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Transparency and Self-Knowledge
Alex Byrne sets out and defends a theory of self-knowledge-knowledge of one's mental states. Inspired by Gareth Evans' discussion of self-knowledge in his The Varieties of Reference, the basic idea is that one comes to know that one is in a mental state M by an inference from a worldly or environmental premise to the conclusion that one is in M. (Typically the worldly premise will not be about anything mental.) The mind, on this account, is 'transparent': self-knowledge is achieved by an 'outward glance' at the corresponding tract of the world, not by an 'inward glance' at one's own mind. Belief is the clearest case, with the inference being from 'p' to 'I believe that p'. One serious problem with this idea is that the inference seems terrible, because 'p' is at best very weak evidence that one believes that p. Another is that the idea seems not to generalize. For example, what is the worldly premise corresponding to 'I intend to do this', or 'I feel a pain'? Byrne argues that
both problems can be solved, and explains how the account covers perception, sensation, desire, intention, emotion, memory, imagination, and thought. The result is a unified theory of self-knowledge that explains the epistemic security of beliefs about one's mental states (privileged access), as well as the fact that one has a special first-person way of knowing about one's mental states (peculiar access).
both problems can be solved, and explains how the account covers perception, sensation, desire, intention, emotion, memory, imagination, and thought. The result is a unified theory of self-knowledge that explains the epistemic security of beliefs about one's mental states (privileged access), as well as the fact that one has a special first-person way of knowing about one's mental states (peculiar access).
- GenresPhilosophy
240 pages, Hardcover
Published June 26, 2018
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November 14, 2024
This book offers a head-scratching thesis. The question is: How do we obtain self-knowledge (viz., our knowledge of our inner states, such as our beliefs, perceptions, sensations, intentions, imaginings, etc.)? Bryne offers two desiderata for an account. First, an account of self-knowledge should explain the “privileged” status of this knowledge; namely, purported instances of such knowledge are more often veridical (or attempts at obtaining such knowledge are more often successful) than the comparison class of purported knowledge of other people’s mental states. Second, an account should explain the “unique” status of this knowledge; namely, we have a certain relation to this knowledge which no one else can have. Others might guess or deduce all they want about my mental states, but only I can have a certain sort of knowledge about them, which is a different sort than whatever they might arrive at, even if both of our knowledges are equally truthful.
The heart of Bryne’s account is this. Regardless of whether it’s our beliefs, perceptions, sensations, intentions, desires, emotions, imaginings, or thoughts we’re coming to know (he goes through all of these instances in the book), we come to know them through “the transparency method.” The general form of this method is that there is a rule of inference which we follow and which normally guarantees that the outputted belief is true in such a way that counts as knowledge. The general form of the rule is: “If [the relevant kind of object/facts X], then believe that you [the relevant kind of mental attitude]-[X].” For example, the rule for arriving at knowledge of our beliefs is “If p, then believe that you believe that p,” and for perception, “If [relevant visual facts x] and x is an F, believe that you see an F.” For desire, surprisingly perhaps, the rule is “If phi-ing is desirable, believe that you want to phi.”
At first, all of these rules might look circular. In almost every section, Bryne acknowledges this objection and offers a similar response to it. The objection has the general form of: in order to arrive at the antecedent of any of these if-then rules, don’t you already need to have come to know about your mental state? Then, in order to answer the question of how you come to know this, or in order to arrive at the antecedent at all, one needs to address the overall question of how we come to know our minds; so the formulation of the rule is a non-starter, appearing to get the goods (of the consequent) only because the goods have already been presupposed and not yet explained (of the antecedent).
The general form of Bryne’s responses to varieties of this objection is: The antecedent, conceptually, is not identical to the consequent, such that there is good reason to think that the antecedent in fact requires different resources for explaining how it’s arrived at than the consequent does. Moreover, Bryne offers resources for explaining how we arrive at the antecedent, and these resources show that we’re normally guaranteed to get this right, or it amounts to a mental state of such a nature that it positions us to normally correctly conclude the consequent.
