The transparency referred to in the title of Matthew Boyle’s book is Gareth Evans’s highly influential idea that one makes self-ascriptions of belief by directing one’s attention to the relevant worldly facts (Evans, 1980). I answer the question of whether I think it’s going to rain by looking at the sky, not into my soul. The reflection in the title is a proprietary notion Boyle derives from work on self-knowledge by Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, 2018). This notion is embedded in a theory of two kinds of awareness, explicit self-knowledge and a more primitive form of “non-positional” consciousness. The thesis of the book is that the interplay between these two forms of awareness affords the correct explanation of why transparency holds, and is the key to understanding self-knowledge in general. The book is divided into three parts. Part I (Chs. 1–3) introduces the main concepts and themes. Part II (Chs. 4–6) develops the Sartrean notion of non-positional awareness. Part III (Chs. 7–10) treats the special notion of reflection and contains extensions and applications of the central ideas.
Boyle announces in the introduction his dissatisfaction with the contemporary philosophical literature on self-knowledge. As he sees it, philosophers from the ancient Greeks through the early moderns conceived the topic of self-knowledge as bound up with fundamental questions of human nature. In this tradition, “openness to self-knowledge, which informs our capacities for knowledge and action (2),” is essential to human mindedness and sets us apart from other animals. As Boyle sees it, “the most striking feature of contemporary work on self-knowledge is its rigorous repudiation of these ways of framing its topic (2).” Depending on how strongly one understands “framing,” I find these claims overdrawn at best and at worst simply unjustified. I will return to the issue later. For now, I note that, presumably as a result of this stance of Boyle’s, a notable feature of the book is its neglect of significant recent authors. Philosophers whose work on self-knowledge is barely or never mentioned include Akeel Bilgrami, Tyler Burge, Brie Gertler, and Crispin Wright. The views of Christopher Peacocke and Sydney Shoemaker receive some discussion, but not in proportion to their influence, and their concern with the connection between self-knowledge and our capacities for knowledge and action is not discussed. This is unfortunate, for when Boyle does engage in detail with the ideas of others, as in his critique of Alex Byrne’s interpretation of transparency (see below), the results are illuminating.
Evan’s idea is immediately persuasive but difficult to explain. How can it be that I answer a question about my mind by looking elsewhere? Is it because the light is better out there? And how does transparency in turn explain one’s knowledge of one’s own mind? Boyle criticizes attempts to account for transparency due to Byrne (Byrne, 2018) and Richard Moran (Moran, 2001). The criticisms of Moran are mostly familiar, e.g., it’s not clear how to extend Moran’s idea that self-ascriptions of belief are made from a “deliberative stance” to other types of mental state. There’s a lot that can (and has) been said by Moran and others on these points. Boyle’s criticisms of Byrne are of greater interest, as they lead to a suggestion that is the germ of the book’s key notion of non-positional awareness.
The idea of Byrne’s theory as presented by Boyle, is that when I self-ascribe a belief in the transparent way, I infer, for example, that I believe it’s going to rain, from the premise that it’s going to rain. This looks like a non-starter, since the premise neither entails nor makes probable anything about my mind. Byrne responds that inferring in this way reliably produces true beliefs, which are “safe” in the technical epistemic sense. Boyle’s criticism of this move is twofold. First, it yields an “alienated” picture of self-knowledge. Since the subject can’t cite their premise as the ground of their belief, the latter is rationally unintelligible to them. Second, there are problems with extending this paradigm to other attitudes. The inference from “I will go to Seattle next week” to “I intend to go to Seattle next week,” will only serve Byrne’s purposes if the “will” is neutral as to how the going comes about—it can’t contain any admixture of intention without cheating. But the inference is a poor one if it’s backed by a belief that the people to whom I owe money are going to kidnap me. It’s only if my judgment of the premise contains a soupçon of intention that it is rationally defensible.
Instead of leaving the matter with the criticism that Byrne’s account is circular, Boyle defends the idea that my knowledge of my own intention to go to Seattle is grounded, in a way, in an intention-inflected awareness that I will go there. But the resulting reflectivist theory has a very different shape than Byrne’s inferential story. This is where Sartre enters the story.
