Achieving to make up your mind

Fernando Broncano Departamento de Humanidades Universidad Carlos III de Madrid [email protected]

Richard Moran offers in Authority and Estrangement a Sartrian way to confront the problems of self-awareness and first-person authority. He proposes a change from the perceptual model to a practical reason based model that hinges on a distinction between theoretical and practical attitude: “The question asked by the agent (…) is “Shall I believe?”, which is a different question from either the theoretical (predictive) question “Will I believe?” or even the normative question “What ought I to believe?” What it is shown to be is a “deliberative question” (…) a question that is answered by a decision or commitment of oneself rather than a discovery of some antecedent truth about oneself” (A&E, 145)

Therefore, there is here an opposition between “commitment” and “discovery” that Moran sets up when considering the practical way as different to the epistemic one, and this is a change that undoubtedly reaches further than the first-person authority field. For, paraphrasing Sartre, the way of commitment would cover all the spheres of the human existence: being, doing and having. These are domains where the personal autonomy takes place, and where an animal pertaining to the human species becomes a responsible agent. The aim of this paper is to examine the way of explaining the first-person authority that means the move from the theoretical to a deliberative attitude. I purpose to argue that this authority becomes a practical as well as an epistemic achievement reached by a person while examining her engagements in the context of a social space. I do not believe that this authority is built into the use rules of language. It is rather a sort of success that is attained under certain conditions. And finally, I shall argue that this attainment involves also certain epistemic achievement in terms of self-knowledge, even if this knowledge is not obtained by perceptual means.

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The attribution of authority to assertions of self-knowledge has a normative as well as a descriptive dimension. We recognize some kind of epistemic privilege in a kind of first-person assertion, that is, the avowal. They constitute a particular type of speech acts that are performed with a special relevance in two contexts (Shoemaker (1988) p. 28): the first is the social context of cooperative relations, where an agent must make sure that the other knows well what he is intending, and therefore that his avowal correctly expresses his intention. The second is the context of deliberations, where the agent cannot limit herself to allow beliefs and desires to compete among them, as sometimes suggested by the weighting metaphor, as if the outcome resulted from a pure alien forces game to which the will were subject. Instead of this passive placing, the subject must appear into each deliberation step by avowing herself what her mental state is. In both contexts, it does not suffice that the subject obtained the knowledge of his own mind from some empirical evidence. The reason is that in this case the relationship between the content of an avowal and the mental state expressed would be a contingent relationship, and hence the authority of this statement would not be higher than the authority of whichever other third-person statement. If the theoretician intends to sustain the special authority on some evidence, he will have to assign some special trait to this alleged evidence. That is the case of the Cartesian model, where the subject has a privileged access to his mind. This option leads irreversibly to a model of consciousness as some internal sensorial organ, and consequently to a perceptual model of access to the own mental states. We needn’t make use of a Wittgensteinian strategy against private language to understand what the bad philosophical consequences of this model are. For instance, an objection is that it undermines precisely what aims to warrant, that is, the first-person authority. And it is so because this model derives the epistemic force of an avowal from a simple adaptation to an “external” object, that is, the own mental state. But this also assigns a quite passive role to the subject. Even if the agent had a privileged access to the own states, it would be possible to address him a sceptical argument as it is the well-known illusion argument. What would be the consequence of being wrong about the content of our own thought? Note that we are not being sceptical here about some external world, but about the own origins of reasoning and intending. A subject who was unable to know his mental states would be a subject not entitled to determine his thoughts and

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actions. The scepticism about her own mental states would lead to scepticism about his own capacities as subject. This makes clearer that the question on the first-person authority is a normative question, and this also opens the possibility of a non Cartesian answer to it such as the constitutive model that Moran proposes. We shall add to this answer the nuance that an avowal is an achievement about the own subjectivity. I agree with Ch. Korsgaard who considers that “reasons means reflective success” (Korsgaard (1996), p. 97), a special kind of success in which our identity as agents is involved: “the reflective structure of the mind – Korsgaard notes- is a source of “self-consciousness because it forces us to have a conception of ourselves” (Korsgaard (1996), p. 100). Therefore, such reflective success amounts to the special kind of self-consciousness that being an agent means. A previous important point to consider before examining Moran’s approach is to determine what could be the stage of mental development reached by the subject in order to be entitled as having first-person authority in avowals. The fact that the contexts of cooperation and deliberation are those in which a first-person authority is required means that the mental traits of the subject involved must be of a peculiar kind. Related to this, many psychologists consider that a main path in the primate mind phylogenesis leads to the development of certain skills to manipulate the mental states of others –and our mental states, of course. In the human species, these capacities have been regarded by some authors as deriving from a faculty so-called “Theory of Mind”, and by others, as some sort of abilities of mental simulation. It doesn’t matter here this debate with the exception of a point shared by both conceptions: human beings are endowed with the ability to decouple mental contents as such mental contents and to categorize what kind of attitude oneself is maintaining about them. Before these steps, the self-awareness shows a deficit to understand mental states. Such is the case of toddlers and persons suffering from Asperger Syndrome, that is, from autism. These creatures are able to access to their mental representations, but they are unable to access to them as “mental representations”. Compare for instance the difference between understanding the content represented in a picture and understanding this content as represented by a picture. Therefore, the reflective success we are considering would begin to be ascribed only to creatures having skills of access to (and manipulation of) their own and others' mental

