Benjamin Winokur

Why should people presume that you are correct when you ascribe beliefs, desires, or other attitudes to yourself? Put differently, why should people regard your ‘attitude avowals’ as ‘first-person authoritative’? One answer from the literature goes like this. First, you frequently bear agentive authority toward your attitudes insofar as only you can determine them by considering the reasons that bear on them. Second, in avowing your attitudes, you express your agentive authority to your hearers, thus making it clear that you alone have the cognitive power to conform your attitudes to your avowals. Your hearers, recognizing what you have expressed, now possess a uniquely strong justification for believing what you say. I argue, however, that expressions of agentive authority fall short of explaining first-person authority. What is needed is a supplemental explanation of the epistemic ground that hearers have for believing that an avower's agentive authority, when exercised and expressed, has also been successfully exercised. The positive task of this paper is to construe this reason as an epistemic entitlement. My efforts thus lead me to a hybridized explanation of first-person authority for attitude avowals where both expression and entitlement play epistemic roles.

There is a certain obscurantist craft by which a speaker’s words, deep or profound as they may seem, are so unclear that they frustrate the interpreter’s hermeneutical efforts. In the end, the interpreter may come to doubt her hermeneutical competencies while inflating her perception of the obscurantist’s epistemic status. The interpreter epistemically subordinates herself, in this way, to the obscurantist. In this paper, I elucidate the nature of this ‘subordinative obscurantism’ and examine its epistemically manipulative applications. I also discuss how subordinative obscurantist manipulation can be used in conjunction with another epistemic manipulation strategy rooted in the use of clear-seeming speech, thereby setting especially pernicious cognitive traps for victims. Finally, I discuss the epistemic status of the beliefs formed by victims of subordinative obscurantist manipulation.

Donald Davidson routinely argued that a certain principle of charity necessarily governs our interpretive activities. The principle implies that successful interpretation culminates in at least some understanding of one another, since successfully abiding by the principle not only culminates in correctly and justifiably attributing attitudes to one another but, also, in seeing those attitudes as constituting a subjectively rational point of view. And yet Davidson also argued that interpreters are not generally in the position of needing to interpret their own attitudes. Granting this, how might _self_-understanding generally arise, and what importance might self-understanding hold for us? I argue that non-interpretive self-understanding plays a key role in fortifying our first-person authority against interpersonal challenges, and that we might explain its origins by adapting certain theories from contemporary discussions of self-knowledge.

Many philosophers contend that we often possess “privileged” and “peculiar” self-knowledge of our mental states. Self-knowledge is privileged insofar as it is systematically more secure than the knowledge that others have of one’s mental states, and it is peculiar insofar as it is systematically obtained in a way that is only suited for delivering self-knowledge. Focusing on privileged and peculiar self-knowledge of propositional attitudes like beliefs, I offer an account of its instrumental value. On my account, privileged and peculiar self-knowledge of one’s propositional attitudes enables one to be a more efficient and reliable interpersonal reasoner.

It is often appropriate to defer to one another when we ascribe mental states to ourselves in the present tense, even when these self-ascriptions are evidentially unsupported. One way to explain this ‘first-person authority’ is in terms of what such self-ascriptions express. According to neo-expressivism, the relevant expressed feature is the very mental state semantically represented by one's self-ascription. Matthew Parrott worries that neo-expressivists lack a strong explanation of the harmonious match between the semantic content of first-person authoritative self-ascriptions and the mental states that one expresses in these self-ascriptive acts. In this paper, I pursue two explanations of why self-ascriptions can be presumed to match in this respect. One might be better called a ‘neo’-neo-expressivist explanation because it carves out a crucial explanatory role for self-knowledge, this being a role that is typically avoided in neo-expressivist explanations of first-person authority. The other is a defence and development of a more familiar neo-expressivist explanation of the desired match. Both explanations are presented as live options that are not necessarily in tension with each other.

David Hume was a Scottish-born philosopher who is regarded today as a titan of 18th century thought. Within one of his most contentious and celebrated philosophical works, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume sets out a skeptical theory about our knowledge of causal relations. In this piece, we will consider Hume’s distinction between two fundamental kinds of knowledge: knowledge of ideas and matters of fact. Using Hume’s theory of knowledge, we will explain Hume’s arguments for why causal relations cannot be known in either of these ways. We will then conclude by outlining Hume’s theory of the nature of belief and by explaining Hume’s position about the relation between belief, the limits of rationality, and the aspects of human life that we share with non-human animals.

There is an ongoing debate about whether any of us are “first-person authoritative” when ascribing mental states to ourselves, and, if so, whether this constitutes a genuine philosophical puzzle. This may come as a surprise, since philosophers have been trying to explain first-person authority for several decades. It would be surprising indeed if this explanatory project turned out to be entirely bankrupt. In this paper, after improving and elaborating on earlier specifications of the phenomenon, I argue that first-person authority is real and worthy of the philosophical attention it has received.

