Self-Knowledge for Humans by Quassim Cassam

Author:Quassim Cassam [Cassam, Quassim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780199657575
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

1 The immediacy of intentional self-knowledge is an important theme in Moran 2001.

2 Evans 1982: 225.

3 Moran 2001: xxix.

4 Moran 2001: 11.

5 Finkelstein 2012: 103.

6 See Kahneman 2011: 97–9 for an account of what he calls ‘substitution’.

7 Someone else who makes this point is Jonathan Way. If I’m driving and there are two equally good routes to where I’m going, I can know which one I want or intend to take even though there is no sense in which I ought rationally to take that route rather than the equally good alternative. Equally, my evidence might be good enough to permit belief in some proposition P, without being so good as to require belief in P. As Way puts it, ‘the claim that there is always a uniquely correct attitude to take towards P, when one is considering whether P, remains a strikingly strong claim’ (2007: 228). Not just strikingly strong but strikingly implausible.

8 Scanlon 1998: 21.

9 Harry Frankfurt has some very helpful things to say about all of this. Focusing on desires, he points out that the fact that a person’s desires are susceptible to rational justification doesn’t entail that a person can identify with his desires only insofar as he supports them with reasons or believes that it is possible to do so. Here is a nice illustration of the point: ‘Suppose I were to conclude for some reason that it is not desirable for me to seek the well-being of my children. I suspect that I would continue to love them and to care about their well-being anyhow. This discrepancy between my judgement and my desire would not show that I had become alienated from my desire. On the contrary, it would show at most that my love for my children is nonrational and that it is “stronger than I am”’ (Frankfurt 2002: 223).

10 Taking it to heart is an interesting and important topic in its own right. In an illuminating discussion Jennifer Church points out that we can assent to a proposition without ever taking it to heart. Members of a jury may deliver a ‘guilty’ verdict and yet remain unconvinced on a deeper level. Conversely, people may dismiss their prejudices as mere prejudices while continuing to hold on to them. In such cases there is a certain lack of what Church calls ‘depth’ to one’s beliefs (2002: 361).

11 Something along these lines is suggested by the discussion of the relationship between judging and believing in Boyle 2011a.

12 There is more on the idea of maker’s knowledge in Hintikka 1974, Mackie 1974, and Craig 1987.

13 That is why, as Baron Reed points out, recognizing that one already believes P may count not merely as a reason to believe that P but as the answer to the question whether one does believe that P. See Reed 2010: 177.

14 Boyle 2009: 138 footnote.

15 Someone else who presses this question is Lucy O’Brien. See O’Brien 2003: 375–82.

16 See Boyle 2011a: 6.

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