PEL Presents Closereads: Donald Davidson on Self-Knowledge (Part One)

Introducing Donald Davidson

0:00This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

0:10It's time for a new reading. And I had suggested another article by Donald Davidson. I feel like when I initially read him, I felt like this is maybe the best philosopher I've ever read. I felt like the most cogent, the most subtle. I don't feel that after our recent partially examined life exploration of him. But I was still curious to read a little bit more. Yeah. What was your overall reaction to this guy? He's great. The things we read are a bit dense, probably. They could use a bit more explication, but maybe not for the audience that he's writing for in a particular journal.

0:50At that time, he's overall a really good writer, and he's obviously, you know, a great thinker. So there's only a certain amount of analytic philosophy I can take. So I'm a little worried that you're going to try it because of your course. Death march us through a lot of analytic philosophy of mine, but we'll see. Yeah, I don't know. I sort of think of these contemporary, I think of the analytic. Well, obviously, like Williamson is core analytic, and that's very contemporary.

1:22But I just, I put Williamson in an entirely different category. It may be closer to Davidson than Chalmers and Fodor and Dennett and people like that. And I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it is, has to do with the relationship to science, or just the relationship to these being live public issues. I guess Ned Block is a good one who is a really sharp writer in that area of philosophy of mind, who is still really difficult, who is still, you can't nail down.

2:00He's not fun like Chalmers is. He's still scathing like Dennett is, but I find him harder to nail down. And he definitely is not as afraid to go off into mathematics territory. So maybe that is the, the line. If you're, are you really an analytic philosopher? If you're not in mathematics territory? I also felt the same way in terms of, okay, this is to the point. It doesn't require me to have a lot of background. It's just a really insightful, subtle, carefully thought thing about Nagel.

2:39So when people would ask me, what is your, you know, what is the one book that you would just recommend for a beginning philosopher? And Nagel's Mortal Thoughts, a collection of essays. I have long felt like I want to actually, maybe we should go back to some of those, not necessarily really the philosophy of mind, but for, for this podcast, right? I remember there's one about the absurd in there. Uh, I forget what else, but you know, nuggets that that was kind of what I liked about analytic philosophy as opposed to Hegel. Hegel, you don't understand it. You're struggling with the words with analytic, good analytic philosophy. You're not struggling with the words. You're, you're just, it just gives you, you know, actual things to think about.

3:21Yeah. Let's get into it.

First person authority

3:23All right. So this part, this, this article is called first person authority is from 1984. I don't even remember how, I just stumbled over this yesterday and I don't even remember how exactly, but it, it seemed, uh, what, once you read the summary, Wes, it has a little summary in three languages at the top. Okay. What explains the presumption that a speaker is right when he sincerely attributes a belief, desire, or intention to his present self, while there is no such presumption when others make similar attributions to him?

4:00It is argued that solutions to the problem of knowledge of other minds, which merely restate the asymmetry, leave open the field to the skeptic. A new explanation of first person authority is offered, which traces the source of authority to a necessary feature of the interpretation of speech. Yeah. This attempt to language if I, you know, already has me skeptical, but we'll see. Yes. Well, I mean, we know sort of the general background of this, which is Wittgenstein's private language argument. You know, do you know what you mean? Can you talk about your individual pain that nobody else can get ahold of? And the very fact that you put it in this public word pain makes it in some way accessible to other people.

4:53They can't see your pain. They can't see your pain. You could be lying about your pain. It seems like you can't be wrong. Well, are there for psychoanalytically like, right? There are phantom pains. There are hysterical. Yeah, but that's, that's not, but you're still feeling the pain, right? You were right. You can't be wrong that you were in pain. Yeah. I think the thing here, you know, just the overall move, right? Ironically, the appeal to a necessary feature of the interpretation of speech. Just take that phrase. You can already see that that's a kind of the, the go-to analytic replacement for introspection.

5:29It's like, well, we're not going to introspect, but we're going to talk about language and semantics and syntax. And we're going to do all this stuff with language that we used to do by just thinking about the mind. But we'll see. I may be, this is just completely prejudiced premonition. We'll see what Davidson. Well, you know already, because you read it. I haven't, no, I haven't read this yet. Oh, I thought you read it. Okay. Nope. All right.

6:21Okay. So he's, is he going to, it sounds like he is going to argue for first person authority, but he's going to try to ground it in language.

7:02So the epistemological facts, which is what he's, right. The traditional way of approaching this in philosophy will get this language grounding. Right. There's this question of, to what degree do we understand ourselves without language, right? Can we have, we've talked before about, can there be thought at all without language? And inevitably we're going to,

7:54does this real thought, does this real thought, does having a language make you a fundamentally different kind of creature regarding your own, certainly regarding your own self-reflection, right? That the dog, that the dog cannot think about, I am believing that somebody is coming home, but can the dog think that, like, can dog hide, dogs hide things from each other? You know, some, if you're trying to, you know, some, if you're trying to sneak up on a prey animal, then it seems like you have at least behavioral equivalents of beliefs that they don't detect me yet.