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states. In particular, it would be ascribed only to creatures able to self-ascribe mental states such as beliefs and desires, and in general to self-ascribe the entire taxonomy of propositional attitudes. Then, the authority achievement is claimed when such creatures reached the reflective level of representation.

3 These former considerations about the mental development of children lead us to an important strategy to cope with the avowals’ authority, the expressionist one. Let us consider the difficulties that their defenders will find to give an account of the ascent to these higher steps of development that involve metarepresentational abilities. We will consider first an account called simple expressionism. In this program, an avowal is just the way to communicate her mental state for a creature. Thus, an avowal is a member of the same category than groans, moans, shouts, etc. First-person authority does not consist in making use the recognitional abilities of our mental states; it consists just in showing them: “At the heart of the simple expressivist account is the idea that avowals are to be sharply contrasted with ordinary descriptive reports, and that their character is to be understood through a close comparison to natural expressions. When I sincerely utter ‘I am in pain’, I am doing something very different from what you are doing when you say of me ‘she is in pain’. Your ascription represents an attempt to report objectively some present mental state of mine, whereas my avowal is just like a grimace or a cry” (Dorit Bar-On, (2004) p. 228)

Simple expressivism has been analyzed by C.Wright against the background of the Private Language Argument. Thus, on the basis of the Wittgensteinian considerations, one should dismiss the idea that avowals qua avowals assert something about the world, provided that their transparent content is understood: “… The expressivist thesis about avowals can be merely that the typical use of such sentences is as expressions rather than assertions. There need be no suggestion that one cannot make assertions about one’s own psychology. But the suggestion –now initially rather exciting- will be that the appearance of the epistemic superiority of the self which avowals convey is an illusion created by attempting to find a home for features which they carry qua expressions in the context of the mistaken assumption that they are ordinary assertions” (Wright (1998), p. 36)

The only open strategy for the expressivist who wants to found the authority on a basis other than epistemic is to settle it in the rules of use of mental states expressions.

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These rules treat the avowals as similar to manners, emotion expressions, etc. in the sense that they establish in which context would be proper to express an emotion, or by contrast it wouldn’t be proper to behave in some particular way. The authority is thus reduced to the authority of the subject as an agent that decides himself to act in a situation and he knows how to behave properly in that situation. If this account would be correct, you would not have to postulate a higher level of self-ascription of mental states to get authoritative avowals. For instance, it is a fact that higher animals are endowed with complex devices of emotions expression, and also that children are able to share their mental states with others. Supposedly, a normative level of success in these expressions requires some additional conditions of use in particular situations. For instance, this requirement could be derived from adaptative or perhaps cultural claims. In this case, the first-person authority would be ascribed to creatures able to subject themselves to the rules without more considerations about their self-knowledge capacities. I do not mean that there cannot be more sophisticated forms of expressivism other that this former caricature, as, for instance, the one recently defended by Bar-On (2004)1 (and perhaps the one referred by Moran in his reply to the presentationism in A&E, 4.1) includes self-ascriptions of mental states. But my point is to contrast the idea of authority based on following rules with the idea of authority based on higher abilities to manipulate mental states possessed by an agent that consciously decided to establish one of that states as an own state. Likely, the expressivist program aims to dismiss the epistemic way of access to own mental states, because it is viewed as closely related to the Cartesian model and to their sceptical outcomes. But the psychological process of acquiring abilities of mental simulation suggests that an element of self-identity could be involved in this process, and therefore, that it could open the possibility of alternatives different of the Cartesian account. As we will argue, we must differentiate between an epistemic access to our mental states, which is likely the Cartesian hard core, and the idea that an epistemic dimension of self-knowledge is involved in the avowals. Indeed, it should not be

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“Unlike the person who grunts, or smiles, she is speaking her mind –that is, she is using articulate verbal means to express her state of mind. And unlike the person who says “Darn it!” or “This is great!, she is speaking selfascriptively”. (Bar-On (2004) p.262).

