The silence of self-knowledge

Abstract

Gareth Evans famously affirmed an explanatory connection between answering the question whether p and knowing whether one believes that p. This is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that judging that p constitutes an adequate basis for the belief that one believes that p. This paper formulates and defends an alternative, more modest interpretation, which develops from the suggestion that one can know that one believes that p in judging that p.

Keywords:

• self-knowledge
• rationality
• belief
• transparency
• cognitive achievement

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper were presented at workshops or seminars in Madrid, Salzburg, London and Buenos Aires. I am grateful to participants for their comments. Special thanks to two anonymous referees for helpful criticism, and to Bill Brewer, Stephen Butterfill, Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Diego Lawler, Hemdat Lerman, Guy Longworth and Matt Soteriou for many discussions about self-knowledge.

Notes

For further examples of the ambitious reading of ET, see Peacocke (1998), Moran (2001) (support for this interpretation will be offered in Section 3), Boyle (2009). For illuminating discussion of Peacocke's version, see Martin (1998).

There are two ways to think about the relation between the two kinds of awareness. It might be said that on the current account, knowledge of what one believes is based on a valid deductive argument (one infers that one believes that p from the premise that one is expressing one's belief that p). Alternatively, we might think of one's awareness of expressing one's belief that p as amounting to a way of being aware of believing that p (which, it might be suggested, is naturally expressed by the idiomatic use of ‘I think that p’, with the implication that one believes that p).

Williams' suggestion, more precisely, is that expressions of belief, ‘in the most basic case’, are ‘involuntary as to what’, though not ‘involuntary as to whether’ (2002, 75). It is not clear from Williams's discussion whether he takes ‘involuntary’ to imply ‘not intentional’. An alternative, and more attractive, reading, it seems to me, would be to understand ‘involuntary' along the lines of ‘spontaneous’, where ‘spontanteous’ contrasts with ‘pre-meditated’ but not with ‘intentional’.

This is one reason it would be a non-sequitur to move from the idea that one may gain knowledge of one's attitudes by expressing them to an assimilation of the first- to the third-person perspective. The non-sequitur is at least encouraged in the following well-known passage of Dennett's:

We often do discover what we think (and hence what we mean) by reflecting on what we find ourselves saying – and not correcting. So we are, at least on these occasions, in the same boat as our external critics and interpreters, encountering a bit of text and putting the best reading on it that we can find. (1991, 245).

Williams himself does not elaborate on the nature of the ‘confrontation’: his discussion resembles Evans's in that it does not take a stand on whether self-knowledge is to be rendered intelligible in terms of an epistemic basis.

For example, Jane Heal maintains that even when ‘a sincere avowal’ is rejected on the basis of convincing contrary evidence, it ‘still retains a kind of shadowy credence. We are inclined to say that the person “sort of” believes or intends as she insists she does’ (2003, 273).

One such condition might be said to be the subject's state of mind. Compare Peter Hobson's account of deficits in insight in patients with borderline personality disorder: such patients show abnormal ‘forms of relating [to other people] that amount to different states of mind’ (2002, 169). Their abnormal states of mind have an ‘impact on the ability to think’ (174), in particular, to think about certain emotionally charged issues. A ‘restriction in the capacity to think’ in turn gives rise to ‘a corresponding loss of insight into the sources of one's behaviour’ (175). For suggestive discussion of the role of social interaction – specifically, of ways in which one's conception of one's own attitudes may depend on one's audience – see Williams (2002, chap. 8).

In Authority and Estrangement, the puzzle is often expressed by asking how it ‘makes sense’ for me to answer a question as to what I believe by reflecting on the object of my belief (2001, e.g. 66–7). Following Moran, Boyle (2009) refers to Evans's procedure as ‘seemingly paradoxical’ (2009, 137).

The quote from Arnold echoed in this passage is given in Moran (2005):

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

Of what we say we feel — below the stream,

As light, of what we think we feel — there flows

With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

The central stream of what we feel indeed.

One might expect to find such support in the first chapter of Authority and Estrangement, where Moran defends a view of self-knowledge as representing a ‘cognitive achievement’, in opposition to ‘deflationary’ approaches to self-knowledge. But note that this discussion is predicated on the assumption I have been questioning in the previous section, that the only alternative to an explanation of self-knowledge in terms of some epistemic basis for second-order beliefs consists in the deflationary repudiation of the notion that self-knowledge involves a ‘cognitive achievement’.

For current purposes, it does not matter whether the disjunctive formulation should ultimately be discarded in favour of a simple account. For the view that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion, see Williamson (2000, 2009). For the suggestion that the norm is provided by justified belief, see Kvanvig (2009).

‘Indeed, there is no point in calling it ‘deliberation’ any more, if [the deliberator] takes it to be an open question whether this activity will determine what he actually does or believes. To engage in deliberation in the first place is to hand over the question of one's belief or intentional action to the authority of reason.’ (2001, 127)

In the light of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that Moran's own position here is not easy to pin down. Shoemaker interprets him as denying that a Moorean self-ascription must be irrational. Someone undergoing psychoanalysis might, according to Shoemaker's Moran, actually come to know that he has a certain belief merely on the basis of evidence, despite regarding the belief as false and irrational. Shoemaker objects to this that the ‘Moore-paradoxical sentence “I believe that my brother betrayed me, but he didn't” remains paradoxical when it is uttered by Moran's analysand’ (2003, 393). As Shoemaker acknowledges, though, some of Moran's remarks are hard to square with this reading.

I borrow the phrase from Millar (2004).

That there is some such sense is arguably consistent not just with the falsity but even with the irrationality of A's belief that p: see Bratman (1987) for an illuminating discussion of the different points of view from which we assess the rationality of actions.

For the distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ advice, see Kolodny (2005).

As Stroud reminds us,

My believing that it has always rained [in Berkeley in January] does not amount to much of a reason for expecting rain in Berkeley in January. In trying to determine what to believe, or what there is most reason to believe, my focus is on the world, or on what is so, not on my attitudes toward what is so. (1999, 34)

I think we can observe a similar oscillation in Byrne's discussion. The suggestion that I ‘infer’ that I believe that p from the premise that p has intuitive appeal insofar as it captures the sense I have that whether I believe that p turns on whether p. But in the light of Byrne's explanation of what makes this type of ‘inference’ knowledge-conducive it emerges that the truth of my premise is totally irrelevant to the truth-conduciveness of the ‘inference’. That explanation suggests the real basis of my self-knowledge is not the fact that p but my believing that p. For what explains the truth-conduciveness of the ‘inference’ is that ‘inference from a premise entails belief in the premise’.

My suggestion, in other words, is that it is no accident that extant ambitious construals of ET encourage the thought that the epistemic basis for self-knowledge is open to reflection. To illustrate, if, as Byrne thinks, I infer that I believe that p from the single premise that p, it is natural to expect that I can be aware that this is what I am doing. Moran's account, recall, is explicitly framed as a solution to the puzzle of how it can ‘make sense for me’ to follow Evans's procedure, in the face of the disparate subject matters of the two questions involved (see above, n. 8). This is a question about an intentional activity of ordinary reflective subjects. If the puzzle has a solution and the activity does after all make sense, presumably this means it makes sense to those engaging in it. Moran's proposed solution, in terms of the content of the conception we have of ourselves as deliberators, suggests he accepts this constraint.