My dissertation, Transparency and the Normativity of Belief, examined transparent self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is ‘transparent’ when one can know one’s own mental state by attending not to the mental state itself, but to the world ‘outside’ of one’s mind. For example, if I want to know whether or not I believe that it is raining, I do not examine anything regarding my own mind. Rather, it seems that I need only consider some pertinent facts about the world, namely, whether it is currently raining. From this I can knowledgeably self-ascribe the relevant belief. However, the fact that this procedure produces self-knowledge at all is something of a puzzle since the evidence that typically justifies a claim about non-mental facts is quite distinct from the evidence that justifies a claim about one’s beliefs. I argue that the solution to this puzzle is found in our proficiency with a truth-normed concept of belief. Given that our concept of belief is such that a belief in p is appropriate only if p is true, a self-ascription of the belief that p can be substituted for an assessment of the way one takes the world to be. I argue that the substitution of belief-reports (i.e., self-ascriptions of belief) for fact-reports is a practice that we acquired prior to gaining any proficiency with the concept of belief. However, once the requisite proficiency is established, this practice constitutes a genuine means for attaining self-knowledge. For, if the subject is proficient with a truth-normed concept of belief and has arrived at the self-ascription from having turned his or her attention to the relevant state of affairs, the self-ascription will cohere with a number of further judgments and beliefs held by the subject. Transparent self-knowledge is thus explained not in terms of some unique introspective faculty, nor by means of a particularly strong inference, but by the practices we have developed relative to a truth-normed concept of belief.

The alternative explanations of transparency do not provide an adequate explanation of the phenomenon. The so-called ‘epistemic accounts’ given by Alex Byrne and Jordi Fernández argue that transparency can be explained by reference to standard forms of justification for the self-ascription of the first-order state. However, both views struggle to provide a sufficiently strong epistemic explanation of a basing relationship that could support the relevant self-ascription. Alternatively, Richard Moran’s ‘deliberative account’ has trouble explaining how the relevant self-ascriptions in cases of transparency amount to knowledge. My account moves us beyond previous attempts to understand transparency which have, in general, come up short. What is more, my account explains several significant features of transparent self-knowledge. It demonstrates that transparent self-knowledge is based on neither inference nor introspection, and yet is both authoritative and distinctly first-personal (i.e., the procedure works only in one’s own case).