First-person privilege, judgment, and avowal

Abstract

It is a common intuition that I am in a better position to know my own mental states than someone else's. One view that takes this intuition very seriously is Neo-Expressivism, providing a “non-epistemic” account of first-person privilege. But some have denied that we enjoy any principled first-person privilege, as do those who have the Third-Person View, according to which there is no deep difference in our epistemic position with regard to our own and others' mental states. Despite their apparently deep differences, I argue that Neo-Expressivism and the Third-Person View differ in their location of first-person privilege. This difference in the source of first-person privilege allows the key elements of each of these views to be compatible, and can even be combined into a single view about the nature of introspection and self-knowledge. The compatibility of these two views that otherwise appear to be in direct opposition is methodologically significant, highlighting several dialectical lessons that clarify the existing debate about first-person privilege. The main lesson to take away is that there are likely other underexplored possibilities for careful synthesis of already existing views, which could shed new light on the nature of first-person privilege, introspection, and self-knowledge.

Keywords:

• self-knowledge
• introspection
• first-person privilege
• avowal
• Neo-Expressivism

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to two anonymous referees and the participants of the workshops in Tuebingen and Nijmegen for detailed discussion about self-knowledge. Special thanks to Dorit Bar-On, Fleur Jongepier, Johannes Roessler, Derek Strijbos, and Hong Yu Wong for insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kateryna Samoilova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Philosophy of Neuroscience Group at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tuebingen. Her research focuses on the nature of introspection and self-knowledge.

ORCID

Kateryna Samoilova http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1047-8211

Notes

1. See Alston (1971) for the wide variety of ways to understand “privileged access”.

2. In fact, Bar-On (2004, chapter 9) has explicitly left room for Neo-Expressivism to be combined with some other views, but my aim is to argue for something stronger. As will emerge, there are benefits to considering the combination of Neo-Expressivism with views like the Third-Person View. Moreover, to my knowledge, there are no extensive arguments made to the effect that accounts such as the Third-Person View are compatible with Neo-Expressivism, nor that anything can be learned from such a combination.

3. If first-person privilege is left open to theoretical interpretation and compatible with otherwise significantly different views on the nature of self-knowledge, as I intend to use the term, then some form of first-person privilege is accepted not only by those working on the topic most recently, such as Moran (2001), Bar-On and Long (2001), Gertler (2001), Fernandez (2003), Byrne (2005), Goldman (2006), and Roessler (2013), but also includes most of the classic views on self-knowledge and introspection, including Armstrong (1981) and Chisholm (1981), going all the way back to Descartes (1641/1984), and Locke (1689/1975), to name just a few.

4. The denial of first-person privilege, at least with respect to some mental states commonly thought to enjoy some form of first-person privilege, can be found in Ryle (1949), Gopnik (1993), and Carruthers (2006).

5. For instance, Bar-On frequently relies on this contrast in her work (particularly in her 2004); also see Roessler (2015).

6. Those who make any distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic approaches to first-person privilege are also those who defend the existence of first-person privilege in the first place (such as Moran 2001 and Bar-On 2004). But I see no reason that the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic approaches should be restricted only to those views that affirm its existence, the Third-Person View being the obvious counter-example, to be discussed in detail later. So I think it is more enlightening to think of the epistemic/non-epistemic dimension as being orthogonal to the affirming/denying the existence of first-person privilege, rather than being open only to those who affirm the existence of first-person privilege.

7. For more on this point, see Byrne (2011).

8. “Introspection” can be a loaded term, carrying various implications about reliability, epistemic privilege, form of access, etc. Nothing in my arguments turns on the specifics of introspection. I use this term in a theory-neutral sense to mean some sort of first-personal process that can (in the good cases) result in justified true beliefs about and even knowledge of our mental states, without taking a stand on whether it is epistemically special, or reliable, or unique; after all, these are all controversial points. All that matters for me is the contrast between self-knowledge and some process that attempts to provide us with self-knowledge, which I term introspection for ease of exposition.

9. This concern, voiced somewhat differently, has been put forward by Brueckner (2011) and Gertler (2011), among others. Bar-On has consistently responded to this objection (most recently in her 2011), but since it keeps resurfacing, it is worth dwelling on this objection further.

10. How to interpret Ryle is a thorny issue in its own right – many a view has been traced back to him, even if merely as a source of inspiration. For instance, Bar-On (Bar-on and Long 2001) takes Ryle to be a Simple Expressivist, but I think there is textual evidence that also supports the sort of view I have outlined here (which is how Byrne 2005 interprets him as well). Either way, to avoid exegetical concerns, the sort of view I have in mind, whether or not it is Ryle's, is less controversially exemplified by “theory theory”.

11. It is worth noting that defending some version of the Third-Person View does not commit one to this view across all mental states. For instance, some passages in Ryle's work suggest that he held the Third-Person View for a limited number of mental states, leaving room for privileged access to other mental states.

12. Due to this dependence on behavior, sometimes Ryle's view is described as behaviorist (including by Bar-On in her 2004), but I want to avoid this label here. A move sometimes associated with behaviorism is the reduction of the mental to behavior, which is not a move that should be associated with the Third-Person View. Instead, this is a view on which our access to the mental, and not the mental itself, involves reasoning about our behavior. To avoid this confusion, I refrain from describing Ryle's view and the Third-Person View as behaviorist.

13. Some of the proposals which offer different variants of the stronger version of the epistemic security claim come from Descartes (1641), Jackson (1973), and Chisholm (1981).

14. Moran (2001) and Roessler (2013), who do not defend Neo-Expressivism, are other good examples.

15. For instance, Hill (1991) and Chalmers (2003) have defended versions of this thesis.

16. In fact, Carruthers (2009) goes as far as denying that we can introspect certain mental states, because he assumes (or thinks that others assume) that introspection is meant to be in some sense a distinct method of access to our mental states. For my purposes of showing compatibility between Neo-Expressivism and the Third-Person View, I treat the denial of introspective access on the ground that introspection must be special and the claim that introspection is not special as equivalent.

17. Byrne (2005), for example, makes it very clear that his view on introspection leaves the status of self-knowledge quite open.

18. Particularly the literature concerning confabulation in wake of the Nisbett and Wilson (1977) study, including Wilson's later work (e.g. 2002), Wegner (2002), and Johansson et al. (2005).

19. Some notable participants in this debate are Schwitzgebel (2011), who has global doubts about the reliability of introspection, and Goldman (2004), who argues for a much more conservative conclusion concerning the reliability of introspection.

20. It is worth noting that some further support for the compatibility between Neo-Expressivism and the Third-Person View comes from Bar-On herself (Bar-On and Long 2001), who traces parts of her Neo-Expressivism to Ryle. Since Ryle is also one of the sources of the Third-Person View, the potentially common source of these two views adds further credibility to the suggestion that these views are compatible.