Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge

Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge. Dorit Bar-On. Abstract. This book motivates and develops a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge that.
Table of contents

And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states?

Dorit Bar-On

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which avowals are expressive acts that have truth-accessible self-ascriptions as their products.

When avowing, a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states.

The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. Read more Read less. Prime Book Box for Kids. Customers who bought this item also bought.

Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion

Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Concept of Expression: Sponsored products related to this item What's this? The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom. On Becoming Who You Are. Improve your knowledge with the world's most interesting facts and the facts behind them. Help yourself to a heaping bowl of Knowledge Stew.

Subscriber Login

Hours of Wordsearch puzzles to enjoy! A perfect gift for birthdays, holidays, or just to relax. Enjoy these easy-to-read puzzles anytime, anywhere! There are no guarantees in publishing, but this guide will guarantee that your book will enter the market with all the prerequisites for success. How to Write a Book: Your book won't write itself Classic Philosophy for the Modern Man. Review "This is a rich book; rich in topics, in argumentation, and in philosophical imagination and insight.

Clarendon Press; 1 edition January 27, Language: Be the first to review this item Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Customer reviews There are no customer reviews yet. Share your thoughts with other customers. By way of contrast, and drawing on the work of Evans and Shoemaker, Bar-on sees the key to this phenomenon of self-reference as arising not from some special inner identification of the subject, but rather from the fact that the subject stands in no genuine need of identification at all.

In a non-self-referential judgment of the form "N is A-ing" in which "N" is, for example, a name or description, we can distinguish between two elements: We can think of the subject as having grounds for i that are quite different and more reliable than her grounds for ii. In such judgments we can speak of possible error of misidentification -- cases in which she has grounds for the more basic judgment i , but her misidentification of N undermines the second judgment. The story is quite different, however, in the judgment that I am A-ing; here there is simply no room for this kind of error of misidentification for the simple reason that I, the subject, have no grounds for thinking that someone is A-ing independent of my grounds for thinking that I am A-ing.


  1. Speaking my mind : expression and self-knowledge / Dorit Bar-On - Details - Trove.
  2. Zwischen Herz und Verstnd (German Edition).
  3. Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge - Oxford Scholarship?

A certain kind of error is eliminated but not through any special epistemic access the subject has to herself. Bar-on extends this intuition to the rest of the self-ascription. My determination that I believe that it is about to rain is not the product of i my determination that I hold some attitude towards some content or other, and my further determination ii that the attitude in question is belief, and that the content of that belief is that it's about to rain; my grounds for thinking that I hold an attitude towards some content or other are simply whatever grounds I have for thinking that I believe that it is about to rain.

Just as there was no room for misidentifying the referent of "I" so here there is no room for misidentifying the content or the character of my attitudes. So we have it that such avowals are immune to a certain kind of error -- errors of "misdescription. She seeks to explain these further points by offering an account of avowals as speech acts of a certain kind -- actions that serve to express mental states.

For reasons of space, I will not discuss her treatment of self-knowledge. In construing avowals as expressive acts, Bar-on is following a familiar route.

leondumoulin.nl: Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (): Dorit Bar-On: Books

Traditional expressive accounts labeled "simple expressive" accounts construed avowals as being analogous to grunts and groans, cries of pain, pleasure etc. This understanding of avowals as being neither true nor false is, however, strikingly counterintuitive, and Bar-On attempts to fashion her account in such a way as to draw on the genuine insights of the expressivists, while rejecting their construal of avowals as neither true nor false.

To this end she distinguishes sharply between the act of avowing, and the product of the action -- a sentence which expresses or encodes a claim such as that one believes that it is about to rain, a claim which is true or false as the case may be. In sincerely uttering "I believe that P" I am, on this account, expressing, in the action-sense, my belief that P, and this act of expressing is to be distinguished from reporting P, promising P, describing P, asserting P, etc.

Bar-On offers no general account of exactly what is involved in such acts of expression which she dubs "expression 1 " , but instead explicates this notion by considering a wide range of examples, examples intended to display a continuity between primitive forms of psychological expression groans, etc.


  1. Die Orgelbauwerkstatt Bütow in Königsberg/Nm: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des märkischen Landorgelbau.
  2. Ripples of Gods Love: Poems to Refresh the Soul;
  3. Die fromme Helene (German Edition).
  4. Editorial Reviews.

At one end of the spectrum we have groans and moans of pleasure and pain, winces, facial expressions, etc. She also offers us a range of characterizations of what it is one is doing when one engages in such expressive behavior: Moreover, these expressions of one's inner states are not only straight from or out of these inner states, without the mediation of some introspective process of discrimination, but, on this account, they serve to show one's occurrent mental states to the other. These actions serve to show "not merely in the sense of showing observers that behaving subjects are in the relevant mental states, but also in the sense of enabling observers to perceive the mental states.

In her terminology, the expressive behavior is said "to be transparent-to-the-subject's-condition. Unlike the simple expressivist, Bar-on claims to be able to accommodate our intuition that avowals are true or false. We must take into account not merely the expressive act of avowing, but also the product of such actions: We can now put this together with her remarks on transparency to explain why it is that avowals are ordinarily taken to be true not just immune to a certain kind of error. To put it succinctly, a subject's utterance of the form "I am in M" is, in ordinary circumstances, taken to be true, because in expressing her belief, the subject's "behavior is transparent to the subject's condition"; in this action we can, so to speak, perceive the subject's being in M, the very state her utterance product says she is in.

We can "see" in her expressive behavior her avowing that she is in M that what she claims via the product is true. Thus the special security of the avowals is obtained without postulating some special inner introspective eye.

2007.02.09

In the final chapter, Bar-on takes up the issue of ontology, addressing concerns that arise from the close link she draws between the subject's mental states and her behavior -- her behavior which serves to express her mental states. There is a temptation to think that if one is really going to suppose that mental states can be expressed in behavior, in such a way that the audience may be said to perceive the mental in the behavior, then one cannot think of mental states as independent states that causally produce such behavior.

It is temping to think that the account commits one to some form of behaviorism -- to identifying the individual's inclinations to various expressive behaviors with her being in pain, with her believing that such and such, etc. Bar-On agrees that, on her account, mental states are not inner states that simply cause behaviors of this or that characteristic form p. The notion of mental condition, she writes, "is neither the notion of some internal state material or not , nor the notion of a disposition to certain kinds of behavior" p.

She offers little by way of a positive account of how mental states are to be construed in her expressive theory.