Authoritatively avowing your imaginings by self-ascriptively expressing them

ABSTRACT

Neo-expressivism is the view that avowals – first-personal, present tense self-ascriptions of mental states—ordinarily express the very mental states that they semantically represent, such that they carry a strong presumption of truth and are immune to requests for epistemic support. Peter Langland-Hassan (2015. “Self-Knowledge and Imagination.” Philosophical Explorations 18 (2): 226–245) has argued that Neo-expressivism cannot accommodate avowals of one’s imaginings. In this short paper I argue that Neo-expressivism can, in fact, accommodate them.

KEYWORDS:

• Avowals
• authority
• neo-expressivism
• performance equivalence
• imagination
• self-knowledge

Disclosure statement

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

Funding details

The author has no funding to declare.

Notes

1 The two-pronged formulation of authority offered here is imprecise and does not exhaust all of the ways in which philosophers understand the authority of avowals (Again, for more, see Winokur, Forthcoming). I will work with these rough formulations here.

2 This does not mean that avowals are immune to all epistemic concerns. For instance, accusations of self-deception may be apt in some cases.

3 This is supposed to assure us that the propositions semantically expressed by avowals match with the mental states action-expressed by them. As aforementioned, Parrott (Ibid.) challenges this, though—again—see Winokur (ms.) for a reply.

4 The reader will notice that Langland-Hassan distinguishes between imagining states of affairs (i.e., propositional imaginings) and imagining objects (i.e., non-propositional imaginings). For ease of exposition, I focus on avowals of propositional imaginings. As far as I can tell, my arguments should apply salva veritate to avowals of non-propositional imaginings.

5 Thanks to Dorit Bar-On for inspiring this line of response.

6 Inspired by the work of Byrne (2005, 2007, 2011).

7 He offers another, similar rule for acquiring self-knowledge of imagined non-propositional objects.

8 I am grateful for conversations with Dorit Bar-On while writing this paper, and for her comments on an earlier draft.

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Notes on contributors

Benjamin Winokur

Benjamin Winokur received his PhD from York University in 2021. He will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University in the 2022-2023 academic year. His research interests span epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Currently, he is working on several projects about self-knowledge, first-person authority, and the social epistemology of the internet.