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ABSTRACT
We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one’s own doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge.
Notes
1. What we call the empirical conception is equivalent to what Gertler (Gertler Citation2011) calls empiricism about self-knowledge. We prefer our terminology because we deny that what Gertler calls ‘rationalism’ is the only alternative to it. We wish to emphasize that in rejecting the empirical conception we do not deny that what is known (viz., the thinker’s belief) in an instance of doxastic self-knowledge is an empirical fact. Rather, our claim is that the process by which such facts are known is not empirical in the sense just spelled out.
2. As is often the case with widespread assumptions, the thesis that doxastic self-knowledge is a kind of empirical knowledge is not usually formulated or defended as such in the philosophical literature. But looking closely one can see how this empirical conception is shared ground among a range of otherwise differing accounts of first-person authority. Gilbert Ryle’s behaviorist view in The Concept of Mind (Citation1949) and D.M. Armstrong’s account of introspection in Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Citation1973) are cases in point: while Armstrong grounds self-knowledge in a dedicated faculty through which beliefs and other mental items are brought to consciousness, and Ryle denies that there is any such faculty, both assume that there is some way in which self-knowledge results from tracking sources of information (or, as Ryle puts it, ‘data’) about one’s states of mind. More recently, Peter Carruthers joins Ryle in rejecting any appeal to a faculty of direct introspection, but on his interpretive account of self-knowledge the reliability of self-attributions is due in part to the fact that ‘we almost always have a great deal more evidence available to us when we interpret ourselves than when we interpret others’ (Citation2010, 105). And Quassim Cassam has recently advanced an account on which self-knowledge is a species of inferential knowledge: ‘In the most straightforward case,’ he writes, ‘you know that you have [an attitude] A insofar as you have access to evidence that you have A and you infer from your evidence that you have A’ (Citation2014, 138). Despite their differences, all of these accounts conceive of doxastic self-knowledge as justified by an empirical process in the sense we have defined.
3. Goldberg describes such an act as ‘reckless’. See Goldberg (Citation2015, ch. 6.)
4. Things will be more complicated if knowledge does not require belief (see, e.g., Schwitzgebel and Myers-Shulz [Citation2013]). Still it seems that on such a view there will be some attitude short of knowledge – if not belief, then perhaps something like acceptance in a context – that suffices for honest assertion, and our arguments below will apply in turn to such a requirement.
5. On the defeasibility of norms of assertion, see Kvanvig (Citation2009).
6. Whether this ‘managing’ involves intentional action, subpersonal mechanisms, or some combination of the two need not concern us here.
7. The obvious exception is when one asserts certain sorts of things about oneself.
8. Here the exception will be any case where there is a special reason to believe that one’s beliefs are correct.
9. We have in mind a simple case where someone deliberately asserts the opposite of something she falsely believes. What she says will be true, and so her assertion will be in accordance with (TA), but she will not have followed that rule, and will not have asserted honestly. We take no stand on whether such an assertion counts as a lie.
10. For doubts about this idea, see Robinson (Citation2005) and Soteriou (Citation2007) .
11. Two obvious questions that we will not belabor: On what basis must the subject understand herself to be doxastically justified? And on what basis must she understand herself to believe as she does on the strength of this justification?.
12. Though they might not be right to – for the belief might be ‘properly basic’.
13. A further problem with this reply is that even if there is some intuitive pull to the thought that honest assertion requires the seeming-truth of the asserted proposition, there is none at all to the idea that this requirement is due to the way that seeming-truth provides a special sort of evidence for what one believes. If the proposal in question were correct (as we have argued it is not), it would be correct only in spite of the fact that it flies in the face of the phenomenology of doxastic self-knowledge.
14. For misinterpretation (or creative reconstruction) along these lines, see Fernandez (Citation2003); Byrne (Citation2011); Gertler Citation2011, 188–190); Cassam (Citation2014, 3–5 and passim).
15. Cf. Moran (Citation2001, § 2.6).
16. Recent Constitutivist proposals include Heal (Citation2001), Schwitzgebel (Citation2011), and Coliva (Citation2011).
17. Among contemporary Constitutivists, Schwitzgebel (Citation2011) is notable in embracing this consequence.
18. See Boyle (Citation2011) and Marcus (Citation2016) for work in this vein.
19. Versions of this paper were presented at the 2016 Orange Beach Epistemology Workshop and a 2018 workshop on Transparency and Apperception at Ryerson University. Thanks to David Barnett, Nick Byrd, Trent Dougherty, John Greco, Boris Hennig, Ulf Hlobil, David Hunter, Anna-Sarah Malmgren, Mark McCullagh, Alexandra Newton, Ram Neta, Sarah Paul, Ted Poston, Jeremy Redmond, Sergio Tenenbaum, Marshall Thompson, and Jonathan Vogel for valuable feedback.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eric Marcus
Eric Marcus works chiefly in the philosophy of mind and action, but also has active research interests in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics and the philosophy of language. He is the author of numerous articles and a book, Rational Causation (Harvard University Press). He is currently working on a second book, tentatively entitled Belief, Inference and the Self-Conscious Mind. He is a Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University.
John Schwenkler
John Schwenkler's research interests are in the philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and cognitive science. His book Anscombe's Intention: A Guide, will be published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University.