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What I want to consider now is whether appealing to the a priori would serve as a better explanation of the special epistemic status of self-knowledge.

What we are considering is the following solution to the Problem of Self- Knowledge: self-ascriptions have the special features that they do in virtue possessing genuinely a priori warrant.

On this account, we simply take it as a brute fact that self-ascriptions are

psychologically non-inferred and groundless. What we can stress, however, is these

features are not obstacles to them constituting knowledge. There are

psychologically non-inferred a priori judgements. And, on the account of the a priori argued for here, psychologically non-inferred a priori judgements are necessarily

groundless judgements. Psychologically direct a priori judgements are warranted

simply because they are self-evident: the believer requires no further grounds in order to be warranted in believing them.

Finally, the solution goes, self-ascriptions are authoritative because our judgements about our own minds are warranted a priori, whereas other people’s judgements about our minds are merely a posteriori. Since the epistemic norms

argued earlier, it does not look like there are those sorts of specific reasons we can point to with regard to self-knowledge, so this dissimilarity is an important one.) The similarity is just that both questions are asked out of pure intellectual curiosity: they are not interrogative. There is a spirit that is common to both questions, if not a sense.

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governing non-inferred a priori judgements are truth-guaranteeing, the type of epistemic warrant we have regarding our own thoughts is stronger than the

warrant other people have. Treating people as experts on their own minds, then, is eminently sensible. By appealing to the a priori, we can fully account for the

puzzling epistemic features that generate the Problem of Self-Knowledge. Now one advantage that this explanation has over an explanation like Burge’s is that it is neither metaphorical nor vague. Saying that self-knowledge has the special epistemic features that it does in virtue of its being a priori is quite different from saying that it has the special features it does in virtue of being from the same point of view as the judgements they are about. The latter is a vague metaphorical claim of limited explanatory value. But the a priori is a legitimate, well-defined epistemological category.

Claiming that self-knowledge is a priori suggests that we can use the

paradigmatic cases of direct a priori judgements as a model for self-knowledge. We know what it is that we currently believe, intend, or want in just the same way that we know that nothing is both green and red all over at the same time. We are authoritative about such matter precisely because it is only us who have access to our mental states in this way: we are the only ones to whom such judgements are self-evident.

Appealing to the a priori thus provides a model by which we can understand how self-knowledge works. It is thus illuminating in a way that appealing to points of view is not.

At this point however, one might object that it is not been properly explained what it is that makes self-ascriptions of this sort self-evident from the first-person perspective. In virtue of what is this case? Or—in other words—how is it possible that we have a priori knowledge of our own thoughts?

It is true that the account I am peddling does not provide a substantive answer to that question. Yet it is, I submit, far from obvious that this is a challenge that my account is required to answer.

I have thus far offered some reasons in favour of thinking that a certain range of self-ascriptions—the sort typically involved in critical reasoning—are best

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understood as being self-evident. They must be so understood on pain of major upheaval of our epistemic practices. I have further suggested that this self-evidence legitimates the decision to characterise them as belonging to a pre-existing

epistemic category: the a priori.

Effectively I have suggested that understanding self-ascriptions as a priori removes the epistemological puzzle surrounding self-knowledge. The question ‘how could a type of belief be direct and groundless and yet still be knowledge?’ has an easy answer: that type of belief could be a priori.

I take this account to be a sufficiently detailed answer to the general ‘How do we know?’ question that epistemology is interested in.

Now it is important to acknowledge that this account certainly does not apply to every item of knowledge of our own minds. This is because self-knowledge is not epistemically homogeneous.

My discussion of self-knowledge thus far has been admittedly narrow. My attention has been focussed on what I take to be the central cases of self-

knowledge: cogito-like thoughts and our judgements about our presently held beliefs, desires and intentions.

However there are a number of ways of knowing about ourselves that look very different to the way we come to know about our minds in the cases I have focussed on. That is, there are ways of acquiring self-knowledge that are not direct, non-inferential or authoritative. A clear example of this sort would be our

knowledge of our own character traits. Knowledge of this sort is typically inferential rather than direct. Coming to know whether we are brave or cautious, generous or prudent, is something that requires time and experience. It is not something that is just immediately obvious to us in the way that the thoughts we are currently thinking are obvious to us.

Roughly speaking, there are two broad categories of self-knowledge: self- knowledge that is ‘special’ and self-knowledge that is mundane in the sense that it is very much like the knowledge we have of other people’s minds.

