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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Great Debates in Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides a timely and original contribution to the debate surrounding privileged self-knowledge
Contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of mind continue to find puzzling the nature and source of privileged self-knowledge: the ordinary and effortless ‘first-person’ knowledge we have of our own sensations, moods, emotions, beliefs, desires, and hopes.
In Expression and Self-Knowledge, Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright articulate their joint dissatisfaction with extant accounts of self-knowledge and engage in a sustained and substantial critical debate over the merits of an expressivist approach to the topic. The authors incorporate cutting-edge research while defending their own alternatives to existing approaches to so-called ‘first-person privilege’.
Bar-On defends her neo-expressivist account, addressing the objection that neo-expressivism fails to provide an adequate epistemology of ordinary self-knowledge, and addresses new objections levelled by Wright. Wright then presents an alternative pluralist approach, and Bar-On argues in response that pluralism faces difficulties neo-expressivism avoids. Providing invaluable insights on a hotly debated topic in epistemology and philosophy of mind, Expression and Self-Knowledge:
- Presents an in-depth debate between two leading philosophers over the expressivist approach
- Offers novel developments and penetrating criticisms of the authors' respective views
- Features two different perspectives on the influential remarks on expression and self-knowledge found in Wittgenstein’s later writings
- Includes four jointly written chapters that offer a critical overview of prominent existing accounts, which provide a useful advanced introduction to the subject.
Expression and Self-Knowledge is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind and language, psychologists with an interest in self-knowledge, and researchers and graduate students working in expression, expressivism, and self-knowledge.
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Seitenzahl: 882
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Great Debates in Philosophy
Series Editor: Ernest Sosa
Dialogue has always been a powerful means of philosophical exploration and exposition. By presenting important current issues in philosophy in the form of a debate, this series attempts to capture the flavor of philosophical argument and to convey the excitement generated by the exchange of ideas. Each author contributes a major, original essay. When these essays have been completed, the authors are each given the opportunity to respond to the opposing view.
Personal Identity
Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne
Consciousness and Causality
D. M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm
Critical Theory
David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy
Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity
Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson
Three Methods of Ethics
Marcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote
Atheism and Theism, Second Edition
J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane
Epistemic Justification
Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa
Four Views on Free Will
John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas
Knowledge of God
Alvin Plantinga and Michael J. Tooley
The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate
John Kleinig, Simon Keller, and Igor Primoratz
Expression and Self-Knowledge
Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright
Expression and Self-Knowledge
Dorit Bar-On
and
Crispin Wright
This edition first published 2024
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bar-On, Dorit, 1955- author. | Wright, Crispin, 1942- author.
Title: Expression and self-knowledge / Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley Blackwell, 2023. | Series: Great debates in philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This Great Debates volume grew out of exchanges that followed the 2012 publication of a Festschrift volume for Crispin Wright, just over a decade ago (Coliva 2012). As often happens in Philosophy, the process of trying to clarify and iron out apparently local points of disagreement between us has unearthed deeper divergences concerning larger issues in the philosophy of language and mind, in epistemology, and in the theory of action. Such is our profession”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023004684 (print) | LCCN 2023004685 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118908471 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118908556 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781118908549 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-knowledge, Theory of. | Self (Philosophy) | Philosophy of mind.
Classification: LCC BD438.5 .B36 2023 (print) | LCC BD438.5 (ebook) | DDC 126--dc23/eng/20230705
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004684
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004685
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Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Privileged Access
§1.1 Privileged Access: What Is the Problem?
§1.2 The Cartesian “Solution”
§1.3 Language First or Thought First?
2 Skepticism about the Problem
§2.1 Rejecting the Entire Explanatory Project: Wittgenstein and the “Default View”
§2.2 Disputing the “Data”
§2.2.1 Snowdon
§2.2.2 Schwitzgebel
§2.2.3 Carruthers
§2.2.4 Williamson
3 A Critique of Some Recent Accounts of First-Person Privilege: Part I: Epistemic Approaches
§3.1 Epistemic Approaches
§3.2 Epistemic Access as “Inward Gaze”: Non-Cartesian Conceptions of Inner Sense
§3.2.1 Materialist Introspectionism
§3.2.2 Against an Expertise Model of First-Person Privilege
§3.3 Privileged Access as Outer Gaze: Transparency Views
§3.3.1 Gareth Evans: Transparency as an Epistemic Procedure
§3.3.2 Five Limitations of Transparency as an Epistemic Procedure
§3.3.3 Alex Byrne: Transparent Inference Rules
§3.4 Christopher Peacocke on Self-Knowledge of Belief
4 A Critique of Some Recent Accounts of First-Person Privilege: Part II: “High-Road” Approaches to Self-Knowledge
§4.1 Avowals as Expressive of Commitments: Moran and Bilgrami
§4.2 Against Commissive Views
§4.3 The Uniformity Constraint
§4.4 Tyler Burge on Self-Knowledge and Critical Reasoning
§4.5 Metaphysical Constitutivism: Resoluteness and Shoemaker
§4.6 Conceptual Constitutivism: Wright and Judgment-Dependence
§4.7 Privileged Access: Diagnosis and Desiderata
5 Some Initial Thoughts about Expressivist Responses to the Problem
§5.1 Psychological Expressivism: Simple and Radical
§5.2 Radical Expressivism: Some Serious Misgivings
6 Neo-Expressivism: Speaking One’s Mind
§6.1 Avowals’ Distinctive Security and Basic Self-Knowledge: A Brief Overview
§6.1.1 Basic Self-Knowledge: Some Theses, Some Questions
§6.1.2 “Language-first” Vs. “Thought-first”
§6.1.3 Avowals’ Security: The Explanatory Task
§6.2 Expressivism: Simple, Radical, and New
§6.2.1 Simple Expressivism
§6.2.2 “Radical” Expressivism
§6.3 The Neo-Expressivist Account of Avowals’ Distinctive Security
§6.3.1 Avowals: Acts, Products, Vehicles
§6.3.2 Neo-Expressivism: Explaining Avowals’ Distinctive Security
§6.3.3 Avowals’ Security: Immunity to Error
§6.3.4 Dual Immunity to Error and the Expressive Character of Avowals
§6.3.5 False Avowals, Transparency, and Moore’s Paradox
7 Neo-Expressivism: Knowing One’s Mind
§7.1 Neo-Expressivism and Self-Knowledge
§7.2 Expression and No-”How„ Basic Self-Knowledge
§7.2.1 “Baseless” Self-Knowledge: Warrant, Entitlement, and Grounding
§7.2.2 The Dual Immunity to Error of Avowals and Avowals’ Default Entitlement
§7.2.3 Avowals as Warranted: Baseless yet Grounded?
