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PEACOCKE's SELF-KNOWLEDGE Annalisa Coliva an Important Group JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 1 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 2 14:50:58 2007 SUM: 6768DA6D /v2451/blackwell/journals/RATI_v21_i1/rati_381 © 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Ratio (new series) XXI 1 March 2008 0034–0006 1 PEACOCKE’S SELF-KNOWLEDGE 2 3 Annalisa Coliva 4 5 Abstract 6 The paper reviews Christopher Peacocke’s account of self- 7 knowledge. His proposal relies on the claim that first-order mental 8 states may be given to a subject so as to function as reasons, from his 9 point of view, for the corresponding self-ascriptions. Peacocke’s 10 Being Known elicits two different views of how that may be the case: 11 a given propositional attitude is considered to be conscious if, on 12 the one hand, there is something it is like to have it; and, on the 13 other, if it can occupy a subject’s attention without being an object 14 of attention. I examine both views and conclude that, on the latter, 15 Peacocke’s proposal risks of not offering an independent reason for 16 the self-ascription, and, on the former, of offering no reason at all. 17 I then turn to some ideas from his The Realm of Reason and claim 18 that they can help stabilise his earlier account only at the cost of 19 surrendering internalism in the epistemology of psychological self- 20 ascriptions and of contaminating internalist proposals about 21 knowledge of any subject matter with an externalist base which 22 would betray their point. Unless one doesn’t want to pay this price, 23 then Peacocke’s account offers no solution to the problem of 24 self-knowledge.1 25 26 An important group of the philosophical problems of self- 27 knowledge originate in the immediate and authoritative way in 28 which each of us characteristically knows of his own intentional 29 mental states. After a rather prolonged focus on the problem of 30 the compatibility of such self-knowledge with semantic external- 31 ism, attention has recently been reverting to the older, more 32 general issue of providing a suitable account of self-knowledge per 33 se. Here much of the discussion has been conditioned by the now 34 familiar ‘either by observation, or by inference, or by nothing’2 35 36 1 I would like to thank Akeel Bilgrami, Carol Rovane, Crispin Wright, Jane Heal, Lucy 37 O’Brien, Elisabeth Pacherie, Jim Pryor, Jerome Dokic, Paolo Faria, Barry Smith, Joelle 38 Proust, Achille Varzi and three anonymous referees for advice on specific points and 39 helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. 40 2 Christopher Peacocke, Being Known (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 231. JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 2 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 2 14:50:58 2007 SUM: 5597481E /v2451/blackwell/journals/RATI_v21_i1/rati_381 14 ANNALISA COLIVA 1 trichotomy which has begun to be perceived by many as a real 2 trilemma, whose horns are each seriously problematical. In par- 3 ticular, the ‘by nothing’ horn, first presented by Crispin Wright 4 and Paul Boghossian in the late ’80s as – ironically – the only 5 viable escape from the earlier ‘either by observation, or by infer- 6 ence’ dilemma,3 has recently come under pressure in its turn. 7 According to the ‘by nothing’ type of view, the characteristic 8 authority granted to a subject’s impressions of his own intentional 9 states is an a priori and constitutive feature of the linguistic prac- 10 tice of ascribing mental states with propositional content.4 11 However, theorists working in this area now seem to be becoming 12 increasingly sceptical of the idea that self-knowledge should best 13 be seen as the result of no cognitive achievement whatever.5 It is 14 indeed natural to think, contrary to constitutivism, that first and 15 second order mental states are distinct existences; moreover, that 16 it is one thing to have first-order mental states and quite another 17 to know what they are and that the latter knowledge may only 18 plausibly be conceived as brought about by being appropriately – 19 that is, cognitively – related to the former. 20 21 3 See Crispin Wright, ‘Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy and 22 Intentions’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXVI (1989), pp. 622–34 (p. 631 in particular). Paul 23 Boghossian, ‘Content and Self-knowledge’, Philosophical Topics, XVII (1989), pp. 5–26 24 (pp. 5, 17 in particular). The traditional forms of observationalism and inferentialism can 25 be traced back to Descartes and Ryle respectively. Recent supporters of the observational 26 model and of the inferential one, however, are David Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the 27 Mind (London: Routledge, 1968) – author of a reliabilist version of the former – and Alison 28 Gopnik, ‘How We Know Our Minds: the Illusion of First-person