Transparency and reflection

ABSTRACT

Much recent work on self-knowledge has been inspired by the idea that the ‘transparency’ of questions about our own mental states to questions about the non-mental world holds the key to understanding how privileged self-knowledge is possible. I critically discuss some prominent recent accounts of such transparency, and argue for a Sartrean interpretation of the phenomenon, on which this knowledge is explained by our capacity to transform an implicit or ‘non-positional’ self-awareness into reflective, ‘positional’ self-knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Transparency
• self-knowledge
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• reflection
• privileged access
• belief
• intention

Notes

1. Sartre (1943), 40-41/23-24 I give page references to works by Sartre first in a standard English translation and then, after a slash mark, in a contemporary French edition (Sartre (1943), (1966). I have occasionally modified translations without comment.

2. I will assume that these ways of answering questions about our own mental states are normally ways of coming to know our own minds. If there are grounds for denying this, all the substantive points in this essay could be reformulated (more cumbersomely) to accommodate the point. For brevity, I will sometimes just speak of ‘the world’ rather than ‘the non-mental world’. This is simply an abbreviation: I do not deny that the world broadly conceived includes my present mental states.

3. Cf. Byrne (2011), Setiya (2012).

4. Cf. Moran (2001), Byrne (2012).

5. This question is pressed by Gallois (1996), Moran (2001), and Byrne (2018), among others.

6. The difference between knowing the content of one’s attitudes and knowing that one holds the attitudes is forcefully emphasized by Dretske (2003), (2012).

7. Cf. Byrne (2005), 85, Finkelstein (2001), Postscript, and Bar-On (2004), Ch. 4.

8. Cf. Byrne (2005), 84–5 and Shah and Velleman (2005), 205–6.

9. For purposes of making my point, I will rely on the simplified understanding of the blindsight commonly discussed by philosophers. For an account of the phenomenon in its full complexity, see Weiskrantz (1986).

10. Cf. Byrne (2005), 96–8; Byrne (2011), 206–7.

11. Byrne (2012). ‘[… x …]_V’ is supposed to be a ‘v-proposition’: a proposition ascribing to x only properties characteristically available to vision (shape, orientation, depth, color, shading, movement, etc.).

12. Byrne (2011). The int-rule is supposed to be defeasible, and the subject must refrain from drawing it if he takes himself to believe that he will ϕ on the basis of good evidence that he will ϕ. For a related proposal, see Setiya (2012).

13. These remarks expand on points made in Boyle (2011).

14. If we grant for the sake of argument that there could be a rational subject who was disposed to make cognitive transitions according to Byrne’s bel-schema, I suppose such a subject could come to appreciate Byrne’s arguments for the claim that this inferential disposition is reliable and safe, and then she could have a kind of second-order approval of her disposition to make the bel inference. But this would be a post hoc approval, not an understanding in virtue of which the subject makes the relevant transition itself. The structure of Byrne’s account requires that the basic transition be from a proposition sheerly about the world to a proposition about the subject’s own mind, and this appears to require that the subject’s disposition to make this transition must be automatic, not rational.

15. Note that, although the English verb ‘will’ is ambiguous between will_I and will_BF, we do have verbal forms that strongly favor the former reading. If a person declares either ‘I shall ϕ’ or (more colloquially) ‘I am going to ϕ’, this normally expresses a present intention to ϕ. I submit that Byrne’s int-schema is initially attractive precisely because we are inclined to read the premise as tantamount to I shall ϕ.

16. Peacocke suggests that it is specifically an ‘action awareness’ (Peacocke 1998, 88, elaborated in Peacocke 2008), but this will not be crucial for the issue that concerns us.

17. Cf. Peacocke (1998), 71–3, 88–90. Peacocke goes on to acknowledge that there may be cases in which a subject self-ascribes a belief without an intervening act of conscious judgment, but he holds that, even in such cases, the subject’s warrant will rest, not sheerly on her belief that p, but on the fact that she would have consciously judged that p if she had considered the question (cf. the ‘requirement of first-order ratifiability’ discussed at Peacocke 1998, 93–4). This complication will not matter for our purposes.

18. Nico Silins has defended a similar view, which he explicitly contrasts with Byrne’s approach in this respect. Cf. Silins (2012), 304, fn. 12 and 306, fn. 17.

19. Cf. Silins (2012), 309, fn. 20.

20. I will follow the common practice of speaking of ‘states’ of consciousness, though Sartre himself would reject this mode of expression as implying a kind of passivity that is foreign to consciousness (cf. Sartre (1962), 61–8/45–51 and 109n/15n). It will be useful to have some common noun designating the sort of thing exemplified when a subject is conscious of something, and I think the term ‘state’ is innocuous once its potentially misleading connotations have been flagged.

21. To avoid outright paradox, Sartre places the ‘of’ in parentheses when he speaks of non-positional consciousness (of) consciousness (cf. Sartre (1956) liv/20). But this maneuver is obviously of no help without an explanation of this other mode of aboutness.

22. This is true even if we add a self-referential device to the reformulation, as in

(1c) I will_BF hereby ϕ because I now intend to ϕ. (cf. Setiya 2012)

Adding ‘hereby’ marks the fact that my now representing this causal connection will contribute to making the relevant connection to obtain, but it is clear that even this more complex thought might express a disengaged observation about the causal relationship between various facts, rather than an intent to make things so. (On another reading, perhaps, the ‘hereby’ itself expresses what we have been using ‘will_I’ to express: that I resolve to make things so. But if this is what ‘hereby’ expresses, then it does not contribute to an account of the intention-expressing ‘will_I’ in terms of independently-intelligible materials; it is simply an alternative marker of the relevant mode of representation.)

23. Cf. Evans (1982), Ch. 6, esp. 170–176 and 192–196.

24. The presupposition of her thought may of course be false: her representation this cat may express a merely apparent awareness of a cat. More would need to be said in a full account of our warrant for self-ascriptions of factive and non-factive perceptual states. More would also need to be said to account for the ways in which we can acquire reflective knowledge of the specific sensory modality involved in a given perception, of which properties are perceived, etc. I believe all this can be done. Here I am just trying to illustrate the basic Sartrean strategy in accounting for transparent knowledge of one’s own perceiving.

25. Note that, although we have developed this point with reference to an example in which a subject deliberates, the occurrence of deliberation is not essential to our account. What is crucial is that the subject’s believing involves non-positional awareness of her holding a question to be closed. In a subject capable of considering propositional questions, such awareness will characterize all beliefs, even those about which the subject does not deliberate.

26. This essay was originally written for the 2013 SPAWN Conference on “Transparency of Mind” at SyracuseUniversity. I am very grateful to André Gallois for inviting me to this event and to Amy Kind for her insightful comments on the paper. The paper has remained in gestation for so long that I fear I’m not able to recall all the people who have helped me with it, but I recall particular debts to Dorit Bar-On, Alex Byrne, Matthias Haase, David Hunter, Béatrice Longuenesse, John McDowell, Dick Moran, Sarah Paul, and Kieran Setiya.

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Matthew Boyle

Matthew Boyle is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.  Before that, he was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.  He is presently at work on a book on the self-knowledge and its importance for the philosophy of mind.