§7.3 Basic Self-Knowledge Without Avowals?
§7.3.1 The Objection from Unavowed Self-Knowledge
§7.3.2 Implicit Self-Knowledge and the „Episodic Constraint”
§7.3.3 Is Avowing Necessary for Possessing Actual Self-Knowledge?
§7.4 Neo-Expressivism: “Grammar,” Epistemology, and Metaphysics
§7.4.1 Neo-Expressivism Vs. Other Views
§7.4.2 Expression, Self-Knowledge, and the Nature of Mind
Appendix: Epistemological Disjunctivism about Self-Knowledge
8 On Neo-Expressivism: Continuing Doubts
§8.1 Introduction: Testimony, Expression, and the Program for the Chapter
§8.2 Immunity to Error through Misidentification and Immunity to Error through Misascription
§8.3 Immediacy and the Phenomenal
§8.4 Is Self-Knowledge a Kind of Knowledge “No-‘How’”?
§8.5 Bar-On’s Marginalization of Salience
§8.6 “Speaking From” and Authority
§8.7 On Neo-Expressivism’s Account of Self-Knowledge
§8.8 Neo-Expressivism and Barn Façades
§8.9 Resumé of Objections Raised
9 Speaking One’s Mind: Authority, Testimony, and Expression
§9.1 Introduction: Where Are We?
§9.2 Avowals’ Immunity to Error, Security, and Authority
§9.3 Avowals: Testimony, and “Evidential Force”
§9.4 Arguments for the Routine Testimonial Model Debunked
§9.4.1 The Argument from Deliberate Expression
§9.4.2 The Argument from Intentional Communication
§9.4.3 The Argument from Linguistic Application
§9.5 “Evidential Force” and “Performance Equivalence”
§9.6 The Insufficiency of RTM
§9.7 Wright’s Knowledge “How” and the Immediacy of the Phenomenal
§9.8 Avowals’ Expressive Character and Speaking One’s Mind
§9.9 What about Salience?
Appendix: On Immunities to Error and Skeptical Scenarios
§1 Expressive Character and Non-Recognitionality
§2 Non-Recognitionality and IEM/A
§3 Non-Recognitionality and Brute Error
§4 Mental State Façade Country?
10 Divide and Conquer: A Prospectus for Progress?
§10.1 Some Points about Belief and Judgment
§10.2 Varieties of Awareness and of Judgment-Dependence
§10.3 Avowals as Initiative?
§10.4 Self-Interpreting
§10.5 Self-Knowledge of Intentionally Directed Affective States
§10.6 Common-sense Psychological Explanation and the Trifecta
§10.7 Summary of the Prospectus
11 Expression, Mediating Beliefs, and the Judgment-Independence of Mental States
§11.1 Expression, Action, and Belief
§11.1.1 Wright’s Argument from Intentional Action Debunked
§11.1.2 Expressive Acts and Intentional Actions
§11.2 “Initiative” Avowals
§11.3 (Non-Phenomenal) Attitudinal Avowals
§11.4 Avowals of “Pure Phenomenal” States and “Directed Affective” States: “S-awareness” and “C-awareness”
§11.4.1 Pure Phenomenal States (“PPSs”): Hypothesis 1
§11.4.2 Directed Affective States (“DASs”): Hypothesis 2
§11.4.3 Difficulties with Hypotheses 1 and 2
§11.5 Some Remaining Case
§11.5.1 “Negative Avowals”
§11.5.2 Self-Ascriptions of Psychological Change
§11.6 Uniformity and the Trifecta
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 11
Figure 1 Avowals of Pure Phenomenal States.
Figure 2 Avowals of Affective Directed States.
Guide
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Preface and Acknowledgments
This Great Debates volume grew out of exchanges that followed the 2012 publication of a Festschrift volume for Crispin Wright, just over a decade ago (Coliva 2012). As often happens in Philosophy, the process of trying to clarify and iron out apparently local points of disagreement between us has unearthed deeper divergences concerning larger issues in the philosophy of language and mind, in epistemology, and in the theory of action. Such is our profession.
In the chapters that follow, we present work we have done in more recent years together and separately to determine what role the notion of expression can usefully play in a philosophical explanation of basic self-knowledge. Part One of this volume (Chapters One to Five) distills the elements of our joint dissatisfaction with leading views on the status of basic self-knowledge. It is our hope that Part One may serve as an advanced critical introduction to the contemporary discussion of the relevant issues. In Part Two (Chapters Six to Eleven), we attempt to articulate—provisionally, of course—the divergent views we have each arrived at, in part as a result of engaging in the present debate. Parts One and Two are, to a considerable extent, independent of each other, and can be consulted as such by philosophically more experienced readers.
