Knowing that one wants to go to the movies is an example of self-knowledge, knowledge of one’s mental states. It may be foolish
to ask the man on the Clapham Omnibus how he knows what he wants, but the question is nonetheless important – albeit neglected
by epistemologists. This chapter attempts an answer.
The term “privileged access” is due to Gilbert Ryle; on the Cartesian view that he is concerned to attack, “[a] mind has a
twofold Privileged Access to its own doings” (Ryle
1949, 148). The first kind of privileged access is that:
(1) . . . a mind cannot help being constantly aware of all the supposed occupants of its private stage, and (2) . . . it can
also deliberately scrutinize by a species of non-sensuous perception at least some of its own states and operations. (Ryle
1949, 148)
And the second kind is that:
both this constant awareness (generally called ‘consciousness’), and this non-sensuous inner perception (generally called
‘introspection’) [are] exempt from error. (Ryle
1949, 149)
(1) in the first quotation together with the first conjunct of the second quotation basically amount to the claim that one’s mental states are self-intimating: if one is in a mental state M, one knows (or believes) that one is in M.
Self-intimation is extremely implausible, at least with respect to the mental states that will be under discussion in what
follows. Here is a perfectly ordinary
prima facie example of believing that
p (and possessing the relevant concepts) without knowing, or even being in a position to know, that one believes that
p. Pam is now not in a position to retrieve the name of her new officemate (it is on ‘the tip of her tongue,’ say) and so is
not in a position to verbally self-ascribe the belief that her officemate’s name is ‘Andy.’ Nothing else in her behavior,
we may suppose, indicates that she believes that she has this belief. But she nonetheless does believe now that her officemate’s
name is ‘Andy,’ because otherwise there would be no explanation of why she recalls the name later when taking the train home
.
1Of more interest is (2) in the first quotation, the claim that one employs a kind of “
non-sensuous
perception” to find out about one’s own mental life. Non-sensuous perception is supposed to work only in one’s own case: according
to Ryle’s opponent, “I cannot introspectively observe . . . the workings of your mind” (Ryle
1949, 149). A more general version of (2), then, is the claim that one knows about one’s mental life in a way that one cannot
know about another’s mental life. That is, one has a special method or way of knowing that one believes that
The Searchers is playing at the Orpheum, that one wants to go to the movies, and so on, which one cannot use to discover the mental states
of someone
else. Since such a first-person method need not be epistemically privileged or authoritative, ‘privileged access’ is not ideal
terminology. Instead, let us put the generalized (2) by saying that we have
peculiar access to our mental states.
Ryle’s second kind of “Privileged Access,”
“exemption from error,” is evidently better-named. Infallibility sets the bar too high, though: a weaker and more useful claim
is that our beliefs about our own mental states, arrived at by typical means, are more likely to amount to knowledge than
the corresponding beliefs about others’ mental states and the corresponding beliefs about one’s environment. (The latter comparison
has clear application only for some mental states, paradigmatically belief.) Retaining Ryle’s terminology, let us put this
weaker claim by saying that we have
privileged access to our mental states.
A number of authors (for instance,
Alston
1971; McKinsey
1991; Moran
2001, 12–13), presumably following Ryle, use ‘privileged access’ for what is described in our preferred terminology as privileged
and peculiar access. Whatever the labels, it is important to keep the two sorts of access separate.
The distinction between privileged and peculiar access is one thing; the claim that we actually have one or both sorts of
access is another. Let us briefly review some evidence.
1.1 Privileged access
Consider Jim, sitting in his office cubicle. Jim believes that his pen looks black to him; that he wants a cup of tea; that
he feels a dull pain in his knee; that he intends to answer all his emails today; that he is thinking about paperclips; that
he believes that it is raining. Jim also has various equally humdrum beliefs about his environment: that it is raining, that
his pen is black, and so on. Furthermore, he has some opinions about the psychology of his officemate Pam. He believes that
her pen looks green to her; that she wants a cup of coffee; that her elbow feels itchy; that she is thinking about him; that
she believes that it is raining.
In an ordinary situation of this kind, it is natural to think that Jim’s beliefs about his current mental states are, by and
large, more epistemically secure than his corresponding beliefs about his officemate Pam and his corresponding beliefs about
his environment.