8:30And then when they start sprinting, then I, you know, the subterfuge is over. So it seems like they have some sort of crude theory of mind, if it's not entirely reflex, which it seems like it's more reflexible than that. So it can't be reflex. Yeah. They certainly don't have theory of mind in our sense, which we know, we know, which is basically about an understanding that others can have different beliefs than ours and they could be, they could be wrong about them. But yeah, they have seemed to have something. And I think concepts are largely dispositional, you know, as per meaning, as use dispositions to behave in certain ways and say certain things. This makes me sound more behavioralistically analytic than, you know, you might expect, but I think this is part of it.

9:15And in that way, they're similar to character traits and something I've been thinking about with psychoanalysis. So there's not an easy way to disentangle concepts and the self ego, right? Development, ego structure. Concepts are part of our structure and they operate non-consciously, but we can become conscious of them and language is the way to do that, I think. And then you were just, just to finish what you were asking, like, can we be mistaken that we're in pain? I don't think we can, of course, because if we're, you know, someone's going to say, Ooh, I'm going to, I'm the evil genius. I'm going to give you the illusion, the delusion that you're in pain and you go, ow.

9:59And of course, ow is, you are in pain. In some cases, illusions and the real thing can't be distinguished. But if you're into psychoanalysis, you could say, well, the person doesn't know why they're in pain. They have a bad theory of their pain. They think it's because they wanted the piece of cake and, you know, mommy said no. And that may be part of it. Deprivation. But really, it's because they were offended. It's the pain of, you know, Aristotelian slights and anger, what psychoanalysts would call narcissistic injury.

10:35So I think we can be wrong about the nature of a pain, very, you know, and, and badly wrong, and that can make it worse. So just to go back and answer your question a little bit. So that, that, that does add wrinkles and complications ultimately to these views, I think. Well, and I would add the distinction between a mere feeling and an emotion. So pain, we normally think of as a mere feeling, but I'm thinking about when a child has a little tiny scratch and are, is the child going to completely lose it and throw a tantrum or is the child just going to get up and keep moving?

11:16Like you would think that the pain is probably the same either way, but the expression of the pain. And then that, you know, the, the narcissistic injury. Yep. It's so unfair that the world is this way that I should be in pain, you know, Oh, parental figures. I need to show you and share with you this pain. You know, it's like, I'm pointing out the pain. Look, look, there's a pit, you know, because I want to get, so to say that that doesn't change the experience.

11:46It seems naive. Clearly, you know, it's a much more intense pain, but yet the facts on the ground and maybe the facts of the actual sensation are not any different. Yeah. I mean, this is really an odd thing and it speaks to the stoic insight, right? The stoic intuition, which is that we can have these propositional attitudes, these beliefs that, that do change the, uh, the qualia of the phenomenon or, or do they, I mean, that, that's, that, that's a paper. I'm sure it's been written many times, but do they, and how do they do it? And yeah, they certainly make it worse, right? The child example you're giving. Yeah. I think we'd have to, our default view would have to be, yes, it does change the, the qualitative feel of the experience. It does, it doesn't just add on other qualities. Right. But, but anyway, that's, that bears a lot of thinking about.

Propositional attitudes versus sensations

12:41All right, go. The connection between the problem of first-person authority and the traditional problem of other minds is obvious, but as I pose the former problem, there are two important differences. First-person authority is a narrower problem, since I shall consider it only as it applies to propositional attitudes, like belief, desire, intention, being pleased, astonished, afeared, or proud that something is the case, or knowing, remembering, noticing, or perceiving that something is the case.

13:13But I shall not discuss what are often taken to be central to the problem of other minds, pains, and other sensations. No. And knowledge, memory, attention, and perception, as directed at objects like people, streets, cities, comets, and events, rather than propositions. He's always got to include something astronomical, you know. What holds for the propositional attitudes ought, it seems, to be relevant to sensations and the rest, but I do not explore the connection here.

13:45Okay, so let's, okay, right, there's the problem of other minds, and then there's first-person authority. Problem of other minds, how do we, you know, I can't just say what's in your head and I can't experience it, and I don't have direct knowledge that you even have something in your head. And the problem of first-person authority is whether I can say that I seem to have a pain that I don't have, have, or something like that. If I don't have that first-person authority, I might have pains that I, I may not have pains that I think I have.

14:19All right. But here, he's going to leave aside pain, and then he's only going to consider propositional attitudes. And I don't know that knowing should be included in here, because knowing is an achievement term, whereas believing, remembering, noticing. Well, noticing maybe is like knowing, but in any case, it seems that a, I just was reading last night, looking at another possible paper for us to read by Jerry Fodor about methodological solipsism.