We wish to thank Wiley for their patience and flexibility as this volume developed and transformed. We are both immensely grateful for the assistance we have been given by Drew Johnson and Ben Winokur in bringing the volume to completion: for numerous discussions of substance, excellent editorial advice, and sustained help throughout the work on this project, which went well beyond what is normally understood by “research assistance.” Special thanks to Ben for his contribution to the last stages of the project—his tireless work on integrating and reorganizing materials, the editing and compilation of footnotes and references, proof-reading and the preparation of the index. It would, absolutely, not have been possible to complete this volume without both Drew’s and Ben’s invaluable assistance. We wish to thank the University of Connecticut and NYU for providing the financial support that made it possible to engage the help of these colleagues.
We each have a considerable list of individual debts to acknowledge.
Dorit Bar-On first offered a systematic development of the view she dubbed “Neo-Expressivism” in a 2004 book Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Bar-On wishes to thank Douglas Long (who, sadly, passed away recently) for several years of sustained philosophical exchanges and collaboration in the preceding years. Bar-On is also grateful for many fruitful later discussions of her book—especially to Matthew Boyle, Tony Brueckner, Alex Byrne, Lucy O’Brien, Eric Marcus, Aidan McGlynn, Ram Neta, David Rosenthal, Jack Spencer, and Maura Tumulty. The present volume has provided a welcome opportunity to consolidate developments of Neo-Expressivism undertaken in articles published between 2004 and 2023 and to offer new ones in response to Wright’s extensive critique. Bar-On wishes to thank the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for fellowships that enabled her to produce earlier drafts of her contributions to the volume. Special thanks are owed to Rockney Jacobsen for several recent discussions on expression and first-person authority and for comments that informed the present versions of Chapters Six, Seven, Nine, and Eleven. Casey Doyle, Nadja-Mira Yolcu, and Ram Neta also read drafts of Chapters Nine and Eleven and provided very helpful feedback. Earlier versions of parts of Chapter Seven have been presented at Warwick University, Mannheim University, Stirling University, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Connecticut. Thanks to audiences at these presentations for productive exchanges. Special thanks to Drew Johnson, with whom Bar-On has worked on the topic of self-knowledge for a number of years now, and with whom she co-authored the Appendices to Chapters Seven and Nine (which are in turn based on two published joint papers). And thanks to Orly Lubin for her good advice. Finally, Bar-On wishes to thank Keith Simmons for his unfailing support and philosophical companionship throughout the period of co-authoring this volume and beyond.
Crispin Wright’s engagement with the problem of Self-Knowledge dates from the Whitehead Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1996. More than 15 years later, when fashioning a reply to Bar-On’s contribution to the festschrift referred to above, he came to think that her version of an expressivist proposal promised considerably more resources than the cruder expressivisms he had critiqued in the Harvard lectures and the idea for this volume emerged from the informal discussions that followed. His thinking about the issues has been advanced enormously by his participation over several years in the seminars and workshops of two groups of scholars and friends: first at the Northern Institute of Philosophy in Aberdeen during the preparation of an application (later unfortunately and—we felt—undeservedly unsuccessful) for an ERC Advanced Grant to work on a major collaborative project on Selves Knowledge of Themselves, and subsequently at Stirling where the philosophers enjoyed the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation and the Thought Trust for the 30-month project, Knowledge beyond Natural Science, one stream of which was devoted to self-knowledge. Wright would like to express his deep gratitude both to the funders and to those two groups of colleagues: in no particular order, Aidan McGlynn, Paula Sweeney, Federico Luzzi, Doug Edwards, Alex Plakias, Peter Sullivan, Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, Sonia Roca-Royes, Xintong Wei, Giovanni Merlo, Giacomo Melis, Paul Conlan, and Indrek Lobus. More recently, he has benefited greatly from the generous critical attention that Matthew Boyle, Alex Byrne, and Paul Boghossian gave to early versions of Chapters Eight and Ten.
The kind of opportunity provided by a Wiley “Great Debate” to interact intensively and over an extended period with the views of a fellow professional is relatively rare in academic philosophy. We have both learned a great deal in the course of engaging in this work and hope we have been able usefully to convey some of the lessons in the chapters that follow. Someone had to have the last word. It happens to be Bar-On, but our debate could easily have continued. At various stages as the exchange developed, we were encouraged to hope that it might be possible to come to agreement about the form of the best account—or possibly the best accounts, plural—of First-Person Privilege. That could have generated a concluding, irenic Chapter Twelve. Perhaps it is unsurprising—if not just a tad disappointing—that, in the end, agreement on how best to address so intricate and challenging a philosophical problem has remained beyond our reach.
Dorit Bar-On, Crispin Wright
January 2023
1 Privileged Access
Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright
Contents
§1.1 Privileged Access: What Is the Problem?
§1.2 The Cartesian “Solution”
§1.3 Language First or Thought First?
***
§1.1 Privileged Access: What Is the Problem?
Although some philosophers have preferred to think otherwise, it is not philosophical theory but a part of the ordinary folk notion of the mental, enshrined in literature and drama, that each of us stands in a special relationship, denied to others, to our own mental lives—that (many of) our mental states and attributes are (normally) directly available to us and only indirectly available to others, that “You cannot really know what another is thinking,” for example, whereas of one’s own (occurrent) thoughts one cannot but be aware. This special relationship—often referred to by the term privileged access—seems to embrace (some instances of) each of sensation, mood, emotion, belief, desire, fear, intention, action (what I am currently doing), memory (what I am currently remembering), perception (what I am seeing), thought (what I am thinking), imagination, (idiolectic) meaning … the list goes on.
The putative special relationship is frequently gestured at by the phrase “first-person authority.” But the term, “authority,” oversimplifies the respects in which, according to the folk notion, self-knowledge is special. As an initial approximation, there are three distinct features to reckon with.
First (Immediacy), in a wide class of cases, your knowledge of your own psychological attributes need not rely on the kind of evidence—what you say, how you act, how you look—on which others have to rely in coming to justified views about your psychological attributes, and may often seem to rely on no kind of evidence at all.
Second (Authority), your knowledge of a wide class of your own mental attributes does not only originate differently from the ways others can know of them—it is generally superior, and to be deferred to.
