First of all, I want to thank the Philosophers’ Cocoon for giving me this great opportunity to present and discuss my work. I especially want to thank Marcus Arvan, whose idea it was to run this Featured Author series.
Here is what I would like to do in my posts in the Cocoon. Over the last few years, I've written papers on a variety of topics in the philosophy of mind, action and epistemology. Although these papers seem to be a bit all over the map, I feel that there is a common cluster of concerns that animates them all. I want to take this opportunity to try to bring them together into a more or less coherent story. Some of these posts will be more speculative than others, as I will be going beyond what’s actually in my published papers.
As I see things now, the thread that runs through all of my work is a concern with cognitive agency.
This phrase can mean different things. On the one hand, it can mean the sort of agency or control that you have over your own mental states (and is paradigmatically exercised in reasoning). I have written a bit on reasoning, and I am currently working on a related project as well. I will return to this in a later post. In this post, I want to highlight a different aspect of cognitive agency.
I start from the idea that judging that p is, in some sense, an exercise of agency on your part, regardless of the origins of that judgment — specifically, regardless of whether it is the conclusion of an explicit bit of reasoning.
Suppose that the solution to a problem you’ve been thinking about all day suddenly just occurs to you as you are getting ready to go to bed. There is nothing that you did (at the time, at least) in order to arrive at the solution. And yet intuitively a judgment that just strikes you is as much an exercise of agency on your part as the conclusion of a long chain of reasoning. As Karl Jaspers (1963, 122) writes, thoughts “that strike us—and perhaps make us say not ‘I think’ but ‘it occurs to me’—are still at the same time our thoughts, executed by us”.
Developing an account of judgment as an exercise of agency is an interesting, and underexplored, topic. I doubt that traditional approaches in the philosophy of action are adequate to the task (see also Hieronymi 2009, Boyle 2011). I will return to this in a later post, and I certainly hope to write more on this topic in the future. (My paper ‘Spontaneity and Cognitive Agency” touches upon it, in the context of criticizing standard interpretations of Kant’s difficult notion of the spontaneity of the understanding.)
Setting aside the metaphysics for now, I think it is also worth thinking about the phenomenology that Jaspers gestures towards. As Jaspers suggests, there seems to be something experiential in common between considered thoughts — judgments which, in his terms, we report with “I think that …” — and thoughts which we report with “it strikes me that …”. There is something that it is like to judge, regardless of where the judgment came from.
The idea that there is a distinctive phenomenology associated with judgment is at the core of my 2014 paper Self-Knowledge and the Phenomenological Transparency of Belief. In that paper, I use this idea to argue for a new(-ish) account of our knowledge of what we believe. The account I defend is a species of the so-called transparency approach, inspired by Gareth Evans’s (1982, 225) idea that “[I]n making a self-ascription of belief, one’s eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward—upon the world.” However, unlike other proponents of transparency approaches (e.g., Gallois 1996, Byrne 2005 [pdf]) I emphasize the role of the phenomenology of belief in the epistemology of self-knowledge.[1] (Silins 2012 also develops an account that combines transparency and phenomenology, but for reasons discussed in the paper I find his account unsatisfying.)
As I see things, transparency is part of the phenomenology of occurrent belief (or judgment — I do not distinguish between the two). When you judge that p, you experience the thought that p as transparent. Taking the content of your belief to be a fact about the world is part of the phenomenal character of an episode of judging, or of occurrent belief.
What is the motivation for this view? One motivation is simply the observation that occurrent beliefs are phenomenologically distinct from occurrent desires, wishes, fears etc., even if they happen to have the same content. This suggests that there is something phenomenologically distinctive about the attitude that you bear to a content, over and above the content itself. But the attitudeyou bear to the content of a judgment is precisely this — you take it to be a fact about the world. So it seems perfectly natural to think of transparency as part of the phenomenology of judgment (or occurrent belief).
One point that deserves special emphasis here is that, on the view I propose, the phenomenology of judgment does not essentially consist in your being aware of any sort of mental representations (e.g., sentences, images etc). It may or it may not be the case that in judging you usually (or even always) are aware of such things. On the view I am suggesting, the phenomenology of judgment is "transparent", in the sense that in judging that p you are aware of things outside yourself as being a certain way — namely, such that p. This point is essential to my account of self-knowledge, and also of the rational role of judgment more broadly.
So what does this tell us about self-knowledge? This part of the argument is pretty straightforward. If you possess the concept of belief, then you can be expected to know that the way you take things to be is, in principle at least, to be distinguished from the way things actually are. Subjects with the concept of belief can reasonably be expected to grasp the distinction between appearance and reality. Thus, in a case where a subject with the concept of belief judges that p — and thus takes p to be a fact about the world — she can reasonably be expected to be able to step back from her judgment, and self-ascribe the belief that p.
Notice that this “stepping back” move is not usefully classified as an inference.
In inferring q from p you are relying on the truth of p, as evidence for one or another of its consequences. By contrast, self-knowledge involves bracketing, or stepping back from, your commitment to p. (This is a further point of contrast with recent transparency-based views, such as those defended by Gallois and Byrne.)
Finally, the paper argues for the following bold claim: the phenomenological transparency of occurrent belief or judgment is essential to its reason-giving role. The thought is that unless you take it that p is a fact about the world — in the relevant, phenomenological sense — then p cannot be a reason for you to act intentionally. A state with the content that p might still, of course, influence your behavior even if it lacks the relevant phenomenology; but it won’t make it the case that you act for the reason that p.
Let’s sum up.
My claim is that Jaspers is right that there is a distinctive phenomenology of thinking — a sense, in thinking, that your thoughts are somehow manifestations of your own agency. In the particular case of judgment, I suggest, this ultimately comes down to this: your judgments are not just events in you; they constitute your outlook upon the world. Their distinctive phenomenology comes down to this: the content of your judgments figures in your consciousness as the way you take the world to be. This ultimately helps account for the phenomenon of transparency that Evans identified. More broadly, it helps explain the distinctive rational role of judgment in our cognitive lives.
[1] Why the emphasis on judgment, rather than other occurent attitudes? I don't actually have a deep reason for this. For an approach to our knowledge of desire that is in some ways similar to mine see Lauren Ashwell's (2013) paper in Philosophical Studies.
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