ABSTRACT: What explains first-person authority? What explains the presumption that an utterance is true when it is a sincere intelligible determinate first-person singular simple present-tense ascription of intentional state? According to Rockney Jacobsen, self-ascriptions each enjoy a presumption of truth because they are systematically reliable. They are systematically reliable because they are typically both truth-assessable and expressive. Such self-ascriptions, if sincere, are certain to be true. This article presents a defence and a critique of Jacobsen's theory. It is argued that (...) the purported prevalence of expressive self-ascriptions is at best contingent. This contingency cannot explain why self-ascriptions are necessarily authoritative.RÉSUMÉ: Comment expliquer l'autorité de la première personne? Comment expliquer la présomption qu'un énoncé est vrai lorsque c'est une attribution d'un état intentionnel, sincère et intelligible, à la première personne du singulier de l'indicatif présent. Selon Rockney Jacobsen, les auto-attributions jouissent d'une présomption de vérité parce qu'elles sont systématiquement fiables. Elles sont systématiquement fiables parce qu'elles ont pour caractéristique d'être à la fois expressives et évaluables en termes de vérité. Si de telles auto-attributions sont sincères, elles sont certainement vraies. Cet article présente une défense et une critique de la théorie deJacobsen. L'auteur soutient que la prétendue prévalence des auto-attributions expressives est au mieux contingente. Cette contingence ne peut pas expliquer pourquoi il est nécessaire que les auto-attributions fassent autorité. (shrink)

There is a common assumption that intention is a complex behavioural disposition, or a motivational state underlying such a disposition. Associated with this position is the apparently commonsense view that an avowal of intention is a direct report of an inner motivational state, and indirectly an expression of a belief that it is likely that one will A. A central claim of this article is that the dispositional or motivational model is mistaken since it cannot acknowledge either the future-direction of (...) intention or the authority of avowals of intention. I argue that avowals of intention - first-person, present-tense ascriptions - express direct knowledge of a future action, knowledge that is not based on examination of one's present introspectible states or dispositions. Such avowals concern a future action, not a present state or disposition; just as self-ascriptions of belief concern the outer not the inner, so self-ascriptions of intention concern the future outer, not the present inner. One way of capturing this future-direction is to say that avowals of intention - and perhaps sense intentions themselves - are a kind of prediction, and not a description of one's present state of mind. This position is suggested by Anscombe in her monograph Intention (1963), and treats avowals of intention as judgements about the future, which unlike ordinary predictions are not based on evidence. However, since talk of prediction everywhere suggests an evidence-based stance - that meaningful hypothesis about the likely occurrence of events is being proposed, an hypothesis that can be falsified by evidence - the description future-outer thesis is preferred. I defend this thesis against various objections, arguing that it complements Anscombe's characterisation of intentions as based on reasons. (shrink)

The article proposes a novel approach to mental agency that is inspired by Victoria McGeer’s work on self-regulation. The basic idea is that certain mental acts leave further work to be done for an agent to be considered an authoritative self-ascriber of corresponding dispositional mental states. First, we discuss Richard Moran’s account of avowals, which grounds first-person authority in deliberative, self-directed agency. Although this view is promising, we argue that it ultimately fails to confront the empirical gap between occurrent judgments (...) and dispositional beliefs. Second, we show how Victoria McGeer's account of self-regulation allows us to bridge this gap by emphasizing that avowals are only reliable and authoritative insofar as we take certain steps to live up to the commitments inherent in our self-ascriptions. Third, we address the question whether and to what extent self-regulation can be seen as a form of mental agency. Unlike the ‘pure’ deliberative form of mental agency advocated by Moran, which is direct, conscious and intra-personal, we follow McGeer and argue for a notion of mental agency as an indirect, unconscious and inter-personal process of self-regulation. (shrink)

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is (...) in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance. (shrink)