And third (Salience), we tend, in the round, to know what there is to know: our own mental attributes of the kinds listed do not, in general, elude our awareness, although those of others may often do so.1,2
We shall refer to these three features collectively as the Trifecta and, sometimes, will use “Privileged Access” and “First-Person Privilege” as catch-all terms for the three.3
So, the problem—as it initially impresses—is to provide a philosophical account of these asymmetries. Knowledge generally is democratic in the sense that ways to achieve knowledge about various subject matters, while they may in practice be exclusive to those with special gifts of intellect, opportunity or training, are in principle open to anyone. Self-knowledge, by contrast, of perfectly everyday kinds, is routinely achieved by the self concerned in ways that are denied to others, even in principle. What explains this?
§1.2 The Cartesian “Solution”
There is a venerable response to this question, which springs to mind so naturally that it can seem constitutive of the very subject matter, an aspect of the “data.” This is the idea, associated (perhaps erroneously) by many modern thinkers with Descartes,4 that each one’s mental life constitutes a totally transparent inner theater, with an audience, necessarily, of one. Others will need indirect evidence to suppose that something is happening on your inner stage, but you can just observe it. So of course you know best. And since there is total transparency, you will be able to observe what is there to be observed.
Familiarly, however, when pressed, the venerable response transpires to be deeply problematic on several counts. To begin with, the appeal to a kind of interior observation involves distortion of the phenomenology of many—too many—of the attributes that intuitively fall within the province of privileged access. For example, when you acknowledge that you believe something, or have a certain intention, there is normally no distinctive, individuative state of consciousness involved, as there is with, say, a toothache or an itch—nothing in particular that “it is like” to have that particular belief or intention. But more theoretically, the inner theater model plays a villain’s part in generating the sceptikal problem of other minds. And its very coherence is put in serious question by the misgivings about “private language”—really, they concern the possibility of private conceptualization—original to Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations.
Since constraints are thereby imposed on any more satisfactory account, it is worthwhile reviewing these points in some detail. For Cartesianism, our access to our mental states is afforded by a superior kind of inner perception, a faculty that brings us to awareness of the character of states, events, and processes within our inner mental lives broadly as our ordinary perceptual faculties bring us to awareness of states, events, and processes taking place in the perceptible material world around us. But there are crucial differences. While a perceptually normal subject paying close attention to the objects around them will normally be accorded a certain authority for what is there and how matters stand with it, and will normally be expected to notice these things, the Cartesian view, as traditionally understood, embraces far stronger—maximally strong—versions of Authority and Salience:
Absolute First-Person Authority
: If a (sincere, competent) subject spontaneously avows being in mental state M, then their avowal is absolutely
indubitable, infallible
, and
incorrigible
.
Guaranteed Salience
: If a subject S is in mental state M, then they are
guaranteed
to know that they are in M.
Moreover, the access given by the inner gaze is comprehensive yet local:
All-Encompassing Yet Restricted Epistemic Access
: A subject’s inner gaze encompasses
all
their occurrent mental attributes but exclusively concerns
their own
mental attributes. It does not take in their physical states, or the mental states of others.
And finally:
Necessarily Privileged Self-Knowledge:
The matters which a subject’s avowals concern are things which the subject necessarily knows.
According to the above theses, sincere avowals would constitute self-attributions that are guaranteed to be true, could never rationally be doubted, and could never reasonably be corrected by others. As such, they would present a radically unusual subclass of things we know and would contrast sharply not only with mental attributions to others but also with all bodily self-attributions. Self-attributions of bodily features and conditions such as height and weight, disease, heart rate, digestive processes, etc. are often made on the same kinds of bases as similar attributions to others. And (as we shall later see) even self-attributions of limb position and bodily orientation, as well as self-attributions of what we see, hear, or touch, or of what we are doing at a given moment—all of which do exhibit certain notable first-person/third-person contrasts—seem open to straightforward rejection and correction by others and are even open to doubt by oneself. Though one does not normally tell what the position of one’s legs, or whether one is sitting down, or whether one sees something, or is doing something, in the same way in which others determine these facts about oneself, others can nevertheless be in a position straightforwardly to deny and correct a self-attribution such as “My legs are crossed” or “I am sitting down”; similarly, e.g., “I (am) hear(ing) a loud siren,” or “I’m drawing a horse.” By contrast, on the Cartesian conception, the corresponding avowals (“It feels to me as though my legs are crossed,” or “I feel as though I am standing”; “I seem to be hearing a loud siren”) are absolutely indubitable, infallible, and incorrigible: with respect to such self-attributions, one enjoys absolute authority. (We will return to contrasts between first-person bodily and mental self-attributions later on.)
On the Cartesian conception, this absolute authority is due to the fact that we each have our own personal, absolutely secure form of access to our own present states of mind. The results delivered by this form of access are guaranteed to be true. There is a striking corollary of this. Since it seems impossible that we could have such secure access to any of our bodily states, the privileged epistemic access we each have to our mental states requires those states to have a peculiar non-bodily nature. Hence, as noted, the pressure to adopt the following, metaphysical thesis—one that the historical Descartes undoubtedly did hold—regarding the relation between mind and body:
Substance Dualism
: The states known via the “inner gaze” are states of an immaterial substance that is (only contingently) associated with our material body.
Given this thesis, it transpires that avowals and nonmental bodily self-attributions differ in the metaphysical kinds of subject matter they concern. Avowals concern states of our immaterial minds, which are metaphysically distinct from, and only contingently coexist with, our bodies. These states are, moreover, private states—they cannot be objects of direct awareness to others who can know of them, if at all, only by less secure, inferential means.
