Privileged Access without Self-Knowledge and The Grounds of the First-Person Perspective

Robert J. Howell

Southern Methodist University

Some of my beliefs about myself are unquestionably cases of self-knowledge: “I am

thinking”, “I believe Elvis is dead” and “I was born in the U.S.A.” are all such beliefs. For

some of these I have a sort of privileged access to their truth. Other people might know the

first two facts about my mental life, for example, but I am somehow in a particularly good

position to know them. I am not, it would seem, in a similarly advantageous position with

respect to facts about my birthplace—I may know where I was born, but other people can

know it just as easily.

The extent and the analysis of this first-person authority has been much debated, but

it is typically agreed that judgments that reflect this sort of privileged access are a subset of

judgments that constitute self-knowledge. I maintain that this is a mistake. Why certain

pieces of self-knowledge are particularly well-justified is an important question, and

analyzing the particular mechanisms that enable self-knowledge is an important

epistemological project. Nevertheless, it is an error to think that investigations into self-

knowledge can provide a complete picture of privileged access, because there are cases of

privileged access that do not—and perhaps cannot—constitute self-knowledge. In this

paper I will provide an account of privileged access that accommodates this fact.

Recognizing that privileged access outstrips self-knowledge not only yields a better

account of first-person authority. It also paves the way for a clearer understanding of what

is sometimes called “the first-person perspective,” or “the subjective stance.”1 While much

discussed, this notion is not particularly well understood. I maintain that once the

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connection between privilege and knowledge is severed, a theory of first-person authority

can point the way to an account of the “first-person perspective.”

Because many philosophers actually define privileged access in terms of epistemic

success or entitlement, I have the burden of showing that such definitions are too narrow.2 I

begin by presenting a couple of bare-bones, no-frills versions of the traditional epistemic

accounts I oppose. 3 I will then present the cases I think escape those accounts, explaining

why they seem to have an important source of first-person privilege nevertheless. After

making explicit the sort of privilege I have in mind, I provide an account of its source. I am

not aiming to provide a reductive account of first-person privilege, in that I am not aiming to

provide an account of it in non-epistemic terms. Instead, my goal here will be to explain the

particular nature of first-person privilege by showing how it can be understood in terms of

more basic epistemic notions. I will conclude by using those same epistemic notions to limn

the elusive notion of the first-person perspective.

I. What Traditional Accounts Miss

The most famous account of privileged access is now probably the most maligned,

but it deserves revisiting nevertheless. Descartes is credited with arguing that we have

infallible access to our own mental lives. This would be privileged access indeed. We can

define Cartesian Privilege (CP) as a combination of self-presentation and incorrigibility:

(CP): A judgment <p> has CP for S iff (S believes <p> iff p).

Nowadays, CP is considered too restrictive a criterion for privileged access. Surely there are

fallible judgments which reflect a special access to ourselves that is unavailable to others.

Am I infallible about whether I am feeling a sudden hot sensation or a sudden cold

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sensation? What about my emotions—am I depressed or anxious? These are features of

myself to which I have a special but not necessarily infallible access.

The failure of the Cartesian Criterion suggests that an epistemic status providing a

lesser degree of security is needed to capture all of the cases of privileged access.

Traditionally, privileged access has been associated with some form of special, perhaps

automatic, entitlement to certain beliefs about oneself. Yet no one thinks that Cartesian

certainty is the only sort of entitlement. It has become popular in epistemology to say that

we are justified in having a belief iff it is generated by a reliable faculty.4 There is of course

more than one way to flesh out the notion of reliability, but for our purposes the details of

the analysis do not matter. Here I wish to argue is that a Reliabilist Criterion for privileged

access should be rejected for the same reasons as the Cartesian Criterion: they are both too

strict.