For example, consider the belief rule. The obtaining of the antecedent “If p,” for Bryne, should be understood in terms of our “recognizing” (his term) that p. Once we recognize that p, we can safely conclude that we believe that p, because the episode of our recognizing as such (my terms) entails that we’ll have this belief state. Bryne suggests to break this down a bit further along the following terms: In coming to recognize p, we recognize the various conditions which amount to the truth of p. Compare this to Gareth Evans’ method for self-knowledge of beliefs: we can know what we believe by “looking outwards” and seeing what it is that we believe (e.g., I know that I believe that my skin is burnt by looking at my hand; I don’t have to check anything “internal” to my mind to know this.) The conditions which make up your position of recognizing p are different than those which make up your position of concluding that you believe that p; the latter position is made up by your drawing an inference from the antecedent, and the former position is made up by your being in the world in such a way that you form beliefs about it.
Or, take the desire rule. Bryne is less explicit for this case of how we arrive at the position of the antecedent “If phi-ing is a desirable option.” Through the examples he offers of our knowing our desires, it is strongly suggested that we get there through the same processes by which we arrive at the antecedent of the belief rule; namely, by imagining or perceiving aspects of one’s situation, one can recognize various propositions which amount to the desirability of phi over other options.
Bryne’s account of self-knowledge of emotion is a bit different. He sticks with the example of disgust. The rule here is: “If x is disgusting and produces disgust reactions in you, believe that you feel disgust at x.” For this antecedent to obtain, it seems to rely on resources found in the treatment of the belief rule, at the least. By recognizing various conditions which make up the truth of x’s being disgusting and producing disgust reactions in you, you arrive at this antecedent, or the antecedent comes to hold. But for many emotions, disgust even, it’s not clear that recognizing that such conditions hold is a straightforward manner as it is in perceptual beliefs (e.g., I know that I believe I’m seeing a hawk). To recognize that a pattern of physiological arousal in you is one of disgust, as opposed to other emotion types, can be tricky. This is affirmed by psychological literature on the misattribution of arousal and the “social construction” of certain emotions.
Bryne doesn’t raise an objection like this. If he is to address it, it seems that he could deny that our detecting disgust reactions in us is unreliable. He might posit certain bodily/mental mechanisms which guarantee that we recognize such reactions accurately; he goes through the mechanisms of nociception in his treatment of self-knowledge of pain in a previous chapter, for example. If he takes this path, he’d have to admit that for many emotions, namely those for which there aren’t reliable mechanisms, we lack privileged self-knowledge. His account is not as universal as he thinks. Maybe that’d be fine by his lights; he sometimes admits that his account is limited in its scope, such as when he treats the belief that you don’t know whether p or not p.
But this sort of solution isn’t so straightforward. Here one can notice cracks in Bryne’s account of self-knowledge of emotion, which might extend to his general account of self-knowledge of any mental state, or at least certain other cases of it. For Bryne’s account of emotion to be not dangerously circular, he’d need to say that whatever processes that are involved in coming to recognize that x is disgusting and is producing disgust reactions in you don’t significantly overlap with the processes involved of the consequent, namely, your belief that you’re feeling that x is disgusting. I think this is implausible regarding the case of emotion. Emotion, as well-known in the psychological literature, consists in complex processes, and arguably is always constituted by its regulation, either by us deliberately or implicitly. In our coming to sense that we’re have one particular emotion over others, this will regulate how the emotion unfolds and feed into its constitution.
I think many desires are like this, as well. Often when we start off with a place of desire, we aren’t aware of exactly what we want, but come to locate something. This process of location is often shaped by our needs to be seen as socially normal or acceptable, as well as our need for what we’ve identified to be reachable, rather than something that’d require tons of work or significant change of lifestyle. Freud understood this fact in terms of the process of sublimation. I think that’s pretty truthful. So like emotion, the desires we end up with are constituted over complex processes, into which what we believe about our desire significantly figures.
Even many beliefs are like this. As long as our belief is evaluative in character or involves something which is intrinsically partly socially constructed, belief should be treated in a similar way to desire and emotion. This is because when we evaluate something (e.g., I believe that it’s been a wonderful day) or deal with something intrinsically partly socially constructed (e.g., I believe that I’ve sinned), the subject matter of belief partly depends upon our values, interests, or lifestyle, all of which is partly subject to our voluntary control. We often can at least slightly shift what we’re valuing most at this present moment through what we come to know about ourselves. In coming to know that I believe that it’s been a wonderful day, for example, this may partly constitute the quality of the day’s wonderfulness such that I come to find myself surrounded by the conditions which amount to the truth of this proposition. In contrast, if I came to know that I believed a different proposition, that it’s been a strange day for example, this might partly constitute the quality of the day such that the proposition of my first-order belief shifts.
