Self-Knowledge and Rationality

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent's intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view.     

Self-Knowledge and Rationality

The topic of this article is the dependency or, maybe, the interdependency of rationality and self-knowledge. Here two questions may be distinguished, viz. (1) whether being rational is a necessary condition for a creature to have self-knowledge, and (2) whether having self-knowledge is a necessary condition for a creature to be rational. After a brief explication of what I mean by self-knowledge, I deal with the first question. There I defend the Davidsonian position, according to which rationality is, indeed, a necessary condition for self-knowledge. In addition, I distinguish two aspects of rationality which I call basic and local rationality. After that I concentrate on the second question for the remaining larger part of this article. Here I proceed in two stages: first I examine whether self-knowledge is necessary for basic rationality, and then whether it is necessary for local rationality.

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Introspection and Authoritative Self-Knowledge

In this paper I outline and defend an introspectionist account of authoritative self-knowledge for a certain class of cases, ones in which a subject is both thinking and thinking about a current, conscious thought. My account is distinctive in a number of ways, one of which is that it is compatible with the truth of externalism—the view that the contents of subjects’ intentional states are individuation-dependent on factors external to their minds. It is thus decidedly anti-Cartesian, despite being introspectionist. My argument proceeds in three stages. A virtue of the position I develop is that the epistemic features on which it is based also apply to sensations and to non-episodic intentional states, to the extent that one has authoritative knowledge of them. However, despite the appeal to analogies with observable properties of objects of perception, the account is not a ‘perceptual’ model of such knowledge in the sense that those such as Shoemaker, Burge and others have in mind. Because the features on which the analogy is based are abstract and general, they are not tied to cases of observation alone. Those who appeal to such phenomena as ‘intellectual experience’ (Burge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96, 91–116, 1996) or ‘intellectual intuition’ (Bealer, Philosophical perspectives, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 29–55, 1999) in their accounts of authoritative self-knowledge may well appeal to such features. This, amongst other factors, distinguishes the position from other introspectionist ones in a way that makes it immune to standard objections to perceptual models of self-knowledge.

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The Self-Knowledge Gambit

If we hold that perceiving is sufficient for knowing, we can raise a powerful objection to dreaming skepticism: Skeptics assume the implausible KK-principle, because they hold that if we don’t know whether we are dreaming or perceiving p, we don’t know whether p. The rejection of the KK-principle thus suggests an anti-skeptical strategy: We can sacrifice some of our self-knowledge—our second-order knowledge—and thereby save our knowledge of the external world. I call this strategy the Self-Knowledge Gambit. I argue that the Self-Knowledge Gambit is not satisfactory, because the dreaming skeptic can avail herself of a normative counterpart to the KK-principle: When we lack second-order knowledge, we should suspend our first-order beliefs and thereby give up any first-order knowledge we might have had. The skeptical challenge is essentially a normative challenge, and one can raise it even if one rejects the KK-Principle.     

Infallibilism about Self-Knowledge

Descartes held the view that a subject has infallible beliefs about the contents of her thoughts. Here, I first examine a popular contermporary defense of this claim, given by Burge, and find it lacking. I then offer my own defense appealing to a minimal thesis about the compositionality of thoughts. The argument has the virtue of refraining from claims about whether thoughts are “in the head;” thus, it is congenial to both internalists and externalists. The considerations here also illuminate how a subject may have epistemicially priviledged and a priori beliefs about her own thoughts.     

Two Kinds of Self-Knowledge

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance.     

Self-Knowledge and the Bounds of Authenticity

This paper criticizes the widespread view whereby a second-order judgment of the form ‘I believe that p’ qualifies as self-knowledge only if the embedded content, p, is of the same type as the content of the intentional state reflected upon and the self-ascribed attitude, belief, is of the same type as the attitude the subject takes towards p. Rather than requiring identity of contents across levels of cognition self-knowledge requires only that the embedded content of the second-order thought be an entailment of the content of the intentional state reflected upon. And rather than demanding identity of attitudes across levels of cognition self-knowledge demands only that the attitude of the intentional state reflected upon and the attitude the subject self-attributes share certain features such as direction of fit and polarity.

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The Psychology and Epistemology of Self-Knowledge

In this paper I argue, first, that the most influential (and perhaps only acceptable) account of the epistemology of self-knowledge, developed and defended at great length in Wright (1989b) and (1989c) (among other places), leaves unanswered a question about the psychology of self-knowledge; second, that without an answer to this question about the psychology of self-knowledge, the epistemic account cannot be considered acceptable; and third, that neither Wright's own answer, nor an interpretation-based answer (based on a proposal from Jacobsen (1997)), will suffice as an acceptable answer to the psychological question. My general ambition is thus to establish that more work is needed if we are to have a full account of self-knowledge in both its epistemological and psychological aspects. I conclude by suggesting how my thesis bears on those who aim to provide an empirical account of the cognition involved in self-knowledge. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Problem Of Self-Knowledge

This article develops a constitutive account of self-knowledgethat is able to avoid certain shortcomings of the standard response to the perceived prima facieincompatibility between privileged self-knowledge and externalism. It argues that ifone conceives of linguistic action as voluntary behavior in a minimal sense, one cannot conceive ofbelief content to be externalistically constituted without simultaneously assuming that the agent hasknowledge of his beliefs. Accepting such a constitutive account of self-knowledge does not, however,preclude the conceptual possibility of being mistaken about ones mental states. Rather, self-knowledgehas to be seen as only a general constraint or as the default assumption of interpreting somebodyas a rational and intentional agent. This is compatible with the diagnosis of a localized lack of self-transparency.     

The Basis of Self-Knowledge

I discuss the claim what makes self-knowledge epistemologically distinctive is the fact that it is baseless or groundless. I draw a distinction between evidential and explanatory baselessness and argue that self-knowledge is only baseless in the first of these senses. Since evidential baselessness is a relatively widespread phenomenon the evidential baselessness of self-knowledge does not make it epistemologically distinctive and does not call for any special explanation. I do not deny that self-knowledge is epistemologically distinctive. My claim is only that talk of its evidential baselessness is insufficient to account for its epistemological distinctiveness.

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