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The Authority of Expressive Self-Ascriptions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

A. Minh Nguyen
A. Minh Nguyen
Affiliation:
Eastern Kentucky University
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Abstract

What explains first-person authority? What explains the presumption that an utterance is true when it is a sincere intelligible determinate first-person singular simple present-tense ascription of intentional state? According to Rockney Jacobsen, self-ascriptions each enjoy a presumption of truth because they are systematically reliable. They are systematically reliable because they are typically both truth-assessable and expressive. Such self-ascriptions, if sincere, are certain to be true. This article presents a defence and a critique of Jacobsen's theory. It is argued that the purported prevalence of expressive self-ascriptions is at best contingent. This contingency cannot explain why self-ascriptions are necessarily authoritative.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , Winter 2008 , pp. 103 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2008

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References

Notes

1 For a characterization of first-person authority along these lines, see Shoemaker, Sydney, “First-Person Access,” in his First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 50–73, esp. p. 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wright, Crispin, “Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy, and Intention,” Journal of Philosophy, 86 (1989): 622–34, esp. pp. 632–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Davidson, Donald, “First Person Authority,” Dialectica, 38 (1984): 101–11, esp. p. 101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For a systematic critical exploration of these and related first-person notions, see Alston, William, “Varieties of Privileged Access,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 8 (1971): 223–41.Google Scholar

3 See Davidson, Donald, “Knowing One's Own Mind,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 60 (1987): 441–58, esp. p. 442CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Davidson, , “First Person Authority,” p. 103.Google Scholar

4 Davidson, Donald, “Davidson, Donald,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Guttenplan, Samuel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 231–36, esp. p. 234Google Scholar. If silence implies consent, then Davidson has to commit himself to the idea that the true-presumptiveness of self-ascriptions is a matter of logical necessity. The passage, which he quotes from Alston (“Varieties of Privileged Access,” p. 235Google Scholar), characterizes the special status of self-ascriptions in terms of a certain logical impossibility, but his sweeping criticism of the characterization says nothing about Alston's use of this modal notion. See Davidson, , “First Person Authority,” p. 107.Google Scholar

5 Shoemaker, , “First-Person Access,” p. 50.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 51.

7 Shoemaker, Sydney, “On Knowing One's Own Mind,” in his First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25–49, p. 25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Shoemaker, , “First-Person Access,” p. 51Google Scholar; italics in original. In what sense is it necessary? Shoemaker's ensuing discussion on p. 52 provides a clue, for he uses the expression “conceptually necessary” therein.

9 For the distinction between the conceptual problem and the epistemological problem of other minds, see Hyslop, Alec, “Other Minds,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Zalta (Winter 2005 Edition, URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries/other-minds/>))>Google Scholar. Hyslop provides a more comprehensive examination of the epistemological problem in his Other Minds (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995)Google Scholar. Anita Avramides does the same for the conceptual problem in her Other Minds (London: Routledge, 2001).Google Scholar

10 See Davidson, , “Davidson, Donald,” p. 235Google Scholar; “Knowing One's Own Mind,” p. 442Google Scholar; and “First Person Authority,” p. 101Google Scholar. Davidson seems to think that the reason there is a problem about first-person authority can be elucidated in the modality of either the ontology of psychological states or the semantics of psychological expressions. This is a suggestive hypothesis, but I shall not explore any connection between ontology and semantics here.

11 Compare Moran, Richard, “Interpretation Theory and the First Person,” Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (1994): 154–73, esp. pp. 156–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Jacobsen, Rockney, “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” Philosophical Quarterly, 46 (1996): 12–30, p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Wright, Crispin, “Critical Notice of Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning,” Mind, 98 (1989): 289–305, p. 294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See, for instance, Peacocke, Christopher, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 147–76.Google Scholar

14 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” p. 13.Google Scholar

15 Davidson, , “First Person Authority,” p. 103.Google Scholar

16 Burge, Tyler, “Content Preservation,” Philosophical Review, 102 (1993): 457–88, p. 467CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Burge offers a defence of what he calls “the Acceptance Principle,” which states that “[a] person is entitled to accept as true something that is presented as true and that is intelligible to him unless there are stronger reasons not to do so” (ibid.). The principle, he contends, is neither “a statistical point” (ibid., p. 468) nor “an empirical principle. … The justificational force of the entitlement described … is not constituted or enhanced by sense experiences or perceptual beliefs” (ibid., p. 469). This principle is meant to apply to anything that is presented as true and that is intelligible to a rational interlocutor. It makes no difference whether the subject matter is one's own present intentional states or something else. But if the Acceptance Principle holds, the parity of entitlement across first-person and third-person contexts will obliterate the asymmetry defining first-person authority. Perhaps aware of this consequence, Burge characterizes the special status of self-ascriptions not in terms of their presumptive acceptability but in terms of something much stronger, namely, their self-verifying character. He argues that self-judgements such as I doubt that water is more common than mercury “are self-verifying in an obvious way: making these judgements itself makes them true” (Burge, Tyler, “Individualism and Self-Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy, 85 [1988]: 649–63, p. 649).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Wright, Crispin, “Self-Knowledge: The Wittgensteinian Legacy,” in Knowing Our Own Minds, edited by Wright, Crispin, Smith, Barry, and Macdonald, Cynthia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 13–45, esp. pp. 17–18Google Scholar; italics in original.

