Self‐Knowledge: Expression without Expressivism

Abstract

Few would say that we are infallible with respect to our own states of mind.Still, our ordinary ways of thinking represent people as having an especially intimate relationship to their own attitudes, sensations, emotions, and so on.This special intimacy is suggested inter alia by the default assumption that when sincerely made, present-tense mental state self-ascriptions -statements like "My feet are aching", "I want to leave the party", "I think Justin is bored" -will be true.Following familiar usage, I will call such statements 'self-ascriptions', and will label this feature of them their 'first-person authority'.It is natural to understand first-person authority as bound up with the fact that we are in an especially good position to know about our own states of mind, with the idea being that sincere self-ascriptions express this knowledge.Call this the 'epistemic approach' to understanding first-person authority.But there is also a prominent line of thought which rejects the epistemic approach.Expressivists about self-ascriptions think that it fails to capture a second feature of these statements, what I will call (following Bar-On (2004, 6 ff.)) their 'epistemic asymmetry' with other kinds of assertion.

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