Ockham on the Possibility of Self-Knowledge: Knowing Acts without Knowing Subjects

Vivarium ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 220-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Schierbaum

My aim in this paper is to show that William Ockham (ca. 1287-1347) succeeds in accounting for a particular kind of self-knowledge, although in doing so he restricts the direct cognitive access to mental acts and states as they occur, in a way similar to the restriction in contemporary debates on self-knowledge. In particular, a considerable number of Ockham-scholars have argued that Ockham’s theory of mental content bears a substantial likeness to contemporary ‘externalist’ approaches, and I will argue for the success of this theory in three steps: first, I show that, although the form of what is judged (‘I am F’) implies the ascription of an act to oneself (as the subject of the act), through ‘intuition’ it suffices to directly cognize the act but not the subject. In Ockham’s conception, intuition is a specific kind of singular cognition. In the second step I show that, according to Ockham’s thesis of mental language, Person is an aspect of mental verbs and not of acts of intuition. Lastly I argue that the correctness of first-person judgments about one’s acts is guaranteed by an ontological fact, and not an epistemological fact. It becomes apparent that this reading is compatible with an epistemological externalism.

Dialogue ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Ali Hossein Khani

Abstract I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this anti-reductionist account, intention is treated as an irreducible state of the subject. I will draw a comparison between this account and Wright's and I will show that Davidson's account can be viewed as a non-reductionist judgement-dependent account along the lines suggested by Wright. I then explain how this account can help deal with various perplexities in Davidson's later view of meaning and mental content.


Author(s):  
Paul Bernier

It has been disputed whether an externalist conception of the individuation of intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, is compatible with self-knowledge, that is, the claim that one's judgments about one's intentional states are non-evidential, non-inferential, and authoritative. I want to argue that these theses are indeed incompatible, notwithstanding an important objection to this incompatibility claim. The worry has been raised that if externalism is true, then for a subject to know, say, that he or she believes that p, the subject would need to know, on the basis of some evidence, the external conditions which determine the belief's content. Thus, externalism would be incompatible with self-knowledge. But many philosophers have accepted an objection suggesting that this worry is mistaken because in order to have a belief one need not know the metaphysical conditions determining its content, even if they are externalist. And thus, the subject's reflexive judgment about the belief would not need to rest on evidence about those external conditions. But this objection rests on a crucial assumption according to which mental content is reflexively transparent in the sense that a subject could not judge that she or he has an intentional state and be mistaken about the content of her or his state, even if the content is externally determined. My main purpose is not reflexively transparent on the assumption of externalism and, thus, self-knowledge and externalism are incompatible.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas J. Kraay

Externalism holds that the individuation of mental content depends on factors external to the subject. This doctrine appears to undermine both the claim that there is a priori self-knowledge, and the view that individuals have privileged access to their thoughts. Tyler Burge’s influential inclusion theory of self-knowledge purports to reconcile externalism with authoritative self-knowledge. I first consider Paul Boghossian’s claim that the inclusion theory is internally inconsistent. I reject one line of response to this charge, but I endorse another. I next suggest, however, that the inclusion theory has little explanatory value.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas J. Kraay

Externalism holds that the individuation of mental content depends on factors external to the subject. This doctrine appears to undermine both the claim that there is a priori self-knowledge, and the view that individuals have privileged access to their thoughts. Tyler Burge’s influential inclusion theory of self-knowledge purports to reconcile externalism with authoritative self-knowledge. I first consider Paul Boghossian’s claim that the inclusion theory is internally inconsistent. I reject one line of response to this charge, but I endorse another. I next suggest, however, that the inclusion theory has little explanatory value.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
E. S. Burt

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing ‘I’ doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-97
Author(s):  
Nigora Mukhamedova ◽  

The article deals with the issues based on the study of non-categorical statements in a linguistic text in modern English. The essence of scientific communication is a message, or the transmission by means of language of some mental content, including the expression of an intellectual-evaluative attitude to the subject of speech. The content of intellectual assessments is conditioned by knowledge and experience of intellectual and material activities of people.In a scientific text, this attitude can be the result of verifying the truth of what is expressed by the author himself or by another scientist or a team of researchers, as well as confirmation or refutation of apreviously formed assessment that served as the basis for further discussion


