Abstract
Self-evaluation is not a private affair. Inasmuch as it consists in obtaining a value-oriented perspective towards oneself and involves value judgements with regard to one’s own conduct, self-evaluation is built upon the normative system in which an agent is embedded. And inasmuch as the agent is immediately concerned by its conclusions, self-evaluation has a remarkable impact on the agent’s further behaviour.
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Notes
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I will elaborate later, why self-knowledge qua being the author of my mind does not entail that my mind’s constitution simply implements my would-be image of it. Let me allow only three brief remarks here: First, imagining my mind is itself a mental activity already presupposing the constitution of the mind. Second, the realisation of a mentally represented object is not restricted to cases of “making up one’s mind” and therefore cannot account for the specificity of the first-personal relation to my intentional attitudes. Third, constituting one’s mind by self-description/self-interpretation resembles creating a set of third-personal propositions and hence does not provide sufficient grounds for the responsibility that comes along with being the subject of one’s mind. Cf. Moran (2001, esp. chaps. 2.2–2.5).
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Peter Strawson has famously argued for the distinctiveness of psychological predicates compared with physical predicates in this respect. It is crucial for this view that although psychological predicates comprise different modes in the first and third person case, none of these modes is conceptually privileged over the other. This is partly because psychological predicates are taken not to designate states of mind as kept in an inner realm, but to refer to primarily embodied intentional activities like smiling, going for a walk etc. As a consequence, the problem of other minds is disguised as a pseudo-problem insofar as intentional attitudes are basically perceivable by others in their bodily component. Cf. Strawson (1990 [1959]).
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In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston looks into a mirror after having been heavily tortured for a long time, without recognising that it is himself he looks at. Cf. also Wright (1998).
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Moran (2001, 27).
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Cf. Moran (2001, 31ff.).
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Cf. ibid., 13.
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Cf. Hieronymi (2009, 1ff.).
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The normativity involved is rational, not moral. That is, if one does not behave in accord with the contents of one’s avowals one will be considered unsteady, irrational or unaccountable. The intersubjective consequences of irrational behaviour do not so much consist in specific punishment, but rather in the loss of recognition as an equivalent member of one’s social context. Cf. McGeer (1996, 508).
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The formulation can be misunderstood as suggesting that the subject’s obtaining one of the two positions is a deliberate act based on the subject’s decision to either identify with her mind or distance herself from it. But voluntarism with regard to the position we take up towards ourselves begs the question, because if taking a position was based on a deliberative process, this process itself wouldn’t do without a standpoint from which it departed. Moreover, this view if conceivable at all would suggest that the subject was primarily standing at distance to herself, that she was in a position to choose from either accepting her authorship of her mental activity or maintaining an objective relation to it. However, this amounts to returning to the picture of mental activity occurring in some special realm the subject has privileged access to, from which we started, rather than illuminating the special features of the subject’s first-personal perspective.
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Cf. Anscombe (1950), McGeer (1996, 508ff.), Moran (1997, 154). The remoter the future is at which one’s commitments are directed, the more converge the relation one obtains to oneself in the future and the relation to one’s future self. This is convincingly argued especially by Carol Rovane in Rovane (1998).
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Cf. McGeer (1996, ibid.).
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Gertler finds the latter conception entailed in Moran’s deliberative account of self-knowledge, which actually departs from knowing one’s beliefs as the default case of deliberative self-knowledge. This is indeed highly demanding – too demanding, as O’Brien remarks – regarding the subject’s cognitive capacities and hence should be taken with caution. Cf. Gertler (2008), and O’Brien (2003).