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excluded that even a sort of self-discovery different to the Cartesian could appear in this self-knowledge. An additional reason against the expressivism comes from the psychological conditions that are required by the contexts of use of avowals, specifically the cooperative and deliberative contexts. Shoemaker correctly holds that in both contexts second-order attitudes are required by the subject: “But if one doesn’t believe that one believes that P one cannot say either of these things with the intention of conveying to the other person that one believe this. And unless that second-order belief is true, one cannot succeed in fulfilling the intention. In the absence of self-knowledge, information about a person’s mental states could not be conveyed to others as the result of speech acts aimed at facilitating cooperative endeavours by conveying such information” (Shoemaker (1996) p. 28)

Crispin Wright blames to a “conception of avowals as reports and the associated conception of a self-standing subject-matter which they serve to report” (Wright (1998) p. 53) of being responsible of the Cartesian sins and he correspondingly reminds us the Wittgensteinian advice “to make a radical break with the idea that language always function in one way, always serve the same purpose: to convey thoughts” (Investigations, 304). We agree, but the Shoemaker’s argument is very far from this idea. His point is that there are language games in which the success conditions of some utterances require to share intentions among the speakers. And it is a strategic condition to achieve the cooperative aim of the game. Take for instance: - “I believe that I have got a spider on my shoulder, could you help me?”

Let us suppose that I wrongly confused a spot with a spider: a mere terror expression would not make the work of requesting help. Properly, you must be sure of my believing to do something in this situation. Suppose that you heard from me “Spider! Help me!” without seeing more than a spot. Unless you successfully simulate my mental state you couldn’t understand my cry. The former avowal makes the work for you. In the deliberative second context, having second-order attitudes is much more necessary, according to Shoemaker. One could consider deliberations as “a battle in which one’s various desires are pitted one against another, the strongest prevailing and determining one’s course of action” (Shoemaker (1996), p. 28). In this case, one need not to be conscious of his beliefs and desires, “he would merely be the subject of them”.

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But, Shoemaker reminds us that “deliberation is a Self-critical enterprise. One’s beliefs, desires and intentions are up for reviews and for this to occur one must not only have them but be aware of having them”. We find actually that, in both contexts, having higher mental simulation abilities is a necessary condition to determine the other’s behaviour, in the cooperative case, or the own assertions in the deliberative one2. It could be objected that we are surreptitiously coming back to the perceptual model. Truly it would be inevitable if we would consider the success conditions of avowals as mere epistemic conditions. But Moran reminds us the Wittgensteinian analysis of the Moore Paradox, and how it is shown that the distinction of levels (p and believing that p), as they are represented in the same proposition, cannot be a raw epistemic distinction. For the paradox would be inevitable then: “p, but I don’t believe it”. 4 An important step to understand how the avowals show us something important about the nature of the subjectivity is to understand the asymmetry between the belief ascriptions in first and third person: “The belief of another person may represent indicators of the truth, evidence from which I may infer some conclusion about the matter. I may trust them or mistrust them. With respect to my own beliefs, on the other hand, there is no distance between them and how the facts present themselves to me, and hence no going from one to the other” (A&E, p. 75)

But one could conclude that closing the gap between the facts and how the facts present themselves to the subject leads necessarily to a sort of evanescence of the subject as a unity in the scenario of the self-ascription. And consequently that only psychological facts and language rules remain in that scenario. However, then a new kind of distance well-known from the Kantian tradition arises here: the transition from an empirical to a transcendental self. This difference is essential in the Moran’s treatment of the avowals. He proposes the substitution of the Cartesian distance between an observer self and some observed mental object for the Sartrian estrangement of the

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It could be alleged that some alternative ways of describing this condition are that the agent posses a concept of beliefs and desires, as well as that he correctly use the belief-desire language game, but the point is here what kind of subject can reach this level.

