Self-knowledge, belief, ability (and agency?)

Abstract

Matthew Boyle [(2011). “Transparent Self-Knowledge.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1): 223–241. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8349.2011.00204.x] has defended an account of doxastic self-knowledge which he calls “Reflectivism”. I distinguish two claims within Reflectivism: (A) that believing that p and knowing oneself to believe that p are not two distinct cognitive states, but two aspects of the same cognitive state, and (B) that this is because we are in some sense agents in relation to our beliefs. I find claim (A) compelling, but argue that its tenability depends on how we view the metaphysics of knowledge, something Boyle does not consider. I argue that in the context of the standard account of knowledge as a kind of true belief – what I call the Belief Account of knowledge – the claim faces serious problems, and that these simply disappear if we instead adopt an Ability Account of knowledge, along the lines of that defended by John Hyman [(1999). “How knowledge Works.” The Philosophical Quarterly 49 (197): 433–451; John Hyman (2015). Action, Knowledge, and the Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press]. I find claim (B) less compelling, and a secondary aim of the paper is to suggest that once we reject the Belief Account of knowledge, and move over to an Ability Account, there is no explanatory role for (B) left to play.

Keywords:

• self-knowledge
• transparency
• constitutivism about self-knowledge
• agentialism about self-knowledge
• ability account of knowledge

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited from discussion with Luke Brunning, Casey Doyle, Jane Heal, and Michael Thorne, and especially with Alexander Greenberg with whom I have discussed these issues at length. The paper was written with the support of the Analysis Trust, from whom I received an Analysis Studentship in 2016–2017. I presented this paper at a conference on Self-Knowledge and Agency at St. Hilda’s College Oxford in May 2017, and am very grateful to the audience for the excellent discussion, in particular to Matt Boyle, and to John Hyman who provided a very useful and detailed critical response. Unfortunately, I have had to leave many of the issues discussed there to one side in this paper, for reasons of space, and in order to keep the dialectic manageable. I look forward to taking these issues up in future work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Lucy Campbell completed her PhD, “Action, Intention, and Knowledge” in 2015 (Cambridge, UK). During 2015–16 she was a Teaching Assistant in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and then held an Analysis Studentship in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford (2016–17). She is currently a temporary Lecturer in Philosophy at St. Peter’s College, Oxford and Exeter College, Oxford. She works mainly in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and action, with a focus on the epistemology of mind and action. She has also published on Anscombe's epistemology and metaphysics of action.

ORCID

Lucy Campbell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8778-524X

Notes

1. Failing to give a positive explanation of why judgments formed by reasoning in accordance with the Doxastic Schema do constitute knowledge is rather odd in the context of an account which at points advertises itself as explaining doxastic self-knowledge. One way of understanding Boyle’s criticisms below is plausibly as a version of the demand for Byrne to respond to just this worry.

2. That is not to say that Boyle is the only philosopher to hold a version of the claim. It is shared in some form by various proponents of “constitutivism” about self-knowledge. For other versions of the idea, see e.g. Heal (1994); Shoemaker (1994); and Rödl (2007).

3. This would include a person’s knowledge of many of her mental states other than belief, but also plausibly her “practical knowledge” of what she is intentionally doing. An influential version of the idea that the two-in-one claim is also true for practical knowledge is embodied in Anscombe’s characterisation of this knowledge as “the cause of what it understands” (Anscombe 2000, 87). I provide an account of practical self-knowledge which takes its mark from Anscombe’s, and has much in common with the account of doxastic self-knowledge I develop below, in Campbell (2017).

4. For more on this idea from Boyle’s perspective, see Boyle (2009).

5. For the canonical defence of this kind of view, see Anscombe (2000). For an influential (putative) counterexample, see Davidson (2001, 50), and for a response on Anscombe’s behalf, see Thompson (2011, 209–210).

6. A key thought in Boyle’s discussion, and in other agentialist accounts of self-knowledge is that it is the p-believer’s responsiveness to her reasons for believing that p which somehow grounds her knowledge that she believes that p. In the current context, the thing to note is that it is not obvious how the idea of agency does any work in this picture: why is responsiveness to reasons essentially an agential matter? One line of thought links our reasons-responsiveness to a particular kind of responsibility which we seem to bear for our beliefs, and to the thought that responsibility is characteristic of agency. There are two problems here. First, the appeal to agency again looks like a red herring – the appeal to reasons-responsiveness and responsibility seems to do all the work. More seriously, I doubt that an account of self-knowledge can be grounded in an account of reasons-responsiveness and responsibility, since plausibly an account of responsibility – whether in the practical or in the theoretical sphere – presupposes self-knowledge, and so cannot explain it. Here is not the place to develop these thoughts, but I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to say something about the idea that doxastic self-knowledge might be somehow grounded in reasoning.

7. This further condition has been variously understood as justification, safety, sensitivity, truth-tracking, having been caused by the fact known, or produced by a reliable mechanism, and so on. Happily, we need not choose between these here, because I am interested in whether the two-in-one claim can be understood in the context of the Belief Account rather generally. It is worth noting that the Belief Account is also neutral on the debate between reductionists and anti-reductionists about knowledge. One might hold that knowledge is true belief which meets some further epistemic condition, without expecting that this “further epistemic condition” can be defined reductively, that is, without using the concept of knowledge.

8. The only other metaphysics of knowledge I can think of which would appear likely to provide a happy home for the two-in-one claim is a “Mere True Belief” account of knowledge, along the lines of that defended by Sartwell (1991; 1992; see also Skidmore 1997). Given the unpopularity of such an account, however, the picture embodied in what we might call “two-in-one-MTB” is unlikely to attract many followers, and I will not consider it here.

9. Here, is not the place to defend the Ability Account in detail. For Hyman’s own responses to a battery of objections, see (2015, 7.3.). The worry I consider here was put by an anonymous reviewer for this journal.

10. Hyman himself points out that his conception of knowledge is very well placed to accommodate self-knowledge (2015, section 7.4). Hyman does not develop the kind of account I offer here: in particular, he does not endorse the two-in-one claim.

11. Thanks to Casey Doyle and Alexander Greenberg for discussion here.

12. What about cases where a person fails to know about her first-order belief? There are two ways to go in explaining such cases, on the view I am offering. We could say that first-order beliefs are sufficient for the knowledge-ability as long as nothing gets in the way. Or, we could say that having the first-order belief is always sufficient for having the knowledge-ability, but that this ability can (like any ability) be masked. This would entail that strictly, all first-order beliefs are objects of doxastic self-knowledge, but that this knowledge cannot always be manifested. It would take further work to consider which of these two options is preferable. Here, I only want to note that there are options, on the view I am recommending, for explaining our fallibility with respect to our own beliefs. Note too that any constitutivist account – any account which accepts a version of the two-in-one claim – is under this kind of explanatory demand, so that it is not a particular problem for my version of the view.

13. Although my topic here is doxastic self-knowledge, this example also shows that my account can very happily be extended to self-knowledge of other of our mental states. Indeed, I find it plausible to think that a mental state just is a state such that being in it is typically sufficient for using the fact that one is in it as a reason. That is, mental states are states which have an inherent rational-motivational potential. Here is not the place to argue for this claim, however, and I leave it for future work.

14. Although there is not room to do so in this paper, I would like to develop the idea that my belief that there will be a third world war is what underwrites or grounds the ability to use the fact that there will be a third world war as a reason. That would give us a picture on which my second-order knowledge relates to my first-order belief as ability to ground. See Campbell (2017) for some ideas about how a parallel picture might help us to understand practical self-knowledge.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Analysis Trust, via an Analysis Studentship.