Knowing and Expressing Ourselves

This dissertation concerns two epistemologically puzzling phenomena. The first phenomenon is the authority that each of us has over our minds. Roughly, to have authority is to be owed (and to tend to receive) a special sort of deference when self-ascribing your current mental states. The second phenomenon is our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. Roughly, self-knowledge is privileged insofar as one knows ones mental states in a way that is highly epistemically secure relative to other varieties of contingent empirical knowledge. Roughly, one has peculiar self-knowledge insofar as one acquires it in a way that is available only to oneself.

In Chapter One I consider several more detailed specifications of the authority of self-ascriptions. Some specifications emphasize the relative indubitability of our self-ascriptions, while others focus on their presumptive truth.

In Chapter Two I defend a Neo-Expressivist explanation of authority. According to Neo-Expressivism, self-ascriptions are authoritative insofar as they are acts that put ones mental states on display for others, whether or not these mental states are also known by the self-ascriber with privilege and peculiarity. However, I do not dispute that we often have privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. This raises the question of what such knowledge does explain, if not the authority of our self-ascriptions.

In Chapter Three I examine several extant answers to this question, focusing on privileged and peculiar self-knowledge of the propositional attitudes. Each answer meets with objections.

In Chapter Four I develop a Social Agentialist account of the explanatory indispensability of privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. I argue that such knowledge enables at least three forms of social-epistemic agency: interpersonal reasoning, complex group action, and linguistic interpretation. Next, I argue that, even though privileged and peculiar self-knowledge does not explain the authority of our self-ascriptions, it is importantly related to our (Neo-Expressively understood) authority.

In Chapter Five I consider possible sources of our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge, focusing again on propositional-attitudinal self-knowledge. I eventually defend a Constitutivist view. This is the view that, for agents who meet certain background conditions, self-knowledge is privileged and peculiar because it is metaphysically built into the attitudes self-known.