Authority as (qualified) indubitability

ABSTRACT

Self-ascriptions of one's current mental states often seem authoritative. It is sometimes thought that the authority of such self-ascriptions is, in part, a matter of their indubitability. However, they do not seem to be universally indubitable. How, then, should claims about self-ascriptive indubitability be qualified? Here I consider several such qualifications from the literature. Finding many of them wanting, I nevertheless settle on multiple specifications of the thesis that self-ascriptions are authoritatively indubitable. Some of these specifications concern how other agents ought to treat one's self-ascriptions, while a final specification concerns how one is entitled to respond to others’ doubts about one's self-ascriptions. The result is a pluralistic view of self-ascriptive indubitability: different types of mental state self-ascriptions are indubitable in different ways, and for different people.

KEYWORDS:

• Authority
• self-knowledge
• indubitability
• self-ascriptions
• avowals

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 I say ‘at least in part’ because, as has often been observed, the indubitability of self-ascriptions is not equivalent to their presumptive truth. Indubitability insulates self-ascriptions against doubts, whereas the presumptive truth of self-ascriptions supplies agents with a positive stance toward them. The presumptive truth of self-ascriptions has received comparatively greater attention in the literature (see, e.g. Davidson 1984; Jacobsen 1996, 2008, 2009; McGeer 2007; Nguyen 2008; Parrott 2015; Doyle 2021; Williamson 2000).

2 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging this clarification.

3 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this worry.

4 One final innocent qualifier might be that the agent's self-ascription is not a mere slip of the tongue. However, I think that this folds into the sincerity qualifier, and hence need not be explicitly brought into PIT.

5 This point would appear to apply to other putative counter-examples for PIT, such as those canvassed in Carel and Kidd (2014).

6 This view is also endorsed by Bilgrami (2006, 2012).

7 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for offering this interpretation of Coliva.

8 There are self-ascriptions of intentionally contentful mental states that seem indubitable without qualification such as ‘I am thinking that P’ (Burge 1996). This is not a particularly puzzling case, however, because it wears its self-verifying status on its semantic face.

9 The term ‘luminous’ comes from Winokur (2022), and the term ‘self-intimating’ comes from Ryle (1949). Neither use their respective terms approvingly, though others (e.g., Shoemaker 2009) have done so.

10 Thus, the following may be preferable: Plain Attitudinal Indubitability Thesis (PAIT): If an agent is taken to be sincere and competent with the concepts required to self-ascribe her propositional attitudes, then her self-ascriptions of those mental states cannot be reasonably doubted by others.

11 Barz (2018) adapts the following case from Locke (1967). See Bar-On for a structurally similar case (2004, 322–323).

12 Wright's point is made in a discussion of criticisms about first-person authority due to Snowdon (2012). See Zimmerman (2008, 344) for a similar discussion.

13 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for prompting this point.

14 See fn. 10 for a refined version of PIT.

15 For more about the complicated interplay between the harms and benefits of self-deception, see Bagnoli (2012).

16 This is one reading of the lesson of Davidson's reflections on radical interpretation (1973). On another reading, what the interpreter must maximize in his conception of the interpretee is not correctness, but intelligibility. Still, I suspect that there is some degree of important correlation between intelligibility and correctness – agents who we take to be increasingly wrong about their perceptual environment will also be increasingly unintelligible to us.

17 Interestingly, this way of carving up the terrain is commensurate with the only known empirical study of people's attributions of authority to self-ascriptions (Komorowska-Mach and Szczepura 2021).

18 See Coliva (2016, §8.2) for a take on how self-ascriptions of suitably ‘basic’ emotions can be construed as indubitable in a sense, roughly, like that of PIT. Whether something else, like AIT, could be extended beyond propositional attitude self-ascriptions and to self-ascriptions of emotions is a question that warrants further thought.

19 Thanks to three anonymous reviewers at Inquiry for their many helpful criticisms and suggestions.