘fill the foreground’ of practical deliberation. For one thing, the phenomenology of reflection doesn’t lend any support to the idea that we are self-preoccupied like this as practical deliberators. The situation is at least very often as Blackburn depicts it: we consider this and that, where this and that are the various features that weigh with us as we try to decide what to do.” (Dunn 2006, p. 89)
This line of reasoning implies that there are psychological states with a dual direction of fit, that is, a world-to-mind and mind-to-world direction of it. The intelligibility of such states is explicitly defended by Dunn regarding evaluative beliefs: “One and the same state—the belief that p ought to be—has a mind-to-world direction of fit with respect to the content that p ought to be (marking out its states as a belief) and a world-to-mind direction of fit with respect to the embedded content that p (marking out its status as, or as a state that involves, the desire that p).” (Dunn 2006, p. 17)
Hence, in assuming the existence of this sort of psychological state, I am not going beyond what Dunn’s deliberative model concedes. Moran is less explicit in this respect. Still, some commentators have point out some difficulties in his approach that might be solved by allowing for attitudes with a dual direction of fit. Gardner (2004, p. 262) is puzzled about how a fact could have practical significance and still be recognized as a fact from a realist perspective, whereas O’Brien (2003, pp. 366–7, 381–2) straightforwardly suggests that some sort of non-conceptual practical awareness is required to explain “… how agency gives us knowledge” (O’Brien 2003, p. 367) and it seems that practical awareness could not but have a dual direction of fit.
In section 4, I will emphasize how the agent may challenge some traits of her character and, yet, fail to estrange it insofar as her response to some situations may still be shaped by it.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my colleagues in the Phronesis Weekly Seminar for their generous discussion of an early draft of this paper. I have also benefited from the questions and remarks by the participants in VII SEFA Conference (Madrid, September 11-14, 2013), Workshop on Agency, Responsibility and Self-Deception (Bogotá, November 21-22, 2013) and Workshop on Self-Knowledge, Expression and Transparency (Murcia, March 17-18, 2014). I am finally pleased to acknowledge that research for this paper has been funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (CSD2009-00056, FFI2013-47948-P, FFI2014-55256-REDT).
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Corbí, J.E. Self-Knowledge, Deliberation, and the Fruit of Satan. Acta Anal 32, 245–261 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0304-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0304-1