Self-Knowledge as Knowledge? - Jesús Vega-Encabo - Dialnet

teorema Vol. XXX/3, 2011, pp. 35-49 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2011) 30:3; pp. 35-49]

Self-Knowledge as Knowledge?

Jesús Vega-Encabo

I. HANK’S CASE

At the end of his book Expression and the Inner, David H. Finkelstein considers whether first-person self-ascriptions are manifestations of knowledge. He asks us to imagine how three different philosophers would describe the following situation: Hank is someone who has learned by testimony some facts about Green’s disease (that people who have a sharp pain in the back of their knee are more likely than average people to get Green’s disease). Hank feels such a pain at a moment thereafter. So he draws the conclusion that he is more likely than the average person to get Green’s disease [Finkelstein (2002), pp. 148-149]. In principle, if Hank is justified in believing the con-clusion of the inference he makes, he should also be justified in holding the premises. Besides, insofar as he can be said to know the premises of the fol-lowing argument, he can also be said to know the conclusion:

1. Someone that has a sharp pain in the back of the knee is more likely

to get Green’s disease 2. I feel a sharp pain in the back of the knee 3. I am more likely to get Green’s disease

As it stands, Hank’s case may suggest that knowledge of the first prem-

ise is of a piece with knowledge of the second premise, that is, that the self-knowledge exhibited in his being aware of his pain and the knowledge acquired by other means (perceptual, testimonial, or inferential) are both cognitive achievements. Finkelstein challenges this supposed epistemic continuity be-tween the premises. Moreover, he claims that epistemological vocabulary is optional in describing Hank’s self-ascription (as expressed by 2). But this does not put into question the fact that Hank is entitled to the conclusion of his obvious inference.

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Finkelstein then proposes three different philosophical descriptions of Hank’s case:

PH1. It is sheer nonsense to describe Hank’s self-ascriptions in epistemic terms. Even if he is really in pain and is aware of being in pain, we can-not naturally say of him that he knows or does not know that he is in pain, whereas it is natural to say of him that he knows by testimony what the first premise asserts. Epistemic talk is, in the case of authorita-tive self-ascriptions, “unnatural and misleading and, at worst, sheer nonsense” [Finkelstein (2003), p. 151].

PH2. It makes sense to describe Hank in epistemic terms; but his self-ascription does not represent knowledge because he is not epistemically justified. This second philosopher claims that knowledge requires epis-temic justification and, given that there is no epistemic basis on which his self-ascription is made, he does not know that he is in pain (even if he is entitled to draw the conclusion of the obvious inference).

PH3. It makes sense to describe Hank self-ascriptions in epistemic terms. Epistemic vocabulary can be appropriately applied to describe Hank’s relation to the propositions expressed by premises 1 and 2 in the argument. There is a sense in which it can be said of Hank that he really knows that he is in pain. First-person self-ascriptions represent a kind of knowledge that does not require epistemic justification. Though other types of knowledge require justification, they are not of a piece with self-knowledge. There is no epistemic continuity between both premises, because self-knowledge is not like knowing by perceptual, testimonial, or inferential means.

Finkelstein adds the following diagnosis: (i) PH1, PH2, and PH3 do not

disagree “about anything of genuine philosophical import”. (ii) “[A]ll three of them might agree with everything I’ve said in this book” [Finkelstein (2003), p. 152]. On the contrary, I will argue firstly that these three philoso-phers disagree philosophically about whether it is possible to offer a substan-tive epistemology for self-knowledge and whether this epistemology should be unified under just one notion of knowledge. And secondly I will suggest that it is not optional for Finkelstein’s sophisticated expressivism to use epis-temic vocabulary in order to describe first-person self-ascriptions. The next section will be devoted to characterizing the phenomenon of first-person au-thority and Finkelstein’s expressivist account. In section 3, I will argue that insofar as one accepts that avowals have an assertoric dimension, it is plausi-ble to claim that self-ascriptions could represent self-knowledge. Section 4 will focus on why Finkelstein’s account is committed to accepting that self-

Self-Knowledge as Knowledge? 37

ascriptions are manifestations of self-knowledge, even if one is not disposed to give an epistemic account of the phenomenon of first-person authority. In any case, PH1, PH2, and PH3 disagree on matters of epistemological import, and PH3 is more congenial to the kind of sophisticated expressivism Finkel-stein is attempting to argue for.

