Transparency, expression, and self-knowledge

Abstract

Contemporary discussions of self-knowledge share a presupposition to the effect that the only way to vindicate so-called first-person authority as understood by our folk-psychology is to identify specific “good-making” epistemic features that render our self-ascriptions of mental states (‘avowals’) especially knowledgeable. In earlier work, I rejected this presupposition. I proposed that we separate two questions:

(i) How is first-person authority to be explained?

(ii) What renders avowals instances of a privileged kind of knowledge?

In response to question (i), I offered a neo-expressivist account that, I argued, is compatible with a variety of non-deflationary, substantive answers to question (ii). Here I re-evaluate the relative merits of the neo-expressivist account in light of some recent attempts to capture first-person authority by appealing to the so-called transparency of mental self-attributions. I then canvass two recent appeals to transparency that give priority to question (ii). Bearing in mind difficulties with the recent attempts, I return (in Section 3) to relevant aspects of my own neo-expressivist account, which, instead, begins with question (i). I conclude by offering reasons for thinking that the neo-expressivist approach is better suited for integration with a folk-psychologically grounded understanding of ourselves than the alternatives canvassed.

Keywords:

• self-knowledge
• transparency
• expression
• first-person authority
• neo-expressivism
• folk psychology
• avowals

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Fleur Jongepier, Kate Nolfi, Tory McGear, and Carol Voeller, as well as the audience at the conference on Self-Knowledge and Folk Psychology, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 27–28 June 2014 for helpful discussions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dorit Bar-On is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut (previously at UNC-Chapel Hill) and director of the research group Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning. She is the author of Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (OUP 2004). She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Expression, Action, and Meaning, as well as a volume in the Wiley Great Debates in Philosophy series (with Crispin Wright).

Notes

1 I discuss avowals’ epistemic security and offer an account of it in, inter alia, Bar-On (2000, 2004, 2009a), and Bar-On and Long (2001).

2. See, e.g. Sellars (1956, XV.56, XV.59). For an account of introspective privileged access very much along these lines – in terms of reliable second-order non-inferential (and “silent”) responses to one's own first-order mental states – see Rosenthal (2005). For helpful exposition, see O'Shea (2007, 92ff.).

3. In my final section, I will briefly present an alternative to Sellars’ myth of Jones, one inspired by our real, non-mythical lives.

4. I here follow the rough division in Gertler (2011, Ch. 1) of contemporary views into empiricist vs. rationalist.

5. In keeping with this way of thinking, it is often assumed that

• (a) our folk psychological conception of avowals’ distinctive security reflects our taking them to be prime instances of knowledge, knowledge that is, moreover, privileged and

• (b) (therefore?) any explanation of avowals’ distinctive security must appeal to whatever features render them instances of knowledge.

6. See, e.g. Bar-On (2004, Ch. 1, 2010, 2012; Bar-On and Long 2003). For more recent discussion, see Bar-On and Nolfi (forthcoming).

7. Parts of this section overlap Bar-On and Nolfi (forthcoming). I wish to thank Nolfi for permission to use these materials and for helpful discussions.

8. I am here focusing on epistemic, as opposed to psychological groundlessness (see e.g. Cassam 2014). For my own take on the distinction, see Bar-On (2004, Ch. 6 and passim).

9. Inner sense, recall, pins the security of avowals and first-person authority to the high degree of reliability – even if not Cartesian infallibility – of our faculty of inner perception; and acquaintance theories pin it to the existence of an unmediated relation of direct acquaintance we have to our own current states of mind. For a survey, see Gertler (2011, Ch. 4, 5).

10. Compare Boyle (2011, 226).

11. For the reading of transparency that follows, see Bar-On (2000) and Bar-On (2004, Ch. 4); see also Bar-On (2009a, 2010, 2012).

Following Evans, I prefer to speak of transparency-to-the-world as a feature of (some) self-ascriptions of beliefs and other states of mind (that is, second-order judgments on our first-order mental states), rather than speaking – as do some recent authors – of our first-order beliefs (and other states) themselves as enjoying transparency. For discussion, see Bar-On (2009b). (This will become relevant later on.)

