Making Nonsense of Moore’s Paradox

I show how the view on offer resolves Moore’s Paradox. Moorean absurdity does not, as it is generally held, involve an inter-level conflict between first- and second-order beliefs (or the corresponding utterances); it is just a conflict between doxastic stances on the question of a single proposition’s truth. Moore-Paradoxical statements are, in this way, similar to statements of the form “p and not-p.” What makes Moorean absurdity puzzlingly puzzling is that whereas an utterance of “p” expresses the speaker’s stance on the truth of p, the corresponding utterance of “I believe that p” would seem to express the speaker’s stance on the logically unrelated proposition that she believes that p. But this is a mistake. The correct explanation of Moorean absurdity is that both assertion and explicit belief-avowal manifest precisely the same thing: self-conscious knowledge of (first-order) belief.

Self-Knowledge Requirements and Moore's Paradox

Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding Moore's paradox might be marshaled to support rational requirements to know one's beliefs, and finds that none succeed.

First-person and the semantic roots of Moore’s paradox

In this contribution, we argue that Moore's paradox has its roots in the semantics of first-person. We build up on some of Frege's concerns about the first-person, recently revived by Kripke as a criticism of the position according to which Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics is all is needed for an adequate semantics of the first-person. First, we discuss the so-called pragmatic approach to Moore's paradox, discussing its possible limitations, in accordance with some ideas expressed on the matter by Shoemaker. Second, we show that sentences where a predicate expressing a “phenomenal” property combines with a first-person pronoun are bound to express Stalnaker's diagonal proposition, and are true a priori. Crucially, the proposition expressed does not correspond to the ascription of a property to an independently established object. Finally, we provide significant empirical evidence to the effect that this emerging “subjective” layer of meaning is actually what is needed to solve some of the puzzles around Moore's paradox: the status of Moore's sentences essentially depends, in fact, on the interaction between the “objective” and the “subjective” layers of meaning.

Concluding Discussion

This chapter discusses the argument of Sections 49-52 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention. It begins by considering her account of the relation between intentional and voluntary action. Following this, the chapter considers Anscombe’s closing treatment of the concept of intention for the future, emphasizing her view that intention is expressed in a statement about what is going to happen, and considering how her discussion of this position mirrors elements in Wittgenstein’s discussion of Moore’s paradox.