14:52And the idea was, there are these externalists about belief that think that you need to understand the context in which someone is put to even say what the content of their proposition is. That if they're in a different environment, then what they mean in their head could mean something different. And it seemed like that that raised, I didn't get that far into the photo or paper to know, but it seemed like that, that raised too many problems.

15:22Like when you're studying the kind of thing that Davidson's going to be studying here, you need just detach it, put, have an epoche, have, have a, we're, we're going to put aside whether the belief is true or not. It's just, are you correct in ascribing a belief to yourself and are you, as compared to your level of certainty and warrant in ascribing a belief to somebody else? But a propositional attitude is, is, you know, an interesting way to go, right?

15:53Cause it's non-traditional and because it doesn't like the extent to which it carries qualitative content or qualia with it is disputed and unclear. Yep. Right. To have a belief itself is not to say I necessarily bring up, you know, I believe that the cat is on the mat doesn't, right. It certainly isn't the same as having the experience that the cat is on the mat or the dream or even imagining it, you know, for reading at a quick pace, we're reading all these propositions without putting images to every single one of them, probably.

16:27Exactly. So this is something that he gets away from qualia here. And I, I guess that makes it easier. I don't know. I mean, we'll have to see whether these beliefs, desires, intentions, whether these are dispositions, in which case, I don't know what my dispositions are. In many cases until something, the inciting incident that would make that disposition actualized comes to case, you know, would you run from a bear attack?

16:57Like, uh, do you believe that bears are so dangerous that you need to run away from them? Or do you believe, you know, what they tell you that don't just yell at it and that'll make it run away? You know, I don't know. I think another, you know, case from this sentence, right. He uses the word problem and it's not necessarily something I'm going to put an image to. Right. So what does it mean to say, I know the meaning of it? Well, I have a dispositions to use it in certain ways in certain sentences and to know if you're using it the wrong way in certain sentences, it'll be like, what, what's he saying?

17:34And so that's the beginning, you know, of sketching out a dispositional account of what it means to have a concept in this case. And it's, uh, of course it, you know, I think it runs against our intuition. Well, you know, if I have the word, I just, you know, I have a, there's kind of a platonic idea behind it, or there's at least something in the, something floating around in the mind that it refers to. And it can't just be dispositional. It's got to be, it's got to be there in some sense.

18:04But I think, um, that's probably not the way it works. Yeah. So he could be, be talking instead of dispositionally about the qualia that, uh, an instantiation. I think there is a technical term for this, but I'm not remembering what it is offhand. The, uh, an occurrence belief. That's, that's what I mean. An occurrence belief and a current desire. It is happening right now. It is a content of consciousness. That would be just like a pain. That's something that you should be aware of. And it seems like you couldn't be wrong about it, even though maybe you could misunderstand what it entails or how it relates to the world or things like that.

18:42So I believe that the cat is on the mat because I, my wife told me that and I'm not thinking about it. Right. And yeah, we have to divide this into two, right? Cause I could believe it without even being thinking, thinking about it. It's just a belief that I carry around. Then I could attend to the belief, but in any case, I don't need images necessarily to attend to the belief. And then there's the question, you know, if I'm wrong, if I've been lied to and I've just believed it, okay, that's fine. But I'm not, I could say, but I wasn't wrong that I believed that. So that's the authority at work with a propositional, just, just for listeners. So, all right.

19:20All propositional attitudes exhibit first person authority, but in various degrees and kinds belief and desire are relatively clear and simple examples. Seems like it's, they're not based on what we were just saying. What do you really desire? Anyway, while intention, perception, and memory, memory and knowledge are in one way or another, more complex. Thus, in evaluating someone's claim to have noticed that the house is on fire, there are at least three things to consider.

19:50Whether the house is on fire, whether the speaker believes the house is on fire and how the fire caused the belief. So he's not engaging in methodological solipsism, like at least at this point. If the fire sets your propositional attitudes on fire, then it causes the belief that it's on fire. I mean, maybe I can only think if I write stuff down, then it, then my propositional attitudes, I have no, I have no memory. With respect to the first, right, that the house is on fire, the speaker has no special authority.

20:25With respect to the second, he does. And with respect to the third, responsibility is mixed and complex, right? Whether the, the house being on fire caused my belief. Or how it, how it, how it did. The question whether someone intends to lock the door by turning the key depends in part on whether he wants to lock the door and believes that turning the key will lock the door and whether this belief and desire have caused, in the right way, a desire to turn the key. Special authority attaches directly to claims about the desire and belief, less directly to claims about the necessary causal connection.

20:56All right. Even though he's going to concentrate on belief, what is he saying about the causal thing being mixed? How does that work? You want to explain that to me?