At first it might look like Bryne could respond to this by insisting that the rules he offers are “self-verifying” in the sense that while the first-order belief, desire, emotion, etc. could be false or inappropriate, our second-order belief or representation of this first-order mental state will be accurate and truthful. The rules succeed when we’re only trying, rather than succeeding. But this doesn’t address my concern above. It’s not that I might believe falsely when I come to know what I believe in a certain manner influenced by my motivations. Instead, the conditions which make up the truth of what I believe at that first-order level, in the first place, might get shifted, such that given a situation I find myself in, there could be a range of equally truthful first-order beliefs which I form, each of which come with its corresponding truthful second-order belief.
In other words, Bryne’s claims that self-knowledge is a matter of detection (not self-constitution) and that all mental states of which we can know can be given the same treatment, or can be addressed by one account, are problematic. Some mental states we know about are surely matters of detection (I think we detect all of our sensations and perceptions, and certain of our beliefs, namely those which aren’t evaluative or about subject matters which are intrinsically partly socially constructed). But others are not like this.
As a whole, however, Bryne’s account is fascinating and the discussions he has across the range of types of mental state are worthwhile reading. He comes up with creative solutions to prima facie holes of his account, when it’s applied across the different types of mental state, and it’s fun to read these, even if it’s not always compelling. I particularly like his approach of showing that knowledge can be achieved without being well-founded or justified in a traditional epistemic sense. The antecedent of the general rule for arriving at self-knowledge doesn’t contain the resources necessary for justifying the consequent. But it’s practical conditions surrounding any situation under which the antecedent obtains which almost guarantees that the consequent will be true, and it’s our familiarity or even knowledge of these conditions which might be understood as figuring into the epistemology of the consequent, the bit of self-knowledge we conclude. It’s intuitive to think that accounts of self-knowledge would either foreground inferential processes or hold that inference isn’t involved (but there’s rather something like an inner scanner or something akin to a sensory organ which picks up on mental states). Bryne’s account breaks from that mold. His both foregrounds inferential processes and non-inferential conditions, like how we perceive or sense our surrounds, or whatever is going on which is essential to our coming to recognize the conditions which make up the antecedent of each of the rules.
My claims about self-knowledge are tentative. I wonder whether it could be the case that there’s something continuous and uniform about treatments of self-knowledge of perception, evaluative belief, and emotion alike, for example. I’ve been focusing in on the discontinuous features. I also wonder about whether supposing that an account of any instance of self-knowledge ought to foreground some inference could be helpful for my thought. In my thinking on these issues, so far, I’ve had the tendency to stay at a level of description of what’s intuitive to personally report on our experiences, or of what’s central to everyday language. The inference rules Bryne offers are not avenues we personally or deliberately follow; they are supposed to stand in for transitions our mind makes regardless of whether we’re aware of them. This is a different level of description than that which I’m used to thinking at.
The heart of Bryne’s account is this. Regardless of whether it’s our beliefs, perceptions, sensations, intentions, desires, emotions, imaginings, or thoughts we’re coming to know (he goes through all of these instances in the book), we come to know them through “the transparency method.” The general form of this method is that there is a rule of inference which we follow and which normally guarantees that the outputted belief is true in such a way that counts as knowledge. The general form of the rule is: “If [the relevant kind of object/facts X], then believe that you [the relevant kind of mental attitude]-[X].” For example, the rule for arriving at knowledge of our beliefs is “If p, then believe that you believe that p,” and for perception, “If [relevant visual facts x] and x is an F, believe that you see an F.” For desire, surprisingly perhaps, the rule is “If phi-ing is desirable, believe that you want to phi.”