Consider the case of “the speckled hen.” 5 When presented with a picture of a

speckled hen, one presumably has a subjective state representing the hen. One can, if one

wants, close one’s eyes and hold an image of the hen in one’s mind. There is presumably a

fact of the matter about how many speckles there are on the image of the hen.6 If the hen is

pretty unspeckled, having only three, say, one can probably judge reliably about one’s image

that it is three-speckled. But one’s judgment will not be so secure when the hen becomes

significantly more speckled. Say it has fifty speckles. Is one’s judgment “I have an image of

a fifty-speckled hen” reliable? Probably not. Even if it happens to be true, one could easily

have judged incorrectly. This is true of many cases—from judgments about one’s own

emotions to judgments about sensations received from viewing graded swatches on a color

wheel. If these are cases of privileged access, reliability does not seem to be a necessary

condition for that privilege.7

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In the face of the speckled hen, there are two obvious strategies for rescuing an

adequate notion of privileged access. One is to move away from traditional epistemic

accounts of first-person authority altogether. A popular version of this strategy is to

downplay the privilege we enjoy with respect to the ascriptive part of our judgments and

focus instead upon the immunity to error we enjoy with respect to the subject of those

judgments. Thus many philosophers have embraced “Immunity to Error through

Misidentification” as a replacement for more traditional sorts of privilege.8 Other

philosophers move even further from epistemic notions, explaining privilege without appeal

to immunity to error of any kind. Instead, some say there is an honorary status granted to

certain avowals about one’s own states,9 or that one’s relation to one’s own beliefs and

states is special in some way that is normative but not specifically epistemic.10 This strategy,

therefore, divorces first-person authority from privileged access. A second option also

presents itself: to deny that speckled-hen cases and their like really demonstrate first-person

authority or privileged access.

Arguing against all of those who divorce first-person privilege from an epistemic sort

of privileged access is beyond the purposes of this paper. Instead, I propose to deal with

such views by offering a positive theory that is designed to handle the cases at hand but that

still grounds first-person authority in an epistemological sense of privileged access. If such a

theory is available much of the motivation behind the non-traditional theories disappears.11

First-personal authority should not be severed from first-person access, but first-person

access should be severed from self-knowledge. Once it becomes clear that a weaker form of

epistemic access is available, it should be clear that divorcing first-person authority from

such access is a mistake. Therefore, I will indirectly answer the advocates of option one by

answering the advocates of option two: by providing a clear sense in which speckled-hennish

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judgments are cases of privileged access despite the fact that they do not, and perhaps

cannot, constitute knowledge.

II. Characterizing Privileged Access

Two distinctions will substantiate my claim that there is a type of privileged access

independent from entitlement or self-knowledge. The first is a distinction between epistemic

privilege and access privilege, and the second is between vertical reliability and horizontal

reliability.

A. Epistemic Privilege vs. Access Privilege

Consider again the example of the speckled hen.

Take the following beliefs, grounded in introspection.

a) I am having an image as of a hen

b) I am having an image as of a fifty-speckled hen.

Both of these beliefs are first-personal, but they appear to have different epistemic standing:

a is surely much more justified than b. As we have seen, even if the subject is right in his

report of b, he is probably lucky and it is quite likely that people other than the subject will

be much more reliable when it comes to b than the subject himself. (Imagine that the

subject formed the image after being shown a picture, and the person showing him already

knew the number of spots in the picture.) It doesn’t even seem that there is, or that there

should be, a presumption that the subject’s self-ascription is accurate.12 Nevertheless, there is

some sense in which we are right to say that a subject has some privilege when it comes to b.

After all, there is clearly an asymmetry between the subject’s access to his image and a third-

person’s access, and this asymmetry remains despite the subject’s unreliability. This is

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because by experiencing the hennish sensation, the subject’s evidence for the proposition is

precisely what would make the proposition true. The third-person cannot be in that

position. Despite the fact that the picture of the speckled hen (combined with the open eyes

of the subject, the normality of his vision, etc.) is probably good evidence about the number

of spots on the image of the hen, the evidence of the interlocutor does not actually include

the proposition’s truthmaker, and so it can diverge from the facts in a way that the subject’s

cannot. Let us call the privilege that the subject has for a, the type of privilege that can

constitute knowledge, epistemic privilege. For b, since the subject is unreliable about it, his

privilege is not epistemic.13 Call that privilege access privilege. Epistemic privilege is a sort of

privilege that is more apt to produce knowledge, but access privilege indicates a unique

cognitive position with respect to one’s own states nonetheless. The suggestion then is that

the privileged access we have to our own states is constituted by access privilege rather than

by epistemic privilege.