II. FIRST-PERSON AUTHORITY AND EXPRESSIVISM

Contrast the two following sets of statements:

(1) I am terribly bored.

My right leg hurts a lot. I believe that scientists are getting better knowledge of the structure of matter. I am afraid of becoming depressed.

(2) The birds are eating all the fruits in the garden.

My table is always full of papers and books. I am 5 feet tall.

The kind of authority exhibited by the first set of sentences cannot be assimi-lated to the kind of authority I can claim to have regarding sentences in (2).

In fact, we talk about authority in many different ways. Someone can be an authority on a certain subject matter, because she is a trustworthy witness or has acquired an expertise through study and dedication. But we also talk of “institutional” authority—in cases where someone is entitled to establish cer-tain facts or constraints that others would recognize as legitimate, cases, for instance, where someone declares that X and Y are married or that this area is now protected from fishing. It could be claimed that one of the purposes of Finkelstein’s book is to convince us that these two ways of understanding “authority” are not good models to account for the authority of the kind of mental self-ascriptions that figure in (1). If there is any “authority” in first-person self-ascriptions [Finkelstein (2003), p. 102], it cannot be assimilated either to the authority of an expert (that inspires a detectivist model of first-person authority) or to the authority of an institutional entity or a legal repre-sentative (that gives support to a constitutivist model). On the one hand, de-tectivism wrongly assimilates mental state avowals to the description of physical objects and assumes a detached view of psychological conditions


(that will be detected by an introspective mechanism) in a way that loses sight of the characteristic self-intimacy of genuine first-person avowals. On the other hand, constitutivists misrepresent our responsibility for those mental states we authoritatively ascribe to ourselves. It is difficult to see how self-ascriptions such as “My right leg hurts a lot” could involve any active consti-tutive moment.

So which is the best characterization of the phenomenon of first-person authority? Three features are essential to it:

a) Privilege: I have the last word regarding my psychological condition. b) Groundlessness: I do not need to rely on any behavioral evidence or

evidence of any other kind to be entitled to my self-ascriptions. This suggests that first-person self-ascriptions are not assessable in ordi-nary terms: we don’t raise doubts about their veracity, and we don’t ask for—or provide evidence of– their truth [Bar-On (2004)].

c) Authority: my self-ascriptions are prima facie treated as reliably true;

there is a presumption of truth about them; they come, in a sense, with a certain guarantee of their truth [Wright (1998), Bilgrami, (2006)].

In order to account for these three features of first-person self-

ascriptions, Finkelstein argues for a sort of sophisticated expressivism that includes the following four theses:

1. First-person self-ascriptions are not, typically, reports; they do not

provide information about a speaker’s psychological condition that she has learned [Finkelstein (2003), pp. 96-97; 101].

2. First-person self-ascriptions are primarily expressions of that which

they are ascriptions of [Finkelstein (2003), p. 93; 101]. 3. First-person self-ascriptions are not mere expressions; they also can

be assertions. They have an assertoric dimension [Finkelstein (2003), p. 97].

4. First-person self-ascriptions are not just ascriptions; they are interpre-

tations that contextualize what they ascribe [Finkelstein (2003), pp. 111; 113].

Theses 1 and 2 constitute the core of a simple expressivism [Bar-On (2004)] that is rejected by Finkelstein in the book, both as a reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and as a tenable philosophical position. So thesis 3 and 4 are es-


sential to move towards a sophisticated expressivism that does not fall prey to traditional objections.

How does expressivism account for first-person authority? Here is the start of Finkelstein’s proposal:

(i) Being expressions, self-ascriptions satisfy the first feature of first-person authority –privilege- because I am in a unique position to express my mind. I am the best person to ask in order to know my psychological condition for the same reason that it is better to look at my face; my mental self-ascriptions express mental states, just as smiles or grimaces do.