Take Jim’s belief that he believes that it is raining, for example. It is easy to add details to the story so that Jim fails
to know that it is raining; it is not so clear how to add details so that Jim fails to know that he believes that it is raining. Perhaps Jim believes that it is raining because Pam came in carrying a wet umbrella, but the rain stopped
an hour ago. Jim is wrong about the rain, but he still knows that he believes that it is raining – this knowledge will be manifest from what he says and does.
Now contrast Jim’s belief that he believes that it is raining with his belief that Pam believes that it is raining. Again,
it is easy to add details to the story so that Jim fails to know that Pam believes that it is raining. Perhaps Jim believes
that Pam believes that it is raining because he entered the office wearing a visibly wet raincoat. Yet Pam might well not
have noticed that the
raincoat was wet, or she might have noticed it but failed to draw the obvious conclusion.
Similar remarks go for Jim’s belief that he wants a cup of tea, which can be contrasted with Jim’s belief that Pam wants a
cup of coffee. Now it may well be that, in general, beliefs about one’s own desires are somewhat less secure than beliefs
about one’s own beliefs, or beliefs about how things look. This is more plausible with other examples, say Jim’s belief that
he wants to be the CEO of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Inc., or wants to forever remain single – it would not be particularly
unusual to question whether Jim really has these particular ambitions. And perhaps, in the ordinary circumstances of the office,
Jim might even be wrong about his desire for tea. Still, Jim’s claim that he wants tea would usually be treated as pretty
much unimpeachable, whereas his claim that Pam wants coffee is obviously fallible. (Jim’s evidence points in that direction:
Pam normally has coffee at this time, and is heading to the office kitchen. However, she drank her coffee earlier, and now
wants a chocolate biscuit.) And treating Jim as authoritative about his own desires has nothing, or not much, to do with politeness
or convention. Jim earns his authority by his subsequent behavior: Jim will drink an available cup of tea and be visibly satisfied.
The precise extent and strength of privileged access is disputable; the fact of it can hardly be denied
.
2
1.2 Peculiar access
Peculiar access is equally apparent. The importance of “third-person” evidence about one’s mental life can easily be overlooked,
but it is clear that one does not rely on such sources alone. Quietly sitting in his cubicle, Jim can know that he believes
that it is raining and that he wants a cup of tea. No third-person or behavioral evidence is needed. To know that Pam wants
a coffee requires a different sort of investigation – asking her, observing what she does, and so forth.
It is often claimed that one knows one’s mind “directly,” or “without evidence.” (For the former see, e.g.,
Ayer
1959, 58; for the latter, see, e.g.,
Davidson
1991, 205.) If that is right, and if one knows others’ minds
“indirectly,” or “with evidence,” then this is what peculiar access consists in – at least in part. But such claims should
be made at the end of inquiry, not at the beginning.
Sometimes peculiar access is glossed by saying that self-knowledge is “a priori” (e.g. McKinsey
1991;
Boghossian
1997). This should be resisted – certainly at the beginning of inquiry, and probably at the end. One leading theory of self-knowledge
classifies it as a variety of
perceptual knowledge, in many respects like our perceptual knowledge of our environment. “The
Perception of the Operations of our own Minds within us,” according to
Locke, “is very like [the perception of “External Material things”], and might properly enough be call’d internal Sense” (
Locke [
1689] 1975, 105). On this
inner-sense theory (
Armstrong
1968, 95; see also
Lycan
1987,
ch. 6; Nichols and Stich
2003, 160–4), we have an internal “scanner” specialized for the detection of our mental states. No doubt the hypothesized inner
sense is not much like our outer senses – recall that
Ryle characterizes it as “non-sensuous perception” – but it is surely unhelpful to classify its deliverances with our knowledge
of mathematics and logic
.
3
1.3 The independence of privileged and peculiar access
It is important to distinguish privileged and peculiar access because they can come apart in both directions. Hence one can
find theorists who deny that we have one kind of access while affirming that we have the other (for examples, see Byrne
2005, 81). As the previous two sections suggest, this extreme claim is not credible, but a more restricted version is actually
correct. Privileged and peculiar access do not perfectly coincide: in particular, there are many ordinary cases of the latter
without the former.
For instance, the epistemic security of self-ascriptions of certain emotions or moods is at the very least nothing to write
home about. One may have peculiar access to the fact that one is depressed or anxious, but here the behaviorist greeting –
“You’re fine! How am I?” – is not much of a joke, being closer to ordinary wisdom.
