Self-Knowledge, “Transparency,” and the Forms of Activity

This paper begins by setting out in very general terms some considerations that would link self-knowledge to a certain form of agency, and then considers two recent studies (one by Nishi Shah and David Velleman, and another by Alex Byrne) which argue in their different ways that an account of self-knowledge which appeals to the “transparency” of belief must be divorced from any appeal to rational agency. The paper argues that in both cases the account that emerges from this divorce ends up with a kind of agency in the picture after all, only of the wrong kind. The paper aims to characterize the sense of “activity” or “agency” that is relevant to a central class of cases of self-knowledge, and distinguish this sense of activity from the sense of activity indicating a process of production, or acting upon oneself so as to produce a belief.