The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment

Abstract

Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people’s minds. This seems incompatible with ‘privileged access’ – the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that Carruthers’s new theory cannot clearly preserve the superior reliability of our beliefs about our own attitudes.     

Privileged access,externalism, and ways of believing

By exploiting a concept called ways of believing, I offer a plausible reformulation of the doctrine of privileged access. This reformulation will provide us with a defense of compatibilism, the view that content externalism and privileged access are compatible.     

The patient's private construction of meaning and canons of science: Freud's case studies noch einmal1

Starting from Freud's classical case studies, the author highlights the tension between the psychoanalytical starting point in the subject's own meaning construction and the claims of the professional expert to objectivity, privileged knowledge and interpretative precedence. Psychoanalytic investigation of subjective phenomena came into existence parallel with Freud's magnifi cent project to furnish ‘a psychology that shall be a natural science’. The privileged knowledge of the specialist was substituted by the explicit intention to listen to the individual's own stories and private explanatory constructions. In order to investigate the territory of the unconscious, Freud had to develop various strategies for uncovering and correcting errors, and for testing clinically anchored hypotheses. However, Freud regularly failed to follow his own intentions. The thesis the author presents here is that departures from the explicit ambition to follow the subject's own meaning construction, and departures from the scientifi c attitude, easy to trace in Freud's case studies, accompany each other. These departures have had far‐reaching consequences for the present status of the psychoanalytic knowledge.     

Thinking about the body as subject

The notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments (e.g. ‘My legs are crossed’) can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM.     

Self-Reliance and Empathy: The Enemies of Poverty—and of the Poor

Starting with a brief review of why all post-industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution-affect-action model is used to show how dispositional attributes evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people's ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged.     

Transparency and reflection

ABSTRACT

Much recent work on self-knowledge has been inspired by the idea that the ‘transparency’ of questions about our own mental states to questions about the non-mental world holds the key to understanding how privileged self-knowledge is possible. I critically discuss some prominent recent accounts of such transparency, and argue for a Sartrean interpretation of the phenomenon, on which this knowledge is explained by our capacity to transform an implicit or ‘non-positional’ self-awareness into reflective, ‘positional’ self-knowledge.