Benjamin Winokur

This book examines whether human beings should reflect on, and hence come to know and understand, their own commitments—those beliefs, desires, and intentions that one holds and defends on the basis of one's judgments about the true and the good. It begins by distinguishing committed attitudes from non- committed attitudes and addressing metaphysical concerns about their distinctive features, paving the way for an in- depth inquiry into why reflection on the former might matter. The author critiques prevailing theories that tie reflection on one’s commitments to phenomena such as rationality, inferential cognition, intentional action, self-regulation, and more. Thereafter, the book argues that reflective commitment matters for safeguarding oneself against manipulation, enabling interpersonal reasoning, and maintaining coherent agency.

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.

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.