Aiding self-knowledge

ABSTRACT

Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-knowledge
• testimony
• Pessimism
• therapy
• education

Acknowledgments

I presented versions of this paper at the British Wittgenstein Society’s annual conference, the Institute for Education at UCL, and the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Thanks to the audiences on those occasions. I have also benefitted from discussion with Lucy Campbell, John Gibbons, John McDowell, Karl Schafer, Kieran Setiya, Ben Sorgiovanni, Paul Standish, and Roger Teichmann. Thanks as well to comments from two anonymous referees for this journal.

Notes

1. For the distinction in the moral case see Hopkins 2007.

2. Thus, the platitude should not be interpreted as the claim that forming attitudes on the basis of evidence requires self-awareness. See McGinn 1997 for the claim and Moran 2001 for a compelling objection to it.

3. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this example and the issue.

4. It has to be said that this usage of ‘proleptic’ diverges from Williams’ own. For Williams claims that an external reasons statement – one that specifies a consideration that doesn’t reveal the action to further the agent’s ends, even under a non-trivial idealization – is ‘proleptic’ (1989, 41). That is because he thinks that in making such a statement one aims to convince a subject to alter her motivational states in such a way that she will come to have the reason in question (in the internal sense) because one has made the statement. Williams’ usage is surely sensitive to one aspect of the idea of the proleptic, namely an intervention that bootstraps the subject. But it misses out on another, which is that the two stages must be related internally. After all, Williams thinks that there is something illicit about external reasons claims. He conceives of their ‘proleptic’ effect (in his sense) as closer to the brainwashing case than following a sound deliberative route. The state the subject comes to be in by responding to the external reasons claim is an alteration to but not an articulation of, her prior outlook.

5. See Callard 2018, who ties the form of agency involved in aspiration, understood as aiming to understand and care about new values, in terms of acting on ‘proleptic reasons.’ Callard’s usage follows Williams. She thinks that proleptic reasons are reasons to learn something new, and so can’t fit the internalist’s model. Again, this usage only focuses on one dimension of the proleptic, that it is not yet actual, and not the other, that it is rooted in the subject’s current condition. It might be said that Callard is wrong to contrast proleptic reasons and internal reasons. On her view aspirants must have an ‘inkling’ of the values they aim to understand and be moved by (ibid.). One might reasonably wonder whether it is fair to say that aspiring involves articulating an inkling, and so is within the mold of a sound deliberative route, on at least Williams’ capacious understanding of this.

6. See Lear 2004, Ch. 1 for a helpful account of emotions as processes that can mature, and therapy as a process of articulating and developing them.

7. This must make room for the possibility of revising one’s attitudes over the course of following a sound deliberative route. But the fact that my current outlook changes by articulating it doesn’t mean the therapist or teacher doesn’t have knowledge of my current condition. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this worry.)

8. This point is prominent in O’Shaughnessy 2000 and Moran 2001.

9. There might be some conceptions of the conscious/unconscious distinction on which we could say this. See Finkelstein 1999.

10. Other features: first-person knowledge is achieved by a uniquely first-person method, a method only available to the subject and it is epistemically privileged. It also might possess unique epistemic statuses, such as immunity from error through misidentification (Shoemaker 1968) or immunity from ‘brute error’ (Burge 1996).

11. I discuss this in more detail in Doyle (forthcoming).

12. ‘Taking’ here is meant to leave open the question whether the attitude one stands in toward the intelligibility of the attitude is belief, knowledge, intuition, or something non-cognitive.

13. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this example and issue.

14. As this example makes clear, though there is a counterfactual element to the idea of proleptic knowledge, it isn’t simply knowledge of a counterfactual about another’s mind.

15. Moran (2001), Lear (2004).

16. For some suggestions see Boyle (2009), Hieronymi (2009), Moran (2001).

17. There will inevitably be in-between cases, of course. Suppose someone offers me testimony that really, I am in mental state M, or would be, if I were to think on it. I might accept this before taking on the work of articulating my mental state, saying, ‘I would be in M, if I thought about it, but I can’t do that now.’ This might already reveal that I have an inkling of my state of mind and so am in the early stages of working through the issues for myself. In another case, it would simply express what I have learned by taking another at her word, and this, I take it, would be suboptimal or objectionable. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue and the example.

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Notes on contributors

Casey Doyle

Casey Doyle is Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford.