•  602
    Problems of sincerity
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (3). 2005.
    It is undeniable that the assumption of sincerity is important to assertion, and that assertion is central to the transmission of beliefs through human testimony. Discussions of testimony, however, often assume that the epistemic importance of sincerity to testimony is that of a (fallible) guarantee of access to the actual beliefs of the speaker. Other things being equal, we would do as well or better if we had some kind of unmediated access to the beliefs of the other person, without the risks …Read more
  •  430
    Getting told and being believed
    Philosophers' Imprint 5 1-29. 2005.
    The paper argues for the centrality of believing the speaker (as distinct from believing the statement) in the epistemology of testimony, and develops a line of thought from Angus Ross which claims that in telling someone something, the kind of reason for belief that a speaker presents is of an essentially different kind from ordinary evidence. Investigating the nature of the audience's dependence on the speaker's free assurance leads to a discussion of Grice's formulation of non-natural meaning…Read more
  •  385
    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge
    Princeton University Press. 2001.
    Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard …Read more
  •  317
    Metaphor
    In Bob Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell. pp. 248-267. 1997.
    Metaphor enters contemporary philosophical discussion from a variety of directions. Aside from its obvious importance in poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, it also figures in such fields as philosophy of mind (e.g., the question of the metaphorical status of ordinary mental concepts), philosophy of science (e.g, the comparison of metaphors and explanatory models), in epistemology (e.g., analogical reasoning), and in cognitive studies (in, e.g., the theory of concept-formation). This article will…Read more
  •  226
    Self-knowledge: Discovery, resolution, and undoing
    European Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 141-61. 1997.
    remarks some lessons about self-knowledge (and some other self-relations) as well as use them to throw some light on what might seem to be a fairly distant area of philosophy, namely, Sartre's view of the person as of a divided nature, divided between what he calls the self-as-facticity and the self-as-transcendence. I hope it will become clear that there is not just perversity on my part in bringing together Wittgenstein and the last great Cartesian. One specific connection that will occupy me …Read more
  •  217
    I—Richard Moran: Testimony, Illocution and the Second Person
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1): 115-135. 2013.
    The notion of ‘bipolar’ or ‘second‐personal’ normativity is often illustrated by such situations as that of one person addressing a complaint to another, or asserting some right, or claiming some authority. This paper argues that the presence of speech acts of various kinds in the development of the idea of the ‘second‐personal’ is not accidental. Through development of a notion of ‘illocutionary authority’ I seek to show a role for the ‘second‐personal’ in ordinary testimony, despite Darwall's …Read more
  •  205
    Responses to O'Brien and Shoemaker
    European Journal of Philosophy 11 (3): 402-19. 2003.
  •  187
    Précis of authority and estrangement: An essay on self-knowledge (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2). 2004.
    Authority and Estrangement addresses a set of questions about self-knowledge and seeks to answer them in the context of the broader differences between the first-person and third-person perspectives on oneself. Attention to these broader differences takes the discussion from epistemology to moral psychology, and seeks to relate some of the issues of contemporary philosophy of mind to the concerns with self-consciousness in post-Kantian thought.
  •  158
    The authority of self-consciousness
    Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 174-200. 1999.
    central to virtually all contemporary thinking on self-consciousness and first-person authority. And a good measure of its importance has been not only as an evolving philosophical account of these phenomena, but also as a model of an account that places the capacity for specifically first-person awareness of one's mental states at the center of what it is to be a subject of mental states in the first place. For not every philosophical account of introspection will take its specifically first-pe…Read more
  •  132
    Anscombe on expression of intention
    In Constantine Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
    Of course in every act of this kind, there remains the possibility of putting this act into question – insofar as it refers to more distant, more essential ends.... For example the sentence which I write is the meaning of the letters I trace, but the whole work I wish to produce is the meaning of the sentence. And this work is a possibility in connection with which I can feel anguish; it is truly my possibility...tomorrow in relation to it my freedom can exercise its nihilating power
  •  130
    Impersonality, Character, and Moral Expressivism
    Journal of Philosophy 90 (11): 578-595. 1993.
  •  81
    Replies to Heal, Reginster, Wilson, and Lear (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2). 2004.
    I’m very grateful for the attention given to my book by all the commentators, and their various and thoughtful responses have helped me in many ways. Several related issues are raised by the comments of Heal and Reginster, and to avoid repetition I will discuss them together here. Both of them raise questions about the scope and authority of rationality over a person’s beliefs and other attitudes, and ask what is supposed to be wrong with adopting what I describe as a spectator’s point of view o…Read more
  •  73
    In an 1896 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, the first and primary confidante for his fledgling ideas, the young Sigmund Freud wrote: “I see that you are using the circuitous route of medicine to attain your first ideal, the physiological understanding of man, while I secretly nurse the hope of arriving by the same route at my own original objective, philosophy. For that was my original ambition, before I knew what I was intended to do in the world.”1 When philosophy is mentioned in his later, published…Read more
  •  71
    Anscombe on ‘Practical Knowledge’
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55 43-68. 2004.
    Among the legacies of Elizabeth Anscombe's 1957 monograph Intention are the introduction of the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ into contemporary philosophical discussion of action, and her claim, pursued throughout the book, that an agent's knowledge of what he is doing is characteristically not based on observation. Each idea by itself has its own obscurities, of course, but my focus here will be on the relation between the two ideas, how it is that the discussion of action may lead us to spea…Read more
  •  43
    The Exchange of Words is a philosophical exploration of human testimony, specifically as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. This account weaves together themes from philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this basic human phenomenon.
  •  40
    Replies to Heal, Reginster, Wilson, and Lear
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2): 455-472. 2004.
    I’m very grateful for the attention given to my book by all the commentators, and their various and thoughtful responses have helped me in many ways. Several related issues are raised by the comments of Heal and Reginster, and to avoid repetition I will discuss them together here. Both of them raise questions about the scope and authority of rationality over a person’s beliefs and other attitudes, and ask what is supposed to be wrong with adopting what I describe as a spectator’s point of view o…Read more
  •  28
    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge
    Princeton University Press. 2001.
    Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard …Read more
  •  16
    The Nature of Mental Things
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (4): 905-912. 1994.
  •  10
    The Authority of Self-Consciousness
    Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 179-200. 1999.
  •  6
    Anscombe on expression of intention : an exegesis
    In Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby & Frederick Stoutland (eds.), Essays on Anscombe's Intention, Harvard University Press. 2011.
  •  1
    The Philosophy of Sydney Shoemaker (edited book)
    University of Arkansas Press. 2000.
    Special volume of Philosophical Topics in honor of Sydney Shoemaker.