18 Compare Wright, Smith, and Macdonald, “Introduction,” in ibid., pp. 1–11, esp. p. 1.

19 See Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression.”Google Scholar See also his “Self-Quotation and Self-Knowledge,” Synthese, 110 (1997): 419–45Google Scholar, and his “Semantic Character and Expressive Content,” Philosophical Papers, 26 (1997): 129–46Google Scholar. I shall not try to determine whether the views that Jacobsen ascribes to Wittgenstein are really Wittgenstein's. Jacobsen articulates and defends these views, and they are important enough to merit serious discussion. Variants of Jacobsen's Wittgensteinian account include: Bar-On, Dorit, Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Falvey, Kevin, “The Basis of First-Person Authority,” Philosophical Topics, 28 (2000): 69–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finkelstein, David, Expression and the Inner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Andy, “The Authority of Avowals and the Concept of Belief,” European Journal of Philosophy, 8 (2000): 20–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McGeer, Victoria, “Autistic Self-Awareness,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 11 (2004): 235–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For simplicity, I shall consider only Jacobsen's account, but the critique to be advanced arguably applies to its variants as well.

20 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” pp. 13–17, 20, 30.Google Scholar

21 Richard Moran advances such considerations in his Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 71–72, 103.Google Scholar

22 Compare Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” pp. 21–22Google Scholar: “On the minimalist account of truth, the Disquotational Schema (hereafter DS), ‘“p” is true if and only if p,’ tells us all there is to know about truth. … By DS, a truth-assessable sentence is any suitable substitute for ‘p’ in the schema.”

23 It is unclear what the intended modality of the “can” in the above statement is. But here I am just paraphrasing Jacobsen's formulation of the minimalist requirements for truth-assessability: “A meaningful sentence of a language counts as truth-assessable if it can occur without (surface) syntactic incongruity as an antecedent-clause and has a significant negation” (Jacobsen, “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” p. 22; italics in original).

24 Ibid., pp. 21–22.

25 Wright, Crispin, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

26 Geach, Peter, “Assertion,” Philosophical Review, 74 (1965): 449–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Jacobsen, personal communication, August 15, 2005.

28 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” p. 23.Google Scholar

29 Compare ibid., pp. 26–27 (italics added): “The mere appearance of the performative verb ‘V' in the prefix (‘I V that …’) introducing the content clause divests those utterances [of explicit performatives] of assertoric status, assigns them another performative status and hence another expressive character. … We are obliged, by minimalism, to regard explicit performatives as truthassessable utterances … but not as expressions of belief. … [N]othing confers on our utterances of explicit performatives the particular non-assertoric status they will have (by default) apart from the meaning of the performative verbs that prefix their content clauses.”

30 Ibid., pp. 23–28. See also Bar-On, Speaking My Mind, pp. 235fGoogle Scholar; Falvey, , “The Basis of First-Person Authority,” p. 72Google Scholar; and Wright, , “Self-Knowledge: The Wittgensteinian Legacy,” p. 36Google Scholar. Unlike Jacobsen, Bar-On, Falvey, and Wright, Finkelstein seems innocent of, or oblivious to, the independence between truth-assessability and assertoric force, for he apparently equates the two: “[I]t does not follow from an avowal's not being a report that it lacks a truthvalue. An avowal of hope that is not a report may yet be a true assertion. … [P]sychological self-ascriptions … have an assertoric dimension; they may be true or false” (Finkelstein, , Expression and the Inner, p. 97Google Scholar). He reasonably claims that being a non-report does not entail lacking a truth-value. But his example about an avowal of hope suggests that for him the possession of a truth-value confers not only truth-evaluability but also assertoric status. The suggestion is confirmed by his subsequent elucidation of the notion of an assertoric dimension in terms of the capacity for being true or false. It may seem uncharitable to accuse Finkelstein of missing the obvious fact to which Jacobsen, Bar-On, Falvey, and Wright draw our attention—the fact that not every utterance of a truth-assessable sentence which means that p is an act of asserting that p. If the accusation is false, however, then the only way to make sense of the above passage is to view Finkelstein as trying to advance the highly implausible thesis that self-ascriptions are assertions as well as expressions of the same psychological states even when wholly and unequivocally expropriated of assertoric status and credentials by etiolating features of context. This interpretation is hardly more generous than the last one.