21:28Insofar as it has to do with my belief, then it seems that I have special knowledge about it, right? If I think I- No, the belief is fine, but I'm saying, he's saying, yeah, we have authority with regard to the belief, right? I believe that the house is on fire, but the causal account, how, how it was caused, he says, is a complicated, right? So there's two, there's two kind of poles. I have authority that, that I believe the house is on fire.

21:59Is it really on fire? No authority. It might not be on fire, but then there's this mix. There's this middle realm of the causal where I think, yeah, I believe it because it is. Well, maybe it's because I have other beliefs. He's saying that's neither fully authoritative nor not, right? Right. I believe that I have observed, I've smelled the smoke, I have seen the fire, I have felt the heat of the fire, and have every reason to believe that I'm next to the relevant house.

22:30So that is, it was in my proposition. So it seems like I have been witness to the causal story. Again, I could be wrong about it, just like I could be wrong about the house being on fire. But part of the story is a story of the connection between my beliefs. Less directly to claims about necessary causal, why necessary causal connection? Why would that be necessary? All right. Well, he's not going to talk about that. So I guess we have to-

23:00I mean, maybe this is going back to the papers that we read of him, that if you say a motivation, a reason is a cause. So- A covering law? But he doesn't think that you need a covering law. Well, they're not covering- Yeah. So maybe the necessary is still throwing me, that I believe that the house is on fire because I have a perception that the house is on fire. So, you know, why do you think the house is on fire? Because I saw it.

23:31Because I saw it. Is that a, that's not like a reason, it's not an intention because it's not, this is not philosophy of action. But the action is my uttering the phrase, you know, in response to your question that the house is on fire. And my reason is the epistemic warrant. So it seems like I have some, is it a necessary causal connection? You know, mental things. So causality, he does think you need at least under some description, right?

24:01For there to be a cause, a covering law under at least some description, not all description. So that would be necessity. So, all right. That's a whole other- Page three. Thing about the nature of causality.

Error and self attribution

24:15Yeah. Though there is first-person authority with respect to beliefs and other propositional attitudes, error is possible. This follows from the fact that the attitudes are dispositions, ooh, that manifest themselves in various ways in over a span of time. Error is possible. So is doubt. So we do not always have indubitable or certain knowledge of our own attitudes. Give me some examples, please. Nor are our claims about our own attitudes incorrigible. It is possible for the evidence available to others to overthrow self-judgments.

24:51Come on, dude. Let's have some examples. You claim to believe in God, but the fact that you just ran from that bear, instead of saying, God will protect me, that means you actually don't believe in God.

25:07That's a complicated one. Being into psychoanalysis, I should have all sorts of examples, right? Yeah. What do we believe? Do you really believe in Australia? I mean, you've heard a lot about Australia, but if you haven't been there, do you really believe in Australia? Or do you think, do you suspect? Maybe this is an elaborate joke. This gets into self-deception as well, which I've always wanted to do a show on, right? How do we deceive ourselves? And we think we believe certain things that deep down, right?

25:42There's got to be a weird kind of contradiction within us because to deceive ourselves, some part of us must know the truth. Otherwise, it wouldn't be self-deception. We'd just be wrong. But yeah, we can have certain, but yeah, I don't know if that's what he's talking about, though. I guess we'll find out. It comes closer to characterizing first-person authority to note that the self-attributor does not normally base his claims on evidence or observation. Nor does it normally make sense to ask the self-attributor why he believes he has the beliefs, desires, or intentions he claims to have.

26:15This feature of self-attributions was marked by Wittgenstein. Here's a quote. What is the criterion for the redness of an image? For me, when it is someone else's image, what he says or does. For myself, when it is my image, nothing. So that was from the investigations. Most philosophers have followed Wittgenstein in this and have extended the criterion to the propositional attitudes, as we shall see.

26:42Yeah. So the criterion for the redness of an image. So if we ask you, you say, well, what's the question here? If you say that's a red apple. Why do you think that you have a red apple? Is it why do you think or is it why? Yeah. What makes it? Yeah. Okay. Why do you think? Okay. Why do you think it's red? And you say, well, look, it's red. But you can't because it's in your head. We're talking about the idea of red.

27:13So why do you? In your private red after, you know, when you're imagining red. Why is your little qualia red?

27:22It just is. Or why are you having that qualia? I don't know. Well, while you're having it, there might be, because I asked you about it. I mean, you probably know it. Also because of a brain state. You could appeal to a brain state. Yeah.

27:39All right. Let's read on. This feature of first person authority, suggestive as it may be, does not help explain the authority. This is so partly because of the caveats. Normally, we do not make self-attributions on the basis of evidence, but sometimes we do. He put normally in quotes there. Usually, in quotes, it doesn't make sense to ask someone why he believes he has a certain belief or desire or intention, but sometimes it does. Even in the exceptional cases, however, first person authority persists.