Factive mental states, like
knowing that Ford directed The Searchers and
remembering that the Orpheum closed down last week, provide further examples.
4 Since knowing that
Ford directed
The Searchers entails that
Ford
directed
The Searchers, but not conversely, it is easier to know the latter fact than to know that one knows it.
5 The belief that one knows that
Ford directed
The Searchers is
less likely to amount to knowledge than the belief that
Ford directed
The Searchers. Yet one has peculiar access to the fact that one knows that
Ford directed
The Searchers, just as one has peculiar access to the fact that one believes this proposition. Jim knows that Pam knows that
Ford directed
The Searchers because (say) he knows she is a movie buff and such people generally know basic facts about John
Ford. But in order to know that he knows that
Ford directed
The Searchers, Jim need not appeal to this kind of evidence about himself
.
How does one know what one believes? Evans suggested an answer: “in making a self-ascription of belief, one’s eyes are, so
to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward – upon the world” (
1982a, 225). Different ways of elaborating Evans’ telegraphic remarks have been proposed by
Gordon (
1995),
Gallois (
1996), Moran (
2001), Byrne (
2005), and
Fernández (
2005). In brief, here is the proposal in Byrne (
2005).
First, a small amount of technical apparatus. Say that an
epistemic rule is a conditional of the following form:
R If conditions C obtain, believe that p.
An example is:
WEATHER If the clouds are dark gray, believe that it will rain soon.
One
follows WEATHER on a particular occasion iff one believes that it will rain soon because one recognizes that the clouds are dark gray, where
the ‘because’ is intended to mark the kind of causal connection characteristic of inference or reasoning. In general, S follows
rule R on a particular occasion iff on that occasion S believes that
p because she recognizes that conditions C obtain, which implies (a) S knows that conditions C obtain, which in turn implies
(b) conditions C obtain, and (c) S believes that
p.
Following WEATHER in typical circumstances tends to produce knowledge about impending rain; rules that are knowledge-conducive are good rules.
Now we can put an Evans-inspired proposal for the epistemology of belief as follows. Knowledge of one’s beliefs can be obtained
by following the rule:
Bel If
p, believe that you believe that
p.
6
But is
BEL a
good rule, as the proposal implies? It might seem not, because its third-person counterpart is plainly a
bad rule:
Bel-3 If p, believe that Pam believes that p.
It would be quite a stretch, for instance, to reason from the fact that I have a quarter in my pocket, or that the Philadelphia
Phillies were originally known as the ‘Quakers,’ to the conclusion that Pam believes these things – most likely she does not.
Following
BEL-3 will thus tend to produce false and unjustified beliefs. Isn’t
BEL just as dodgy?
Fortunately not.
BEL, unlike
BEL-3, is
self-verifying: if one follows it one’s second-order belief is true.
7 In this respect it is an even better rule than
WEATHER – that rule is good, but following it does not guarantee that one will have a true belief about the rain.
The virtues of
BEL do not stop there. Say that S
tries to follow R iff S believes that
p because she
believes that conditions C obtain; hence
trying to follow R is weaker than
following R.
8 Trying to follow
WEATHER is not truth-conducive, hence not knowledge-conducive. In contrast, trying to follow
BEL is maximally truth-conducive: if one tries to follow it, one’s second-order belief is true. We can put this by saying that
BEL is
strongly self-verifying. (Self-verification is thus weaker than strong self-verification.)
The Evans-inspired proposal of a few paragraphs back only covers cases where one’s belief that
p amounts to knowledge, but of course one may know that one believes that
p even though one’s belief that
p is false, or anyway does not amount to knowledge. In the terminology just introduced, the fully general proposal for the
epistemology of belief is this:
Belief Knowledge of one’s beliefs can be, and typically is, obtained by trying to follow BEL.
BELIEF implies that
trying to follow
BEL is knowledge-conducive – that
BEL is a
very good rule.
Now true beliefs, or even true beliefs that could not easily have been false, are not thereby knowledge. So the fact that
BEL is strongly self-verifying does not
entail that it is a very good rule. It does, however, rebut an obvious
objection. And given the intuitive plausibility of Evans’ claim that we know what we believe by “directing our eyes outward,”
the burden of proof is on the critics.
BELIEF is at least a defensible working hypothesis
.
