Do We Determine what We Believe by Looking Outward?

Abstract

Gareth Evans famously claimed that 'In making a self-ascription of belief, one's eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward ¿ upon the world.' This claim exploits the idea that beliefs are 'transparent'. Contemporary philosophers such as Alex Byrne and Jordi Fernandez contend that this 'method of transparency' - determining whether one believes that p by reflecting on whether p - explains our privileged access to our beliefs. I argue that the transparency account of self-knowledge fails to explain how we know our own occurrent judgments, implicit beliefs, or ordinary dispositional beliefs. While the method of transparency brings about judgments, which we can then self-attribute, it cannot explain our privileged access to our pre-existing judgments. To determine whether one implicitly believes that p, one must limit oneself to internal sources of evidence concerning p. In other words, one must look inward. In the optimal cases, the method of transparency yields a judgment that is reliably linked to a dispositional belief, as when one judges that p on the basis of simply remembering that p. But even in these cases, one recovers one's evidence by looking inward rather than outward. And as evidence from social psychology illustrates, many cases are not optimal: one often dispositionally believes that p while judging that not-p. The method of transparency cannot explain our privileged access to our beliefs.

Keywords: self-knowledge, transparency, introspection, belief