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self considered as a psychological fact, as pure facticity, from the self that assumes himself as subject of a choice. Moran underlines that “what is crucial is the distinction between what is true of the person as such (a state of belief) and what truth independent of the person that state commits her to” (AE 78). Therefore, the first-third person asymmetry is just only one of the aspects involved in the authority of avowals. Here it is involved too the asymmetry between being engaged as an empirical (psychological) self and being engaged as a transcendental self. The Moran’s argument is that this separation of levels allows us to pass from a theoretical to a practical attitude, from a theoretical self-knowledge to a commitment with oneself. The Sartrian story of the akratic gambler3 is recalled by Moran as an example that explains why a theoretical attitude doesn’t buy us the success conditions we need, that is, these ones that confer authority to the avowals. For the gambler, “his anxiety is provoked by a disengagement from his resolution, a hedging of his endorsement of it, combined with the simultaneous desire to rely on it like a natural fact” (A&E, p. 80). When failing, the gambler “begins with the tactical substitution of the theoretical point of view for the practical one (…) But soon my accumulated history of backsliding provides more and more good theoretical evidence for predictions of my future conduct that conflict with what I decide to do” (A&E, p.80). In this case the theoretical perspective on him has been imposing itself as “evidence” of incapacity to carry out his commitment, and behind some apparent discovery, it hides a clear case of Sartrian bad faith. In this case, the authentic self collapses into the empirical one. However, even in the case of success, when the gambler gets to take his impulses over, he still cannot sustain his accomplishment on any evidence from his empirical self: “even when I am confident about myself and not worried about backsliding, this does not mean that I can be complacent about my resolution as constituting a real empirical barrier between gambling and myself, for I must recognize that the resolution is mine to keep or to break any time” (A&E, p.82). This extraordinarily deep commentary by Moran helps us to ask if perhaps there are some bridges between the theoretical and

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It is the case of a gambler thad decided freely and sincerely do not gamble again, but when he sees himself approaching to the card table and he is afraid of falling, he reminds himself his commitment. It is a case of anguish facing the past: there is nothing like an internal debate. The gambler asks for help to his decision, but he well knows the inefficacy of this request. The decision is here, but it is transcended by the consciousness of it.

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practical attitude that were not falls on the bad faith. Certainly, the akratic considers his decision of not gambling again as a safeguard, whereas he knows that it will be useless, because he is now taking refuge in his past history, considering it with a resigned acceptation of what he “truly” is. Certainly too, on the other hand, the puritan dominating his desires could get it in the same way of Ulysses, that is, by tying himself to his previous commitment, as if it were a contract, and as if this move could substitute his choice by following the rule. Don’t both cases make room for some other alternative than the strategic use of decisions as cases of bad faith? We have in both cases an interesting way of misunderstanding what a contract is: as if decisions, contracts, institutions, norms, etc. could have an existence alien to the persistence of a will of preserving them. But before pursuing our search, this remark leads us to anticipate a possible objection to Moran’s position coming from certain traditions of social philosophy. From this perspective, the Sartrian approach could be charged with proposing a sort of essentialist authenticity. Yet this authenticity would be too much egocentric, unable to give an account of a self also constituted by the other’s look, as well as by institutions, norms and other forms of social articulation (Ferrara (1998). However, the fact is that an attitude that searches justification in places as they are roles, others’ look, etc. would have a similarly alienating character, and this attitude would be hiding behind roles, rules, etc. the transcendental choices which effectively preserve such roles and rules. Furthermore, we can dodge this objection of egocentric essentialism by noticing again the claims of the two contexts of cooperation and deliberation. Maybe roles and other’s expectations entered in the process of forming intentions but this fact doesn’t aid to avowals in cooperative actions and deliberations. For what actually matters is that the subject has his mind clear in the moment of the avowal, and that he makes quite clear his position to others. The point is not what the origins of the empirical subject are, but if this subject is aware of his commitments by avowing something. Think about, for instance, a judge that pronounces a sentence but hides his engagement behind excuses as “I wouldn’t like to condemn the accused”. But all what we ask the judge for is that he makes present himself in the statement as a judge, and that he be conscious of his performative act when pronouncing sentence. The empirical self of the judge is irrelevant regarding the intentions-in-action that constitute the speech act of condemn,