12. Byrne (2005) talks of the “epistemic rule” BEL: If p, believe that you believe that p – which he formulates to fit epistemic rules of the general form R: If conditions C obtain, believe that p. (He considers, for example, DOORBELL: If the doorbell rings, believe that there is someone at the door. Or NEWS: If the Weekly News reports that p, believe that p (see Byrne 2005, 94)).

13. Given the way Byrne conceives of reasoning in accordance with BEL, it seems legitimate to question whether what is at work deserves to be described as genuine reasoning, with the premises representing the subject's reasons for believing the conclusion, or instead just a (sub)cognitive “movement of the mind” from one cognitive state to another (see Boyle 2011, 7–9).

14. Also crucial in Byrne's formulation here is that recognition entails knowledge. Thus, the fact that a subject recognizes that the antecedent obtains entails that the subject knows (and so also that the subject believes) that it obtains.

15. This, however, may be a peculiarity of the case of belief; see the following.

16. However, there are cases in which one recognizes p, but also affirms that one does not believe p (or believes not-p) based on, for example, a therapist's analysis, or interpretive self-analysis (see below). So cognitive contact with p does not seem sufficient for transparency; for the attribution to be transparent, one must attribute the belief in a certain way.

17. Byrne (2011) proposes to extend the account to, for example, the case of self-knowledge of intention, by appealing to the epistemic rule:

18. See Byrne (2011) for relevant references and objections.

19. Bar-On (2004, Ch. 4) raises a closely related objection to the Epistemic Approach.

In the case of a rule like INT (see endnote 17), the idea Boyle regards as misguided is that

“I might infer propositions about my present intentions from blank future propositions about myself from a blank future proposition about myself, as if I must conclude my own commitment to ø from an unaccountable inkling about what I will in fact do” (2011, 234).

Boyle thinks that Byrne's inferential approach to doxastic transparency faces a certain dilemma: it must either represent the subject as drawing a mad inference, or else must admit that her real basis for judging herself to believe P is not the sheer fact that P, but her tacit knowledge that she believes P (which would effectively mean giving up on Byrne's project) (see Boyle (2011, 231f.).

20. For some discussion of constitutivism (and relevant references), see Gertler (2011, Ch. 6), Coliva (2012), and Bar-On (2009a). Boyle's metaphysicism has several important points of contact with constitutivist views; however, Boyle distances himself from constitutivism (cf. 2011).

21. Although as I argue in Bar-On (2004, 118f.), direct consideration of the relevant worldly items is not an especially reliable method for determining one's desires, preferences, and other states. For example, considering the bulldog in front of me, I may judge that it is not to be feared, yet I may feel very scared of it.

22. Thanks to Tory McGear for prompting this clarification.

Similar remarks apply to Moore's paradox, which is often mentioned in connection with transparency. Notably, transparent consideration of outward phenomena can issue in self-ascriptions that are ripe for being caught in Moorean absurdities. But there are many examples of Moore-style anomalies that do not involve beliefs (consider, e.g. “I'm finding this meeting really exciting, but it's very boring”; “Tea please! But I don't want any tea”; and even “Brrr! It feels hot in here”; or “[Agonized expression] I feel so happy”). Moreover, even focusing on belief, Moorean conjunctions can be rationally produced or entertained. (For discussion, see Bar-On 2009b.)

23. I develop this view in (2004, esp. Ch. 6–8) and elsewhere. For a defense of a somewhat similar expressivist view on the basis of considerations from autism, see McGear (2004).

24. For my most recent summary of distinctions I am using here and in the following, see Bar-On (2015).

25. However, to be clear, I am not endorsing Sellars’ account of self-knowledge, but instead seek to articulate an alternative to it.

26. I here set aside, for the most part, what Sellars (1969) calls (misleadingly, I think) “expression in the causal sense” – for example, nonvoluntary, uncontrolled facial expressions or gestures that reveal one's state of mind. This is because the expressive behaviors relevant to my concerns here – avowals – are not nonvoluntary or reflexive bodily happenings, but rather things that are done by an individual (as opposed to a subsystem, or module, within the individual), over which the individual exercises a certain kind of central, executive control (see Bar-On 2004, 216f., 249ff., 289, 315).