As we suggested at the beginning, the Cartesian conception of these matters so elaborated is not merely a philosopher’s invention, but resonates with at least one strand in a widely (if somewhat inchoately) held folk-theory. Its appeal, or at least its status as an implicit assumption, is witnessed by, for example, the widespread assumption that it at least makes sense to suppose that one might survive one’s bodily death and by the seeming obviousness, both to freshmen and the folk, that there is indeed a “problem of other minds” as traditionally viewed. If mental states are things of which only their subject can be directly aware, then—never mind the superlative character of the knowledge they at least supposedly have of them—what grounds can others have for thinking that one has such states at all? And even if there are some such grounds, what reasons are there for thinking that different selves’ mental theaters are populated by things of even remotely similar kinds? And if there are no strong grounds for that, what grounds are there for thinking that the meanings of expressions in our respective mental idiolects overlap to any significant degree, and that the mental vocabulary we each deploy in speaking and thinking is not our own exclusive property?—that it is not, after all, a “private language” as famously challenged by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations?
This Cartesian slant, we need to stress, does not exhaust the folk-conception of the mental. Indeed, there is reason to doubt that folk-philosophical thought about the mental permits of an overall, coherent systematic account. For, as we shall later have occasion to emphasize, the folk also appear to hold that we normally can tell what others feel, want, intend, and think, very often even without consulting them. Such mental attributes are, we think, very often manifest in their behavior. When we take our children and other family members, or even people we casually come across and, indeed, nonhuman animals, to be agitated, scared, upset, puzzled, and so on, we do not ordinarily suppose that we are hazarding an inferential hypothesis about internal causes, designed to explain their outward behavior or predict what they will do next. Very often we take it that we can just see someone’s fear in their eyes, hear their anger or nervousness in their voice, feel their agitation in their tense body, and so on. If there is a “common-sense” conception of our relation to other minds, it is at least not Cartesian through and through.
We will not here venture to add to the vast literature on the legacy of the Cartesian conception, nor try to add to the debates about Private Language.5 With the exception of the following comments, we will assume—with the majority of those currently seeking an account of the asymmetries between self-knowledge and knowledge of others—that such an account had better avoid the metaphysical extravagance of Cartesian dualism. We think, indeed, there is a reason for avoiding this extravagance that goes beyond a general preference for the relative parsimony of a broadly materialist ontology (as well as more specific concerns about the dubiety of positing immaterial states of individuals that have the potential to interact causally with states of their material bodies). Rather, one further, in our view compelling reason for resisting the Cartesian view lies in the problematic character of its explanatory methodology.
In effect, the Cartesian view offers a metaphysical postulate to solve what is in essence an epistemological puzzle, one that concerns observed contrasts between our apparently privileged knowledge of our current mental states, on the one hand, and our knowledge of all other matters of fact (including others’ mental states, and our own bodily states) on the other. Given the essentially epistemological character of this puzzle, it seems entirely unclear how postulating a realm of immaterial states of our minds can, by itself, help explain in any way why it is that, as subjects of such states, we are guaranteed to have direct and absolutely secure access to them. This will continue to remain unclear, unless we accept—as the Cartesian in fact appears to suppose—that immaterial states of mind, by their very nature, offer precisely such a guarantee. But to rely on this supposition is hardly to provide an explanation of the epistemic privilege we apparently enjoy. Instead, it is simply to build the epistemic privilege, ad hoc, into the very metaphysical characterization of the postulated states.
We indeed need to do better. And this means seeking an explanation of the Trifecta that avoids relying on otherwise unmotivated characterizations of the nature of the states we self-ascribe in our avowals, from which the Trifecta supposedly follow.6
§1.3 Language First or Thought First?
So, the cardinal philosophical problem of self-knowledge, as it will be interpreted in this book, is to do better than the Cartesian response: it is to achieve a satisfactory perspective on what is correct about the idea of privileged access—on what is special about a subject’s self-conception—which can head off the aporetic elements of the Cartesian response, while at the same time finding a place for (perhaps refined versions of) the plausible-seeming asymmetries that, albeit dubiously, motivate it.
What will count as the achievement of such a perspective? Maybe we cannot say much more at this stage than that “we will know it when we see it,” but we do well to note straight away that the Trifecta of Immediacy, Authority, and Salience allow of two radically different directions of interpretation. On one hand—as so far we have implicitly been doing—the three ingredients can be viewed as features of the cognitive relationship in which a subject stands to their own mental attributes. On the other, however, quite differently, they can be viewed as features of the practice of the discourse in which we speak of our own and others’ mental attributes. The term “avowal,” employed with the sense, roughly, of: authoritative, non-inferential psychological self-ascription, is used as if already familiar in Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, and was evidently a term of art in debates in the philosophy of mind for some time before that work. But ever since the publication of Ryle’s book, one important tendency of analytical philosophical discussion of psychological self-knowledge has been to focus on its linguistic expression and on the Trifecta as reflected in characteristics of the competent use of avowals and the competent ascription of mental states to others. How do the Trifecta present themselves when viewed in this Language-First way? As a first approximation:
Immediacy
will have to do, e.g., with the inappropriateness of requesting grounds for a subject’s avowals.
Authority
will have to do, e.g., with the propriety of deference to what subjects have to avow.
Salience
will be manifested, e.g., in the inappropriateness of professions of ignorance of one’s own avowable states.
And these points—no doubt needing refinement to accommodate details of context and variations in the kinds of mental attribute concerned—will be regarded, when viewed from a Language-First perspective, not as reflections of differences in the character of self- and other-knowledge but as about the “language-game,” that is, as grounded in our practices of ordinary psychological self- and other-ascription.
