1 McGeer, Victoria, “Is ‘Self-Knowledge’ an Empirical Problem? Renegotiating the Space of Philosophical Explanation,” Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1996): 483–515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar All quotations in the text are from this article.

2 For some externalist accounts that aim to explain the accuracy of second-order beliefs, see the following papers: Burge, Tyler, “Individualism and Self-Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy, 85 (1988): 649–63;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHeil, John, “Privileged Access,” Mind, 97 (1988): 238–51;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPeacocke, Christopher, “Entitlement, Self-Knowledge and Conceptual Redeployment,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96 (1996): 117–58;Google Scholar and Shoemaker, Sydney, “Self-Knowledge and ‘Inner Sense,’” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54 (1994): 249–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For criticism of the sort of approach embodied in these papers, see my “Trying to Get Outside Your Own Skin,” Philosophical Topics, 23 (1995): 79–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Semantic Answers to Skepticism,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 73 (1992): 200–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 It is not clear how Rylean the neo-Rylean view is, since some of the items constituting McGeer's “patterns of response” are said to be feelings and thoughts.

4 An anonymous referee pointed out that Wittgenstein did not follow Ryle in denying an epistemic asymmetry between first- and third-person psychological claims upon abandoning the reporter/predictor model.

5 McGeer discusses an article by Akeel Bilgrami (“Self-knowledge and Resentment,” in Knowing Our Own Minds, edited by Wright, Crispin, Smith, Barry C., and Macdonald, Cynthia [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], pp. 207–41)Google Scholar, in which he makes a different connection between self-knowledge and agency (which I will not discuss here). McGeer characterizes one of Bilgrami's main claims as follows: “It is an inextinguishable condition of being responsible that we have authoritative knowledge of our own mental state; for if we did not have such knowledge (generally speaking), we could not be held accountable for our acts since (in general) we could not be thought to know what we are doing” (p. 505).

6 McGeer traces this practice to “the training we have received in the public language of folk psychology.” She says that “in learning to use this language to apply to ourselves, we have also been taught to act and think in ways that demonstrate responsible (self-knowing) agency” (p. 510).

7 Though McGeer's view concerns self-ascriptions, or avowals, of the form “I believe that P,” one might maintain that simply asserting the embedded senence in the “that”-clause will convey no less information than the corresponding avowal. I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this point. For an extended discussion of this point, see Gallois, Andre, The Mind Within, the World Without (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also my “Moore Inferences,” Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998): 366–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 An anonymous referee suggested that McGeer could fill the explanatory lacuna I have alleged by adverting to a dispositional state that exists at breakfast. The remarks in the text are an elaboration of this suggestion.

9 Quoted from Wright, Crispin, “Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy, and Intention,” Journal of Philosophy, 86 (1989): 622–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 This was suggested by an anonymous referee.

11 She says that we “mould ourselves to fit the framework” (p. 513).

12 An anonymous referee suggested this: we explain the occurrence of my utterance of “The Yankees won” by fitting it into an overall pattern of behaviour which includes my reaching for the sports page and my uttering first-person avowals such as “I think that baseball is fascinating.” However, it is hard to see how avowals of beliefs other than the belief that the Yankees won can explain why I said that they won, and it is harder to see why my reaching for the sports page explains my linguistic behaviour.

13 See McGeer's discussion on pp. 508-509.

14 I am assuming that justification, possibly of an externalist-e.g., reliabilist- sort, is required for knowledge.

15 Further utterances of “I believe that the Yankees won” might figure in the “pattern.”

16 Returning to McGeer's explication of first-person/third-person asymmetry, it now seems far from obvious that I am powerless to make true my belief that Reggie believes that the Yankees won by committing myself to, and engaging in, some course of action. For example, I can tell Reggie about the game, show him newspapers, and so on. Subsequently, his appropriate “pattern of response” unfolds. McGeer said, in the long passage quoted earlier, “I cannot make it the case that you behave in ways coherent with what I say you hope, desire, or fear any more than I can make it the case that the world is a certain way by announcing how (I think) it is; but I can and do govern my own actions in ways that fit with the claims I make about myself” (p. 507). We can now see that this characterization of first-person/third-person asymmetry is misleading. I do not make it the case that I believe that the Yankees won by announcing that I have that belief (i.e., by saying “I believe that the Yankees won”), on McGeer's view. Rather, I make it the case that I have the belief in question by committing myself to a certain course of action, undertaken after my announcement. Given that I come to have the first-order belief, my earlier assertion that I have the belief is made true.

17 See p. 502. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out this response.

18 An anonymous referee suggested that McGeer's use of scare-quotes in speaking of “knowledge” is evidence of her rejection of a structured hierarchy of first-order, second-order, etc. beliefs. This would raise the question, however, of whether her views engage the extensive literature on authoritative self-knowledge, which is standardly viewed as involving second-order beliefs about first-order mental states. This standard view simply follows from the thoughts that (1) we have propositional knowledge regarding our own mental states, and (2) such knowledge entails belief.

19 An anonymous referee suggested this response.

20 See Kobes, Bernard W., “Mental Content and Hot Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Topics, 24 (1996): 71–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 This was suggested by an anonymous referee.