First-person Authority Research Articles

WHY THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FIRST PERSON AUTHORITY

WHY THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FIRST PERSON AUTHORITY

The Basis of First-Person Authority

Recently a colleague stopped by my office and asked what I thought about the latest draft of a student's dissertation. I told him that I believed that it was ready to be approved. He asked me why I thought so, we discussed the matter a bit, and he went away knowing what I thought about the student's work. Here we have a characteristic reliance on first-person authority : wishing to know what I thought about the dissertation, my colleague simply asked me, and took my response at face value. My concern in this paper is the nature of the authority each person is recognized as having on matters having to do with his own mind. Consideration of our practices surrounding encounters such as this suggests the following as some of the essential features of first-person authority. First, it is normally assumed to hold over a wide range of mental states, including beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, moods, and sensations. In general, if one wants to know what another person thinks, wants, or feels, the best and simplest way of finding out is to ask her. In this paper, I will confine my attention to the authority one has with respect to one's own beliefs, though I believe the account I present will have some application to other prepositional attitudes as well. Second, the authority we are concerned with appears to be genuinely epistemic. First-person attributions of belief and other mental states are generally

Davidson on First-Person Authority

Davidson’s explanation of first-person authority in utterance of sentences of the form ‘I V that p’ derives first-person authority from the requirements of interpretation of speech. His account is committed to the view that utterance sentences are truth-bearers, that believing that p is a matter of holding true an utterance sentence, and that a speaker’s knowledge of what he means gives him knowledge of what belief he expresses by his utterance. These claims are here faulted. His explanation of first-person authority by reference to the requirements of interpretability is committed to the view that all understanding involves interpretation. This is argued to be a misconception of understanding and of speaker’s meaning. Davidson’s account involves acceptance of the cognitive assumption that normally when a person Vs that p, he knows that he does. This assumption is challenged. Throughout, Davidson’s conception is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein’s.

Personal Identity and the Coherence of Q-Memory

Brian Garrett constructs cases satisfying Andy Hamilton’s definition of weak q-memory. This does not establish that a peculiar kind of memory is at least conceptually coherent. Any ‘apparent memory experiences’ that satisfy the definition turn out not to involve remembering anything at all. This conclusion follows if we accept, as both Hamilton and Garrett do, a variety of first-person authority according to which memory judgements may be false, but not on the ground that someone other than the remembering subject had the remembered experience. Garrett’s brain-bisection illustration sounds convincing, but only because we retain the idea that the subjects created by implanting a hemisphere each in two different bodies are entitled to say that they remember experiences before the surgery in the ordinary sense. To that extent the illustration presents a case of ordinary memory, not q-memory.

Externalism and first-person authority

Externalism in the philosophy of mind is threatened by the view that subjects are authoritative with regard to the contents of their own intentional states. If externalism is to be reconciled with first-person authority, two issues need to be addressed: (a) how the non-evidence-based character of knowledge of one's own intentional states is compatible with ignorance of the empirical factors that individuate the contents of those states, and (b) how, given externalism, the non-evidence-based character of such knowledge could place its subject in an authoritative position. This paper endorses a standard strategy for dealing with (a). The bulk of the paper is devoted to (b). The aim is to develop an account of first-person authority for a certain class of intentional states that is capable of explaining (1) why knowledge of one's own intentional states is peculiarly authoritative, and (2) why such authority is compatible with externalism.

Interpreting self-ascriptions

AbstractI argue that the same general principles apply in ascribing mental states and their contents to self and to others. Nevertheless Goldman is right that there is such a thing as FPA (First Person Authority). But Gopnik is right that FPA cannot be explained by reference to a special way of knowing or a special land of knowledge.

Epistemology, two types of functionalism, and first-person authority

AbstractMy target article did not attribute a pervasive ontological significance to phenomenology, so it escapes Bogdan's “epistemological illusion.” Pust correctly pinpoints an ambiguity between contentinclusive and content-exclusive forms of folk functionalism. Contrary to Fodor, however, only the former is plausible, and hence my third argument against functionalism remains a threat. Van Brakel's charity approach to first-person authority cannot deal with authority vis-a-vis sensations, and it has some extremely odd consequences.

Selves, Interpreters, Narrators

Deborah Knight SELVES, INTERPRETERS, NARRATORS I Autobiography, understood in die standard sense of someone telling or more frequendy writing the story of her life, has been a periodic focus of philosophical attention. Partly this is because philosophers such as Augustine and Rousseau have written some of the classics of the genre. Recendy, interest in autobiography has been renewed among philosophers concerned widi narrative and especially those concerned widi die relation between interpretation, narration, and die self. In particular, there has been considerable interest in questions of narrative voice and perspective,1 as well as in questions concerning whether die self is (merely) a literary or fictional construct. One philosopher who has had much to say about selves as autobiographers is Daniel C. Dennett. He argues that the self is just an autobiographical accretion forming on or around some agent who is able to speak, to differentiate itself from others, and to call itself "I."2 The self, according to Dennett, is just the hole surrounded by the autobiographical doughnut. It is a fiction, and like any otiier fiction, what any selfamounts to will depend on die way we tell the story. But as I will argue, Dennett's view oversimplifies die complex narrational role involved in telling tales about oneself and otiiers. It also oversimplifies die relationship between the accreters of autobiography and dieir interpreters. In particular, it fails to recognize that both autobiographical accreters and interpreters are involved in a narrational activity. Perhaps it should not surprise us to discover a philosopher-novelist whose work offers a helpful counterpoint to Dennett's views about story-based selves. Rebecca Goldstein's novel, TheLate-SummerPassion of a Woman ofMind,5 contains an important insight into die narrational Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 274-286 Deborah Knight275 function presupposed by bodi interpreters and self-interpreters. Goldstein, not unlike Dennett, argues that in a fundamental sense our lives are accounted for and made sense of in storied terms. This is not an original observation. What Goldstein recognizes that Dennett does not is the complex narrational interconnection between teller and interpreter. Further, she recognizes the hopelessness of the desire for some omniscient interpreter or impersonal narrator—some third-person interpretive perspective that can simply bracket the intentions of the agent as that agent understands them. Goldstein helps us to see part of what is at stake in all discussions of storied lives, as well as what is at stake in the idea diat die self or subject of action is produced through the stories tiiat we and otiiers tell. So let me contrast Dennett's views about narrated selves with Goldstein's views. My objective is to show the limitations of Dennett's position, and die suggestiveness of Goldstein's. II Dennett's views about the self can be thought of in terms of a pair of guiding intuitions: either (Dl) the self is soul-like, the ghost in the Cartesian machine, the originator a priori ofmeanings and actions, the incorrigible source of intentions, the consciousness that preexists and directs action; or (D2) the self is discursive, which is to say that it is a product formed in language dirough die telling and exchanging of tales about ourselves. If (Dl), then the self is prelinguistic and makes each of us God-like creators and guarantors of our meanings; or, if (D2), then the selfis the fragmentary, pieced-togetiier posit that orients us through an otherwise potentially unbalancing variety of environmental and psychological inputs and outputs. Dennett treats diese two views as the only possible positions in die debate, and since his brand of anti-Cartesianism, like RyIe's before him, requires that he refute (Dl), he is left only with (D2). By refuting (Dl) and keeping (D2), Dennett allows himself to conclude that, while agents' selves are spun through the tales they tell of themselves, there is no good reason to base one's interpretation of any agent on the version of the tale told by that agent. The only perspective from which agents can be interpreted is a diird-person perspective. There can be no significant question as to first-person authority, since on Dennett's view, die first-person subjective position has...

First-person authority and beliefs as representations

First-person authority and beliefs as representations