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although, in other explanatory context could be of some interest (for psychologists, or journalists, for example). And we could obtain similar conclusions in the context of radical deliberations. I mean by it contexts where no consideration about identity can avoid us to take a decision. That is the case of the Sartrian young man that must choose between to care of his elderly mother or to engage in the Resistance. This makes quite clear how the moment of transcendence of this decision cannot be avoided, unless the transcendental self collapses in the excuses of the empirical self. The heartbreak of the choice cannot be evaded by the young by attending to some underlying rule-based authenticity, or to his psychological past. The reason is that similar considerations could be adduced against to both sides. 5 So then, the deliberating subject that Moran proposes is made present through a sort of estrangement from the own mental states and attitudes that constitute his life. I shall propound to consider this transcendence under two axes or reference that are orthogonal, though related, as they speak us about two constitutive dimensions of the agent. In first term, there is a distinction between the representational content a mental state conveys and the apperception element postulated by Kant as a necessary accompaniment of every representation. The “I think” appears here under the form of self-awareness playing a role that cannot be eliminated by any functionalist theory of the conceptual role. This element allow us to discriminate the own thoughts from the aliens ones. For instance, in the schizophrenia processes, some patients report that their thoughts seem to be expressed by somebody else than themselves. This shows a failure of the selfreference system that has very much to do with the sense of ownership “from inside” an agent possesses of her actions and thoughts. It sense cannot be reduced to other components of the representational content. By the way, this doesn’t imply that it there could be a functionalist approach to the self-consciousness, which is a different matter; the point is that a sole conceptual role theory by itself cannot give an account of this sense of ownership. And it is more important, I think that neither could one theory of second order attitudes give such account. The reason is again that even though the second-order attitudes can be accounted in the context of a role conceptual theory it cannot be made in the case of the sense of ownership.

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The second element of estrangement is the insistently depicted by the Sartrian position, and in my view also the represented by the Moran’s perspective about the practical attitude. It is the volitional element involved in the fact that an avowal that endorses some content results ever from a choice, that is, from a performative act. By the same reason, this creates responsibility for the agent at many orders of constituency, as for instance, pragmatic, epistemic, or semantic responsibility. Moran believes that this leap from a mental state to the endorsement an agent gives to it by avowing its content results from a self-interpretation rather a self-discovery. I agree, but I think that it doesn’t matter what production device of performative act is involved here: this device doesn’t affect to the fact that there is gap between a mental state and the choice. Moran considers this step as a commitment, Sartre speaks of choice. My point is that there is involved here a mobilization of the subject as such, as an unified entity, that appears in the choice taking a perspective on himself as an agent. The epistemic traits that the Wittgensteinian tradition assigns to this sense “from inside” are usually characterized as immunity to error by misidentification of the self. They have to do with the formerly proposed dimension of ownership. A postStrawsonian tradition has named this as “sense of agency” (O’Shaughnessy, B. (1980), Bermúdez, J.L.; N. Eilan, A. Marcel (eds.) (1995), Roessler, J.; N. Eilan (eds.) (2003)). I believe that this denomination dangerously approaches to Cartesian territory and to the perceptual model again. Other proposals are the qualitative character or the selfconsciousness proposed by Shoemaker (1996), or the attentional model defended by Peackoke (1998). Again, it doesn’t matter here the supporting device. What we want underline is that there is an element that makes present to the subject in the avowal in a strong sense. In an Austinian way, it could be said that this element doesn’t makes room for excuses, as for instance “Inadvertently I avowed that I believe in Allah”. One reacts immediately asking to oneself: “How it is possible that I could declare it?”; and next, when one is considering that one avowal doesn’t allow such kind of excuses, one begins to consider himself “from outside” and searches what could to explain his slip-up, downing from the practical attitude to a theoretical one. The second type of gap between a representation and a judgement has been explained by Sartre as the transition from the being-in-itself to the being-for-itself. This is a kind of recognition that the subject does when he is making a choice and notices that his will

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and person are being engaged. Some authors, following Sellars consider this step as a transition from the space of causes to the space of reasons and that there is involved a norm in the choice (in this point they putatively are following Kant). In the particular case of an avowal, the attitude verb reflects the kind of commitment the agent makes with the content conveyed by the avowal (transparently conveyed, of course). I propose to denominate the analysis of the first form of transcendence “Problem of the Agent”, and the second one, the commitment dimension, the “Problem of the Agent Control”. The reason is that, in the first dimension, what is involved is the problem of how the agent appears as himself in the scenario of the choice, whereas in the second dimension the question is how he gets control himself by committing himself with the particular content of an avowal. We can understand how the Problem of the Agent Control arises if we attend to the success conditions that one practical attitude must meet, and we consider avowals as a kind of practical attitudes. The point is that a pure act of will doesn’t suffice to meet these conditions. In addition, the subject must be endowed with the sufficient capacity to accomplish the act he is intending. For, in the course of action, the subject produces a real transformation that must be controlled by his intentions-in-action. These intentions involve among other things, a condition of causal control of the consequences by the agent’s intentions. The problem of agent control becomes then a problem about the capacities of a transcendental subject. Whereas we considered the transcendence until now from the view of metaphysical transcendence, here it seems to arise also a question about the causal difference the self-awareness makes in the world. A way of conceiving this causal difference is in terms of the practical knowledge possessed by the agent about his own capacities. Notice here that avowals, as speech acts, have success conditions in the former alleged sense. If we claim in a Kantian mood that the presence of a subject requires from him a sort of sensibility to maxims, the question of the agent control amounts then to the question if this subject must be endowed with the ability to achieve the accomplishment of this maxim. And also, if this capacity is determined by the conscious decision. Dennett graphically puts this question by the recourse to the fictional figure of a zombie that expresses its mental contents (Dennett (1991), p. 309). Because it lacks consciousness by definition, it couldn’t express conscious contents. So then, if it would seem to be making avowals, this could

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be considered as equivalent to the illusions of a non-conscious machine performing a Türing-Test induced in an observed suffering of a kind of user illusion4.

