Self-ascriptions of Belief and Transparency

The access that we have to the contents of our own minds, in contrast with the access that we have to the minds of others, has three main prima facie features. First, it is authoritative: we have a special authority upon what happens in our own minds, in the sense that if we think that we are in a certain mental state it seems that we cannot be challenged. We can indeed make mistakes: our mental states can fail to represent correctly our environment, but it seems that we cannot be wrong in thinking that we have them. Second, our self-access is privileged: it seems to us that we know the contents of our own minds always better than we know the contents of the minds of others. There is a characteristic asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. Third, self-knowledge is also transparent, in the sense that we seem to have access to our own mental states and to their content when they occur: the very fact that we have them is inseparable from our being conscious of them in the first person. These three features seem so specific that they have been taken as characteristic of the mental as such within a whole tradition in philosophy. Cartesianism, in its strongest form, is understood as the view that not only the knowledge that we have of our own minds is authoritative, infallible and transparent, but also that these features define the mental. But this seems to fly in the face of common sense, since it apparently excludes unconscious or 2 dispositional mental states which are neither transparent nor authoritative nor privileged. The Cartesian theorist can bite the bullet and claim that unconscious thoughts and the like are just not mental states at all. But the price is high. Moreover we often go wrong on the contents of our own thoughts, and the traditional appeal to a mysterious faculty of introspection does not convince any more. Anti-Cartesians squarely deny authority, privileged access and transparency. Thus Ryle famously argues in The Concept of Mind that there is no special first-person authority, and that our access to the contents of our own minds has no privilege over our access to the contents of the minds of others, hence that it is no less fallible. This claim has recently been revived by Daniel Dennett (1991) in his attacks against the " Cartesian …