28:12Even when a self-attribution is in doubt or a challenge is proper, the person with the attitude speaks about it with special weight. True. But the existence of exceptions is not the chief reason first person authority isn't explained by the fact that self-attributions are not based on evidence. The chief reason is simply that claims that are not based on evidence do not in general carry more authority than claims that are based on evidence, nor are they more apt to be correct. So, that's a fun little, you know, I had to, I gave evidence why I think that you were thinking of red, right?

28:50I asked you to think of red. I showed you a red swatch. Those are good, but I just know I'm thinking red. I don't have any reason that I can give you. So, why is, you know, clearly we think that I'm more warranted in talking about my own state, but I just gave evidence in the latter case and not in this case. So, it seems like it should be the other way around. Contemporary philosophers who have discussed first person authority have made little attempt to answer the question why self-ascriptions are privileged.

29:22It is long out of fashion to explain self-knowledge on the basis of introspection. And it is easy to see why, since this explanation only leads to the question of why we should see any better when we inspect our own minds than when we inspect the minds of others. It seems pretty obvious to me, but all right, go ahead. Well, we've introduced, with this long journey into Hegel, the idea that, you know, our self-conception, our really having a full mental life might rely on the social.

29:56And I was saying at the beginning of this on language in particular. So, maybe you could think that, right? It's just, it's a Wittgensteinian thought that until we learn the language games, then you don't know whether you're thinking about red, right? You might see a bunch of red things and you might remember those things later, but you don't, until we've talked about it and identified that word, red or rojo or whatever language you're using, Then you don't really have that concept as opposed to, you know, much less, you know, all the huge variations of colors that people who work in paint stores or fabric stores or whatever, you know, have to, I don't know the difference between teal and vermilion or whatever until I talk to somebody about that.

30:49Even though, like, I could, yeah, I would probably just say they're both, that's not a great example, but. Isn't vermilion red or something? They're both red. They both have red involved. Teal is blue-green. Yeah, okay, that's why it's not a good example. Anyway, there's navy blue and sky blue. Well, those are pretty far apart. I mean, I think we, you'd have to pick, you'd have to pick something close. Lavender and sky blue, anyway. Lavender and light purple.

31:20How do you distinguish them? All right.

Ryle and privileged access

31:22Yes.

31:23A few philosophers have denied that the asymmetry exists. Ryle is a sturdy example. In the concept of mind, Ryle suggests that what we take for privileged access is due to nothing more than the fact that we are generally better placed to observe ourselves than others are. Ryle writes, in principle, as distinct from practice, John Doe's way of finding out, John Doe, ways of finding out about John Doe are the same as John Doe's finding out about Richard Rowe.

31:54He continues, the differences are differences of degree, not kind. The superiority of the speaker's knowledge of what he's doing over that of the listener does not indicate that he has privileged access to facts of a type inevitably inaccessible to the listener, but only that he's in a very good position to know what the listener is often in a very poor position to know. The turns taken by a man's conversation do not startle or perplex his wife as much as they had surprised and puzzled his fiancée, nor do close colleagues have to explain themselves to each other as much as they have to explain themselves to their new pupils.

32:26I take it, you have nothing good to say about Ryle.

32:34No, I mean, I don't understand this fully, but the idea here, right, yeah, is that, well, he's against privileged authority, first-person authority. So we find out about our own states of mind in the way that we find out about others, not because we are inside them and that they're immediately accessible to us, but because we are making inferences, I suppose. I agree with Ryle that any attempt to explain the asymmetry between first-person and present tense claims about attitudes

33:11and other person or other tense claims by reference to a special way of knowing or a special kind of knowledge must lead to a skeptical result. Any such account must accept the asymmetry but cannot explain it. But Ryle neither accepts nor explains the asymmetry. He simply denies that it exists. Since I think it is obvious the asymmetry exists, I believe it is a mistake to argue from the absence of a special way of knowledge or a special mode or kind of knowledge to the absence of special authority. Instead, we should look for another source in the asymmetry.

33:42You know, he set this up by talking about dispositions. And if it's really, do you know if you're man enough to not run away from the bear? Like, well, I'm in a better, that seems like a good Rylean candidate because I'm around myself all the time. So I'll get to see, I'll be, if a bear comes upon me or something comparable, I'll be right there to witness it. Whereas you might not have all the relevant evidence, but still I'm observing my own behavior, my own reactions,

34:13and you would be doing so too. If we want to just say, if we want to talk about our current beliefs and like, what are you thinking? Are you thinking that I look bad in this dress? Well, you, it seems like you have a fundamentally different kind of access to your own opinion of the other person in the dress than the person who's asking the question has. Yeah. Because if she knew what you really thought, that'd be hell to pay.

34:44All right. Keep going. You're going to lie.

Ayer and eyewitness analogy

34:46All right. Ayer at one time took a line similar to Ryle's. In the concept of a person, he emphasizes that first person ascriptions can be in error. And he allows that such ascriptions are privileged. Okay. But let's look at the footnote. That's just A.J. Ayer's privacy from 1963. Okay. But when he comes to describe the authority of self-ascriptions, he compares it to the authority we sometimes allow an eyewitness when compared with secondhand reports.