(ii) We are ordinarily entitled to our self-ascriptions even if we do not

have evidence that supports an avowal, for just the same reason that smiles or grimaces do not require evidence [Finkelstein (2003), p. 101]. If they were reports, my entitlement to avow them would have to be grounded on evidence. But they are not; they don’t play an in-formative role based on a previous learning of facts by the speaker.

A conception of first-person authority reduced to these two factors re-

mains confined within the limits of traditional expressivism, making too much of the analogy between self-ascriptions and smiles or facial expres-sions. Such an expressivism amounts to a denial of the very phenomenon of first-person authority. Being merely expressions, self-ascriptions cannot be said to be true of the self-ascriber. So there must be a sense in which self-ascriptions are not like smiles and facial expression. Finkelstein acknowledges this and adds two more factors to his expressivist account.

(iii) Self-ascriptions perform two functions: they express the mental condition of the psychological subject, and they say something true about it [Finkelstein (2003), p. 101].

(iv) Self-ascriptions are not mere ascriptions. They are not just answering

to the subject’s psychological condition; they are putting it in context. They act as glosses that help to contextualize the psychological item, in such a way that it can be said that the psychological item and the self-ascription “make sense together” [Finkelstein (2003), p. 109] or form a “unit of intelligibility” [Finkelstein (2003), p. 108].

It is essential to this account that the relation between a psychological

condition (like my anger) and a self-ascription cannot be viewed in terms of the self-ascription’s registering the independent psychological condition that at the same time it manifests or expresses. But what about the authority of


our first-person self-ascriptions? There is a temptation to disregard the pre-sumption of truth as a feature that has to be accounted for, given the dangers we face when we talk of getting the truth about the subject’s psychological conditions: this could lead us back to detectivism. But there is another option: insofar as self-ascriptions can be true or false, the act of expressing a psycho-logical condition through them guarantees that it is true of the self-ascriber that she has the ascribed mental state the self-ascription has helped to contextualize.

In the next sections, I will argue that if Finkelstein’s sophisticated ex-pressivism is committed to iii) and iv), then it is not compatible with the kind of neutrality he is trying to defend with respect to the descriptions of Hank’s case provided by PH1, PH2, and PH3. But if it rests just on i) and ii), it is not different from traditional expressivist views and is subject to the same battery of objections.

III. SELF-ASCRIPTIONS AND ASSERTION

Finkelstein’s expressivism allows for self-ascriptions to function as as-sertions. In this sense, self-ascriptions are not like smiles; they are truth-evaluable and have an assertoric dimension. In fact, it would be strange to talk about authority in the case of first-person self-ascriptions if they lacked truth-values. In other words, without this move, Finkelstein’s expressivism would be subject to traditional criticisms.

But how should we understand this assertoric dimension of self-ascriptions? Without committing myself to a particular theory of assertion, I dare to claim that at least the following two features are proper to asserting:

i) Characteristically, assertions are moves in an epistemic game. An assertoric utterance represents a knowledge claim by the utterer. Under certain conditions, an assertoric utterance entitles the audience to ascribe to the utterer the possible knowledge of the proposition asserted.

ii) Ordinarily, assertions are backed by judgments or doxastic condi-

tions of the asserter and give voice to a judgment or a doxastic con-dition. For instance, my assertion that the swimming pool is not yet full gives voice to my belief, or articulates my judgment, about the swimming pool. Likewise, when I assert “I am angry”, I am mani-festing a doxastic condition about me and my anger.

There are two different strands in this advance over simple expressivism.

First of all, expressivists need to accommodate the so-called “Geach’s point”. A series of linguistic phenomena suggests that self-ascriptions have truth-


evaluable content: consider for instance transformations of tense (“I am an-gry”, “I will be angry”); embedding in certain contexts (“he knows that I am angry”); logical phenomena like quantification (“I am angry”, “Someone is angry”), the introduction of negation or their inclusion as antecedents in a conditional. All these features serve to motivate the thesis that self-ascriptions contribute semantically to the truth-conditions of the statements they are embedded in. As Hank’s case shows, self-ascriptions also enter logi-cal inferences in an unproblematic way. No doubt: they are treated as truth-apt and assessable as true or false.

