IF YOU BELIEVE YOU BELIEVE, YOU BELIEVE. A CONSTITUTIVE ACCOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE OF ONE’S OWN BELIEFS Peter BAUMANN ABSTRACT: Can I be wrong about my own beliefs? More precisely: Can I falsely believe that I believe that p? I argue that the answer is negative. This runs against what many philosophers and psychologists have traditionally thought and still think. I use a rather new kind of argument, – one that is based on considerations about Moore's paradox. It shows that if one believes that one believes that p then one believes that p – even though one can believe that p without believing that one believes that p. KEYWORDS: self-knowledge, Moore’s paradox, second-order beliefs Can I be wrong about my own beliefs? More precisely: Can I falsely believe that I believe that p? Can I have a false second-order belief that I believe that p (where the belief that p is a first-order belief)? The question is whether a sentence of the following form can be true: (1) S believes that he believes that p, but he does not believe that p.1 If all instantiations of the scheme (1) are false, then the following holds: (2) If S believes that he believes that p, then he does believe that p. In other words, all our second-order beliefs are true: BBp Bp.2 This is the claim I will argue for. However, prima facie it seems that it is possible to have a false second-order belief with the following content: 1 For the sake of simplicity, I am not adding temporal indices except where clarity demands it. I assume here that S is attributing a belief to herself as a present one, not a past or future one. 2 "Bp" stands for "S believes that p." The scope of "B" is the narrowest possible one: B(Bp) and B(p). I will omit parentheses in the following. The claim that BBp Bp is (like some other claims here) one of necessity but I won’t mention this below, just for the sake of simplicity. © LOGOS & EPISTEME, VIII, 4 (2017): 389-416 Peter Baumann (3) I believe that p.3 Why should the fact that someone believes something of the form of (3) entail anything about the truth of that belief? This idea runs against what many philosophers and psychologists have traditionally thought and still think.4 I will use a rather new kind of argument for the main thesis here, – one that involves considerations about Moore's paradox and amounts to a constitutive view of self-knowledge of one’s beliefs.5 The main argument will be developed in 3 Here, (3) is meant as a report of a belief state, not as its expression (cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (2.ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), pp.190-192). 4 See, e.g., among the psychologists: Richard Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (1977): 231-259; Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1980), 195ff.; Timothy D. Wilson, “Strangers to Ourselves: The Origins and Accuracy of Beliefs about One’s Own Metnal States,” in Attribution. Basic Issues and Applications, eds. John H. Harvey and Gifford Weary (Orlando: Academic Press, 1985), 9-36; Alison Gopnik, “How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of First-Person Knowledge of Intentionality,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 9ff.; Daryl J. Bem, Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs (Belmont, CA: Brooks/ Cole, 1970); for the “anti-Cartesian” attitude against another transparency thesis see amongst philosophers Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch.4. 5 In a very general way, I am inspired by a paper by Sydney Shoemaker (see his “Moore’s Paradox and Self Knowledge,” Philosophical Studies 77 (1995): 211-228, his “Moore’s Paradox and Self- Knowledge,” in Sydney Shoemaker, The First Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and also his “On Knowing One’s Own Mind,” Philosophical Perspectives 2 (1988): 183-209; see also David M. Rosenthal, “Self-Knowledge and Moore’s Paradox,” Philosophical Studies 77 (1995): 195-209, and Rogers Albritton, “Comments on Moore’s Paradox and Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Studies 77 (1995): 229-239). He mainly argues that if S believes that p, then S believes or even knows he believes that p. I, however, argue for the converse claim (see also Byeong D. Lee, “Moore’s Paradox and Self-Ascribed Belief,” Erkenntnis 55 (2001): 359-370). Furthermore, Shoemaker's thesis is restricted to the case of rational people. Shoemaker’s “Moore’s Paradox” (1995): 225-226 also makes the converse claim, but much more tentatively, and with restriction to rational people (see with even more reservations, his “Moore’s Paradox” (1996), 92, 93); the argument presented here does not rely on ideas about rationality. For a similar approach see Tyler