Why should you inquire for yourself as a novice in a domain of inquiry when, for most questions within most domains, there are established experts to consult instead? In the face of this question, recent discussants of “autonomous-yet-novice” inquiry have sought to defend its epistemic value for the inquirer. Here I argue that autonomous-yet-novice inquiry can also be epistemically beneficial for agents other than the inquirer herself. Paradigm cases are those in which one agent improves her zetetic skills or virtues through an encounter or interaction with a more skillful or virtuous autonomous-yet-novice inquirer.

Andreotta and Winokur provide an overview of “transparency-theoretic” approaches to self-knowledge, drawing largely on the formative influences of Gareth Evans, Richard Moran, and their critical interlocutors. Transparency-theoretic accounts of self-knowledge state that one must, or can, look outward at the world in order to know something about one’s mind (and perhaps other aspects of oneself). Some traditional objections and limitations for transparency-theoretic accounts of self-knowledge are identified. Subsequently a brief overview of the 13 chapters in this volume are provided, each of which scrutinize, clarify, or expand upon key aspects of transparent self-knowledge.

Transparency theorists about self-knowledge claim that one can know one’s beliefs by focusing on the world beyond one’s mind. While transparency accounts have gained quite a bit of ground in recent years, they have also met with a series of important objections. Some philosophers have addressed these objections by articulating a key role for memory in the epistemic and psychological relationships between outward attention and self-knowledge of belief. This chapter critically evaluates these appeals to memory and then supplies an alternative view about the epistemology of memory-based transparent self-knowledge. However, while the view describes our warrant for self-ascribing beliefs via outward attention, it does not offer any empirical assurances about the reliability of this procedure. Some remarks about directions for future inquiry are offered at the end of the chapter.

Self-ascriptions of one’s current mental states often enjoy a distinctively strong presumption of truth. Some philosophers claim that this ascriptive authority is _non-transferable_ in the sense that it cannot be matched or surpassed by anyone else. In this paper I examine this non-transferability claim in the light of potential extended mentality cases. These cases threaten to show that popular accounts of ascriptive authority do not vindicate its alleged non-transferability. However, I also argue that a less popular account of ascriptive authority can do so.

This volume presents new perspectives on transparency-theoretic approaches to self-knowledge. It addresses many under-explored dimensions of transparency theories and considers their wider implications for epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychology. It is natural to think that self-knowledge is gained through introspection, whereby we somehow peer inward and detect our mental states. However, so-called transparency theories emphasize our capacity to peer outward at the world, hence beyond our minds, in the pursuit of self-knowledge. For all their popularity in recent decades, transparency theories have also met with myriad challenges. The chapters in this volume seek to forge new ground in debates about the role of transparency in self-knowledge. Some chapters deepen our understanding of key themes at the heart of transparency theories, such as the ways in which transparent self-knowledge is properly 'first-personal' or 'non-alienated'. Other chapters extend transparency theory to different kinds of mental states and phenomena such as memory, actions, social groups, credences, projection, second-order sincerity, and Moore's Paradox. New Perspectives on Transparency and Self-Knowledge will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychology.

In the epistemology of self-knowledge, Inferentialism is the view that one’s current mental states are normally known to one through inferences from evidence. This view is often taken to conflict with widespread claims about normally-acquired self-knowledge, namely that it is privileged (essentially more secure than knowledge of others’ minds) and peculiar (obtained in a way that fundamentally differs from how others know your mind). In this paper I argue that Inferentialism can be reconceived so as to no longer conflict with these claims. On a positive framing, Inferentialism earns a seat at the table alongside other theories of self-knowledge that take its potentially privileged and peculiar status seriously. On a less positive framing, Inferentialism’s plausibility now hinges on the plausibility of viewing self-knowledge as at least peculiar, and perhaps as privileged as well.

Self-ascriptions of one's current mental states often seem authoritative. It is sometimes thought that the authority of such self-ascriptions is, in part, a matter of their indubitability. However, they do not seem to be universally indubitable. How, then, should claims about self-ascriptive indubitability be qualified? Here I consider several such qualifications from the literature. Finding many of them wanting, I nevertheless settle on multiple specifications of the thesis that self-ascriptions are authoritatively indubitable. Some of these specifications concern how other agents ought to treat one's self-ascriptions, while a final specification concerns how one is entitled to respond to others’ doubts about one's self-ascriptions. The result is a pluralistic view of self-ascriptive indubitability: different types of mental state self-ascriptions are indubitable in different ways, and for different people.

At least some of your beliefs are commitments. When you believe that P as a commitment, your stance on P is such that you believe it on the basis of your considered judgement. Sometimes, you also believe that you believe P. Such self‐beliefs can also be commissive in a sense, as when they are reflective endorsements of your lower‐order commissive beliefs. In this paper I argue that one's commissive self‐beliefs ontologically constitute one's lower‐order commissive beliefs because one's commissive self‐beliefs instantiate the same inferential dispositions that are constitutive of one's lower‐order commissive beliefs. Constitutive relations between commissive self‐beliefs and first‐order commissive beliefs are maximally epistemically secure because they do not result from any epistemic procedure by which one must try (and possibly fail) to detect one's first‐order commissive beliefs. This maximal epistemic security suffices to warrant one's commissive self‐beliefs, such that one possesses commissive self‐knowledge of an especially privileged sort.