6 A tradition that aims to save a Kantian constraint of autonomy treats the avowals in the context of an instantaneously linear process. In this model, the subject appeared in an initial moment as “discovering” his own mental state, and then, as making an avowal of such state before the others. But this model raises reasonable doubts about the actual autonomy of subject. Let us consider the possibility of an agent that in the very moment of making an avowal asks himself “how could I declare it?” Perhaps an irresolute lover that hastily makes a love declaration and immediately notices that there was only compassion rather true love. For it is possible that this subject doesn’t suffer of error by misidentification and however she still didn’t be sure if the avowal was actually of hers. That is, it the avowal pertained actually to her authentic self. Certainly, Moran is quite aware of this possibility as he concedes that “this authority (of the first-person) can be partial or hedged in various ways. When I know this to be the case, for instance when I know that I am akratic with respect to the question before me, that compromises the extent to which I can think of my behaviour as intentional action” (A&E p.127). But at once he considers these possibilities as being out of the core of the philosophical tasks: “the point is never that various forms of alienation are not possible, or perfectly common, but rather to describe the unalienated conditions of the first-person perspective so that we may see in what sense these states are states of alienation, even what they are alienation from” (A&E p.131). I don’t have any objection to this project. The point is what lessons could be drawn for the self-awareness from this alienating possibilities. Moran subscribes an Anscombian way to establish the asymmetry between the agent’s authority and the others that lies mainly in the fact that he doesn’t obtain knowledge about his mental states from any empirical evidence. The agent’s perspective

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There is here an interesting connection that we won’t follow between the control problem, and the Searle criticism to the Türing-Test. Seemingly, the case of a zombie could be a case of such criticisms. But not necessarily: doesn’t matter if the consciousness involves qualia or not. Our point is about the commitment conditions that a creature lacking reflexivity can meet.

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is so then portrayed as endowing a kind of “practical immediacy” – a practical more than a epistemic immediacy: “because the rational agent declares the authority of reason over his thought and action that he does not apprehend himself under a particular description when he is deciding what to think or do”. I agree, but I wonder if this practical immediacy is just only a trait present in every authoritative declaration or by contrast if it is the criterion that explains such authority. I suspect that the answer is the first one, no matter the importance the sense of immediacy has. Notice that the akratic gambler doesn’t is under self-deception when declaring his commitment of renouncing to gamble again. By contrast, he is taking a sort of “Ulysses and the sirens” strategy, that is, a tying-device based on his former decision. It is quite doubtful that a sense of “practical immediacy” suffices here to discriminate between a proper decision and a decision with a “bad faith” status. For the same sense of immediacy could accompany both avowals. A rejoinder is open to Moran here: he could adduce that, in the second case, the gambler knows of himself that he is suffering from akrasia (A&E, p. 131). But this answer concedes too much to the gambler. One, reciprocally, could consider that in fact every avowal of decisions hides behind the event of avowing similar strategic intentions of future use of the decision, as the gambler does. This sceptical answer cannot be short-circuited postulating a practical immediacy in the genuine cases. If the Moran’s argument is correct, and philosophers must be concerned only the “healthy” cases, and, on the other hand, we maintain that a sense of immediacy is not sufficiently discriminative, perhaps the paradoxical consequence should be that the firstperson authority should have to be established in a third-person way. But fortunately, still it remains other option that we support: we should postulate a sort of acquired capacity, a kind of character for agency, maybe a type of practical virtue that were supposed in the agent self-awareness. The sense of practical immediacy must be related with a sort of knowledge, a sort of self-knowledge to be precise, that certainly cannot be obtained by any discovery of oneself. As a kind of acquaintance, the immediacy signals a way of being involved in some process of self-knowing, but its ultimate foundation lines further and deeper in the very character of the agent as an agent. Let suppose that the agent knows that this avowal is her avowal because she, and only she, can offer an “internal reason” to the Anscombe test, that is, the “why?” question. So far, it is correct overall: it is the way of