35:18This analogy seems to me unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, it fails to tell us why a person is like an eyewitness with respect to his own mental states and events while others are not. And second, it does not suggest an accurate description of what first person authority is like. For first person, attributions are not based on better evidence, but often at least on no evidence at all. Yeah. That contradicts Ryle as well. But the authority of the eyewitness is at best based on inductive

35:51probabilities easily overridden in particular cases. An eyewitness is discredited and is evidence discounted if he is a notoriously unreliable observer, prejudiced, or myopic. But a person never loses his special claim to be right about his own attitudes, even when his claim is challenged and overturned. Why is that? I guess if you want to say that there is a special claim, how could it ever be challenged or overturned?

36:22Yeah, we need an example of something being challenged and overturned. You know, I believe that you were mad at me. That's why I, well, that's a complicated one because now I'm in, it's a propositional attitude about someone else's mind. But, you know, I ran into your car because I believed that you were about to take a left because there is every evidence that you were about to do that, even though your turn signal wasn't on, your car was, you know. Now, could that be a fabricated, completely nonsense, you know,

36:54could that be false? And could you be deluding yourself that that person was about to take a left? Of course, you could be deluding yourself. It could just be nonsense. You could be rationalizing the fact that you're responsible for the accident. But that doesn't change the fact that you believe it. That's the authority. You believe the false thing, but you still believe it. To say that that's overturned, we have to say, well, there's a sense in which they didn't even believe it. They're wrong that they believed that.

37:27And that's about the past. And he wants to get, he doesn't want to get into memory. I'm only lashing out because I'm mad at you. Of course, we can be wrong about memory. So that doesn't, that's not a good example. Memory is a whole different thing. We can be wrong about memories of what we believed all the time. Yeah. Let's just go on and see if he has an example. 105.

Agassi and Freud

37:46It's so thorny, you know. Agassi has actually, Agassi, Andre Agassi, who is this? He's not playing tennis. Joseph Agassi from Science and Flux. Writing his papers. Yes. 1975. Agassi has actually maintained that we know the mental states and events in other minds better than we know those in our own mind. That is the Hegel point. He distinguishes privileged access from the common sense truth that, quote, every person has access to some information available to that person alone and involves oneself, at least as an eyewitness.

38:16He goes on. The doctrine of privileged access is that I am the authority on all my own experiences. The thesis was refuted by Freud. I know your dreams better than you. Do him. I know your methods. Okay. That's sorry. This is not right, but go ahead. How do you pronounce do him? No, no, no. Okay. Just what he's saying is right. But I still don't know if I'm pronouncing do him right. I don't know either. Dwayne? But maybe you do know.

38:47You don't know you know. So do him. I know your methods of scientific discovery better than you. Malinowski is would be I know your customs and habits better than you and perception theorists. I can make you see things which are not there and describe your perceptions better than you can. These are all from Agassiz. Yeah. This doesn't make any sense to me. It's not before. He doesn't know your dreams better than you. You had the dream and he can give you a theory of what the wish is in the dream or a theory of what the meaning of the dream is.

39:18But that's not the same as the phenomenological qualitative content of the dream. He doesn't have. So I don't get that. But anyway, go ahead, because he's about to comment on this. Aside from Freud's case, there's little here to threaten first person authority. Freud's views by extending the concepts of intention, belief, desire, and the rest to include the unconscious do not mean that with respect to some propositional attitudes, a person loses direct authority. Indeed, loss of authority is the main distinguishing feature of unconscious mental states.

39:50Of course, the pre-Freudian attitudes remain as subject as ever to first person authority. But more interesting is the fact that in psychoanalytic practice, recovery of authority over an attitude is often considered the only solid evidence that the attitude was there before being non-inferentially appreciated by its holder. Thus, those cases of unconscious... So in other words, the unconscious becomes conscious. Yeah. Go ahead. Thus, those cases of unconscious mental states that were unsystematically recognized to exist before Freud are indirectly included in the scope of first person authority by psychoanalysis.

40:23So I do not think the existence of unconscious attitudes threatens the importance of first person authority. I agree with that, but what does the sentence before that mean? Unconscious mental states that were unsystematically recognized, right? So he's just saying, yeah, I believe that's true. Also, people recognized and even wrote about the unconscious before Freud, nevertheless systematically, but they're indirectly included in the scope of first person authority. So unconscious mental states are included in the scope.

40:55So we don't have authority on what our unconscious mental states are. So I wonder, you know, you were giving the example before of this, a possible rationalization of why you honked at the person, this traffic incident. And I think that is entirely, you know, of a piece with what we read about him in the other articles for the Partial Examine Life episode, which is that we have a special epistemic access to our own intentions, even though we're very commonly wrong about them.