But this fact, by itself, does not say much about whether the most typical use of self-ascriptions is assertoric. As Wright has shown [Wright (1998), p. 36], self-ascriptions could be viewed more like performative utterances (where having truth-evaluable content and assertoric use come apart). Sentences like “I am angry” could be truth-evaluable, but not used as assertions. Expressivists could claim that their use is primarily expressive. Presence of truth-evaluable content does not entail use with assertoric force; furthermore, it is the fact of being truth-apt sentences that provokes the illusion that they have this possible assertoric use (according to more traditional sorts of expressivism).

So Finkelstein needs to say more about the assertoric dimension of our self-ascriptions, because his point is that they are not only sentences with truth-evaluable content. He explicitly claims that they are expressions and assertions. Moreover, it is by asserting that I am angry with my brother that I express my anger. One possible way of understanding this is by identifying a double illocutionary force in our self-ascriptive utterances. On the one hand, self-ascriptions are expressions; they give voice to the self-ascribed mental condition itself. On the other hand, self-ascriptions are assertions; they give voice to a doxastic condition on the part of the self-ascriber. The only caution that an expressivist must have is that of not accounting for the authority of avowals in terms of the epistemic basis the subject recognizes for the doxastic condition that her self-ascriptions articulate.

If this is true, then our self-ascriptions can be made with an informative intention in view and constitute a report in its more ordinary sense.2 This re-port expresses the first-order mental condition of the self-ascriber, but at the same time it involves “a judgment about one’s state of mind and the special responsibilities of asserting that judgment” [Moran (2001), p. 104]. The kind of sophisticated expressivism that Finkelstein is trying to defend cannot deny this possibility without falling back to more simple versions of expressivism. Otherwise, self-ascriptions would become mere expressions.

Nonetheless, Finkelstein is far from being clear about whether self-ascriptions could involve such judgments. Remember his main thesis: it is by asserting that I am angry with my brother that I express my anger. When he discusses McDowell’s reading of some paragraphs in the Philosophical In-vestigations, he notes that the relation between a pain and the subject’s self-


ascriptions is neither a matter of epistemic justification nor a matter of mere causation. Then he adds: “When someone complains of a splitting headache, she does not judge on this or that basis that she is in pain. Rather, she ex-presses her pain”. And in footnote he adds: “She does not judge at all” [Fin-kelstein (2003), p. 135]. For sure, our avowals are not preceded by, and based on, acts of judging. McDowell agrees on that. This is not the point. In avow-als, are we “expressing an epistemically justified belief”? [Finkelstein (2003), p. 135]. Finkelstein rejects the idea that the avowals express epistemically justi-fied beliefs and that someone judges or believes that she is in pain “on this or that basis”. By itself, this does not mean that avowals cannot be at the same time an expression of the second-order belief that one is in a certain psychological condition. The most plausible claim seems to be that the judgment is made on no basis whatsoever, but that the self-ascription as such involves a belief that is given expression in the very act of ascribing to oneself a certain mental condi-tion. That is why self-ascriptions could be used assertorically.3

But if this is so, then it is plausible to claim that self-ascriptions repre-sent self-knowledge. One of the basic functions of assertions is to transmit possible knowledge. So if self-ascriptions are also assertions, nothing is more natural than to consider them as manifestations of knowledge. Simple expres-sivism rejects the idea that self-ascriptions manifest self-knowledge. Sophis-ticated expressivism seems to be committed to accepting that self-ascriptions manifest self-knowledge. This is contrary to what PH1 is claiming. PH1, who holds that epistemic vocabulary is nonsense in characterizing avowals, will have a hard time articulating the assertoric dimension of self-ascriptive utter-ances. PH2, on his part, recognizes that self-ascriptions are not justified, be-cause they are not ordinarily controlled by evidence. So if we applied epistemic vocabulary, we should say that Hank does not know. PH3 articu-lates a position in which self-ascriptions are manifestations of knowledge, even if a sui generis sort of knowledge, not governed by the very same condi-tions as ordinary knowledge. In principle, they exhibit a clear philosophical disagreement about the legitimacy of epistemic vocabulary.

