Conceptualizing Transparent Self-Knowledge

In this paper, I develop a normativist account of transparent self-knowledge. I argue that our ability to self-ascribe beliefs via transparency derives from our proficiency with a truth-normed concept of belief. Insofar as our concept of belief is such that a belief in p is appropriate only if p is true, it follows that 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 psychological transition at play in cases of transparency is a result of a set of practices surrounding this concept. This account is well-positioned to explain how transparent self-knowledge is privileged (i.e., more likely to amount to knowledge than our beliefs about, say, objects or other minds), peculiar (i.e., this method for self-knowledge is not a viable means for others to come to know our mental states), and non-inferential.

Transparency Over-Extended

In this paper, forthcoming in an Oxford anthology, Professor Annalisa Coliva and I argue that epistemic transparency accounts of the sort put forward by Alex Byrne (2018) and Jordi Fernández (2013) cannot offer a sufficient explanation of the first-personal knowledge we have of our own mental states. We argue against the plausibility of their strategy by noticing that these accounts either (i) fail to present an epistemic account; (ii) assume the very knowledge they are designed to explain - i.e. knowledge of one's first-order mental states; or, (iii) endorse a dubious inferentialist story of how we move from being in a given first-order mental state to its knowledgeable self-ascription We close by highlighting the difficulties presenting these accounts as explanatory for states other than belief and move to promote a pluralist approach to the study of self-knowledge.

Transparency and Self-Knowledge: A Review

The assumption guiding current philosophical research into self-knowledge is that individuals enjoy a ‘first-personal’ knowledge of their own mental states. Alex Byrne’s book, Transparency and Self-Knowledge is a sustained attempt to explain self-knowledge of this first-personal sort. More specifically, Byrne develops a transparency model of self-knowledge wherein one knows one’s own mental states by attending, not to these mental states themselves, but to the world ‘outside’ of one’s mind. Quite boldly, Byrne attempts to explain the entirety of our self-knowledge in this way. In this review, published in Mind, Annalisa Coliva and I assess Byrne’s monist project and offer a few challenges to this impressive, though likely problematic, theory of self-knowledge.

Toward a Pluralist Account of Belief

Theorists across disciplines use the term ‘belief’ in distinct and often contradictory ways. Where philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists often take this term to pick out a mental state defined by its functional role relative to our mental architecture, epistemologists are often concerned with belief as a form of rational commitment. How we should understand these divergent concepts, both in themselves and in their interrelation, remains unclear.

Delivered at the 2023 APA Pacific Division meeting, this paper argues for three interrelated theses: first, I argue that there is a number of concepts of belief on the market, all of which are, prima facie, viable. Second, I argue that there is good reason to maintain that the relations that bind this collection of concepts together are what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls relations of family resemblance. Finally, suggest that our aim should not be to identify the concept of belief but to distinguish (i) which concept of belief we are working with in any given project and (ii) why this concept is the right tool for the job.

The Problems and Promise of an Agentialist Account of Transparency

Transparency accounts of self-knowledge hold that the knowledge we have of some of our own mental states is attained not by looking ‘inward’ to the mental state itself, but by looking ‘outward’ to some relevant state of affairs in the world. Delivered at the 2022 APA Pacific Division meeting, this paper argues that the transparency of self-knowledge is a result of the fact that it is incumbent upon a rational agent to calibrate what one believes with what is true and works to address two critiques of this view. I argue that a proper response to these challenges will require the Agentialist to adopt a Constitutivist stance regarding self-knowledge.