Self-knowledge and communication

Abstract

First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests that we need to reconsider the terms of the standard alternative between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” explanations of first-person authority. In particular, the natural view that the authority we accord to self-ascriptions reflects a distinctive way we have of knowing our own beliefs should not be conflated with the traditional epistemological thesis that such knowledge reflects a private “mode of access”.

Keywords:

• self-knowledge
• expression
• communication
• testimony
• first-person access

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences at workshops and seminars at Tübingen, Nijmegen, Madrid and Geneva for discussion of previous versions of this paper, especially to Cristina Borgoni for her excellent reply at the Madrid meeting, and to Maria Alvarez, Dorit Bar-On, Lucy O'Brien, Julien Deonna, Peter Langland-Hassan, Krysztina Órban, Katia Samoilova, Fabrice Teroni and Hong-Yu Wong for suggestions and criticism. I have also benefited immensely from detailed comments on the penultimate draft by Naomi Eilan, Fleur Jongepier, Guy Longworth and Derek Strijbos. The views expressed in it are those of the author and may not reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Johannes Roessler is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University. He has published articles on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and action, and has co-edited three interdisciplinary volumes, most recently Perception, Causation, and Objectivity (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Notes

1. There are other, less straightforward ways in which someone's telling you that q can give you a good reason to think that q. Perhaps you know that she is trying to mislead you, and also that she realizes you are aware of this (though not of her realization). So you accept that q because you think this is the truth she is trying to withhold from you by asserting that q. For discussion of the significance of this kind of case, see Anscombe (1979) and Moran (2006).

2. For example, Dorit Bar-On challenges the first commitment by arguing that “avowals” do not form “the culmination of the subject's inwardly directed truth-targeting reflection”, and do not represent “the self-ascriber's carefully formed judgement that she is in the self-ascribed state” (2004, 242). Crispin Wright is worried about what he sees as unacceptable implications of the second and third commitment: “the conception of avowals as reports of inner observation is saddled with the idea that the observations in question are ones which necessarily only the subject can carry out. And once that conception is in place, others' means of access to the state of affairs which their subject (putatively) observes is bound to seem essentially second-rate by comparison and be open to just the kinds of skeptical harassment which generates the traditional problem of other minds (…) (Wright 1998, 108).

3. Some would argue that these expectations are not set in stone. Conversations with a therapist, it is said, can provide one with adequate grounds for self-ascriptions of belief that are detached from grounds for the relevant first-order belief, and in that context, the usual appropriateness of responding to a self-ascription with a first-order question or challenge may be suspended. An alternative way to think about such cases would be to suggest that they involve a conflict between two kinds of expectations, that self-ascriptions should express one's first-order beliefs, and that they should be truthful.

4. It might be said that while in asserting that p one represents oneself as knowing that p, in asserting “I believe that p” one does not: the question "How do you know that p?" is in principle always appropriate in response to the former but not in response to the latter statement. But there are other possible interpretations. Sometimes the phrase “I believe that p” may be intended not as a self-ascription of the belief that p but merely of the belief that there is significant evidence that p. Again, the phrase may sometimes be used to enter a kind of pre-emptive plea for blamelessness (in case it turns out that one did not know that p).

5. According to Dorit Bar-On “avowals proper” “are not acts that subjects deliberately undertake to perform with a specific audience-directed goal in mind, such as convincing, informing, pleasing, etc. Like many non-verbal expressive acts, they may not even have any communicative point” (2004, 242). This is in keeping with the “neo-expressivist” view that A's reason for thinking that S believes that p is provided by S expressing her belief that p (rather than by S telling or informing A that she believes that p). Admittedly, there are passages in which she seems to depart from that strict view. For example, at the very beginning of the book, she characterizes avowals as “everyday utterances in which speakers tell us certain things about themselves” (2004, 1). And much later in the book, she considers a “dual expression thesis”, on which avowals can express both the self-ascribed state and the judgement that one is in that state (2004, 307). Still, as far as I can see, these complications do not affect the account she would give of A's reason for thinking S believes that p.

6. Versions of this “double aspect” interpretation of self-ascriptions of belief can be found in Hampshire (1965, 79), O'Shaughnessy (2000, 187) (“these somehow pre-eminent self-conscious manifestations of a belief are at once evidence both of the belief and of ‘insightful’ knowledge of its existence”) and Bar-On (2004, 307ff).

7. Bar-On uses this phrase in formulating what she regards as a possible, and popular, reading of the claim that avowals are assertions. On this reading, “assertion” is “understood, just like ‘report’, as involving the forming of a judgement on some epistemic basis, as well as seeking to convey it (even if only to oneself).” (2011, 195, n. 8) She argues that thus read, the claim should be rejected. I agree that the claim should be rejected, but it seems to me that what is wrong with it is simply that it reflects a plainly mistaken view of assertion. By the lights of that view, not even your telling me your name would count as an assertion (or a report).

8. It might be said that questions such as “How do you know you believe that p?” or “What makes you think you believe that p?” are regarded as conversationally inappropriate merely because it is common knowledge what the answer is. (Williamson (2000, 252–253) considers this in discussing the assertion “I want to go home”.) The total lack of agreement in the literature on even the broadest outlines of the correct answer seems to me to count against that interpretation.