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
João Carlos Brum Torres

O artigo tem por objeto o exame de três registros de gritantes e distintos paradoxos na Doutrina do Direito de Kant. Registros feitos em tempos e contextos históricos diferentes por Friedrich Bouterwek, Marcus Willaschek e Balthazar Barbosa Filho. Bouterwek atribuiu a Kant a mais paradoxal das proposições jamais enunciadas por qualquer autor, a de que a mera ideia de soberania deve obrigar-nos a obedecer como a nosso inquestionável senhor a quem quer que se haja estabelecido como tal, sem que caiba indagar quem lhe deu o direito de comandar-nos. Willaschek aponta a incompatibilidade de duas teses centrais da doutrina kantiana: a do caráter externo dos vínculos jurídicos e a da incondicionalidade obrigacional do direito positivo, pois não é possível entender como é possível termo-nos como obrigados por imperativos jurídicos e, ao mesmo, vermo-nos internamente isentados do dever de obedecê-los. O ponto crítico de Balthazar é alegar que não pode haver na filosofia kantiana uma crítica da razão político e jurídica, simplesmente porque o conceito de imputação, base da normatividade própria dessas esferas, pressupõe uma pluralidade de agentes livres que, justamente, só pode ser uma pressuposição, pois nosso acesso à normatividade prática só pode ter lugar em primeira pessoa. No exame a que o artigo submete essas alegações, o artigo argumenta, em objeção à tese de Balthazar, que o caráter universal e categórico da força que vincula o sujeito quando confrontado com a lei moral em primeira pessoa necessariamente se desvaneceria se, ao mesmo tempo, ele não fosse tomado pela evidência de que a realidade objetiva dos princípios morais é não só instanciável, mas assegurada pela múltipla instanciação. Com relação às dificuldades levantadas por Willaschek e Bouterwek, o artigo argumenta que o princípio exeundum e statu naturali, enquanto norma metapositiva, anterior à divisão do domínio prático entre doutrina do direito e doutrina da virtude, permite ao mesmo tempo compreender a exigência de obediência ao poder constituído e a restrição das obrigações jurídico-políticas exclusivamente ao foro externo.AbstractThe object of the article is to examine three claims about three distinct and allegedly blatant paradoxes in Kant's Doctrine of Right. These three critical points had been made in distinct times and contexts by Friedrich Bouterwek, Marcus Willaschek e Balthazar Barbosa Filho. Bouterwek attributed to Kant the most paradoxical of all paradoxical propositions, the statement that by the mere idea of sovereignty we are obliged to obey as our lord who has imposed himself upon us, without questioning from where he got such right. Willaschek points out the incompatibility of two main theses of Kantian doctrine of right: the claims that the legal bounds are of external character and that they are the source of unconditional obligations, since it seems impossible to understand how it would be possible to be obliged by juridical norms and decisions and at the same time to be exempted of the internal duty of compliance. The radical objection of Professor Balthazar is the claim that in the context of Kantian Philosophy it is impossible to admit a critique of the juridical and political reason because the concept of imputation, ground of the normativity in these domains, requires not only the presupposition of free agents, but a true and secure epistemic access to them, which is, according to him, impossible considering that the moral law and the other practical principles are accessible for us only in the first person. In the course of the appraisal of such claims, the article contest that objection arguing that the universal and categorical force of the normative bound experienced by the subject when confronted with the moral law in the first person would ineluctably vanish if, at the same time, he had not been taken by the evidence that the objective reality of the moral principles is secured by multiple instancing. Regarding the difficulties raised by Willaschek and Bouterwek, the article argues that the principle exeundum e statu naturali, as a norm of meta-positive character, prior to the division of practical domains between the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue, is the cue both to the understanding of the requirement of unquestioning obedience to the constituted power and to the restriction of the validity of this requirement only in foro externo.


Author(s):  
András Bárány

This chapter turns to object agreement with personal pronouns in Hungarian. Pronouns are interesting because they do not always trigger agreement with the verb: first person objects never trigger object agreement (morphology), and second person pronouns only do with first person singular subjects. It is proposed that the distribution of object agreement is a morphological effect and argues that all personal pronouns do in fact trigger agreement, but agreement is not always spelled out. This means that Hungarian has an inverse agreement system, where the spell-out of agreement is determined by the relative person feature (or person feature sets) of the subject and the object. A formally explicit analysis of the syntax and the morphological spell-out of agreement is provided.


Balcanica ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 437-452
Author(s):  
Bogoljub Sijakovic

The culture of ancient Greece, and particularly its philosophy, contains paradigms that are predetermining, binding and eternally valid for the entire body of European culture. European culture and, in its distinctive way, Serbian culture, as an important dynamic motif has the need to constantly revisit Hellenic culture. This is in fact a productive (re) interpretation as a way of acquiring cultural self-awareness and self-knowledge. The entire cosmos and human fate in it are revealed in Hellenic thought as both a riddle and a secret. Both of these relationships to reality, in the model form found already in the work of Heraclitus, still characterize human thought and creation. The world seen as a riddle to be solved is the subject of many a discipline, and the secret that reveals itself to us provides the basis of faith and all arts. Two Serbian poets (although there are more) acquired their creative self-awareness around Heraclitus? concept of fire. In his scholarly and philosophical treatises Laza Kostic (1841-1910) turned to Heraclitus in a bid to solve the riddle of reality. In his contemplative-poetic works Branko Miljkovic (1934-1961) turned to Heraclitus seeking to uncover the secret of nothingness in the latter?s fire and to learn from the Ephesian?s foretokening that poetry is hermetic and loves to hide. Is there a deeper logic linking riddle and secret? Do science, philosophy, art and faith have a deeper unity? The answers are to be sought in Laza?s and Branko?s understanding of Heraclitus? fire.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-95
Author(s):  
O. A. Maslovets

The article represents an effort to specify the essential characteristics of the relationship between the intentionality of consciousness, language and culture, and on this basis to reveal the features of the process of foreign language teaching.The author considers intentionality as a phenomenon that defines and provides the content of consciousness, allowing one to commit an act of self-determination and gaining subjectivity. In the activity of consciousness, the author distinguishes intentional flows of both relatively objects and subjects, which is a prerequisite for comprehending another I, a different cultural entity, and at the same time a condition for self-knowledge and deeper penetration into one’s own culture.Culture is a complex semiotic text, it is a context in which the language being studied as a secondary modeling system acts as a means where various phenomena can be sequentially described and interpreted by students.The openness of the subject to the world, nurtured in the course of intentional teaching of language and culture, allows its utter uniqueness, and at the same time utmost universality, to manifest itself. Such an attitude actualizes the internal regularity of human actions, the possibility of self-development and the formation of a system of deferred actions, which allows a person to realize, take place, actualizes the intentional field of his capabilities.The author comes to the conclusion that the process of foreign language teaching should be interpretative, significative, semiotic in nature. Taking into account during teaching а foreign language the intentional conditioning of any action, including speech, will ensure the achievement of a coordinated consciousness.


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