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

Our fluency with the everyday language of mental states belies an extraordinary theoretical complexity. Our use of the term ‘belief’ is a clear example of this fact. Though an essential bit of language for navigating both our interpersonal relations and our relation to our own selves, most people would likely be at a loss to say just what we mean when we use this term. Or, if they were able to specify a set of rules for its use, it is unclear that they would be widely shared. To be sure, philosophers have not fared much better than everyday folk in this respect.

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.