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producing a reason which makes of this act an avowal. The reason is that the formation process of the avowal requires from the agent to know what she is doing in some attentional sense. However, in other sense, there is involved here something more that attention: the agent is dealing with himself not only representing his own mental states, or interpreting them, but also putting into question his own imaginary self. In other words, the agent is taking himself under the perspective of being an agent. In bad faith cases, although the agent could feel the practical immediacy of his avowals, there must be some failure of their capacity of putting himself under the perspective of an agent. Let’s quote here the interpretation that Robert Pippin has offered recently of the Proust’s Remembrance of the Things Past as a kind of preSartrian narrative (Pippin 2005). Pippin sees the Remembrance under the perspective of the imperative “Become who you are”, rather than the much honoured “Know yourself”. Analogously to Sartre, Proust would have explained how the very fact of searching faithfulness to an imaginary self betrays and undermines this own attempt because this imaginary self is full of roles, other’s expectation, dreamed ends, to which one wants to adapt. Among other disappointments Marcel finds in his search, the analysis of the snobs’ behaviour is particularly illustrative. Snobs are continuously avowing their preferences, likes and dislikes, but in fact they are also continuously adapting themselves to an imaginary self that they are unable to question. They are led by others that they consider as authorities in the good taste, and hence they are unable to know what truly they like. I conjecture that the snobs case show us how a immediacy sense, that they putatively feel, cannot warrant us that the agent is not suffering from mauvaise foi in his avowals. A parallel problem arises when we attend to the second dimension that we called the Agent Control Problem, that is, the problem of the distance between the volitional act of taking a commitment and the own assumed commitment. For an avowal is a speech act performed with the intention of producing some result. I a social context, for instance, it is the aim of explaining to others what the content of the own mind is to they take it in account. In a deliberative context, an avowal is like a milestone that sets a reference place for ulterior considerations, something like a proved auxiliary lemma in the course of a complex reasoning. For in deliberating, an avowal sets up a mental state as a result

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the agent has to take in account with. What is the kind of knowledge the agent must have to his avowal fulfils its function? On the one hand there are the pragmatic rules, whose knowledge (in the sense of a competence) is supposed. Observe notwithstanding, on the other hand, that the success conditions of a performative act reach further than such rules. By contrast, they lie also in the relationship to the actual situation in which the speech act is performed. Let’s imagine a promise for to be accomplished in a far future when the subject doing it suffers, but he ignores that although it is being known by the audience, from an incurable disease. This speech act will be unsuccessful. Analogously, a person that is not lawfully entitled cannot condemn to anybody, neither a judge not being in the context of a trial. Therefore, there are stronger conditions to have authority than the internal conditions such they are the competence establishes. My point is that an agent must be place himself in a perspective to know that these conditions can be met. This requires from the agent to know in some special sense about himself that he is invested of the authority enough to the speech act he is performing. This is what I shall call to take a perspective on oneself as an agent. There is an especially dramatic case that illustrates clearly this point about the success conditions: when the agent avows to know something. These avowals are open actions in which the agent endorses a transparent content as being known by itself. But, the case of avowing to know something shows us that somehow the subject must posses certain knowledge about what is required in an epistemic attitude as knowing is. Let’s imagine that in the context of a trial, when an eyewitness gives his testimony of what he directly saw, this testimony can be rebutted by two strategies. In first term, one can adduce the insufficiency of this testimony. There aren’t here any epistemic troubles for the eyewitness, because we are moving in a transparent context which supports a symmetric understanding from the first and third-person views. But one also can putt into question the epistemic dispositions of the eyewitness. And then one is undermining his very authority as an eyewitness. For instance, one can accuse to him from being unable to discriminate between believing and knowing. This shows us that the authority we ascribe the subject making an avowal has to some extent a relational dimension. In fact, this dimension is the one of the very human autonomy. This isn’t sustained not

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only on the mental acts that take the decisions but also on the actual capacities of the agent to determine his own deeds.