41:31So I flipped the switch because I wanted to turn on the light. But, you know, there's some room for, or, you know, I signaled because I wanted to make a turn, well, if that was like a, so programmed, right, you didn't think even for a second, you know, I, it's just part of my deal that I turned on the turn signal when I'm going to make a turn. Do I always want to say that, like, yes, I wanted to make a turn.

42:04And so I turned on the turn. I guess so. But I'm certainly, am I, am I conscious of a wanting there? I don't know. Yeah, I think often we're not, and Freud would call these pre-conscious rather than unconscious, because I could become conscious of it at any time if I attended to it. But, but yeah, I'm often, it's just, it's below the level of conscious awareness. And when I do the turn signals completely have it, you know, is some little homunculus in me conscious of it? I think so.

42:36They're doing their thing, a module. It has access consciousness, even if it is not something you're aware of. Here, here's a question for you, Wes. Do you, do you not use your turn signal when you were absolutely sure that no one is around to see it?

42:53Well, I don't. And I even, you know, driving in Boston, I stopped using it because it was just going to, I didn't want to clue other people into what I was doing because I knew they were going to try and get in my way. And aggressive. If you're driving in an aggressive environment, you don't want people to know what you're going to do. So I use it when it's warranted.

43:15I use it when it's, it's going to yield the best outcome. Yeah. When I use the turn signal, is it because I want to turn? I mean, there's nothing essential about, it's, it's very conveniently located, especially when you're turning right to just click it, you know, but often I might do it as I'm turning because that is actually the movement of your hand is you flip it up to the right as you start to turn. People do that. I guess, yeah, I guess the left, it works as well. Cause you're pushing it down and you're turning, turning to the left.

43:47Or is it because you want to signal or just because you don't want to get a ticket? Like, I don't actually think this is in this circumstance. Certainly if I'm in a turn only lane or let's, you know, a, you know, there's, there's multiple turn only lanes, right? And you're in the left, most of them. So you're definitely going to turn. I'm not going to sit there with the turn signal on while we're waiting for the light for, for three minutes. Cause I just don't want to hear that fucking thing.

44:19All right. This is, I'm, I'm leading too much into this, but, but I think this is over. Yeah. There's a, it's overdetermined. There's a lot of different motivations. They're below the level of conscious awareness. They're non-conscious. You know, you may have gotten a lot of tickets. You've been burned too many times. So you habitually do the turn signal. So you may be a person who's just very, very concerned about safety. That may be another reason that doesn't explain why you would not use your turn signal. Maybe you became, you know, worried about safety after, cause you got in an accident.

44:49So there's that reason your family has been nagging you about it and you don't want to hear them bitch. So that's another reason that you could just, you could, this is what Freud calls over the determination. You could load up all these different reasons and it's hard to say, which is the one, you know, is there one reason why you did it? But in any case, all the reasons at that operating moment, you're so, you're so habituated to doing something there. Right. There, you know, how Aristotle distinguishes the two senses of belief, right?

45:22There's the belief that I have right now or the current, I think you called it. And then there's the belief that I just have when I'm not even thinking about it. I don't believe in Santa Claus. I don't have to be thinking about not believing in Santa Claus to not believe about him, but I can have the current belief right now that he doesn't exist. Right. So, so in the, in, in the same way. And so what are those sort of dispositional beliefs that are more in the realm of potentiality? Yeah. They're more like character. They're, they're just, um, they're things that are written into us that are, uh, below

45:58the level of the mental or on the border of the mental. But anyway, I still don't, I don't quite understand what he knows, but it means to say that we have privileged access to our unconscious mental states, except that we can't really know that, that they were unconscious, our unconscious mental states until an analyst has helped us make the unconscious conscious. And then we say, Oh, that's the mental state. That's the belief that I had all along. Now I see it. Now I know it. Well, that's what that's okay. This is why I was bringing this up because I feel like in any intention claim, you could

46:34be wrong about it. It could be a post hoc rationalization, but that doesn't mean that you don't still have a, a primary epistemic advantage in accessing your own intentions as compared to somebody else. And I, so I think the same thing would go to your own unconscious contents that that's like your, any disposition that, uh, you didn't know you were afraid, you know, that you had this scarring incident that made you desperately afraid of horses or whatever, because your

47:08dad once dresses a horse and beat the shit out of you, uh, uh, that you've repressed, but yet you, you have at least potential access to that. You experienced it, uh, in a way that nobody else does. It's funny because there's little hands, a famous Freudian case where he's afraid of horses and it does have something to do with his father, but the connection is much more subtle, but yeah, it would be far simpler. That's the thing I was half for men with. If his father would just beat the shit out of me, I'm dressed as though it works.

Strawson and other minds

47:41But anyway, I turn now to philosophers who have assumed that there is such a thing as first person authority and have accepted Wittgenstein's description of the difference between first and third person attributions.