In Boyle’s telling, according to Sartre’s theory, in addition to my positional consciousness (knowledge) that I intend to go to Seattle, there is a more basic non-positional consciousness of my intention that is already present in my judgment that I’ll go there, made, for example, upon learning that the Seattle Opera is doing Tosca next week. “Positional” comes from “posit,” Sartre’s term for an intentional object. My judgment, “I will go to Seattle,” posits myself going there, but not myself having the intention to go there. A child might judge that she’s going to eat that cupcake without possessing the concept of intention or much in the way of a first-person concept. Nevertheless, the bare judgment does express non-positional consciousness—though not knowledge—that I intend to go there. This primitive consciousness of my own intention can be the basis for a kind of reflection that transforms it into positional consciousness, in this case knowledge, that I intend to go there.
That is why transparency holds. In Evans’s example, when the subject looks at the sky and judges that it’s going to rain, this contains the non-positional awareness that she believes this. Reflection upon this awareness by a person with a first-person concept and the concept of belief yields explicit knowledge that she believes it’s going to rain.
Two obvious questions arise at this point. (1) What exactly is non-positional awareness of one of one’s own mental states? (2) What is the nature of the reflection that transforms non-positional consciousness into explicit self-knowledge?
Chapter 4 addresses the first question with a distinction between “subjective” and “objective” forms of mental representation. With a nod to Bernard Williams and Zeno Vendler (Williams, 1973; Vendler, 1979), Boyle maintains that in the objective form, what is represented is “someone’s being/doing/undergoing something,” while the subjective form involves a mere “being, doing, or undergoing, considered from the standpoint of the subject who is, does, or suffers it (87–88).” Wanting to go to Kansas City is not just wanting a certain state of affairs to obtain, but is a kind of “wanting-as-subject” that is more engaged, and accompanies the formation of the desire based on outward-looking considerations. Its basis in this kind of awareness is what gives my self-knowledge that I want to go there its characteristic immediacy (96).
Chapter 5 discusses a model for non-positional consciousness based on spatial awareness of objects in my vicinity. Though their locations are represented in terms of their relations to myself, the most basic forms of awareness of an object as here, or to the left, need not explicitly mark the subject. “Such egocentric modes of presentation give us a model of how a consciousness of oneself as a single subject might be implicit in aspects of the mode of presentation of objects in the non-mental world (110).”
Parts of this discussion are phenomenologically acute. But they trade on our grasp of the spatial content of perceptual representation, a primitive, probably non-conceptual form that is arguably independent of propositional attitudes. It’s hard to see how the correct points Boyle makes here can be adapted to generate a general account of the non-positional awareness of my belief that is manifest in my outward-directed judgment, say, that my father was a cold man.
It’s also a bit mischievous for Boyle to use the term “mode of presentation” here. The spatial model features perceptual analogues of Fregean senses, which mediate reference to objects. But the non-positional “modes of awareness” expressed in my intentionish judgment that I will go to Seattle, or my belief-constituting judgment that it’s going to rain, are associated with my believing and my intending, respectively. The belief and intention are not referents or objects that are presented in a certain Fregean mode—that’s the non-positional part.
Boyle takes up the second question above, of how reflection transforms non-positional awareness into self-knowledge, in Chapter 7. One thing he’s sure of is that this is not an inference, as the contents don’t stand in appropriate rational relations (cf., his criticism of Byrne). It’s also not like the transition from a perceptual representation of a cat to a belief that that’s a cat, because the known proposition in self-knowledge—I see a cat—introduces new contents that are not perceptually represented (168). This correct point seems to undermine somewhat the appeal to spatial representation in Chapter 5 as a model for non-positional awareness.