So, very early in our investigation, we confront a major fork. What comes first here: the linguistic practice, or the thoughts of the thinkers manifested in that practice? The problem of self-knowledge will look very different depending on how we choose. On the first option, we may be inclined to begin by explaining the distinctive marks of avowals without invoking the idea that they derive from first-personal cognitive advantage. Our problem will be viewed as that of accounting for the distinctive use of avowals—their “grammar” in the terminology of the later Wittgenstein—and its contrasts with the grammar of the competent ascription of mental states to others. A range of candidate explanations will then enter the fray, for instance exactly those falling under the broad rubric of the Expressivist approach under debate in this volume, which would otherwise be excluded.7 On the latter option, by contrast, the relevant features of avowals will, from the outset, be seen as reflections of aspects of the epistemology of the self-directed thoughts they express. And it will seem overwhelmingly natural to suppose just what the folk notion, from which the Cartesian view springs, does suppose: that selves characteristically know of the states that give rise to avowal in a way that involves no inference from independent reasons, and which is characteristically very secure; and that the states of the relevant kind are typically salient to their subjects. The problem will then be to account for these apparent epistemic advantages in a way that guards against a slide into Cartesian privacy and its associated nemeses.
***
So much by way of introduction. The program for the discussion in this volume—not all of which is “debate,” for there is much on which we are agreed—is as follows.
Chapter Two will attempt to persuade the reader that what has been sketched is, in the context of some recent skepticism about its genuineness, a well-conceived philosophical problem. We will first consider our problem in the light of the later Wittgenstein’s deflationary attitude to philosophical problems in general before moving to review the arguments of four more recent proponents of skepticism about Privileged Access.
Chapter Three will review what we consider to be the shortcomings of a wide range of approaches which conceive of Privileged Access as a product of one or another putative kind of advantageous epistemic basis that selves have, qua selves, for their self-ascriptions of mental characteristics.
In contrast to the “epistemic access” proposals reviewed in Chapter Three, Chapter Four will review a range of attempts to shed light on Privileged Access by arguing for constitutive connections between a subject’s mental states and what they are sincerely willing to avow or between our capacity for self-knowledge and other distinctive capacities we have as rational or moral agents. These too, we will argue, fail to meet certain desirable constraints. The chapter concludes with a compilation of desiderata that we propose a more satisfying account should meet.
Chapter Five will articulate a range of initial criticisms of traditional (or “Simple”) forms of expressivism about avowals and one development of them—here termed Radical Expressivism—which differs significantly from the Neo-Expressivism that Bar-On will expound and defend in later chapters. These first five chapters conclude that part of our discussion in which we are broadly in agreement.
Thereafter, in Part Two of our exchange, we embark on our debate. In Chapter Six, Bar-On will provide an exposition of the Neo-Expressivism originally developed in her (2004a), highlighting important ways in which it departs from both Simple and Radical Expressivism, as well as from other views criticized in previous chapters. Then, partly in response to objections to Neo-Expressivism raised by critics, Chapter Seven will offer Bar-On’s current take on the contribution Neo-Expressivism can make to our understanding of the epistemology of basic self-knowledge.
In Chapter Eight Wright will develop a range of criticisms which, if sustained, show that Neo-expressivism too is unsatisfactory and presents no significant gain over its Simple and Radical ancestors. Bar-On will respond to these criticisms in Chapter Nine, arguing that, on the contrary, Neo-Expressivism does represent a considerable improvement over these earlier versions of the view.
Wright will use Chapter Ten to outline a research prospectus that aspires to do better than, according to his arguments, Neo-Expressivism can. This prospectus works under the hypothesis that privileged self-knowledge admits of no uniform account but is rather to be explained in a variety of ways, depending on the kind of mental state concerned. In the final Chapter Eleven, Bar-On will raise several difficulties for Wright’s prospectus and question the cogency of the pluralist approach he advocates.
Notes
1
Immediacy
and
Authority
approximately correspond to what Alex Byrne has termed, respectively,
peculiar
access and
privileged
access (2005: pp. 80–81; 2018: §1.3). Salience—sometimes dubbed “transparency” (Bilgrami 2006), “self-intimation” (Shoemaker 2009) or “luminosity” (Williamson 2000)—seems not to figure in Byrne’s landscape of the issues. We have struggled with the choice of a term here. “Transparency,” “self-intimation,” and “luminosity” are all naturally understood as connoting something much more automatic than we want to imply. “Salience” itself has unwanted resonances of the visual. However, we are going to stick with “salience.” The reader needs only to fix on the following intuitive idea: that those kinds of mental states, S, which allow in general of authoritative, non-inferential self-ascription are also such that a suitable conceptually endowed subject in S will at least be in position to know that they are in S.
2
That self-knowledge of the relevant kinds of mental state can and characteristically does exhibit each of these three features is disputed by a number of writers on the topic. The philosophical problem of self-knowledge will, naturally, reconfigure itself—perhaps disappear altogether—depending on whether, or the extent to which, they are right. We will attempt to address, and to rebut, the principal arguments of four leading exponents of such skepticism in Chapter Two.
3
Readers will also encounter uses of “distinctive security” ascribed both to avowals and to self-knowledge. We have struggled with the selection of an upfront, comprehensive, canonical terminology to hit off the explananda at issue, partly because of the switch of target involved in moving from the thought-first to language-first points of view (see §1.3) and partly because substantial philosophy is needed to say exactly what the explananda are on either viewpoint. There are some important distinctions which will emerge only in the course of subsequent discussion, so we ask for readers’ indulgence at this point. Readers should also be aware that Bar-On has misgivings about whether Salience deserves its place. The matter will be discussed further in later chapters.
4
Again, since they have some currency, we keep the label “Cartesian” and cognates for convenience, but intend no attribution to the actual historical Descartes.
5
For some of our contributions to this area, see Wright (1984), (1986), (2001c); Bar-On (1992), (2004a: chapters two and ten), (2009), (2016).