BELIEF, if true, offers a satisfying explanation of both privileged and peculiar access. Privileged access is explained because
BEL is strongly self-verifying. Peculiar access is explained because the method involved only works in one’s own case: third-person
rules like BEL-3 are bad.
For the sake of the argument, assume that BELIEF is true. Is there any need to press on, and try to force all self-knowledge – a fortiori, knowledge of one’s desires – into this rough mold?
In answering that question, two distinctions will be helpful. To introduce the first, consider our knowledge of metaphysical
modality. On one (popular) view, it requires a special epistemic capacity of modal intuition. On the alternative Williamsonian
picture, it requires nothing more than our “general cognitive ability to handle counterfactual conditionals” (
Williamson
2004, 13), such as “If it had rained I would have taken my umbrella.” The Williamsonian view is an
economical account of our knowledge of metaphysical modality: all it takes are epistemic capacities required for other domains. The
popular view, on the other hand, is
extravagant: knowledge of metaphysical modality needs something extra.
A similar “economical–extravagant” distinction can be drawn for
self-knowledge. Let us say that a theory of self-knowledge is
economical just in case it purports to explain self-knowledge solely in terms of epistemic capacities and abilities that are needed
for knowledge of other subject matters; otherwise it is
extravagant. A behaviorist account of self-knowledge is economical: the capacities for
self-knowledge are precisely the capacities for knowledge of the minds of
others. The theory defended in
Shoemaker
1994 is also economical: here the relevant capacities are “normal intelligence, rationality, and conceptual capacity” (
Shoemaker
1994, 236). On the other hand, the inner-sense theory (see
section 1.2 above) is
extravagant: the organs of outer perception, our general rational capacity, and so forth, do not account for all our self-knowledge.
For that, an additional mechanism, an “internal scanner,” is needed.
The second distinction is between
unified and
disunified theories of
self-knowledge. Simple versions of the behaviorist and inner-sense theories are unified: for any mental state M, the account
of how one knows one is in M is broadly the same – by observing one’s behavior, or by deploying one’s “internal scanner.”
But some philosophers adopt a divide-and-conquer
strategy, resulting in more-or-less disunified theories. For instance,
Davidson (
1984) and Moran (
2001) offer accounts chiefly of our knowledge of the propositional attitudes, in particular, belief. Knowledge of one’s sensations,
on the other hand, is taken to require a quite different theory, which neither of them pretends to supply. “[T]he case of
sensations,” Moran writes, “raises issues for self-knowledge quite different from the case of attitudes of various kinds”
(Moran
2001, 10). Similar divisions, although less sharply emphasized, are present in the theories of self-knowledge defended in
Goldman (
1993) and Nichols and Stich (
2003).
There is a case for unification. Suppose that the epistemic capacities one employs to know one’s sensations are quite different
from the capacities employed to know what one believes. As an illustration, suppose that the account just sketched for belief
is correct, and that one knows one’s sensations by employing (in part) a dedicated mechanism of inner-sense. Then dissociations
are to be expected. In particular, a person’s internal scanner could be inoperable, sparing her capacity to find out via BEL what she believes. Such a person would exhibit pain behavior like the rest of us. But does she feel an itch in her shin? “Well, probably, since I just caught myself scratching it.”
Since such dissociations never seem to occur, this indicates that the epistemology of mental states draws on fundamentally
the same capacity, in the sense that individual capacities to know that one is in particular kinds of mental state are a package
deal. The capacity to know what one believes, for example, brings in its train the capacity to know that one sees a tomato,
feels an itch, and wants a beer.
And since the capacity to know what one believes merely involves our general cognitive capacity for reasoning or inference
from (typically) worldly premises to mental conclusions (as BELIEF implies), that capacity should also allow one knowledge of one’s other mental states. And if it does, then the correct theory
of self-knowledge is economical. Roughly put, our general capacity for reasoning about the world suffices for knowledge of
our own minds.
