The Basis of First-Person Authority

Abstract

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

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