A more specific concern about Bar-On's characterization of the way self-ascriptions are “protected” is this. As Hampshire (1979) points out, there is a “general purpose” type of challenge that would sometimes be regarded as appropriate even in response to self-ascriptions of mental states, viz. “Are you sure?” Unlike “How do you know?” and “Why do you think?”, however, this question merely presupposes that one can be more or less careful in making the target judgement, not that the judgement is intelligible in terms of some kind of epistemic basis.

9. See Hampshire (1965) and Moran (2001) for illuminating discussion of this point.

10. The idea that intentions can provide for knowledge in a distinctive way that is not analysable in terms of some “means of access” is a central theme of Anscombe (1957) and Hampshire (1965). For discussion, see also Falvey (2000), Haddock (2011), Thompson (2011), Stroud (2013), and Roessler (2013a).

11. See Bar-On (2011) for illuminating discussion of this thesis: “Naively, the showing behavior relevant to expressing is behavior that springs directly from the expressed state of mind and directly betrays the expresser's state of mind so that suitably endowed observers can immediately recognize it” (218). See also McDowell (1998), Green (2007) and Owens (2006).

12. As William Alston pointed out long ago in a classical article:

  We ordinarily take the look [of a facial expression of disgust] to be an indication of disgust because we suppose it to be a ‘natural’, spontaneous manifestation of being disgusted. As soon as we learn that someone is contriving to look that way, we properly suspect deception. Just the opposite is true of ‘I'm disgusted”. Here we will take the utterance of the sentence to be a reliable indication of disgust only if we suppose it was done intentionally with the agent realizing what he was doing. If we think the sentence was uttered in a fit of abstraction, its indicative value will be impaired if not altogether lost. (1965, 24)

13. The point is not just that the audience needs to construe an assertion as an intentional act. Neo-expressivists might accept this, but insist that we only need to think of an assertion as an act of intentionally uttering something, not as intentional under what might be called attitude-involving descriptions, such as stating one's view that p. (Bar-On's response to Matthew Boyle, as quoted in Boyle (2010, 16–17), suggests she is tempted by this line of response.) But this would make it hard to understand how asserting something can serve to show one's belief: the audience's conception of the point of the utterance would leave the question of the speakers’ attitude wide open. See Owens (2006) and Green (2007) for discussion of the role of the speaker's intentions in making it possible for assertions to show one's beliefs.

14. One philosopher who takes this view is Brian O'Shaughnessy: “(w)hen I say ‘it is raining’ (…) I intend to convey a belief of mine, and that communicative intention is rationally based upon knowledge of that belief” (2000, 187).

15. See note 10 above for recent attempts to elaborate and defend this claim.

16. I take the second, weaker suggestion to provide the canonical statement of Moran's view. Compare this passage: consideration of a deliberative question “terminates in the formation or endorsement of an attitude” (2001, 63 my emphasis). Admittedly, there are also formulations that encourage a stronger reading, on which occupying the “deliberative stance” is a matter of forming a belief (a deliberative question is “answered by a decision or commitment of oneself”, 2001, 145). And there are formulations that suggest a very much weaker reading, on which an occupant of the “deliberative stance” is committed only to taking her beliefs to be open to revision, were she to encounter contrary evidence. Moran sometimes recoils to that position in response to critics who take him to be committed to the strong reading. For example, in his response to Shoemaker, he writes: “the point of speaking of something as ‘up to me’ here is to indicate the responsibility a believer may have when one or another part of this supporting network [of beliefs] is challenged or abandoned” (2003, 403). But arguably, that reading is too weak for Moran's purposes. On it, it is hard to see how the “deliberative stance” can do the work Moran expects it to do; for example, in resolving the putative “puzzle of transparency” (how it can “make sense” for a subject to answer a question about one's belief by answering a first-order question). Note that whether the work Moran expects to be done by the “deliberative stance” needs doing is a substantive question. See my (2013b) for scepticism about some of the assumptions that generate the appearance of a “puzzle of transparency”.

17. Compare Strawson's remark that there are things (“that my elder daughter's name is Julia, that the French for rabbit is ‘lapin’”) we know “too well to believe them for reasons” (1992, 93–94). Heal (2004) also expresses misgivings about what she calls the “internalist” commitments of Moran's theory.

18. For discussion of the two accounts, see Williamson (2000), Kvanvig (2009) and Williamson (2009).

19. One might insist that your reason in the example is that you seem to remember the name. This would not be much of a reason, however. Nor, arguably, is it the kind of reason for which we normally believe what we remember to be the case.

20. Note that even critics of an “epistemic” approach to first-person authority tend to accept the following conditional: if the authority of S's self-ascription reflects her distinctive epistemic position, then a good account of A's reason for thinking S believes requires a theory of how S knows what she believes. They go on to argue by modus tollens, rather than modus ponens.

Additional information

Funding

My work on this paper was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The views expressed in it are those of the author and may not reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.