But how can the account for belief be extended to desire? According to Nichols and Stich, it clearly cannot:
we can answer . . . questions about current desires, intentions, and imaginings, questions like: ‘What do you want to do?’;
‘What are you going to do?’; ‘What are you imagining?’ Our ability to answer these questions suggests that the ascent routine
strategy [i.e. the
Evans-style procedure
9] simply cannot accommodate
many central cases of self-awareness. There is no plausible way of recasting these questions so that they are questions about
the world rather than about one’s mental state. As a result, the ascent routine strategy strikes us as clearly inadequate
as a general theory of self-awareness. (Nichols and Stich
2003, 194)
Finkelstein agrees:
[I]t is difficult to claim that the self-ascription of belief [
à la Evans] provides a model of self-knowledge that can be used in order to understand our awareness of our own, say, desires because
there seems to be no “outward-directed” question that bears the kind of relation to “Do I want X?” that the question “Is it
the case that
p?” bears to “Do I believe that
p?”(Finkelstein
2003, 161)
10
If these philosophers are right, and the world-to-mind account that seems so promising for belief is hopeless for desire,
then the account for belief should be rejected too. (Nichols and Stich, at least, reject it.) Contrariwise, if the world-to-mind
account for belief is right, then there must be a similar account that works for desire. The
next section takes up the challenge of finding it.
In fact, the previous two quotations are far too pessimistic. Although it might superficially appear that “there is no plausible
way of recasting” a question about one’s desires as a “question about the world,” a second glance suggests otherwise. The
issue of where to dine arises, say. My accommodating companion asks me whether I want to go to the sushi bar across town or
the Indian restaurant across the street.
12 In answering that question, I attend to the advantages and drawbacks of the two options: the tastiness of Japanese and Indian
food, the cool Zen aesthetic of the sushi bar compared to the busy garish décor of the Indian restaurant, the bother of getting
across town compared to the convenience of walking across the street, and so on. In other words, I weigh the
reasons for the two options – the “considerations that count in favor,” as
Scanlon puts it (
1998, 17), of going to either place. These reasons are not facts about my present psychological states; indeed, many of them are
not psychological facts at all.
13Suppose I determine that the Indian option is the best – that there is most reason to go to the Indian restaurant. (This might
be the result of agonized deliberation; more typically, it will be a snap judgment.) Once I have this result in hand, which
is not (at least on the face of it), a fact about my present desires, I then reply that I want to go to the Indian restaurant.
This example is one in which I “make up my mind” and form a new desire: prior to being asked, I lacked the desire to go to
the Indian restaurant. But the
Evans-style point about looking “outward – upon the world” still holds when I have wanted to go to the Indian restaurant for
some time. Of course, often when in such a condition, I can recall that I want to go. But on other occasions the process seems
less direct. What immediately comes to mind is the non-psychological fact that the Indian restaurant is the best option; and
(apparently) it is by recalling this that I conclude I want to go there.
14An initial stab at the relevant rule for desire – specifically, the desire to act in a certain way
15 – is therefore this:
Des* If ϕing is the best option, believe that you want to ϕ.
This is not a bad fit for a restricted range of cases, but the general hypothesis that we typically know what we want by following
(or trying to follow)
DES* has some obvious problems. In particular, the hypothesis both under-generates, failing to account for much knowledge of our
desires, and over-generates, predicting judgments that we do not make.
To illustrate under-generation, suppose that I am in the happy condition of also wanting to eat at the sushi bar. Eating at
either place would be delightful, although on balance I prefer the Indian option. In such a situation, I can easily know that
I want to eat at the sushi bar, despite not judging it to be the best option.
16To illustrate over-generation, suppose that I really dislike both Japanese and Indian cuisine, and I do not much care for
my companion’s company either. Still, he would be terribly offended if I bailed out of dinner, and would refuse to publish
my poetry. I do not
want to eat at the Indian restaurant but – as children are often told – sometimes you have to do
something you do not want to do. The Indian is the best of a bad bunch of options, and I accordingly choose it. Despite knowing
that eating at the Indian restaurant is the best course of action, I do not follow
DES* and judge that I want to eat there. Later, in between mouthfuls of unpleasantly spicy curry, I hear my companion droning
on about his golf swing, and I think to myself that I really do not want to be doing this.
The description of this example might raise eyebrows, since it is something of a philosophical dogma that intentional action
invariably involves desire – on this view, if I slouch to the Indian restaurant, resigned to a miserable evening, I nonetheless
must have wanted to go there. Whether this is anything more than dogma can be set aside, because (wearing my Plain Man hat)
I will not agree that I want to go to the Indian restaurant. So, even if I do want to go to the Indian restaurant, I am ignorant
of this fact, and what primarily needs explaining is the Plain Man’s
self-knowledge, not the self-knowledge of sophisticated theorists.