6
There is a point of contact here with Christopher Peacocke’s idea of the “Integration Challenge” that arises in a number of areas of philosophy (Peacocke 1999). Peacocke’s point is that proffered accounts of the metaphysical character of a certain subject matter—for example, platonism about mathematical entities, physicalism about mental states, or Lewisian modal realism about the truth-makers for counterfactual conditionals—should harmonize with an
independently
motivated account of how our judgments about the relevant subject matter can be knowable—and knowable, ideally, by the methods we actually regard as conferring knowledge of the subject matter in question, with whatever degree of certainty we consider that those methods confer. You duck the Integration Challenge if you simply
postulate
epistemic capacities to reconcile the knowability of a certain subject matter with preconceived ideas about its metaphysical character. And you also duck it if, conversely, you simply
postulate
a metaphysical character to reconcile the knowability of a certain subject matter with preconceived ideas about how knowledge about it may be achieved. Cartesian dualism ducks the Integration Challenge.
7
For different versions of this approach, see, e.g., Jacobsen (1996), Falvey (2000), and Finkelstein (2003). See also Bar-On (2004a). (However, in Chapter Six, Bar-On explains why it is a misunderstanding to regard her view as “language-first.”)
2 Skepticism about the Problem
Crispin Wright
A number of authors have argued recently that the problem of self-knowledge is founded on misapprehension: that First-Person Privilege is a creature of exaggeration, indeed even quite misconceived, at least when it comes to a significant range of avowals. In later sections of this chapter I will argue that the considerations marshaled by four recent exemplars of this tendency, albeit very different, all come well short of showing anything of the kind. However, it will reward us to pay some attention to the detail of their arguments, partly for reassurance that our present debate does have a genuine subject matter, and partly because the result in some cases will be increased clarity about what exactly are the “data” that a satisfactory account should be charged to explain. I have selected Paul Snowdon, Eric Schwitzgebel, Peter Carruthers, and Timothy Williamson as representatives of this Skepticism.1
First however there is a need to address a much more radical form of skepticism—a doubt that concerns not the authenticity of First-Person Privilege but the legitimacy of the very demand itself for (philosophical) explanation of its manifestations.
Contents
§2.1 Rejecting the Entire Explanatory Project: Wittgenstein and the “Default View”
§2.2 Disputing the “data”
§2.2.1 Snowdon
§2.2.2 Schwitzgebel
§2.2.3 Carruthers
§2.2.4 Williamson
***
§2.1 Rejecting the Entire Explanatory Project: Wittgenstein and the “Default View”
The doubt arises in tandem with the explicit conception of philosophical methodology and philosophical problems that is presented in the Philosophical Investigations. No major philosopher has been more self-conscious about the nature of philosophy, and proper philosophical method, than Wittgenstein. This self-consciousness was a product of his conviction that, up to his time, the subject had been, for a great part, practiced badly, that what had passed for “philosophical” thought was very often literally nonsensical—indeed, that philosophy’s “problems” tended to be philosophers’ fault, a self-inflicted wound.
This strand in Wittgenstein’s thinking abrades head-on with the more traditional conception of philosophy as the “Queen of the Sciences”: a region of enquiry in which, as in physics, or mathematics, we aim to discover objective truths, but truths of an especially profound and fundamental kind. Philosophy, as so traditionally viewed, pursues the real essence of things—the nature of truth, what moral goodness consists in, the nature of time, and so on—even, traditionally, the nature and existence of God. The idea that pure reflective thought could be a self-sufficient tool of enquiry in this kind of way originated millennia before the development of modern empirical science, and doubtless initially drew strength from thinkers’ innocence of any contrast between the empirical and the a priori. But even after that distinction had been accepted, philosophers clung on to the idea that there is a special province of especially deep truths—the province of Metaphysics, classically conceived—whose secrets are in principle accessible to the traditional methods of analysis, reflection, and inference.
A certain conception of the status of philosophical problems goes along with this way of thinking. Traditional philosophers tend to think of themselves not as creating philosophical problems—in the sense in which a troublemaker creates problems—but rather as their discoverers. The problems are thought of as objectively “out there,” available to be appreciated by any explorer of sufficient sophistication and reflective capacity. In this respect, they are thought of as analogous to mathematical problems (as those are usually conceived). Arithmetical concepts, for instance, are conceived as available in principle to any rational thinker, to whom it will then be open to wonder about the number and distribution of the primes, about how many perfect numbers there are, about the truth of what we call Goldbach’s Conjecture (that every even number is the sum of two primes), and even whether all arithmetical truths admit of some form of proof, etc. In the same way, according to the traditional conception, there are, for any sufficiently conceptually sophisticated, reflective thinker, objective problems about the possibility of knowledge of a material world, or of other minds, the nature of causation, the relationship between thought and language, and about our puzzling ability to know extensively and to know best about our own mental states.
It goes with this general conception that philosophical discovery is potentially legitimately revisionary of ordinary ways of thinking and of ordinary practices. If we misconceive the nature of time, for instance, it cannot be ruled out that the misconception may have seeped into quite specialized forms of scientific and mathematical thought; so changes may be enjoined in those disciplines when the misconception is put right. Likewise, if we are ignorant about the real nature of knowledge, it may be that when we understand it better, we will recognize that much of our customary application of the notion is misguided—for instance, that we ought not to see empirical science as, even in the best case, producing genuine knowledge.
On the traditional conception of philosophy, then, against which Wittgenstein was reacting, surprising—disconcerting or exciting—intellectual discoveries are on the cards. True, there hadn’t, by the late 1940s, been many salient such discoveries that philosophers had actually made—then, as now, they tended to be much better at confounding the argumentative constructs of their colleagues than at constructions that actually break new ground. But this lack of progress was not generally perceived as a challenge to the authenticity of the “Queen of the Sciences.” You might think it would have to bring into question either the adequacy of philosophy’s methods to its target subject matter—the amenability of that subject matter to pure reason and analysis—or even the very existence of the subject matter: the putative substructure of deep conceptual or essential truths which were supposed to be philosophy’s proper concern. But philosophers have showed resource in thinking up excuses for their lack of progress that are consistent with the traditional picture. I associate with Peter Strawson, for instance, the not implausible thought that philosophy’s slow progress is largely attributable to the fact that successive generations of philosophers cannot in the nature of the case inherit a legacy of knowledge from their predecessors in the way that is possible in science or mathematics. We are, rather, like adolescents—each generation of philosophers has to make its own mistakes, if it is to understand why they are mistakes. This puts limits on the extent to which their wisdom, when they get it, can surpass that of earlier thinkers.