IV SELF-KNOWLEDGE

In the previous section, I implicitly made use of an important distinc-tion. It is not contradictory to reject epistemic accounts of first-person author-ity and at the same time accept that self-ascriptions and avowals do really articulate self-knowledge. Finkelstein’s account of first-person authority de-nies that this authority derives from the working of an epistemic method of detection of the subject’s mental states. Nonetheless, by itself, this does not say anything about whether self-ascriptions can be coherently viewed as ma-


nifestations of self-knowledge. As I have suggested, this seems a matter of disagreement between our three philosophers.

There is certainly a way of posing the problem of self-knowledge that Finkelstein would not be disposed to accept: how do our second-order beliefs about our first-order mental states (about our psychological conditions) amount to knowledge? This formulation (which wouldn’t make sense either for PH1, and would raise many doubts for PH2 and PH3) seems to assume some controversial philosophical theses about the independent nature of men-tal states and the descriptive function of our self-ascriptions. Nevertheless, it coheres well with our prior characterization of authority as a sort of presump-tion of truth: avowals represent privileged self-knowledge in a way that other expressions like smiles or grimaces could not do, because presumably, when-ever I have a belief about my mental state, it is true that I am in such a men-tal condition. This is the kind of authority that justifies, in principle, our talk of self-knowledge regarding our mental conditions.

Or maybe not. Finkelstein could hold on to the coherence between PH1, PH2, and PH3 by arguing that their descriptions are just façons de parler: the crucial point is that for all of them Hank’s entitlement to his self-ascription is not based on a cognitive achievement.4 And he adds: “Do I mean to deny that the person who says, ’I want you to stop humming that irritating song,’ knows that she wants the humming to stop? No; I don’t mean to deny this. But if we do choose [my italics] to speak of knowledge in such a case, it’s knowledge of a rather special sort” [Finkelstein (2003), p. 125, ft. 15]. Re-member, first-person authority cannot be appropriately regarded as an epis-temic matter; and it is even misleading to insist on the idea that the relation we bear to our mental condition in a first-person way is epistemically asym-metrical with respect to the relation we have to the mental conditions of oth-ers or even to our mental states and processes when we “view” them from a third-personal perspective. There is here no cognitive achievement involved.

In fact, Finkelstein associates first-person authority with a feature that we could label as expressiveness. This feature can be characterized in two ways: (a) as a capacity to express one’s own state of mind simply by self-ascribing it, and (b) as a condition under which the awareness of the mental state exhibited by a self-ascriber does not involve the raising of any epistemic question [Finkelstein (2003), p. 125] about which mental state she is ascrib-ing to herself. It is obvious that we can acquire knowledge about our psycho-logical conditions in many different ways and that the propositions that figure in our self-ascriptions could nevertheless be the same. Nothing prevents our acquiring this knowledge through the use of an introspective mechanism, or our relying on the remarks provided by an analyst, or our trusting the testi-mony of others about our own expressive behavior, etc. In such cases, we are in a position to self-ascribe a certain proposition and we can be described as knowing that proposition to the extent that the judgment expressed by the


self-ascription is true and complies with certain epistemic conditions. How-ever, here we are not speaking with first-person authority; our self-ascriptions are not privileged, groundless, and authoritative. They lack expressiveness because they are not the manifestation of the ability to express a mental state by self-ascribing it [Finkelstein (2003), p. 120]. As I said before, Finkelstein is trying to hold that self-ascriptions do not involve any cognitive achieve-ment. But it is one thing to argue that the features of privilege, groundless-ness and authority of certain self-ascriptions shouldn’t be explained away in epistemic terms, that is, as a consequence of the subject’s holding well-warranted true judgments that are given voice through self-ascription, and it’s another thing to claim that it is optional to talk about ourselves as having knowledge of our mental condition once expressiveness endows us with first-person authority.

But how can I know, when self-ascribing a certain condition, that I am exercising such a capacity for expressiveness? How can the subject know that her self-ascription is really an expression of her mental condition and not merely something she knows on the basis of evidence? In the rest of this sec-tion, I will consider possible cases of gaining and losing expressiveness. I will try to show how both kinds of cases involve epistemic issues and that there is a certain epistemic continuity between cases of non-expressive self-knowledge and expressive self-ascriptions.