27. Thus, like traditional avowal expressivism, neo-expressivism does not regard avowals' distinctive security as inherited from the security of this or that epistemic basis on which they are made or from the very nature of mental states. But, unlike the traditional view, neo-expressivism emphasizes important dissimilarities between avowals and inarticulate grunts, grimaces, or cries, and even many verbal expressions. Unlike the latter, avowals exhibit various semantic continuities with other attributions of states (both to oneself and to others). (For a full development of the account of avowals’ security – the epistemic asymmetries, as well as the presumption of truth governing them – see Bar-On 2004, Ch. 6–8; in keeping with my rejection of the presupposition mentioned earlier, the account of what could render avowals articles of knowledge is provided separately, in Ch. 9.)

28. As an aside: of course, on a given occasion, an animal can bare its teeth without being angry. This can happen for any number of reasons, and not necessarily because the animal is trying to deceive. In such cases, of course, the teeth-baring does not allow us to perceive the animal's being angry (by perceiving its baring its teeth). Showing and perceiving are both factive. But that does not mean that we cannot apply the idea of perception in such cases. (For discussion, see Bar-On 2004, 240ff., 310ff., and 410ff.)

29. For relevant discussion, see Bar-On (2015).

30. Unlike in the case of natural expressions, the relevant information is not revealed through perception-enabling features of the expressive behavior. It is made available to us through the linguistic vehicle used in the act of avowing.

31. See Bar-On (2004, 310ff.). The relevant transparency is enjoyed by avowals qua expressive acts, and is shared by all other such acts – it is due to the fact that expressive acts show the expressed state. I distinguish, in this connection, between, for example, expressing pain and expressing my pain, thereby making room for the possibility of expressive failures (see esp. Ch. 8).

32. The commissive aspect of transparent self-attributions of belief (and other reflective states) emphasized by reflectivist views can also be seen as a consequence of avowals’ expressive character. Insofar as avowing a belief serves to give direct expression to the self-ascribed belief itself (rather than – or perhaps in addition to – one's second-order belief), in avowing (as opposed to merely reporting one's belief) one incurs commitment to the truth of one's first-order belief (see Bar-On 2004, 318–310, 2009a).

33. It may be thought that this shows transparency-to-the-world not to be a special case of transparency-to-the-subject's-state, since the former is supposed to be a “first-person” feature of certain self-attributions, whereas the latter is, in a sense, “third-person” (thanks to Tory McGear). However, this ignores the first-person epistemic consequences of taking avowals to be a species of expressive acts (for my take on the first- and third- person aspects of the neo-expressivist account, see my Bar-On (2004, esp. Ch. 7, 10).

34. See Evans (1982, esp. Ch. 7, Sec. 2), Shoemaker (1968), and Wright (1998, 18–20). For the relevance of immunity to error to the present topic, see esp. Bar-On (2004, Ch. 4, 6, 2012).

35. For discussion, see Bar-On (2004, Ch. 6, 2007, 2012).

36. Evans’ construal of transparent self-ascriptions can be regarded as following the same pattern. For he portrays them as judgments that are about one's intentional states, but ones made not on the basis of introspective identification of a (self-ascribed) state inside us (as he says: “[With this] method of self-ascription … we … have no need for the idea of an inward glance” 1982, 225). Nonetheless, he takes a person's transparent self-ascription to represent “knowledge of one of his mental states: even the most determined sceptic cannot find here a gap in which to insert his knife”, Evans (1982, 225). But it should be kept in mind that, unlike proprioceptive and kinesthetic self-ascriptions, transparent intentional self-ascriptions, as Evans himself notes, do not utilize any “special faculty of inner sense or internal self-scanning” (1982, 230, fn. 42). I distinguish two questions in this connection: the question how one can make a genuine ascription of an intentional state, and the question why one is assured to make a correct ascription. Evans does not explicitly separate the two questions. The procedures he offers for explaining self-knowledge of intentional states seem to play both the role of explaining how one can think about one's intentional state at all (even though one is not directing attention at the state) and how one can obtain reliable self-knowledge regarding such states.

