UC Irvine

This dissertation is a contribution to our understanding of transparent self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is transparent insofar as one can know one’s own mental states by attending, not to these mental states themselves, but to the world ‘outside’ of one’s mind. The paradigm case for this model is one’s knowledge of one’s own beliefs. If one wants to know whether or not one believes that it is raining, one does not examine anything regarding one’s own mind. Rather, it seems that one need only consider some pertinent facts about the world, namely, whether it is currently raining. From this one can self-ascribe the relevant belief. The current explanations of transparent self-knowledge are limited. I argue that the most influential explanation of transparency, namely, epistemic accounts à la Alex Byrne and Jordi Fernández, fail to provide an adequate explanation of this phenomenon. I also argue that deliberative accounts of transparency face significant challenges. Pace philosophers like Richard Moran, the self-ascriptions made via the transparency method constitute knowledge only insofar as there exists a unique set of relations that hold between the concepts we are deploying. If we are to understand transparent self-knowledge and the problems that attend it, we will need to countenance a concept of belief as a normative attitude and attend carefully to the norms that govern its proper use.

I argue that the substitution of belief-reports (i.e., self-ascriptions of belief) for fact-reports is likely something that we learned to do well before we had a full proficiency with the concept of belief. However, the self-ascription made can only be understood as a genuine case of self-knowledge once the requisite proficiency with the concept is established. Since our concept of belief is such that a belief in p is appropriate only if p is true, a self-ascription of the belief that p can be substituted for an assessment of the way one takes the world to be. Insofar as the subject is in possession of a specific set of concepts (e.g., , , , etc.) and the subject has arrived at the self-ascription via transparency, that subject will, by necessity, be in a position to offer sufficient reasons for the self-ascription. As such, the self-ascriptions that arise in cases where the transparency procedure is followed will be justified insofar as one is able to situate one’s judgments within the space of reason. Transparent self-knowledge is thus explained not in terms of some unique evidential ground, nor by means of a particularly strong inference, but in terms of the normative constraints on and the fact that the relevant self-ascription will cohere with a number of further judgments, beliefs, and concepts held by the subject. This account is consequently able to explain how the knowledge arrived at in this way is (i) privileged, (ii) peculiar, and (iii) non-inferential.