17In the under-generation example, why do I think I want to go to the sushi bar? Going there is not the best option, all things considered, but it is a good option, or (much better) a desirable one, in the Oxford English Dictionary sense of having “the qualities which cause a thing to be desired: Pleasant, delectable, choice, excellent, goodly.” Going
to the sushi bar is not merely desirable in some respects, but desirable tout court. The sushi bar is a short cab ride away, the saba is delicious, an agreeable time is assured, and so on. If the Indian restaurant
turns out to be closed, that is no cause to investigate other alternatives: going home and heating up some leftovers, getting
takeaway pizza, and so on. The sushi bar is a more than adequate alternative. In the over-generation example, by contrast,
the Indian option is not desirable, despite being the best.
So these two problems can both apparently be solved simply by replacing ‘best’ in
DES* by ‘desirable,’ yielding the rule:
Des If ϕing is a desirable option, believe that you want to ϕ.
And the hypothesis corresponding to
BELIEF (
section 2) is:
Desire Knowledge of one’s desires is typically obtained by trying to follow
DES.
18
If
DESIRE is true, then
DES is a
good (knowledge-conducive) rule. So let us now examine whether it is – if it is not, other objections are moot.
The rule
BEL, recall, is:
Bel If p, believe that you believe that p.
As noted in
section 2,
BEL is
self-verifying: if one follows it one’s second-order belief is true. As argued in that section, this observation defuses the objection that
following
BEL cannot yield knowledge because the fact that
p is not a reliable indication that one believes that
p.
A similar objection applies to DES: that φing is a desirable option is not a reliable indication that one wants to φ. Pam’s walking three miles to work tomorrow
is desirable, because she’ll then avoid hours in an unexpected traffic jam, and get promoted for her foresight and dedication,
yet (not knowing these facts) Pam wants only to drive.
Unfortunately, a similar reply does not work: DES is not self-verifying. Cases of accidie are compelling examples. Lying on the sofa, wallowing in my own misery, I know that going
for a bike ride by the river is a desirable option. The sun is shining, the birds are twittering, the exercise and the scenery
will cheer me up; these facts are easy for me to know, and my torpor does not prevent me from knowing them. If I concluded
that I want to go cycling, I would be wrong. If I really did want to go, why am I still lying on this sofa? It is not that
I have a stronger desire to stay put – I couldn’t care less, one way or the other.
Still, this example is atypical. One’s desires tend to line up with one’s knowledge of the desirability of the options; that
is, known desirable options tend to be desired. (Whether this is a contingent fact, or a constitutive fact about desire or
rationality, can for present purposes be left unexamined.) What’s more, even though there arguably are cases where one knows
that φing is desirable and mistakenly follows
DES, ending up with a false belief about what one wants, the case just described is not one of them.
I know that cycling is desirable yet fail to want to go cycling, but I do not follow
DES and falsely believe that I want to go cycling. Lying on the sofa, it is perfectly clear to me that I do not want to go cycling.
(Just why this is so will be examined later, in
section 4.2.)
Thus, although DES is not self-verifying, it is (what we can call) practically self-verifying: for the most part, if Pam follows DES, her belief about what she wants will be true. And that is enough to rebut the parallel objection that following DES cannot yield knowledge because the fact that φing is a desirable option is not a reliable indication that one wants to φ.
Again, this does not entail that DES is a good rule, but the burden of proof should be on those who think it is not.
As also noted in
section 2,
BEL is
strongly self-verifying. That is, if one
tries to follow it – if one believes that one believes that
p because one believes that
p – then one’s second-order belief is true. That feature of
BEL is the key to explaining privileged access for belief. Similarly, since one’s desires tend to line up with one’s
beliefs about the desirability of the options, whether or not those beliefs are actually true,
DES is
strongly practically self-verifying. Privileged access to one’s beliefs and desires can therefore be explained in basically the same
way.
At this point a worry about circularity might arise: perhaps, in order to find out that something is desirable, one has to
have some prior knowledge of one’s desires. If that is right, then at the very least a significant amount of one’s knowledge
of one’s desires remains unexplained. The
next section examines some variations on this theme.
4.1 Desirable and Desired
According to the
circularity objection, in order to follow
DES, one has to have some knowledge of one’s desires beforehand. (The difference between
following DES and
trying to follow it only complicates matters while leaving the basic objection intact, so let us focus exclusively on the former.