37. For discussion of various substantive responses to question (ii), see Bar-On (2004, Ch. 9).

38. For relevant discussion, see Bar-On and Nolfi (forthcoming).

39. Boyle wishes to dissociate himself from the label “constitutivism”, but for reasons that do not bear on the objections here (see 2011, 228–229, fn. 5). In 2010, Boyle speaks of brute beliefs as constituting a different species of belief (though they may belong to the same genus as our reflective beliefs). Interestingly, in 2011, he says that he does “not wish to deny that creatures incapable of reflection can have belief” and takes “no position on whether their believing involves tacit knowledge of believing” (228, fn. 5). But, given that (even tacit) knowledge presumably requires belief, and given the plausible assumption that at least second-order belief requires the concept of belief (and of other mental states), it is difficult to see how he can avoid taking a (negative) position on the question at hand.

40. See Bar-On (2009a). Some constitutivists explicitly restrict their thesis to what they term rational beliefs and intentions, “judgment-sensitive” wishes, desires, and preferences, intentional states understood as commitments, and so on (see, e.g. Moran 2001; Bilgrami 2006). Alternatively, one can insist on judgment sensitivity and reason responsiveness as necessary conditions on a state being one of belief, intention, desire, etc., and then make Boyle's move (see previous footnote) of acknowledging a broad genus of which belief, intention, desire, etc., proper and their non-reflective analogues are both species. Either way, one must embrace what I go on to call Mind-mind dualism.

In the case of reflective creatures, Boyle might insist that “being already tacitly known” does not entail “being reflectively attended to”, thereby making room for the range of states under consideration. But this would seem to me to build much more into reflective attention than Boyle should allow, given his objections to epistemicism. Space limitations prevent me from elaborating on this worry here. (For relevant discussion, see Bar-On 2004, Ch. 9, 2009a); see also my reply to Boyle in 2010 (which I develop further in a paper in progress).

41. Of course, none of this is to deny that reflective beings like ourselves have, in addition to the types of states of mind we share with brutes, also types of states of mind that we do not share with them. And part of the difference may well have to do with the exercise of our reflective, self-transformative capacities.

42. Unlike Byrne and Boyle (and others) who try to accommodate and explain the asymmetry between attributions of propositional attitudes to oneself and to others, Carruthers (2011) endorses a “full symmetry” view, according to which we know all of our own propositional attitudes in exactly the same (“interpretive”) way that we know of others’, and we are equally prone to mistake in our mental self-attributions. Carruthers claims that psychological experiments show that people can attribute “thoughts to themselves that we have every reason to believe they never entertained, and making errors in self-attribution that directly parallel the errors that we make in attributing thoughts to other people”. But he also thinks that the “studies show that …  people are using the same mindreading faculty that they employ when attributing thoughts to other people, relying on sensory forms of evidence that stands in need of highly fallible interpretation”, suggesting that “there is just a single mental faculty (the ‘mindreading' faculty) that is responsible for all our knowledge of propositional attitudes, whether those thoughts are our own or other people's”. (Others, like Schwitzgebel, have extended the scope of the claim of our radical fallibility to sensations.)

43. Thus, I submit, the experiments cannot help establish the claim that there's “full symmetry” between mental self-attributions and attributions to others; nor do they support his idea that avowals of propositional attitudes are the result of mindreading self-interpretation (as Carruthers maintains; see previous endnote). Similar remarks apply to a number of cases discussed by Nisbett and Wilson (1977) including ones showing “implicit bias”) as well as to Schwitzgebel's “armchair” experiments concerning visual experiences. (The latter experiments are characterized in terms of asking subjects when they see an object in their visual field. But presumably the subjects would give the same answers if asked: “Tell me when the object appears”.)

If (as suggested to me by McGear) we insist that the subjects in the experiments do have the beliefs they avow (and that are expressed by their non-self-ascriptive pronouncements), then, of course, no threat to avowals’ security would arise. At least in some cases such insistence would require severing the connection of belief with action and insisting on too strong a connection between beliefs qua psychological states and verbal expressions of beliefs. However, this issue merits further discussion, which I cannot undertake here. (In particular, it is important to distinguish behavior and actions that are caused by one's beliefs and behavior (nonverbal or verbal) through which one expresses one's belief. See my 2004, Ch. 6–7 for relevant discussion.)

44. Thanks to Fleur Jongepier for prompting this clarification.

45. See Boyle (2010) and Bar-On's reply (2010).