7 What kind of conditions are we postulating in addition to this sense of immediacy that Moran suggests as sign of commitment? Maybe are we adding more and more necessary conditions, when rather we should have to search sufficient conditions that indicate the subject has first-person authority? After all, perhaps in philosophy we should look for criteria about if subjects are mastering determinate concepts, as it is the case of first-person authority in the avowals, and do not practice armchair psychology. However we are postulating something more than conditions the subject should meet in each avowal. By contrast, the project is to analyze the very concept of avowing as an achievement that refers to the process of making up the own mind. The idea is that when one avows an own mental state, at once one makes a commitment one takes too a perspective on himself as an agent, and this allows somehow the agent to calibrate the act one is doing. Meanwhile the agent is taking such a perspective on oneself as an agent it happens a double process: on the one hand, all the cognitive resources and capacities are mobilized and that produces a practical unity which is constituted as a subject. It is the constitution of a practical unity that allows the agent to realize what he is doing when avowing. A mere combination of cognitive and practical resources, as I conjecture that it happens in animal and not well-formed agents, couldn’t make the work that the unity of consciousness does. But notices that the unity self-awareness produces is not a given, but a consequence from the mobilization that taking a perspective brings about. On the other hand, one also realizes that is entitled in this circumstance to make this avowal: the agent reflects on his own capacities to make this commitment exactly in that circumstances, he knows, at once is making the avowal, that he is entitled and able to do it. This results not from a “theoretical discovery”, but from a self-calibration in the precise circumstances of the avowal as a speech act. In fact, the attainment of a commitment with the avowal content is at once an achievement of the subject as such, which proves to be able of opening himself to the world. In some sense it requires certain character or psychological maturity, but it goes further to a transcendental sense, as the subject achieves to place him in the open space

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of social practices and relations, beyond the Agustinian loneliness of the consciousness. But, by the same reason, this acquiring first-person authority cannot be conceived neither as a mere result of a process of brain development nor a product or rules of language game internalized through a passive process of enculturation. The subject involved in avowals makes present his agency to himself at once makes up his mind, constituting himself in this way into a public space. There is here involved some non-Cartesian discovery: the practical discovery of what oneself truly is when one gets to do things. We remark again that this is not a theoretical discovery, but a result from the fact that the agent placed to himself in a situation of self-discovering as an agent. This kind of discovery involves certain epistemological requirements that I won’t pursue here, notwithstanding I would like to underline the epistemic character of this self-knowledge, even though we accept the practical way to obtain this knowledge. When one is taking a perspective on himself as an agent, one is not looking at himself as if one were seeing oneself objectively from a third-person view. Certainly, in the Moran’s model, when one deliberates “his eyes are directed outward” and one recognizes the authority of reasons and consequently commits himself with the content conveyed by the avowal. I agree, but I would add that the agent takes this commitment by taking a perspective on himself as an agent. An illustrative example is when one is doing something complex, that requires from us many resources and skills, and in some particular moment one says to oneself: “Hey!, pay attention to what you are doing!”. For instance, we are driving a car absent-mindedly and suddenly we notice a red light and then we realize that we are driving, that the situation requires our bests and, finally, that we are able to cope with the situation. In this example, we attend transparently outward, but we notice ourselves at once as skilful in the task. Analogously, when we make an avowal we learn something about ourselves, that is, that we are authoritatively entitled to doing it. Perhaps an attentional model as the proposed by Peacocke (1998) could provide us with the keys to find the success conditions for first-person authority. Maybe, however I guess that we don’t know enough still about psychophysiology of attention to be sure that we are not reproducing the perceptual model here. For then we will find in an attentional model the same perplexities than in the old perceptual model. Notwithstanding, my impression is that this model doesn’t involves an objectivation of

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the perspective under forms of empirical evidence, and yet it contributes to discriminate in a more fine-grained way the conditions in which the action is happening. When attentively the agent knows of himself that he is engaged in a task, somehow he is calibrating his forces and hence, when he takes a commitment he does it by taking in account the circumstances of him. The first-person authority, then, would become as a result of the fact that the attention is sufficiently discriminative. And consequently, one needn’t to ask oneself: “How could I declare it?”

References Bar-On, D. (2004) Speaking My Mind. Expression and Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press Bermúdez, J.L.; N. Eilan, A. Marcel (eds) (1995) The Body and the Self. Cambridge MA: MIT Press Dennett, D. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Ferrara, A. (1998) Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity. London: Routledge Korsgaard, Ch. (1996) The Sources of Normativity. New York: Cambridge University Press Moran, R. (2001) Authority and Estrangement. An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press (quoted as A&E) O’Shaughnessy, B. (1980) The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Peacoke, Ch. (1998) “Conscious Attitudes, Attention, and Self-Knowledge”, in Wright, C.; B. Smith, C. Macdonald (eds) (1998) Knowing Our Own Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2005) “On “Becoming Who One Is” (and Failing). Proust’s Problematic Selves”, in The Persistence of Subjectivity on the Kantian Aftermath. New York: Cambridge University Press Roessler, J.; N. Eilan (eds) (2003) Agency and Self-Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press Shoemaker, S. (1996) The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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