Burge, “Our Entitlement to Self- Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1996): 91-116. The thesis that BBp Bp is much stronger than Burge’s earlier claim that “Cartesian” thoughts of the form “I am thinking the thought that water is wet” are always true (see his “Individualism and Self-Knowledge,” The Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 649-663). Jaakko Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief. An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 123ff. goes into a similar direction as I do here. He, however, does not rely upon Moore's paradox (even though he has a lot to say about it; see Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief, 64ff.). For more recent constitutive views which differ considerably from the proposal here see, e.g., Richard Moran, 390 If You Believe, You Believe. A Constitutive Account of Knowledge of One’s Own Beliefs sections 2-4. Section 5 discusses objections. But first I need to say more about the notion of belief and related notions in order to clarify the main thesis and set the stage. 1. Beliefs I take beliefs to be dispositional mental states that can be both manifest and latent, – dispositions for occurrent thought and more indirectly also for behavior based on such occurrent thoughts.6 Beliefs do not always express themselves in occurrent thoughts. In my dreamless sleep I still believe that 2+2=4 even though I am sleeping and not thinking at all about numbers. One of the characteristics that distinguish beliefs from other mental states is a specific relation to truth: Their contents are held true by the subject. Desires and other mental states are different in that respect. Beliefs are “cognitive” in this sense; one could also say that a belief is a cognitive attitude towards some content. In the case of a self-attributing second-order belief the notion of “I” lies within the scope of the second-order belief; it is not sufficient for such beliefs to attribute a belief to someone who happens to be me if I don’t think of that person as myself. We are dealing with de dicto-beliefs about oneself here,7 not with de re- beliefs. Similarly, the notion of a belief, too, lies within the scope of the second- order belief. If somebody ascribes a belief to herself, then she must be clear about the type of attitude she ascribes to herself. One cannot, for conceptual reasons, believe that (3) is true of oneself and not believe it is a belief (that p) that one has here. Believing the latter presupposes that one possesses the concept of a belief and that one knows certain basic things about beliefs. One need not have a psychological theory of belief but one needs to know, say, that there is a difference between beliefs and other kinds of attitudes (like desires, for instance). If one does not know these basic things then one does not possess the concept of a belief and thus cannot have second-order (de dicto) beliefs.8 All this will become important below. Authority and Estrangement. An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Fordi Fernández, “Self-Knowledge, Rationality and Moore’s Paradox,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2005): 533-556, and Mathiey Doucet, “Can We Be Self- Deceived about What We Believe? Self-Knowledge, Self-Deception, and Rational Agency,” European Journal of Philosophy 20 (2012): E1-25. 6 If not indicated otherwise, I will use “thought” for “occurrent thought.” 7 One could add: with de se-beliefs (see David Lewis, “Attitudes de Dicto and de Se,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513-543). 8 This holds even given an externalist account of mental or semantic content. 391 Peter Baumann To avoid misunderstandings: By "second-order beliefs" I do not mean beliefs that one does not have a certain first-order belief. It is certainly possible for people to have repressed beliefs that they think they don’t have. Jack might just laugh at the thought that his parents abandoned him when he was 4 years old but psychotherapy might uncover that he has a repressed belief that this was indeed the case. This example is of the following form: S believes that he does not believe that p, but he does believe that p. This is certainly possible but I am not dealing with this case here (see also section 5.1 below).9 2. The Argument: First Part Suppose that (4) S believes at t-1 that he believes that p.10 What does this entail? Dispositional beliefs are often latent. However, there is a condition on dispositional beliefs which seems very plausible: (5) If S believes at t-1 that p, then S manifests that belief as an occurrent belief at t* (which is either before or at t-1).11 A few remarks on (5) are necessary before we can make the next step in the argument.