31 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

32 Jacobsen takes himself to be offering a full account of “the reliable authority all persons enjoy concerning their own mental states” and “a speaker's effortless and reliable ability to provide true self-ascriptions.” See ibid., pp. 12, 13, 29, 30.

33 Ibid., p. 16.

34 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

35 See Wright, , “Self-Knowledge: The Wittgensteinian Legacy,” p. 37.Google Scholar

36 Urmson, James, “Parenthetical Verbs,” Mind, 61 (1952): 480–96, p. 485CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare David Rosenthal's observation: “‘I think that p’ can, of course, be used to qualify the firmness of one's conviction that p is the case, in ways that simply asserting ‘p’ doesn't” (“Moore's Paradox and Consciousness,” in Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 9Google Scholar, AI, Connectionism, and Philosophical Psychology, edited by Tomberlin, James [Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1995], pp. 313–33, p. 331).Google Scholar

37 Grice, Paul, “Logic and Conversation,” in his Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 22–40.Google Scholar

38 Williamson, Timothy, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 243.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., p. 243.

40 Ibid., p. 256.

41 Ibid., p. 257.

42 Ibid.

43 The quotation comes from Hilary Putnam's science fiction story about the super-super-spartans or super-super-stoics, imaginary individuals who are capable of feeling pain but, unlike us, have the ability to successfully suppress all involuntary pain behaviour and even all talk of pain. See his “Brains and Behavior,” reprinted in The Nature of Mind, edited by Rosenthal, David (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 151–59, esp. pp. 154–55.Google Scholar

44 See Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), p. 166.Google Scholar

45 See Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Nidditch, Peter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 105Google Scholar, and Armstrong, David, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968), pp. 323–38.Google Scholar

46 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” pp. 16–17Google Scholar; italics in original. Moran rejects something very much like this view, which he calls “the Presentational View,” and the attribution of it to Wittgenstein in his Authority and Estrangement, pp. xvii, xix, 70–73, 100–107Google Scholar; see also Moran, 's “Interpretation Theory and the First Person,” p. 157, n.3.Google Scholar

47 Ibid., pp. 156–57; italics in original.

48 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” pp. 23–28, esp. p. 26. See also n.30 above.Google Scholar

49 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” pp. 15, 30.Google Scholar

50 I am not hostile to the idea of banishing first-person authority as traditionally conceived; on the contrary, I am quite receptive to that idea. See my “Davidson on First-Person Authority,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 38 (2004): 457–72Google Scholar; and my “Why There Is No Such Thing as First-Person Authority,” Southwest Philosophy Review, 16 (2000): 165–89.Google Scholar I am hostile only to the idea of banishing first-person authority on the grounds that one cannot explain it.

51 Wright, , “Critical Notice of Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning,” p. 294.Google Scholar

52 Jacobsen, , “Wittgenstein on Self-Knowledge and Self-Expression,” p. 13.Google Scholar

53 The phrase “first-person avowability” occurs in Wright, , “Critical Notice of Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning,” p. 293.Google Scholar

54 Wright, , “Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy, and Intention,” pp. 632–33Google Scholar; italics in original.

55 Wright, Crispin, “Wittgenstein's Rule-Following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics,” in Reflections on Chomsky, edited by George, Alexander (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 233–64, esp. pp. 251–52Google Scholar; italics in original.

56 Wright, , “Self-Knowledge: The Wittgensteinian Legacy,” pp. 17–18Google Scholar; italics in original. See also ibid., p. 41.

57 Compare Gallois, André, The World Without, the Mind Within: An Essay on First-Person Authority (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 31Google Scholar; and Thöle, Bernhard, “The Explanation of First Person Authority,” in Reflecting Davidson, edited by Stoecker, Ralf (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 213–47, esp. p. 217.Google Scholar

58 Davidson, , “First Person Authority,” p. 105.Google Scholar

59 Compare ibid., p. 103: “Even in the exceptional cases, however, first person authority persists; even when a self-attribution is in doubt, or a challenge is proper, the person with the attitude speaks about it with special weight.”

60 For a canonical discussion of psychological defence mechanisms, see Freud, Anna, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1967).Google Scholar

61 See Ullmann-Margalit, Edna, “On Presumption,” Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983): 143–63, esp. pp. 150–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 See Rosenthal, David, “Thinking that One Thinks,” in Consciousness, edited by Davies, Martin and Humphreys, Glyn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 197–223, esp. p. 214.Google Scholar

63 Jacobsen, , personal communication, 08 10, 2004.Google Scholar

64 Moran, , Authority and Estrangement, pp. 71–72.Google Scholar

65 Wright, , “Self-Knowledge: The Wittgensteinian Legacy,” p. 38.Google Scholar Although I concur with Wright's conclusion, my critique of the expressivist proposal is not quite the same as his. See the end of §5 of the present article.