At first, all of these rules might look circular. In almost every section, Bryne acknowledges this objection and offers a similar response to it. The objection has the general form of: in order to arrive at the antecedent of any of these if-then rules, don’t you already need to have come to know about your mental state? Then, in order to answer the question of how you come to know this, or in order to arrive at the antecedent at all, one needs to address the overall question of how we come to know our minds; so the formulation of the rule is a non-starter, appearing to get the goods (of the consequent) only because the goods have already been presupposed and not yet explained (of the antecedent).
The general form of Bryne’s responses to varieties of this objection is: The antecedent, conceptually, is not identical to the consequent, such that there is good reason to think that the antecedent in fact requires different resources for explaining how it’s arrived at than the consequent does. Moreover, Bryne offers resources for explaining how we arrive at the antecedent, and these resources show that we’re normally guaranteed to get this right, or it amounts to a mental state of such a nature that it positions us to normally correctly conclude the consequent.
For example, consider the belief rule. The obtaining of the antecedent “If p,” for Bryne, should be understood in terms of our “recognizing” (his term) that p. Once we recognize that p, we can safely conclude that we believe that p, because the episode of our recognizing as such (my terms) entails that we’ll have this belief state. Bryne suggests to break this down a bit further along the following terms: In coming to recognize p, we recognize the various conditions which amount to the truth of p. Compare this to Gareth Evans’ method for self-knowledge of beliefs: we can know what we believe by “looking outwards” and seeing what it is that we believe (e.g., I know that I believe that my skin is burnt by looking at my hand; I don’t have to check anything “internal” to my mind to know this.) The conditions which make up your position of recognizing p are different than those which make up your position of concluding that you believe that p; the latter position is made up by your drawing an inference from the antecedent, and the former position is made up by your being in the world in such a way that you form beliefs about it.
Or, take the desire rule. Bryne is less explicit for this case of how we arrive at the position of the antecedent “If phi-ing is a desirable option.” Through the examples he offers of our knowing our desires, it is strongly suggested that we get there through the same processes by which we arrive at the antecedent of the belief rule; namely, by imagining or perceiving aspects of one’s situation, one can recognize various propositions which amount to the desirability of phi over other options.
Bryne’s account of self-knowledge of emotion is a bit different. He sticks with the example of disgust. The rule here is: “If x is disgusting and produces disgust reactions in you, believe that you feel disgust at x.” For this antecedent to obtain, it seems to rely on resources found in the treatment of the belief rule, at the least. By recognizing various conditions which make up the truth of x’s being disgusting and producing disgust reactions in you, you arrive at this antecedent, or the antecedent comes to hold. But for many emotions, disgust even, it’s not clear that recognizing that such conditions hold is a straightforward manner as it is in perceptual beliefs (e.g., I know that I believe I’m seeing a hawk). To recognize that a pattern of physiological arousal in you is one of disgust, as opposed to other emotion types, can be tricky. This is affirmed by psychological literature on the misattribution of arousal and the “social construction” of certain emotions.
Bryne doesn’t raise an objection like this. If he is to address it, it seems that he could deny that our detecting disgust reactions in us is unreliable. He might posit certain bodily/mental mechanisms which guarantee that we recognize such reactions accurately; he goes through the mechanisms of nociception in his treatment of self-knowledge of pain in a previous chapter, for example. If he takes this path, he’d have to admit that for many emotions, namely those for which there aren’t reliable mechanisms, we lack privileged self-knowledge. His account is not as universal as he thinks. Maybe that’d be fine by his lights; he sometimes admits that his account is limited in its scope, such as when he treats the belief that you don’t know whether p or not p.
But this sort of solution isn’t so straightforward. Here one can notice cracks in Bryne’s account of self-knowledge of emotion, which might extend to his general account of self-knowledge of any mental state, or at least certain other cases of it. For Bryne’s account of emotion to be not dangerously circular, he’d need to say that whatever processes that are involved in coming to recognize that x is disgusting and is producing disgust reactions in you don’t significantly overlap with the processes involved of the consequent, namely, your belief that you’re feeling that x is disgusting. I think this is implausible regarding the case of emotion. Emotion, as well-known in the psychological literature, consists in complex processes, and arguably is always constituted by its regulation, either by us deliberately or implicitly. In our coming to sense that we’re have one particular emotion over others, this will regulate how the emotion unfolds and feed into its constitution.