Let’s consider first a case of gaining expressiveness. Let’s suppose that I enjoy a certain state of secure belief about my mental condition of anger vis-à-vis my brother but grounded on certain observations that my friends have made me pay attention to, so that I am in a position to claim “I am angry with my brother”. This is an unconscious feeling that I acknowledge on the basis of evidence I have access to. My self-ascription is true and epis-temically grounded, in such a way that it could be claimed that I acquire some knowledge.

Consider now the scenario in which I express my anger with my brother by issuing the very same self-ascription. Now, according to Finkelstein, noth-ing prevents me from claiming that talk of knowledge is here sheer nonsense. Nothing forces me to claim this either, but, insofar as it is an option I have, expressiveness is consistent with not taking self-ascriptions as manifestations of my knowledge that I am angry with my brother. But in principle I have a certain relation to the very same proposition. Imagine that I first get the knowledge about my mental condition in the non-authoritative way and only later become first-personally authorized to make the very same self-ascription: Could I possibly be taken as not knowing the proposition that I previously knew?

I think that one thing is true: our intuitions about asymmetry between first- and third-person do not justify even the mere possibility of avoiding ep-istemic vocabulary to adequately describe what an expressive self-ascription


manifests about what the subject is in position to know or not know. On the contrary, any deflationary movement in this field has problems giving its due to the epistemic asymmetry.

Consider now a case of losing expressiveness. Following the previous characterization of expressiveness, in those cases where it remains open an epistemic question, a subject’s self-ascription is not expresssive. So we could lose the ability to express our mental states merely by self-ascribing them in-sofar as some epistemic question is raised about whether we really are in a certain mental state. In this sort of cases, it suffices to begin to consider some evidence for or against the belief that one is in a certain mental state both for losing expressiveness with respect to this mental state and for needing epis-temic vocabulary to describe the situation.

In general, self-ascriptions can be taken to manifest a certain belief about the mental condition they express (to the extent that they are asser-tions); at the same time, self-ascriptions, even if they are expressive, can be questioned by the subject herself, so that they are open to self-criticism and transparent to the mental condition itself, that is, the subject is in a position to take her second-order belief as answering to an independent mental condi-tion. That means that there is a sense in which the self-knowledge that we manifest in our avowals represents a certain cognitive achievement. It is true that when we offer the self-ascription as a natural and immediate expression of our mental state, there is no cognitive effort involved, there has been no in-ference or reliance on observation or on evidence, but that does not mean that the subject is not answering in a cognitive way to truth conditions that are “in some way independent of the making of the judgment” [Moran (2001), p. 19]. Briefly, though our expressive self-ascriptions are not based on evidence (and we acquire knowledge based on nothing, to use Boghossian’s terms), the judgments expressed by our self-ascriptions are clearly subject to revision (if not just as a consequence of our fallibility) and to evidential considerations insofar as they answer to contingent and independent mental conditions.

I think that the best way to interpret Finkelstein’s dialectics in his book Expression and the inner is as one attempt to sever the link between first-person authority and self-knowledge. Detectivism could be an adequate model of self-knowledge, but not of first-person authority. Speaking with first-person authority is not just a question of getting knowledge (maybe by intro-spection or a reliable tracking competence or an infallible mechanism); it is rather a phenomenon about how we consciously entertain certain psychologi-cal conditions. In a sense, the phenomenon concerns primarily how we are able to give significance to our mental states in the context of our life. And maybe this last condition has nothing to do with my knowing which mental states I am in. It rather involves a certain transformation of my psychological condition.


