Speaking Sense: A Hybrid Source of Justification for Self-Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract Nico Silins [(2012). ‘Judgment as a Guide to Belief.’ In D. Smithies and D. Stoljar (eds), Introspection and Consciousness, pp. 295–327. Oxford: Oxford University Press; (2013). ‘Introspection and Inference.’ Philosophical Studies163, 291–315; (2020). ‘The Evil Demon Inside.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research100, 325–343] argues that conscious judgements justify self-attribution of belief in the content judged. In defending his view, he makes use of Moore's paradox, seeking to show how his theory can explain what seems irrational or absurd about sentences of the form, ‘p and I do not believe that p’. I show why his argument strategy is not available to defend the view that conscious judgements can justify the self-attribution of belief in the content judged. I then propose an amended version of his theory, which holds that sincerely asserting a proposition – whether aloud or silently – justifies self-ascribing belief in the proposition expressed. In doing so, I draw on an argument which I made in Gregory [(2018). ‘The Feeling of Sincerity: Inner Speech and the Phenomenology of Assertion.’ Thought7, 225–236] that there is something it is like to make a sincere assertion which is different from what it is like to make an insincere assertion. The phenomenology of sincere assertion provides immediate justification for self-ascription of belief in a proposition which has been sincerely asserted; nonetheless, it may be that we need to interpret our own assertions in order to determine which propositions they express. This paves the way for showing how two competing schools of thought about self-knowledge – one which holds that self-knowledge is immediate and one which holds that self-knowledge is inferential – might be combined.