I think many desires are like this, as well. Often when we start off with a place of desire, we aren’t aware of exactly what we want, but come to locate something. This process of location is often shaped by our needs to be seen as socially normal or acceptable, as well as our need for what we’ve identified to be reachable, rather than something that’d require tons of work or significant change of lifestyle. Freud understood this fact in terms of the process of sublimation. I think that’s pretty truthful. So like emotion, the desires we end up with are constituted over complex processes, into which what we believe about our desire significantly figures.
Even many beliefs are like this. As long as our belief is evaluative in character or involves something which is intrinsically partly socially constructed, belief should be treated in a similar way to desire and emotion. This is because when we evaluate something (e.g., I believe that it’s been a wonderful day) or deal with something intrinsically partly socially constructed (e.g., I believe that I’ve sinned), the subject matter of belief partly depends upon our values, interests, or lifestyle, all of which is partly subject to our voluntary control. We often can at least slightly shift what we’re valuing most at this present moment through what we come to know about ourselves. In coming to know that I believe that it’s been a wonderful day, for example, this may partly constitute the quality of the day’s wonderfulness such that I come to find myself surrounded by the conditions which amount to the truth of this proposition. In contrast, if I came to know that I believed a different proposition, that it’s been a strange day for example, this might partly constitute the quality of the day such that the proposition of my first-order belief shifts.
At first it might look like Bryne could respond to this by insisting that the rules he offers are “self-verifying” in the sense that while the first-order belief, desire, emotion, etc. could be false or inappropriate, our second-order belief or representation of this first-order mental state will be accurate and truthful. The rules succeed when we’re only trying, rather than succeeding. But this doesn’t address my concern above. It’s not that I might believe falsely when I come to know what I believe in a certain manner influenced by my motivations. Instead, the conditions which make up the truth of what I believe at that first-order level, in the first place, might get shifted, such that given a situation I find myself in, there could be a range of equally truthful first-order beliefs which I form, each of which come with its corresponding truthful second-order belief.
In other words, Bryne’s claims that self-knowledge is a matter of detection (not self-constitution) and that all mental states of which we can know can be given the same treatment, or can be addressed by one account, are problematic. Some mental states we know about are surely matters of detection (I think we detect all of our sensations and perceptions, and certain of our beliefs, namely those which aren’t evaluative or about subject matters which are intrinsically partly socially constructed). But others are not like this.
As a whole, however, Bryne’s account is fascinating and the discussions he has across the range of types of mental state are worthwhile reading. He comes up with creative solutions to prima facie holes of his account, when it’s applied across the different types of mental state, and it’s fun to read these, even if it’s not always compelling. I particularly like his approach of showing that knowledge can be achieved without being well-founded or justified in a traditional epistemic sense. The antecedent of the general rule for arriving at self-knowledge doesn’t contain the resources necessary for justifying the consequent. But it’s practical conditions surrounding any situation under which the antecedent obtains which almost guarantees that the consequent will be true, and it’s our familiarity or even knowledge of these conditions which might be understood as figuring into the epistemology of the consequent, the bit of self-knowledge we conclude. It’s intuitive to think that accounts of self-knowledge would either foreground inferential processes or hold that inference isn’t involved (but there’s rather something like an inner scanner or something akin to a sensory organ which picks up on mental states). Bryne’s account breaks from that mold. His both foregrounds inferential processes and non-inferential conditions, like how we perceive or sense our surrounds, or whatever is going on which is essential to our coming to recognize the conditions which make up the antecedent of each of the rules.
My claims about self-knowledge are tentative. I wonder whether it could be the case that there’s something continuous and uniform about treatments of self-knowledge of perception, evaluative belief, and emotion alike, for example. I’ve been focusing in on the discontinuous features. I also wonder about whether supposing that an account of any instance of self-knowledge ought to foreground some inference could be helpful for my thought. In my thinking on these issues, so far, I’ve had the tendency to stay at a level of description of what’s intuitive to personally report on our experiences, or of what’s central to everyday language. The inference rules Bryne offers are not avenues we personally or deliberately follow; they are supposed to stand in for transitions our mind makes regardless of whether we’re aware of them. This is a different level of description than that which I’m used to thinking at.
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