Self-knowledge and scepticism

Donald Davidson has argued that most of our beliefs must be true and that global scepticism is therefore false. Davidson's arguments to this conclusion often seem to depend on externalist considerations. Davidson's position has been criticised, however, on the grounds that he does not defeat the sceptic, but rather already assumes the falsity of scepticism through his appeal to externalism. Indeed, it has been claimed that far from defeating the sceptic Davidson introduces an even more extreme version of scepticism according to which we cannot even know the contents of our own minds. This paper argues that these criticisms are mistaken and that Davidson does indeed have grounds to argue that scepticism is false. The externalism that figures in Davidson's antisceptical arguments is shown to be merely an element in Davidson's overall holism according to which the very possibility of having beliefs that could be true or false depends on most of those beliefs being true and their contents known.     

Self-knowledge and the KK principle

I argue that a version of the so-called KK principle is true for principled epistemic reasons; and that this does not entail access internalism, as is commonly supposed, but is consistent with a broad spectrum of epistemological views. The version of the principle I defend states that, given certain normal conditions, knowing p entails being in a position to know that you know p. My argument for the principle proceeds from reflection on what it would take to know that you know something, rather than from reflection on the conditions for knowledge generally. Knowing that you know p, it emerges, is importantly similar to cases of psychological self-knowledge like knowing that you believe p: it does not require any grounds other than your grounds for believing p itself. In so arguing, I do not rely on any general account of knowledge, but only on certain plausible and widely accepted epistemological assumptions.     

Self-knowledge defenses to self-threats

We examined whether people use both shifts in the spontaneous self-concept (self-knowledge content) and in self-concept clarity (self-knowledge structure) to defend against salient self-threats, and identified relevant moderators of this process. In Study 1, women emphasized relational self-aspects in response to mortality salience, compared to men. In Study 2, high self-esteem individuals showed more polarized self-knowledge after mortality salience, while in Study 3 they became faster in their self-categorizations when faced with uncertainty, and more consistent and faster in their self-categorizations when faced with isolation, relative to those with low self-esteem. In the discussion, we focus on how these outcomes can be interpreted as meaning maintenance, clarify the role of self-esteem, and offer directions for future research.     

Self-knowledge: An expanded view

This paper argues for a more extensive study of self-knowledge. From the cognitive perspective, self-knowedge is a critical component of personality. Until quite recently, however, the study of self-knowledge has been narrowly conceived, focusing primarily on how individuals describe their roles and characteristic behaviors. Yet individuals also have knowledge about their preferences and values, their goals and motives, and their rules and strategies for regulating behavior. These dynamic aspects of self-knowledge are significant because they can be importantly revealing of future behavior. The content and organization of self-knowledge is important first because it indicates which domains of behavior are regarded as the most self-relevant. It is in these domains that the strongest links between personality and behavior will be observed. Second, self-knowledge cognitively represents desired and undesired states for the self, as well as specific ideas about how to realize or avoid these states. It thus indicates the likely course of behavior in self-relevant domains. A number of recent research efforts can be intepreted as explorations of self-knowledge. These are briefly reviewed and integrated to provide a general outline for an expanded view of self-knowledge.     

Self-knowledge and social desirability of personality traits

Research into the self-concept has shown that self-knowledge is affected by factors such as trait desirability, trait vagueness, and self-variability. Among these, social desirability appears to play a prominent role. In a multidimensional view of the self, however, several studies indicate that in special conditions people show adequate self-knowledge in specific personality dimensions. The present study tests this with respect to extraversion and anxiety predisposition on a sample of 160 late adolescents. The main results confirm the prominent influence of social desirability, but they also provide support for the hypothesis of the specificity of self-perception. Despite a common pattern, the effects of desirability appeared, to some extent, to be less strong for anxiety than for extraversion. Several possible interpretations of this finding are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Truthmaker commitments

On the truthmaker view of ontological commitment [Heil (From an ontological point of view, 2003); Armstrong (Truth and truthmakers, 2004); Cameron (Philosophical Studies, 2008)], a theory is committed to the entities needed in the world for the theory to be made true. I argue that this view puts truthmaking to the wrong task. None of the leading accounts of truthmaking—via necessitation, supervenience, or grounding—can provide a viable measure of ontological commitment. But the grounding account does provide a needed constraint on what is fundamental. So I conclude that truthmaker commitments are not a rival to quantifier commitments, but a needed complement. The quantifier commitments are what a theory says exists, while the truthmaker commitments are what a theory says is fundamental.

Prosodic form and parsing commitments

This paper examines the question of whether there are effects of prosody on the syntactic parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs. It reports the results of five experiments employing cross-modal response tasks where the visually presented target word was either an appropriate or an inappropriate continuation in terms of the prosodic form of the preceeding auditory sentence fragment. Two experiments employing cross-modal naming only showed indications of sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness manipulations when coupled with a simultaneous appropriateness judgment task. In contrast, the experiments employing cross-modal lexical decision showed greater sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness effects. However, while the results from these studies replicated our earlier auditory parsing results and provided support for the suggestion that there are differences in visual and auditory parsing processes and for a constituent-based, minimal commitment type auditory parser, none of the studies demonstrated an effect of prosodic form on the parsing process.     

Ontological commitment and ontological commitments

Philosophical Studies - The standard account of ontological commitment is quantificational. There are many old and well-chewed-over challenges to the account, but recently Kit Fine added a new...