The right way to think about reflection, according to Boyle, is to see it as like the “taking it to follow” involved in drawing an inference. The moral of the encounter between the Tortoise and Achilles is that this should not be construed as an additional propositional premise. But it is significant that the subject who draws the inference “can so readily formulate a corresponding proposition (180).” This shows that the proposition “makes explicit modes of rational significance of which the subject already exhibits an understanding.” Boyle concludes that the formulation of the principle “does not require the acquisition of new knowledge beyond what is already exercised in the relevant acts of first-level cognition (184).” I don’t see how this last remark can be reconciled with Boyle’s admission above that the judgment that I see a cat introduces new objects of reference over the perceptual state. In an early chapter Boyle mentions a previous incarnation of his own reflectivist view which held that self-knowledge is an explicit reflection on tacit knowledge of the relevant mental state. The problem with that view was that if tacit knowledge is really knowledge, then what can the reflection add but an inconsequential verbal expression of it? I fear a version of this problem survives into the present work.
Space precludes discussion of the chapters in which Boyle takes up bodily awareness and the Lichtenbergian “no-subject” tradition, and mounts a defense of “armchair” psychology (Chapters 6 and 8). I want to conclude with a general point about the project of the book as a whole.
At various points in the book, Boyle deliberately downplays the differences between “knowing, being conscious, and being aware of something (95).” This leaves me wondering exactly what kind of knowledge he thinks self-knowledge is. Late in the book Boyle discusses a case, due to Krista Lawlor, in which a woman putting her child to bed finds herself thinking tender thoughts that issue in the self-exhortation that she should have another child. She questions this, and Lawlor comments that as she thinks through the issues, she is seeking an explanation for her thoughts and feelings, “their likely causes (270; Lawlor, 2009, 48–49).” While he acknowledges some aspects of the case, Boyle thinks Lawlor’s description borders on a “fundamental misunderstanding.” It can’t be right that the woman needs to “discover whether a certain state figures in the causal background of her thoughts and feelings.” That would “involve a form of alienation from her own desire (271 italics original).” “Alienation” is a strong word, but the case is meant to be one where some aspects of the subject’s mind are opaque to her. And isn’t that a common situation for muddled beings like ourselves? For his part, Boyle seems to be resistant to the idea that it is ever true that one has a belief or desire that requires effort to come to know.
This brings us back to Boyle’s dissatisfaction with the recent literature on self-knowledge. Early on, Boyle contrasts his “metaphysical” approach to the topic with a different one which is “primarily epistemological,” which he calls the “Correlation Model of self-knowledge (13).” As far as I can see, the Correlation Model amounts to little more than the application to my own mind of the idea that knowing that p involves a non-accidental “correlation” between belief and truth, so that my knowing that I believe that p requires that I have a true second-order belief about my belief that p. But Boyle sees the Correlation Model as lying behind the “apparent triviality” of much recent work, with its focus on a “strikingly insignificant” variety of self-knowledge, as compared with the forms of self-knowledge prominent in the historical tradition (12).
The triviality charge is unfair, as the Lawlor example indicates. Discussions of similar cases are frequent in the writings of the leading players in the field. Moreover, I think most of the philosophers I mentioned in my second paragraph would be surprised to hear that they have repudiated concern with such broader questions as the relation between self-knowledge, the first person perspective, knowledge in general, agency, and rationality. Some of these authors connect their epistemology to properly metaphysical questions about the self and the nature of propositional attitudes. If self-knowledge really is a form of knowledge, it’s hard to see how one can theorize about it without serious attention to epistemic matters.
This book will appeal to philosophers interested in a Sartrean treatment of self-knowledge. Boyle gives an engaging presentation of Sartre’s central ideas on the topic, and relates them in interesting ways to other themes in philosophy of mind. But I suspect that philosophers grounded in a more mainstream analytic perspective on self-knowledge will find the book’s impressionistic treatment and insular character frustrating.
REFERENCES
Matthew Boyle, “Transparent Self-Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. 85, no. 1 (2011): 223–241.
Alex Byrne, Transparency and Self-Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford University Press, 1980).
Krista Lawlor, “Knowing What One Wants,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 79, no. 1 (2009): 47–75.
Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Routledge, 2009).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, S. Richmond, trans. (Routledge, 2018).
Zeno Vendler, “Vicarious Experience,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 84, no. 2 (1979): 161–173.
Bernard Williams, “Imagination and the Self,” in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973, 26–45).