Knowledge of Intention- 29 ality’, Brain and Behavioural Science, XVI (1983), pp. 1–14 – author of a refined version of 30 the latter. For a criticism of these models and their developments see, for example, Sydney 31 Shoemaker, The First Person Perspective and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 32 1986) especially at pp. 201–23; Crispin Wright, ‘Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian 33 Legacy’, in Crispin Wright, Cynthia Macdonald and Barry Smith (eds.), Knowing Our Own 34 Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 13–45; Dorit Bar-On, Speaking My Mind. 35 Expression and Self-Knowledge (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Chs. 2, 4; 36 and Akeel Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006), 37 Ch. 1. 38 4 Among those broadly in agreement with Wright and Boghossian, beside the already 39 mentioned Shoemaker and Bilgrami, see also Jane Heal, ‘On First-person Authority’, 40 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, CII (2001), pp. 1–19 and Julia Tanney, ‘A Constructivist 41 Picture of Self-knowledge’, Philosophy, LXXI (1994), pp. 405–22. 42 5 See Peacocke, Being Known, Chs. 5 (and 6); Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement 43 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 12–27; Bar-On, Speaking My Mind, Ch. 9; 44 Lucy O’Brien, ‘Self-knowledge, Agency and Force’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45 forthcoming. © 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 3 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 2 14:50:58 2007 SUM: 46BAA72F /v2451/blackwell/journals/RATI_v21_i1/rati_381 PEACOCKE’S SELF-KNOWLEDGE 15 1 In this aporetic context Christopher Peacocke’s recently pro- 2 posed Rationalist account6 of intentional self-knowledge is apt to 3 impress as especially welcome. Peacocke’s model is meant to vin- 4 dicate the intuitive picture according to which self-knowledge is 5 indeed real knowledge, while avoiding both the observational and 6 the inferential stories about how such knowledge is grounded. It 7 is the brief of this note to argue that Peacocke’s proposal unfor- 8 tunately also confronts serious objections of its own, which might 9 perhaps be overcome, but at significant costs, and that it isn’t 10 obvious that he or anyone else may want to pay them. 11 12 Peacocke’s Rationalist account of self-knowledge 13 14 According to Peacocke, ‘conscious thoughts and current attitudes 15 (. .) can give (. .) the thinker a reason for self-ascribing an 16 attitude to the content which occurs to the thinker, provided our 17 thinker is conceptually equipped to make the self-ascription’.7 To 18 illustrate: suppose you have (1) an apparent memory that Italy was 19 a monarchy before World War Two. That, according to Peacocke, 20 gives you a (non-conclusive) reason for (2) judging that Italy was 21 a monarchy before World War Two, which, in turn, gives you a 22 reason for (3) self-ascribing the belief that Italy was a monarchy 23 before World War Two (provided you possess the first person 24 concept, the concept of belief and those concepts which are 25 necessary for the specification of the content of your belief). In 26 Peacocke’s view, when the self-ascription is formed in this way, it 27 amounts to knowledge, because the second-order belief would be 28 true – in virtue of the conceptual truth that if one judges that p, 29 one believes it – and justified by the corresponding first-order 30 mental state.8 31 In Peacocke’s view, this proposal avoids inferentialism because 32 ‘to say that (2) is the thinker’s reason for making the judgement 33 34 6 The label is mine but in keeping with Peacocke’s recent pronouncement of being 35 interested in defending a new form of rationalism (see his ‘Three Principles of Rational- 36 ism’, European Journal of Philosophy, X (2002), pp. 375–397, and his The Realm of Reason 37 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). The earlier account of self-knowledge, offered in Being 38 Known is indeed in line with Peacocke’s later work. 39 7 Peacocke, Being Known, p. 214. 40 8 According to Peacocke, a judgement that p may not always occur, as a matter of fact, 41 but it should always be available to a subject, in order for his psychological self-ascription 42 to be justified (Peacocke, Being Known, pp. 222–3; 241–2). © 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 4 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Fri Nov 2 14:50:58 2007 SUM: 4AEFE924 /v2451/blackwell/journals/RATI_v21_i1/rati_381 16 ANNALISA COLIVA 1 in (3) is not to say that he infers the self-ascription from a premise 2 that he has made such a first-order judgement’.9 It avoids obser- 3 vationalism – both in classic Cartesian and more modern reliabi- 4 list versions – because to say that a first-order mental state is 5 conscious doesn’t mean, according to Peacocke, that it is an object 6 of (quasi-perceptual)
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