19)
In its crudest form, the objection is simply that the relevant sense of “desirable option” can only mean
desired option. If that is so, then
DES is certainly a good rule, but only in a trivial limiting sense. Unpacked, it is simply the rule: if you want to φ, believe
that you want to φ. And to say that
one follows
this rule in order to gain knowledge of one’s desire to φ is to say that one comes to know that one wants to φ because one recognizes
that one wants to φ. True enough, but hardly helpful.
However, this version of the circularity objection is a little too crude, leaving no room for any other features to count towards the desirability of an option. (Recall examples of such features
quoted from the OED: “pleasant, delectable, choice, excellent, goodly.”) A slightly less crude version admits that other features are relevant,
but insists that a necessary condition for an option’s being desirable is that one desire it. Is this at all plausible?
No. As many examples in the recent literature on “reasons” bring out, desires rarely figure as considerations for or against
an action, even the restricted set of considerations that bear on whether an action is desirable. The Indian restaurant example
is a case in point. Here is another. Suppose I see that an interesting discussion about the mind–body problem has started
in the department lounge, and I am deciding whether to join in and sort out the conceptual confusion. I wonder whether the
participants would applaud my incisive remarks, or whether I might commit some terrible fallacy and be overcome with embarrassment,
but I do not wonder whether I want to join in. Suppose I want to attend a meeting which is starting soon, and that this desire will be frustrated if I stop
to join the discussion in the lounge. I do not take this to be a consideration in favor of not joining in, but rather (say) the fact that turning up late to the meeting will be thought
very rude.
The force of these sorts of examples can be obscured by conflating two senses of ‘reason.’ Suppose I want to join the discussion,
and that is what I do. So a reason why I joined in was that I wanted to. Doesn’t that show, after all, that my wanting to join in was a reason, namely a reason for joining in? No, it does not. That I wanted to join the discussion is a reason in the explanatory sense, as in “The failure of the blow-out preventer was the reason why the Deep Water Horizon exploded.” But it does not
follow that this fact is a reason in the (operative) normative sense, the “consideration in favor” sense of ‘reason.’
There is no straightforward connection between an option’s being desirable and its actually being desired that would support
a version of the circularity objection. Could a connection between desirability and one’s counterfactual desires do any better?
As an illustration, consider the claim that φing is desirable iff if conditions were “ideal,” the agent would want to φ. All
such analyses have well-known problems; for the sake of the argument let us suppose that this one is
correct.
20 (Since the right-hand side is surely not
synonymous with the left, take the biconditional merely to state a necessary equivalence.) Does this analysis of desirability suggest
that sometimes one needs prior knowledge of one’s desires to find out that φing is desirable?
First, take a case where one is not in ideal conditions. To return to the example at the end of the
previous section, suppose I am lying miserably on the sofa. I know that cycling is desirable; I also know, let us grant, the supposed equivalent
counterfactual, that if conditions were ideal, I would want to go cycling. In order for circularity to be a worry here, it
would have to be established that (a) I know that cycling is desirable by inferring it from the counterfactual, and (b) I
need to know something about my present desires in order to know the counterfactual. Now whatever “ideal conditions” are exactly,
they are intended to remove the barriers to desiring the desirable – drunkenness, depression, ignorance, and so on. And, although
I do not actually want to get on my bike, the enjoyment and invigorating effects of cycling are apparent to me. Regarding
(b), it is quite unclear why I need to know anything about my present desires to know that if the scales of listlessness were
to fall from my eyes I would desire the manifestly desirable. And regarding (a), the most natural direction of inference is
from left to right, rather than vice versa: my knowledge of the desirability of cycling – specifically, its enjoyment and
invigorating effects – come first, not my knowledge of the counterfactual.
Second, take a case where one is in ideal conditions. I am lying on the sofa, not at all miserable. I know that cycling is
desirable, and I know that I want to go cycling. I also know, we may grant, that conditions are ideal. Given the equivalence,
do I know that cycling is desirable by inferring it from the counterfactual, which I infer in turn from truth of both the
antecedent and the consequent? If so, then there is a clear problem of circularity. But how do I know that the antecedent
is true, that conditions are ideal? Since the chief purchase I have on “ideal conditions” is that they allow me to desire the desirable, the obvious answer
is that I know that conditions are ideal because I know that cycling is desirable and that I want to go cycling. But then
the epistemological direction is again from left to right, rather than – as the objector would have it – from right to left.
