Cristóbal de Losada (St Cross College) 'Transparency Reconsidered'
Abstract: In an ordinary case, I don’t need to inspect myself to figure out what I believe, the way I might have to inspect another—paying attention to what she says and does—to figure out what she believes. My own beliefs I seem to know immediately and without need for evidence. Some philosophers have sought to explain my capacity for this kind of self-knowledge by arguing that, in an ordinary case, the question whether I believe p is transparent to the question whether p. That is, in answering the question whether I believe p, I attend to all the same features of the world that bear on the question whether p. To borrow a famous example of Gareth Evans’s, in answering someone who asks whether I believe there will be a third world war, I turn my gaze outwards, upon all the reasons in favour or against the conclusion that there will be a third world war. The puzzle of transparency asks what justifies me in answering a question about myself in this way. After all, I often fail to believe no more and no less than what is true. So how can the reasons to believe some p also be reasons for me to believe that I believe it? Different philosophers give different accounts. I canvass prominent examples of such accounts and argue that all fail. I suggest that the reason all fail is that my capacity for self-knowledge has nothing to do with putative transparency phenomena. Indeed, I deny that such phenomena arise in quite the way philosophers take them to, and I argue that any attempt to explain the distinctive character of self-knowledge by way of transparency will result in a distorted picture of our own rationality.