V. CONCLUSION

A certain tendency in the contemporary literature on first-person au-thority insists on rejecting a characterization of the phenomenon in epistemic terms. Expressivism, in its different versions, is a branch of this tendency. Authoritative self-ascriptions are not cognitive achievements at all, and in the more radical versions they do not even manifest self-knowledge on the part of the self-ascriber. There is much to recommend in Finkelstein’s expressivism: an essential component of our self-ascriptions is to expressively open our minds in such an immediate and natural way that the expression and that which is expressed make sense together. Finkelstein’s sophisticated expres-sivism attempts not to lose the assertoric dimension of our self-ascriptions. They are truth-evaluable and they are authoritative: as I have said before, the act of expressing a psychological condition through our avowals guarantees that it is true of the self-ascriber that she is in the self-ascribed mental state. In any case, Finkelstein doesn’t pay much attention to this feature of first-person authority and how the contextualizing feature of our self-ascriptions could help to elucidate how our avowals are presumed to be true or even guaranteed to be true in a sense that our perceptual judgments, for instance, are not.

Finkelstein’s expressivism seems to face a dilemma. On the one hand, if he adheres to a strong analogy between self-ascriptions and natural expres-sions, the link with the assertoric and epistemic dimensions of avowals will be severed. On the other hand, I have tried to show that taking the assertoric dimension of avowals seriously means committing oneself to an epistemic description of first-person self-ascriptions. So it is difficult to view it as an option to describe Hank’s case as articulating self-knowledge. First-person authority is not accounted for in epistemic terms, but that does not let us to draw the conclusion that avowals could be coherently described as not mani-festing self-knowledge. There is a sense in which we should view avowals as the result of a cognitive achievement, not in the sense that the self-ascriber has recognized or ascertained a certain fact about his own psychological life and then reports it through her avowals, but in the sense of considering that our self-ascriptions answer to an independent reality.

So if self-ascriptions are assertions and articulate self-knowledge, then there are genuine philosophical disagreements between PH1, PH2, and PH3. PH1 disagrees with PH2 and PH3 on whether there can be a substantive epis-temology of self-knowledge. PH2 and PH3 disagree on whether our substan-tive epistemology of self-knowledge could be unified under just one notion of knowledge. PH1 is closer to simple expressivism, given his rejection of epistemic vocabulary in the characterization of Hank’s avowals. As such, he is disposed to renounce a substantive epistemology for self-knowledge. PH2 accepts epistemic vocabulary, but recommends a sort of error theory about


the cognitive expressions used to describe Hank’s self-ascriptions. In any case, PH2 argues from a certain unified epistemology that makes justification a necessary condition for knowledge. PH3, insofar as he takes seriously a de-scription in terms of knowledge, should be committed to provide an elucida-tion of the special kind of knowledge that our self-ascriptions manifest. If this is not one of his commitments, then he is not only rejecting the idea that first-person authority is backed by a cognitive achievement, understood as the outcome of our efforts to get things right, but also the possibility of develop-ing a substantive epistemology, that is, an account of how self-ascriptive judgments are reliable, apt to be knowledge or presumably true (obviously in a sense that is not shared by other forms of getting knowledge).

My suspicion is that Finkelstein views Hank’s case as indifferent with respect to the epistemic question because he draws his intuitions about first-person authority exclusively from the theses defended by a simple expressivist, whereas he draws on sophisticated expressivism when trying to recover the idea that self-ascriptions are truth-evaluable and assertoric (so he will be free of traditional objections against expressivism) without drawing the epistemo-logical consequences of this move.

Behind many of the arguments against the idea that we should care too much about knowledge when addressing issues about first-person authority is the conviction that the only epistemic model that is available is detectivism, and as Finkelstein and others have shown, detectivism is an insufficient and flawed position as an account of first-person authority. Nonetheless, Finkel-stein is yet guided by the assumption that the only epistemic model to ac-count for authoritative self-knowledge is a form of detectivism.

So I do not see any other possibility, to avoid philosophical conflict between PH1, PH2, and PH3, than to regard epistemic vocabulary as mere flatus vocis, a description that amounts to nothing. If, on the contrary, we accept that our self-ascriptions can enter into inferences like those that Hank makes and can function as genuine assertions, then the philosophical disagreement between our three philosophers becomes clear: they disagree about whether it makes sense to develop a substantive epistemology of self-knowledge and whether our epistemology should be unified under just one notion of knowledge. Departamento de Lingüística General, Lenguas Modernas, Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia y Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Ciudad Universitaria de Cantoblanco E-28049 Madrid E-mail: [email protected]


NOTES

1 I would like to thank Josep Corbí, Fernando Broncano, Diego Lawler, Ignacio Vicario and Víctor Martín Verdejo for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and specially David Finkelstein for his comments on the last version and his suggestions to improve the text. The research for this paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2009-12054, CSD00C-09-00056).