If I know that cycling is desirable prior to knowing that conditions are ideal, then (granted the equivalence) I can infer
the counterfactual from the fact that cycling is desirable.
The circularity objection is, at the very least, hard to make stick. Let us now turn to some complications.
4.2 DES and Defeasibility
To say that we typically follow (or try to follow) rule R is not to say that we always do. The rule WEATHER (“If the skies are dark gray, believe that it will rain soon”) is a good enough rule of thumb, but it is defeasible – additional evidence (or apparent evidence) can block the inference from the premise about the skies to the conclusion about
rain. For example, if one knows (or believes) that the trusted weather forecaster has confidently predicted a dry but overcast
day, one might not believe that it will rain soon despite knowing (or believing) that the skies are dark gray.
Given that DES is only practically (strongly) self-verifying, one might expect that rule to be defeasible too. And indeed the example of accidie, used earlier
to show that DES is only practically self-verifying, also shows that it is defeasible.
In that example, I am lying miserably on the sofa, contemplating the pleasures of a bike ride in the sunshine. This is not
just a situation in which I know that cycling is a desirable option but nevertheless do not want to go cycling. It is also
a situation in which I do not believe that I want to go cycling. Yet if I slavishly followed DES, I would believe that I wanted to go cycling. So why don’t I?
I believe that I am not going to go cycling, but that is not why I do not think I want to go: I sometimes take myself to want
to φ when I believe that I am not going to. For example, I really want to read Mind and World this evening, but that is not going to happen because I do not have the book with me.
A better suggestion is that I believe I do not want to go cycling because I believe I intend to remain on the sofa. I do not believe I intend to avoid reading Mind and World this evening, so at least the suggestion does not falsely predict that I will take myself to lack the desire to read Mind and World. However, it is obviously not right as it stands. Suppose, to return to the earlier restaurant example, I want to go both
to the Indian restaurant and to the sushi bar, and I then form the intention to go to the Indian restaurant, on the grounds
that this option is slightly more desirable. When I realize that I have this intention, I will not thereby refuse to ascribe
a desire to go to the sushi bar: if the Indian restaurant turns out to be closed, I might say to my companion “No worries,
I also wanted to eat Japanese.”
This highlights a crucial difference between the cycling and restaurant examples: in the cycling case I do not think that
remaining on the sofa is a desirable option – I intend to stay there despite realizing that there is little to be said for
doing so. I do not think I want to go cycling because, if I did, why on earth don’t I go? The means to go cycling are ready
to hand, and the alternative is quite undesirable.
In general, then, this is one way in which DES can be defeated. Suppose one knows that φing is a desirable option, and considers the question of whether one wants to φ.
One will not follow DES and conclude one wants to φ, if one believes (a) that one intends to ψ, (b) that ψing is incompatible with φing, and (c)
that ψing is neither desirable nor better overall than φing.
That explains why I do not follow DES in the cycling case, and so do not take myself to want to go cycling. Here the action I intend is not the one I think desirable,
and neither is it the one I think best, all things considered. More common cases of action without desire are when the intended
action is taken to be the best, as in the earlier restaurant example with the tedious dinner companion. Dinner at the Indian restaurant
will be terribly boring and I will not have a good time; nonetheless, it is the best course of action available, perhaps even
beating out other options (like staying at home with a good book) that are actually desirable. I intend to go, but I really
do not want to.
Something else needs explaining, though. It is not just that I fail to believe that I want to go cycling – I also know that
I lack this desire. I also know that I lack the desire to go to the Indian restaurant. So how do I know that I do not want to go cycling, or do not want to go to the Indian restaurant? (Read these with the negation taking wide scope: not wanting
to go, as opposed to wanting not to go.)
In the boring dinner example, I know that going to the Indian restaurant is not desirable – indeed, it is positively undesirable.
An obvious explanation of how I know that I do not want to go is that I follow this rule:
NoDes If φing is an undesirable option, believe that you do not want to φ.
21
NODES does not apply in the accidie example, of course, because I know that cycling is desirable. But the earlier discussion of
that case already shows how I know that I lack the desire to cycle: if I really have that desire, what is to stop me getting
on my bike? The gleaming marvel of Italian engineering is right there, and staying on the sofa has nothing to be said for
it.