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Abstract
Recently influential “rationalist” views of self-knowledge about our rational attitudes hold that such self-knowledge is essentially connected to rational agency, and therefore has to be particularly reliable, immediate, and distinct from third-personal access. This approach has been challenged by “theory theory” or (as I prefer to call them) “interpretationist” views of self-knowledge: on such views, self-knowledge is based on the interpretation of information about ourselves, and this interpretation involves the same mindreading mechanisms that we use to access other persons’ mental states. Interpretationist views are usually dismissed as implausible and unwarranted by advocates of rationalism. In this article, I argue that rationalists should revise their attitude towards interpretationism: they can, and ought to, accept themselves a form of interpretationism. First, I argue that interpretationism is correct at least for a substantive range of cases. These are cases in which we respond to a question about our attitudes by a conscious overt or inner expression of our attitude, and form a self-ascriptive belief on the basis of that expression. Second, I argue that rationalists can adopt interpretationism without abandoning their basic tenets: the assumption that both approaches are incompatible is unfounded.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted for helpful comments to the audience at the Nijmegen conference and to two anonymous referees. Special thanks go to Catharine Diehl, Erasmus Mayr, Teresa Pedro and Tobias Rosefeldt for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Franz Knappik has received his doctorate from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, in 2011. Since the same year, he has been Lecturer in philosophy at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His main research interests are in the philosophy of mind and the history of philosophy (German Idealism).
Notes
1. Other philosophers (e.g. McGeer Citation1996) have developed the basic idea that self-knowledge is a matter of rational agency in non-epistemic terms. In this article, I will only be concerned with epistemic versions.
2. Some authors claim that the first-/third-personal asymmetry requires an epistemic difference in the method that we use to acquire self-knowledge (e.g. Byrne Citation2011). I will not treat this as essential part of the view in question.
3. It is more common to refer to the positions in question as “theory theory” or “inferentialist” accounts of self-knowledge. I prefer “interpretationism” because this term leaves open which precise theory of mindreading is adopted, and whether the process leading to self-knowledge is, strictly speaking, inferential in nature or not (see note 5).
4. For example, from developmental psychology: Gopnik (Citation1993); from cognitive architecture and evolutionary biology: Carruthers (Citation2011).
5. Similarly, the perception of facial expressions as expressive of emotions can be said to involve interpretation, although we normally would not be able to spell out the input data for the interpretation process in terms of explicit premises. (Without this qualification, interpretationism would founder on the objections levelled by Bilgrami Citation2006, 19–20).
6. Carruthers (Citation2009, 123) adds the further condition that information about context (such as the subject's circumstances and public behaviour) is accessed. The form of interpretation that I will argue for in Section 3 fulfils this additional condition, too.
7. I shall remain non-committal here about the precise identity-conditions of mechanisms.
8. This view is adopted by Shoemaker (Citation1996, 241) in his response to the regress problem.
9. For one thing, I do not believe that Shoemaker's arguments succeed in establishing a constitutive account (unless it is understood in the sense of the first form of modified universalism that I have discussed above). For a critique of Shoemaker's arguments and his positive account, cf., e.g. Peacocke (Citation2008, 268–275).
10. Cf. also Goldman (Citation2006, 240–241) for a similar critique of an analogous position.
11. For the sake of my discussion, I will assume that this is true for all aspects of the response event that are available to the meta-cognitive capacity. Alternatively, it might be held that the content of the response event is independently available to that capacity, for example, through “activation” in working memory. But this view will have to allow for some form of interpretationism, too. For normally, there will be further activated contents at the same time (e.g. of beliefs and intentions that are relevant to what one is presently doing). Hence, the meta-cognitive capacity would need a mechanism that identifies which of the various simultaneously activated contents belongs to the thought that presently occupies P-consciousness. This mechanism would have to interpret the phenomenal properties of the response event in terms of various simultaneously activated contents, and identify the content that best fits the phenomenology and the context. (Thanks to Tobias Rosefeldt for pressing me on this point.)
12. This awareness might consist, for example, in an accompanying, P-unconscious thought (cf. Rosenthal Citation2005, 14–15, 126).
13. For the sake of our discussion, we can neglect the contrast between “sensory” and “quasi-sensory”.
14. On a rich notion of the sensory, one might hold that hearing something as bearer of a determinate linguistic meaning is a sensory phenomenon. In that case, there would be a strong sensory difference between both scenarios; but such hearing-as would itself require previous interpretation of sensory data.
15. It might be objected that the mere requirement of understanding inner speech (and similar phenomenology) is too “easy” an interpretive achievement to yield a controversial position. But what is at stake is not whether the interpretation that self-knowledge is based on is a difficult task or not, but whether self-knowledge is based on interpretation or not (cf. Carruthers’ reply to a similar objection by Petty and Briñol in his Citation2009, 169).
16. At least if it is assumed in addition that the fact that a thought expresses a target attitude is part of the intentional properties that define the thought.
17. Cf., e.g. Goldman (Citation2006, 231–234) for a critical discussion regarding the implications of confabulation findings for self-knowledge.
18. For the idea of inner aspect-perception, cf. Gopnik (Citation1993, 10–12). Carruthers (Citation2011, 87) seems to allow for a similar possibility regarding inner speech (“global broadcast” of interpretation that is “bound” into sensory content; cf. Carruthers Citation2011, 50–51).
19. Cf. also notes 14 and 18.
20. By contrast, versions of rationalism that require, in addition, that the first-/third-person asymmetry consists in an epistemic difference between methods of gaining self-knowledge (cf. note 2) are incompatible with interpretationism.
21. Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this problem.
22. This move could seem to be precluded by my above account of expressive episodes: why should, on that account, the phenomenal properties of response events be more than “the testimony of an alien voice, whose rational significance for my thinking now was an open question” (as Boyle Citation2009, 160 writes in a related context)? Put very briefly, I would reply: because it is part of the phenomenology of P-conscious thoughts figuring as response events that I experience them as my own responses to the initial questions (e.g. through “context integration”, see Martin and Pacherie Citation2013, 115–117).