Just as there was no room for misidentifying the referent of "I" so here there is no room for misidentifying the content or the character of my attitudes. My determination that I believe that it is about to rain is not the product of (i) my determination that I hold some attitude towards some content or other, and my further determination (ii) that the attitude in question is belief, and that the content of that belief is that it's about to rain my grounds for thinking that I hold an attitude towards some content or other are simply whatever grounds I have for thinking that I believe that it is about to rain. A certain kind of error is eliminated but not through any special epistemic access the subject has to herself.īar-on extends this intuition to the rest of the self-ascription. The story is quite different, however, in the judgment that I am A-ing here there is simply no room for this kind of error of misidentification for the simple reason that I, the subject, have no grounds for thinking that someone is A-ing independent of my grounds for thinking that I am A-ing. In such judgments we can speak of possible error of misidentification - cases in which she has grounds for the more basic judgment (i), but her misidentification of N undermines the second judgment. We can think of the subject as having grounds for (i) that are quite different and more reliable than her grounds for (ii). In a non-self-referential judgment of the form "N is A-ing" in which "N" is, for example, a name or description, we can distinguish between two elements: we can think of the subject as judging (i) that someone is A-ing, and (ii) that this someone is N, that it is N that is A-ing. By way of contrast, and drawing on the work of Evans and Shoemaker, Bar-on sees the key to this phenomenon of self-reference as arising not from some special inner identification of the subject, but rather from the fact that the subject stands in no genuine need of identification at all. Here, too, theorists in the Cartesian mold think of this security as arising from some special epistemic access to an ego or whatever, but such accounts have little attraction today. She begins her story with an extended discussion of a different but related phenomenon, the security with which a speaker singles herself out in utterances of the form " I am A-ing" (thinking, acting, etc.). She rejects wholesale all such epistemic accounts. Variations on this approach (appeals to inner scanners, monitors, etc.), which Bar-on labels the epistemic account, have been offered by identity theorists, functionalists, etc. Elements of this story - especially the peculiar immaterial character of the inner states - have largely been abandoned as nonscientific, but the general framework has, more often than not, been retained: each subject has special access to her inner states, and it is this special access that underwrites the supposition that first person avowals are true, while others who have access only to what the subject says and does are in no position to challenge such avowals. The special reliability (incorrigibility or whatever) of my first person reports simply reflects the reliability of my access - leaving no room for challenge. from my behavior, what I say and do, from the character of my proximate environment, etc. I am supposed to have access to my own occurrent mental states by way of some introspective mechanism, while others have to infer my beliefs, etc.
This special character of avowals is traditionally accounted for in epistemic terms, in terms of the alleged special access a subject has to her own inner states of mind - be they propositional attitudes, phenomenal states, etc. This, even though I use such ascriptions to make perfectly unremarkable contingent claims about myself, claims which have no special status when made by someone else about me.
In this ambitious book, Dorit Bar-On articulates and defends an account of avowals, first person, present tense, ascriptions of occurrent mental states, ascriptions such as, "I am in pain." These ascriptions are problematic in that they seem to be immune to challenge, in no need of justification, indeed presumed true (when sincere).
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