Hongwoo Kwon

There are close parallels between Frank Jackson's case of black-and-white Mary and David Lewis's case of the two omniscient gods. This essay develops and defends what may be called “the ability hypothesis” about the knowledge that the gods lack, by adapting Lewis's ability hypothesis about the knowledge that Mary acquires. What the gods might lack despite their propositional omniscience is not any distinctive kind of information, but certain abilities of introspection. The motivating idea is that knowledge one acquires by exercising introspective abilities cannot fail to be knowledge about oneself or indexical knowledge. So in order to envisage the gods' epistemic situation coherently, we need to assume that they lack those introspective abilities. But once we recognize that, it turns out that positing a special kind of information is a gratuitous addition. The two gods' ignorance simply consists in their lack of introspective abilities.

In this paper, I develop and defend a novel account of Moore’s paradox, which locates its source in self-reference. The main insight comes from Gareth Evans’s discussion of Transparency, which says that a normal person takes p to be directly relevant to the truth of “I believe that p.” It has been noticed by many philosophers that Moore’s paradox is closely related to Evans’s Transparency. However, Evans’s claim that Transparency is constitutively related to self-reference has received relatively little attention from those philosophers. I claim that once we get the two links straight and join them, a novel and plausible account of Moore’s paradox emerges. According to this account, the absurdity involved in Moore’s paradox is traceable to a constitutive relation between Transparency and self-reference. Asserting “p but I do not believe that p” sounds absurd, because the use of “I” indicates that the subject thinks of the individual referred to as herself, while her failing to conform to Transparency implies the opposite.