Vol. 38 No. 1 (2018)
Articles

Reasoning and Self-Knowledge

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  • Martin F. Fricke
Martin F. Fricke
Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas - Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.2018.282

Published 2018-05-01

Keywords

  • Razonamiento,
  • Autoconocimiento,
  • Transparencia,
  • Shoemaker,
  • Byrne
  • Reasoning,
  • Self-Knowledge,
  • Transparency,
  • Shoemaker,
  • Byrne
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

What is the relation between reasoning and self-knowledge? According to Shoemaker (1988), a certain kind of reasoning requires self-knowledge: we cannot rationally revise our beliefs without knowing that we have them, in part because we cannot see that there is a problem with an inconsistent set of propositions unless we are aware of believing them. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. A second account, versions of which can be found in Shoemaker (1988 and 2009) and Byrne (2005), claims that we can reason our way from belief about the world to self-knowledge about such belief. While Shoemaker’s “zany argument” fails to show how such reasoning can issue in self-knowledge, Byrne’s account, which centres on the epistemic rule “If p, believe that you believe that p”, is more successful. Two interesting objections are that the epistemic rule embodies a mad inference (Boyle 2011) and that it makes us form first-order beliefs, rather than revealing them (Gertler 2011). I sketch responses to both objections.

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References

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