47:55Strawson discusses first person authority in the context of trying to answer skepticism about other minds. And this of course is PF Strawson, not Galen Strawson. According to Strawson, if the skeptic understands his own question, how does anyone know what is going on in someone else's mind? He knows the answer. For if the skeptic knows what a mind is, he knows it must be in a body and that it has thoughts. He also knows that we attribute thoughts to others on the basis of observed behavior, but to ourselves without such a basis. Strawson writes, this is from 1959, his book Individuals, which is something that I kind

48:32of want to read. In order to have this type of concept of a mental property, one must be both a self-ascriber and an other ascriber of such predicates, which ascribe mental properties, and must see every other as a self-ascriber. In order to understand this type of concept, one must acknowledge that there is a kind of predicate which is unambiguously and adequately ascribable, both on the basis of observation of the subject of predicate and not on that basis that is independently of observation of the

49:04subject. Wait, let me read that again. Yeah, I didn't follow that. So observation being like observing my own mental states on the inside, I think.

49:35So it's, yeah, so there's these certain, these mental predicates and we ascribe them on two bases.

49:42Behavioral and direct. There's the self-ascription and then, yeah, the direct and then the behavioral for other people. But he's saying that I need both to even have the concept. Right. That's what the language game is. I couldn't ascribe them to myself unless I were capable of ascribing them to others. And we do get support from this, right? Because it's, right, there's the Hegelian point about recognition, you know, knowing myself through the eyes of the other, basically. And then there's Thomas Skitsello and joint attention and all of that stuff where I, to

50:19have a theory of mind, I have to, and to have a theory of my own mind, I have to be thinking of the other as thinking of my mind and sharing objects of attention and things like that. Sorry. That's a really terrible explanation of all that, but you get the idea. This cannot be deemed a satisfactory answer to the skeptic. For the skeptic will reply that though Strassen may have correctly described the asymmetry between first and other person descriptions of mental predicates, he has done nothing to explain it.

50:50In the absence of an explanation, the skeptic is certainly justified in asking how we know that the description is correct. In particular, why should we think that a predicate is sometimes applied on the basis of observation and sometimes not is unambiguous? This question to which Strassen has not addressed himself is the source of skepticism about knowledge of other minds. Right? So it sounds like if you want to use this Wittgenstein language game talk, it seems like you can only

51:20talk about the intersubjective. You can't talk about the, the, your, your relation to yourself, but I'm not sure if that's the case because part of my addressing you is to say, I know that I have this belief and I'm observing it. So you might say that the direct observation is not actually part of the language game, but reference to the direct observation is part of the language game. And it's part of the definition of to be in, let's just use to be in pain because that's easiest. That if I say that I'm in pain and you understand that, then you, you know, both your own experience

51:56of observing your own pain and you know how you tell that other people are in pain, you know, that these are, even though you can't see the self-ascription of my self-ascription of pain, you know, in your own case. And so therefore it's part of the language game. All right. Well, we have one minute, 47 seconds to wrap up here. Let's not start on the rest of this.

Reflecting on the text

52:20We are pretty much exactly halfway through the article. So we'll do this one more time. And so far it's not been intolerably analytic. There's no, he's good. I enjoy Davidson a lot actually. And I like the slow build. You notice that he just sort of, it's like a suspense movie. It's like a thriller or something. You know, we, we know something is coming. There's something in the basement. Oh, that's a horror film. Anyway. I mean, we did have an abstract.

52:50It hasn't arrived yet. And he just, he just, he just, he just, you know, builds, builds, builds. Let me look again. What's how, what's he going to say about this? Let's look again at the abstract, the summary of the whole thing. What explains the predumption that a speaker is right when he sincerely attributes a belief, desire, or intention to his present self, when there's no such presumption when others make it, it is argued that solutions, quote unquote, to the problem of knowledge of other minds, which merely restate the asymmetry, leave open the field to the skeptic. A new explanation of first person authority is offered, which traces a source of the authority

53:21to a necessary feature of the interpretation of speech. It's a, gives you a general idea, but he's into no spoilers, man. You don't put spoilers up front. It's a Davidson paper. Still, is that a summary? That's not a summary, like a newspaper article summary. It should tell you, it should characterize it. If he told you up front, you wouldn't need to read the paper, probably.

53:43All right. We'll see y'all next time. Remember, if you are seeing this on the public feed, which we've now successfully transferred to our own site so it will not disappear despite my warnings in the past, you should sign up for our Patreon, patreon.com slash close reads philosophy, and that will get you part two. Otherwise, we will assume you don't, you don't care about the suspense. You've had enough of this, and in a month from now, you'll hear us start another, or no, two

54:13weeks from now, you'll hear us start another thing. Sometimes it's a month, but it won't be in this case. All right. Thanks, Wes. Bye, everybody.