2 Finkelstein has a sui generis notion of report. For him, reports are “an attempt (or merely apparent attempt) to inform someone of a fact that the speaker has learned or ascertained” [Finkelstein (2003), p. 97, italics in the original].

3 See for instance the following text in the footnote 9 of the page 120: “the sort of ability at issue is one that enables a person to express his state of mind in a self-ascription of it, where what matters –what carries the expressive force– isn’t his tone of voice…, but simply the fact that he is giving voice to his sincere judgment about his own state of mind”. Here Finkelstein seems to be assuming that the expression of a mental state depends on giving voice to a sincere judgment about the mental state.

4 Truly enough, Finkelstein does not say much where this entitlement comes from and what it consists in. REFERENCES BAR-ON, D. (2004), Speaking My Mind. Expression and Self-Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford

University Press. BILGRAMI, A. (2006), Self-Knowledge and Resentment, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press. FINKELSTEIN, D. (2003), Expression and the Inner, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press. FRICKER, E. (1998), “Self-Knowledge: Special Access Vs. Artefact of Grammar -A

Dichotomy Rejected”, in C. Wright, B. C, Smith and C. Macdonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155-206.

MORAN, R. (2001), Authority and Estrangement. An Essay on Self-Knowledge, Prince-ton: Princeton University Press.

WRIGHT, C. (1998), “Self-Knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy”, in C. Wright, B. C, Smith and C. Macdonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-45.

RESUMEN

David Finkelstein, en su libro Expression and the Inner, ofrece una explicación no-epistémica de la autoridad de primera persona que podría caer bajo la etiqueta de expresivismo sofisticado. Discuto el caso de Hank, introducido en el último capítulo del libro para apoyar la idea de que no hay necesariamente un desacuerdo filosófico entre aquellos que consideran que es un puro sinsentido describir las declaraciones de Hank en términos epistémicos, aquellos que niegan efectivamente que conoce porque no está justificado y aquellos que aceptan una descripción epistémica según un con-cepto de conocimiento que no implica justificación. En mi comentario, argumento que


en la medida en que el expresivismo sofisticado se toma en serio la idea de que las de-claraciones son también aseveraciones, debería estar comprometido con una descrip-ción epistémicas de las auto-adscripciones en primera persona, incluso si esta descripción se aleja de concepciones epistemológicas tradicionales. Casos de ganar y perder lo que denominaré expresividad muestran la continuidad epistémica en auto-adscripciones que podrían diferir en autoridad de primera persona. Hay, por tanto, un desacuerdo filosófico serio entre nuestros tres tipos de filósofos. PALABRAS CLAVE: expresivismo, declaración, autoconocimiento, autoridad de primera persona, aseveración, logro cognitivo. ABSTRACT

David Finkelstein, in his book Expression and the Inner, offers a non-epistemic account of first-person authority that could fall under the label of sophisticated ex-pressivism. I discuss Hank’s case, introduced in the final chapter of his book to sup-port the idea that there is no necessary philosophical disagreement between those that consider to be sheer nonsense to describe Hank’s avowals in epistemic terms, those that deny that he knows because he is not justified, and those that accept an epistemic description under a concept of knowledge that does not entail justification. In my com-ments, I argue that insofar as sophisticated expressivism takes seriously the idea that avowals are also assertions, it should be committed to an epistemic description of first-person self-ascriptions, even if that description departs from traditional epistemological conceptions. Cases of gaining and losing what I will dub expressiveness show the epis-temic continuity between self-ascriptions that could differ in first-person authority. So there is serious philosophical disagreement between our three types of philosophers. KEYWORDS: Expressivism, Avowal, Self-Knowledge, First-Person Authority, Asser-tion, Cognitive Achievement.

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