IngentaConnect 7. Self-Knowledge and Resentment

Author: Bilgrami, Akeel

Source: Knowing Our Own Minds, October 2000 , pp. 207-243(37)

Publisher: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs

Abstract:

The paper pursues the question: what makes self-knowledge of our intentional states special, what makes it different from other kinds of knowledge? It does so by contrasting a ’constitutive’ view of self-knowledge with a perceptual model of self-knowledge, and claims that if the former can be shown to be plausible, that will establish the special character of self-knowledge. It then follows Crispin Wright in setting up a biconditional, which links the first-order and second-order intentional states as a prima facie mark of the constitutive view of self-knowledge. In the rest of the paper, however, a quite different understanding of the biconditional is provided from the one in Crispin Wright's work. The biconditional is given support by a normative conception of agency owing to Strawson's conception of freedom, and a normative conception of intentionality. The overarching claim of the paper is that the special character of self-knowledge is of a piece with the special nature of the agent's or first person point of view, and at bottom, both self-knowledge and the point of view of agency are of a piece with the irreducibility of norms and values to states of nature, as natural sciences study them.

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