Wittgenstein’s official conception of philosophy, and philosophical method, as it emerges in the Investigations, reads as strikingly antithetical to—indeed contemptuous of—all this. Set against the idea that philosophy is to uncover the (hidden) essences of certain difficult concepts—time, freedom, meaning, causation, truth, goodness, necessity, and so on—we find instead the notion that there are no hidden essences: that when a concept covers a seemingly diverse range of cases, that may just be the whole fact of the matter—there need be no underlying principle of unification. (This of course is the point of the notion of “family resemblances.”) Wittgenstein writes:
[The traditional questions] see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into a thing, and which an analysis digs out.
“The essence is hidden from us”: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: “What is language?,” “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once and for all; and independently of any future experience.(Investigations §92)
For Wittgenstein, the analytical pursuit of hidden essences is a chimera-hunt. Everything we need to know is already on the surface. What the philosopher has to do is not penetrate behind the use of language, but rather arrange the manifest facts of its use in the right kind of way, for it is in this way, he thinks, that our perplexities will be resolved:
Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.(§126)
…we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognise those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.(§109)
The conception of a philosophical problem that emerges here, for all its post-Wittgensteinian familiarity, should still seem striking. Gone is the traditional idea of the objective conceptual tangle or paradox, appreciable in principle by any rational thinker. It is replaced with the notion, to the contrary, that philosophical problems are muddles: confusions into which we fall, seduced by superficial aspects of our language, and a natural propensity to misconstrue the way it works:
The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.(§119)
A philosophical problem has the form “I don’t know my way about.”(§123)
The task of the philosopher, then, is not to uncover essential truths or to explore metaphysical reality but rather to defuse the temptation to certain sorts of muddle:
What we “are tempted to say” in such a case is, of course, not philosophy; but is its raw material. Thus, for example, what a mathematician is inclined to say about the objectivity and reality of mathematical facts, is not a philosophy of mathematics, but something for philosophical treatment.
The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.(§255)
And of course, famously:
What is your aim in philosophy?—to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.(§309)
…somewhere it had no need to go, and ought not to have gone, in the first place.
Given this conception of the nature of philosophical problems, and of the way in which they are to be resolved, the idea that philosophy might somehow sustain or undermine claims that are in some way foundational for our linguistic practice in a given area, and so prove potentially revisionary of it, is of course quite pre-empted. You get into philosophical trouble by failing to understand the way a particular language game works. Unpicking the knots of confusion, then, cannot possibly issue in a ground for criticism of that language game:
Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. It also leaves mathematics as it is, and no mathematical discovery can advance it. A “leading problem of mathematical logic” is for us a problem of mathematics like any other.(§124)
So: a quite new, deflationary conception of philosophy—of its agenda, and of its proper methods—is being proposed. The business of philosophy is not the pursuit of—a special rarefied kind of—truth, nor the explanation of puzzling phenomena, but the dissolution of confusion. Philosophical problems are not standing intellectual challenges, but the effects of language’s “bewitching our intelligence.” They are to be resolved not by penetrating to conceptual essences, but by a descriptive examination of the surface: reflection on the way language actually functions. And philosophy, properly conducted, will give us no theories or explanations—on the contrary, the inclination to theorize, and especially to generalize, across diverse but superficially similar language games and forms of expressions is a prime source of philosophical confusion.
So, what of our “problem” of self-knowledge? Well, although this later Wittgensteinian conception of philosophical problems and philosophical method is not directly applied in the Investigations to self-knowledge, it is straightforward to see how it may be made to engage. The problem will be viewed as set by our urge to understand our customary treatment of avowals: their apparently non-inferential character, their strong authority, and the incongruity of their embedding within expressions of doubt. These are facts about the “language-game,” about the received practice of self- and other-attribution of mental states and we do indeed have a powerful urge to theorize them—to explain and, presumably, to try to legitimate them. Such an explanation would naturally be supposed to require some kind of coordinated insight into the nature of their subject matter and of thinkers’ relationship with it. And now, since, notably, our treatment of avowals sustains a superficial analogy with ordinary observational reports made under optimal conditions, ordinary thought, always prone to generalize across “language-games,” tries to see them as just that—and is thereby rapidly embroiled in all the difficulties of the Cartesian philosophy of mind. A Wittgensteinian solution to—disinfection of—the situation will be to realize that the Cartesian picture attempts a lay-philosophical explanation of something which neither needs nor admits of any explanation. Rather, we reach bedrock with the relevant aspects of the “grammar” of avowals: this “grammar” constitutes the basic rules of the ordinary, folk-psychological language game. The Trifecta are primitive.
In earlier work, I dubbed this broadly later-Wittgensteinian approach to our problem “the Default view.”2 According to the Default view, that avowals manifest the Trifecta is “a constitutive principle” of psychological discourse. On the Default view, that avowals are, e.g., not treated as subject to ordinary epistemic assessment in the way in which other-ascriptions of mental states are, is in no way a by-product of independently appreciable facts about mental reality or about the cognitive relationship of subjects to their own mental states. Rather, we are here prone to succumb to the urge
…to look for an explanation while we ought to look at what happens as a “proto-phenomenon.” That is, where we ought to have said, “This language-game is played.(§654)
A caveat. Care is needed here: we need to set aside one possible misunderstanding of this Default View. The misunderstanding is the thought that it entails a kind of conventionalism: that is, the idea that psychological ascriptions are all ultimately answerable to the subject’s own seemingly groundless dispositions of avowal only and purely because this is what the conventions governing psychological discourse happen to dictate