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Moran (2001, chap. 2.6). As I already mentioned, he focuses on beliefs (chap. 3) as paradigmatic case where the transparency condition holds. He leaves open the possibility of extending the notion to non-cognitive intentionality as well. I think that this is actually the right thing to do in the light of the notion of intentional attitudes I am spelling out here. On such an account, intentionality amounts to the mode of “aboutness” by which one propositionally relates to an object in the world and is transparent insofar as this relating is actively undertaken by the intentional subject. The main challenge I see for Moran’s account consists in the need to reconcile content-externalism (transparency) with the distinctive subjectivity of first-personal knowledge (authority, immediacy). Referring to the agent’s agential knowledge about his intentional attitudes goes as far as these actually are determinable by the agent – insofar as they are actions, not passions. Not only does this exclude the passive elements of conative and affective intentionality, but it also presupposes the agent’s conceptual knowledge of his attitudes, and a fortiori the mastery of corresponding intentional concepts. Introducing a meta-cognitive level into first-personal knowledge of non-cognitive intentionality, however, alienates those parts of experience that are not knowable agentially. This applies to non-cognitive intentional attitudes insofar as they are not deliberately caused by the agent and hence represented as external to his deliberative stance (i.e. external to the (rational) agent himself). How then can other intentional attitudes than beliefs and intentions be first-personally known? I think that on Moran’s account, there is no space for this. Fortunately, there are alternatives – that I cannot elaborate here – that draw on non-conceptual action-awareness as basis for agential self-knowledge rather than on rational self-consciousness. Cf. O’Brien and Soteriou (2009), esp. the contributions by Christopher Peacocke and Joëlle Proust.
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Cf. Gertler (2008). There are further objections related to the possible mismatch between coming to a theoretical conclusion and abolishing pre-existing contrary beliefs. One can in Gertler’s example conclude that black cats are not responsible for one’s bad luck and still hold the belief that it is black cats that caused one’s own misfortune. However, this case is an instantiation of Moore’s paradox and as such considered by Moran (2001, chap. 3).
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Christopher Peacocke has spelled out this idea and an according functional model on various occasions, most recently in Peacocke (2009).
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I actually want to put forward a stronger claim. It does indeed seem to me that agential self-knowledge does not even require the subject to be conscious of the intentional attitudes she endorses. For if agential self-knowledge is internally related to and hence comes into play together which a particular intentional attitude, and if further an intentional attitude is a transparent constituent of the subject’s perspective from which she acts and deliberates, it is neither necessary for the endorsement of an intentional attitude unlike for having sensations – nor for agentially knowing it that the subject is aware that it is in place. Cf. Moran (2001, 41 et passim). This, however, is true of theoretical knowledge as well, I know for example that Paris is the capital of France even if I am not constantly aware of this fact.
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Cf. McGeer (1996, 508ff.).
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Alternatives can include self-deception, ignorance towards or repression of the mismatch. Which method is applied by the subject presumably depends to some extent on the relevance of the incoherence in question, to some other on the method she is prone to pursue given her mental constitution. At any rate, since holding intentional attitudes implies that the subject knows that she employs them, she is accountable for the way she handles situations of incoherence.
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The two ways of controlling the constitution of one’s set of intentional attitudes are presented in detail by Hieronymi (2009). Exercising rational influence over oneself parallels rational influence over other people to a certain extent (cf. Rovane 1998), its success still hinging on an exertion of direct rational control, the endorsement of the response in question.
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Cf. Hieronymi (2009, 1).
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Thanks to Anita Konzelmann Ziv for helping me to clarify this point.
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Moran (2001, 164).
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Remember that it is not necessary for my argument that these claims be made in public. It is sufficient to have taken a stance and thereby be able to avow one’s intentionality.
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Cf. McGeer (1996, 509).
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That we first adopt the norms of our immediate social environment without questioning their objectivity is captured in Heidegger’s notion of everydayness. The self-concept developed in social interaction first and foremost sets the usual way of life as normative standard. It is only after the individual has recognised her own possibilities and talents that she is able to detach her self-view from a non-individual oneself. Still, she cannot entirely leave the conventions and language of her social context behind because they constitute the means by which she performs changes in her normative system. Cf. Heidegger (2008 [1927]).
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I am indebted to the audience of the Workshop Self-Evaluation: Individual and Collective at Basel in January 2009, in particular to Anita Konzelmann Ziv and Carol Rovane by whom I received more than helpful and detailed comments.
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Schmid, U. (2011). Where Individuals Meet Society: The Collective Dimensions of Self-Evaluation and Self-Knowledge. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Lehrer, K., Schmid, H. (eds) Self-Evaluation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 116. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_14
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