Abstract
This paper contributes to a debate that has arisen in the recent self-knowledge literature between agentialists and empiricists. According to agentialists, in order for one to know what one believes, desires, and intends, rational agency needs to be exercised in centrally significant cases. Empiricists disagree: while they acknowledge the importance of rationality in general, they maintain that when it comes to self-knowledge, empirical justification, or warrant, is always sufficient.
In what follows, I defend agentialism. I argue that if we could only come to know our judgement-sensitive attitudes in the way described by empiricism, then we would be self-estranged from them when we acquire knowledge of them. We would relate to our own attitudes as if we were watching the movies of our inner lives unfold. Given that this is not the position we typically inhabit, with respect to our judgement-sensitive attitudes, I conclude that empiricism fails. This is the self-estrangement argument against empiricism. I then consider a response that Brie Gertler, an empiricist, offers to the objection that empiricism fatally portrays us ‘mere observers of a passing cognitive show’ (2016, p. 1). I argue that her response is unsuccessful. Hence, we should endorse agentialism.
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Notes
Gertler (2011a) has previously referred to this view as ‘rationalism’. In her more recent work, she has used the term ‘agentialism’ to describe this view because she claims that doing so allows us to distinguish between authors who invoke rationality in explaining self-knowledge, and yet do not claim that rationality makes an epistemic contribution to self-knowledge (she cites Shoemaker (1994) and Gallois (1996) as adherents to this view); and authors who do think rational agency makes an epistemic contribution to self-knowledge, such as Moran (2001, 2012) and Boyle (2009, 2011, 2019).
Sensory-based attitudes include, for example, a belief that one is seeing a blue sky, is in pain, or is hungry.
Dorit Bar-On (2004) thinks this is a problem for agentialism because it would mean that the agentialist would have to deny the uniformity assumption—the assumption that all privileged self-knowledge is achieved in the same way. One can respond to Bar-On, following Matthew Boyle (2009), by simply rejecting the uniformity assumption. This is the positon I adopt in this paper. I agree with Boyle that is it unclear why the assumption should be made in the first place.
The agentialist position rests upon the assumption that our judgement-sensitive attitudes are held on the basis of reasons. This does not necessarily mean for good reasons, an assumption that Cassam (2014)—mistakenly in my view—attributes to the agentialist position.
I grant that it can be sometimes hard to change our beliefs.
Lest I be misunderstood: I am not making the strong claim that we are never self-estranged from our judgement-sensitive attitudes.
Similar appeals to endorsement have been made by Moran, who thinks that without endorsement, a person’s self-attribution ‘may as well be about some other person’ (2001, p. 93). Lisa Bortolotti similarly thinks endorsement should be ‘measured in terms of the capacity for reason-giving’ (2009, p. 235).
The argument I am advancing does not take a stance upon several controversies that divide agentialists. Baron Reed (2010), for example, distinguishes between two main types of agentialist (referred to by Reed as ‘rationalist’) approaches: an outward approach, which he attributes to Akeel Bilgrami (2006), and an inward approach, which he attributes to Moran (2001) and Burge (1996). There are also, furthermore, important differences between Moran’s view and Burge’s.
See Moran (2012) for a critique of Byrne’s attempt to account for transparency without appealing to agency.
I say typically here because we need to allow that one can self-attribute an attitude and still be self-estranged from it. The IAT case is an example of this.
For a discussion about how to describe cases where a subject explicitly endorses P and behaves as if she believes not-P, see Albahari (2014).
I am not suggesting that all beliefs are judgements, however. This would be to ignore dispositional beliefs which can arises independently of any conscious judgement.
See Reed (2010) for a discussion about why endorsing P on the sole basis of one’s remembering that one once believed that P is problematic.
I have argued previously (Andreotta 2021) that this result illustrates how the transparency method can be applied to intentions.
This is not to say that mere reflection upon an attitude P will always be enough to change that attitude (Hieronymi 2014, p. 8).
See Sorgiovanni (2020) for a discussion about the role that memory plays in the agentialist’s explanation of self-knowledge.
I thank an anonymous peer reviewer for bringing this concern to my attention.
Moran articulates this point in the following passage, when describing the process of knowing what he intends to do: ‘My knowing what I will do next is not based on evidence or other reasons to believe something, so much as it is based on what I see as reasons to do something. Hence, a person’s statement of intention is not to be challenged by asking for his evidence’ (2001, p. 56).
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Acknowledgements
An early version of this paper was presented at a workshop on self-knowledge, held at Deakin University in December 2017, titled Self-Knowledge: Occurrent Trends and Issues. I am grateful for the helpful comments I received from Harriet Levenston, Ryan Cox, Jordi Fernández, and Michael Mitchell. I am also grateful to Harriet Levenston and Michael Rubin who read draft versions of the paper and offered helpful suggestions and criticisms. I would also like to thank Miri Albahari and Nin Kirkham, who supervised my PhD thesis on self-knowledge, from which this paper is a descendent of.
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Andreotta, A. More than Just a Passing Cognitive Show: a Defence of Agentialism About Self-knowledge. Acta Anal 37, 353–373 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00492-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00492-y