Posts on social media platforms like Twitter are sometimes the products of deceptively designed bots. These bots can cause obvious epistemic problems, such as tricking human users into believing the contents of misleading posts. However, less-considered epistemic problems involve false bot judgements where a human user mistakes another human user’s post for a bot-post, or where a human user mistakenly believes that bots are the primary vehicles for tokening certain content on social media. This paper takes up three questions concerning false bot judgements: what exactly are their associated epistemic harms, just how harmful are they, and what should we do about them?

Many philosophers accept an ‘Authority Thesis’ according to which self-ascriptions of one’s current mental states ordinarily are or ought to be met with a distinctive presumption of truth. Recently, however, Wolfgang Barz (2018) has argued that there is no adequately specified Authority Thesis. This, he argues, is because available specifications are either (1) philosophically puzzling but implausible, or (2) plausible but philosophically unpuzzling. I argue that there are several plausible and philosophically puzzling specifications of the Authority Thesis.

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.

Donald Davidson famously offered an explanation of “first-person authority”. However, he described first-person authority differently across different works—sometimes referring to the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions of their current mental states, and sometimes referring to the direct self-knowledge that agents often have of said states. First, I show that a standard Davidsonian explanation of first-person authority can at best, and with some modification, explain the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions. I then develop two Davidsonian accounts of direct self-knowledge—one accounting for its function and another accounting for its source—pushing back in the process against deflationary and quietist rejoinders to these projects. Finally, I relate my Davidsonian accounts of direct self-knowledge back to the modified Davidsonian account of the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions.

This dissertation concerns two epistemologically puzzling phenomena. The first phenomenon is the authority that each of us has over our minds. Roughly, to have authority is to be owed a special sort of deference when self-ascribing your current mental states. The second phenomenon is our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. Roughly, self-knowledge is privileged insofar as one knows ones mental states in a way that is highly epistemically secure relative to other varieties of contingent empirical knowledge. Roughly, one has peculiar self-knowledge insofar as one acquires it in a way that is available only to oneself. In Chapter One I consider several more detailed specifications of the authority of self-ascriptions. Some specifications emphasize the relative indubitability of our self-ascriptions, while others focus on their presumptive truth. In Chapter Two I defend a Neo-Expressivist explanation of authority. According to Neo-Expressivism, self-ascriptions are authoritative insofar as they are acts that put ones mental states on display for others, whether or not these mental states are also known by the self-ascriber with privilege and peculiarity. However, I do not dispute that we often have privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. This raises the question of what such knowledge does explain, if not the authority of our self-ascriptions. In Chapter Three I examine several extant answers to this question, focusing on privileged and peculiar self-knowledge of the propositional attitudes. Each answer meets with objections. In Chapter Four I develop a Social Agentialist account of the explanatory indispensability of privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. I argue that such knowledge enables at least three forms of social-epistemic agency: interpersonal reasoning, complex group action, and linguistic interpretation. Next, I argue that, even though privileged and peculiar self-knowledge does not explain the authority of our self-ascriptions, it is importantly related to our authority. In Chapter Five I consider possible sources of our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge, focusing again on propositional-attitudinal self-knowledge. I eventually defend a Constitutivist view. This is the view that, for agents who meet certain background conditions, self-knowledge is privileged and peculiar because it is metaphysically built into the attitudes self-known.

A growing cohort of philosophers argue that inference, understood as an agent-level psychological process or event, is subject to a “Taking Condition.” The Taking Condition states, roughly, that drawing an inference requires one to take one’s premise(s) to epistemically support one’s conclusion, where “takings” are some sort of higher-order attitude, thought, intuition, or act. My question is not about the nature of takings, but about their contents. I examine the prospects for “minimal” and “robust” views of the contents of takings. On the minimal view, taking one’s premise(s) to support one’s conclusion only requires focusing on propositional contents and putative epistemic support relations between them. On the robust view, taking one’s premise(s) to support one’s conclusion also requires knowledge (or being in a position to have knowledge) of the attitudes one holds toward those contents. I argue that arguments for the Taking Condition do not entail or sufficiently motivate the robust view. Accordingly, contra several philosophers, the Taking Condition does not illuminate a deep relationship between inference and self-knowledge.

Alex Byrne (2005; 2011a; 2011b; 2018) has argued that we can gain self-knowledge of our current mental states through the use of a transparency method. A transparency method provides an extrospective rather than introspective route to self-knowledge. For example, one comes to know whether one believes P not by thinking about oneself but by considering the world-directed question of whether P is true. According to Byrne, this psychological process consists in drawing inferences from world-directed propositions to mind-directed conclusions. In this article, I consider whether this ‘Inferential Transparency Method’ can provide us with the self-knowledge that some philosophers have thought we require in order to “critically reason” (Burge 1996), and I conclude that it cannot provide such self-knowledge. The force of this objection depends on how much stock we should place in our status as critical reasoners. However, I conclude by suggesting a more general worry for Byrne’s account.

Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his argument for the existence of indispensable epistemic facts. I conclude, therefore, that Cuneo’s argument fails to justify moral realism.