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But there are also what we might think of as borderline cases: cases which in some ways resemble the special kind of self-knowledge and in other ways resemble the mundane kind. One example of such is our knowledge of the causal

processes that lead up to the decisions and beliefs we arrive at. As Nisbett and

Wilson point out, people tend to think of themselves as being in an epistemically privileged position with regard to these types of judgement, but there is good psychological evidence that suggests that this confidence is misplaced. Such judgements are assumed to be authoritative, so they are like ‘special’ self- knowledge in that sense, but self-ascribers are not genuinely in an epistemically privileged position with regard to those judgements. So they are like mundane self- knowledge in that sense.

Another good example of a borderline case is the one Crispin Wright finds in Jane Austin’s Emma. Wright picks up on a passage where Emma comes to believe herself to love Knightley based on how she finds herself reacting to a friend’s declaration of love for him. As Wright puts it:

[N]ow she realises that she strongly desires that he marry no one but her, and she arrives at this discovery by way of surprise at the

strength and colour of her reaction to Harriet’s declaration, and by way of a few minutes reflection on that reaction. She is, precisely, not moved to the realisation immediately; it dawns on her as something she first suspects and then recognizes it as true. It explains her reaction to Harriet. (Wright 1998 p. 16)

What this points out is that while Emma is usually very clear (we may assume) about what she desires, this is not always the case. Sometimes we might not be able to tell, via the usual introspective methods, that we have the desires that we do.

The same is true, I take it, also of intentions and beliefs: while it is often perfectly clear to us that we have such mental states when we do, for some of our beliefs, desire and intentions, however, even careful introspective scrutiny might

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fail to reveal them. The second point it raises is that while what we desire is usually obvious to us, it is not always. Sometimes, even states that we are normally

perfectly authoritative about are unclear to us.

What I want to suggest is the a priori account of self-knowledge is well equipped to deal with a surprisingly wide range of cases like this.

As my earlier discussions of the a priori pointed out, it is possible for people to take certain propositions to be a priori obvious when they are not. In cases like this they mistake a non-self-evident proposition for a self-evident one. This mistake leads them to—perhaps blamelessly—fail to comply with the relevant epistemic norm.

In chapters two and four I suggested that one way this might happen was if the believer in question had developed a recalcitrant intuition in virtue of having held some theoretical view for a long time. How it intellectually seems to us can be very strongly influenced by our background theoretical beliefs, opinions,

inclinations, and so forth. If these intellectual seemings are very strong, we might consider it a priori obvious that some claim is true when it really is not. That is to say, false background beliefs and theories can place us in a position in which we systematically misidentify the antecedent conditions of norm (10).

Or, to phrase it the way I did in the last chapter, we might say deviant philosophical theories, folk theories, unwarranted presumptions, and even semantic intuitions can place us in epistemically non-ideal circumstances.

We are thus well equipped to argue that we can sometimes be likewise in epistemically non-ideal conditions with respect to our own minds. For if there can be circumstances that prevent us from recognising analytic propositions as true, then it is hard to see why we would want to deny that they could be analogous circumstances that sometimes prevent us for recognising our own beliefs, desires and so on.

Consider those people who think it is obvious that they chose the rightmost item of clothing because it appears to be of higher quality. Now if we take Nisbett and Wilson’s explanation of the error seriously then what we can say of them is that their folk theory of privileged access has placed them in epistemically non-ideal

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position: a position where they mistakenly take the cognitive processes resulting in their decision to be self-evident when they are not. Their over-generalizing about the situations in which they are authoritative has led them to systemically

misidentify the antecedent conditions of norm (10). When considering the processes that led up to a decision, they mistaken take the answer to be self- evident to them when it is not.

We could, not implausibly, adopt a similar line with regard to Emma. That is, we could insist that she has been placed in an epistemically non-ideal position. There are a number of possible explanations to choose from. Perhaps Emma has deviant semantic intuitions about love. Or perhaps there is some sort of Freudian repression mechanism or self-deception at play. Perhaps Emma has inconsistent beliefs or conflicting desires about Knightley. All of these seem to be prima facie plausible explanations of how Emma could have been mistaken or unaware of her own feelings towards Knightley. And I see no implausibility in the claim that

conditions like these can—like theoretical beliefs and semantic intuitions—place us in an epistemically non-ideal position.

The point here is that while I have focussed primarily on a narrow range of cases of self-knowledge and spent very little time considering the plethora of mundane or borderline cases, the account developed here is flexible enough to apply also to some of the more complicated borderline cases. While I think it is important to recognize that these special, central cases of self-knowledge are not entirely representative of self-knowledge as whole, I also think that this account developed here does apply to, and make sense of, a wider range of self-ascriptions than we might have suspected.