Belief and Self‐Knowledge: Lessons From Moore's Paradox

How do we know what we believe? Gilbert Ryle is often credited with the view that we know what we believe in much the same way that we know what others believe: namely, by inference from observation of behavior. This Rylean view cannot explain all of our self-knowledge, however, since we can know what we believe even when our beliefs make no relevant causal impact on our behavior.1 In opposition to this Rylean view, I will assume that there is an epistemic asymmetry to be drawn between first-personal and third-personal ways of knowing what we believe. Each of us has some way of knowing what we ourselves believe that is peculiar in the sense that it is different from any of our ways of knowing what others believe. What is more, I will argue, this first-personal way of knowing what we believe is privileged in the sense that it is immune from the rational uncertainty and error that affects our ways of knowing what others believe.2 What is this first-personal way of knowing what we believe? A preliminary answer is that we know what we believe by introspection. However, the term ‘introspection’ is nothing more than a placeholder for an account of how we know what we believe. We certainly cannot assume that our knowledge of what we believe has its source in anything like inner perception. So the task remains for a theory of introspection to fill in this placeholder by giving an informative account of our first-personal way of knowing what we believe. The aim of this paper is to argue that what I call the simple theory of introspection can be extended to account for our introspective knowledge of what