Belief Self-Knowledge

A fundamental puzzle about self-knowledge is this: spontaneous, unreflective self-attributions of beliefs and other mental states (avowals) appear to be at once epistemically groundless and epistemically privileged. On the one hand, it seems that avowals simply do not require justification or evidence. On the other hand, avowals seem to represent a substantive epistemic achievement. Several authors have tried to explain away avowals’ groundlessness by appeal to the so-called transparency of present-tense self-attributions. After a critical discussion of two extant construals of transparency, this article presents an alternative reading of transparency (based on neo-expressivism about avowals) that explains, without explaining away, the apparent groundlessness of avowals. The article goes on to explore a way of coupling this alternative reading with a plausible account of how it is that ordinary avowals can represent genuine knowledge of present states of mind.