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Dorit Bar-On Department of Philosophy University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill March 18, 2005 Friday, 12:15pm-1:15pm Walsh Conference Room, Barnwell Philosophers and psychologists alike have tried to explain a kind of basic self-knowledge human subjects appear to have that is articulated in self-ascriptions such as "I am feeling dizzy", "I am thinking about my lecture right now", "I'm scared of that dog", etc. (Such self-ascriptions are often called "avowals" in the literature.) It is commonly thought that we enjoy a certain authority or privilege when we avow present mental states, and that this is an important mark of the commonsense distinction between so-called conscious mental or psychological states, on the one hand, and purely bodily states, on the other. In my recent book (Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon, Nov 2004) I develop a philosophical account that tries to respect the commonsense view without falling into objectionable Cartesianism about the mind. On my account, what gives avowals a special status is the fact that they serve to express rather than merely report the states that are self-ascribed. Although avowals share their semantics with bodily self-reports, they differ from such reports in their pragmatics and epistemology. We can gain insight into basic self-knowledge, I argue, if we see avowals as continuous with non-linguistic expressive behavior of the sort found in non-human animals and prelinguistic children. I take it as an advantage of my view that it lends itself to empirical support (or refutation) by studies in psychology and linguistics. In this talk, I aim to present the expressivist view I propose in a way that would invite suggestions regarding its potential empirical import.  |
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