Unfortunately, while access privilege might help draw attention to the special access

I’m interested in, it remains a somewhat thin notion. It is rather difficult to explain the sense

of “possessing the truthmaker for p” which doesn’t just reduce to “having p as a conscious

state.”14 Nevertheless, the distinction provides a sense of the special type of relation

involved in first-person authority. The distinction between vertical reliability and horizontal

reliability will help make the matter more precise.

B. Vertical Reliability vs. Horizontal Reliability

Reliability as it is traditionally conceived fails to locate the source of first-person authority,

simply because subjects are not necessarily the most reliable epistemic agents about many of

the things to which they nonetheless have a special type of access. In the speckled hen

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example, the experimenter is almost certainly more reliable than the subject.15 Similarly,

there are undoubtedly cases where I sincerely claim to be having a blue sensation when I am

really having a teal sensation. But all of these cases have something in common: they are

near misses. I might not be right about how many speckles are on my hen, but I’m not too

far off. I might not be seeing blue, but again, my error is not, and cannot be, egregious. The

reliability criterion does not capture this important feature of privileged access—while it

does indicate how likely one is to miss the truth in a judgment, it does not capture how far off one

is likely to be. This introduces an overlooked dimension of reliability. Let’s say that vertical

reliability is a measure of how likely it is that one is wrong in a judgment, while how far off

one can be is a matter of horizontal reliability. While this latter dimension is neither here nor

there with respect to knowledge, it seems quite relevant to the notion of privileged access in

general. Compare the two judgments about the image of the speckled hen, that of the

experimenter and that of the subject. The experimenter’s judgment is probably more

reliable. But if he is off, it is easy and understandable for him to be way off. It is possible,

when he makes the judgment, that the subject is hallucinating a pink elephant or that the

subject has momentarily lost consciousness. What’s more, it is possible that the

experimented himself is hallucinating. This large-scale error is precluded in the first-person

perspective which remains, in this case, potentially vertically unreliable, but horizontally

reliable.16

These distinctions suggest there is a way to provide an epistemological account of

privileged access even if it is not the sort of access that can provide knowledge (i.e. it doesn’t

enjoy epistemic privilege, in the sense defined above). Horizontal reliability and access

privilege indicate a unique way in which a subject’s self-ascriptive judgments hold a non-

accidental connection to the truth, even if the type of non-accidentality is not the sort that

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generates knowledge. They both capture an asymmetry between our access to ourselves and

the access others have to us. 17

III. Cartesian Containment: The Source of Privileged Access

Our judgments about ourselves are not horizontally reliable for no reason. We have this

authority, I propose, for basically Cartesian reasons, even if not for the reasons traditionally

ascribed to Descartes. As we have seen, Cartesian Privilege demands too much for first-

person authority. Nevertheless, judgments with first-person authority bear an important

relationship to judgments that do have CP. For example, the judgment that (p) I am

entertaining a mental image of a hen with 50 speckles, is probably not very reliable at all.

Still, there is something privileged about this judgment, and that is in part because it bears a

certain relationship to the judgment that (q) I am having an image of a speckled hen, which

is incredibly reliable, and it bears a weaker version of the same relation to the judgment that

(r) I have an image, which very plausibly has CP.

I maintain that the relevant relationship between (p), (q) and (r) is one of epistemic

containment. That is, the judgment that r is actually contained within the judgment that q,

and they both are contained in the judgment that p. One cannot make the judgment that

(p), in the particular way that this judgment is made, without also, at least implicitly, making

the judgments (q) and (r). Recognizing this relationship that first-personal judgments bear to

judgments like (r) is the first step towards a new account of privileged access.

Although I hope the notion of containment here has some intuitive support, it is in

large part metaphorical at this point and needs clarification. What is it for one judgment to

“contain” another? Images of judgments nesting within one another like so many Russian

dolls can only go so far. “Containment” must be something else when it comes to

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judgments. One might find this proposal unlikely at even an earlier stage, however. The

view presupposes that there are multiple judgments being made when a judgment such as (p)

is made, despite the fact that there appears to be only one judgment. If there were multiple

judgments contained in one act of judging, wouldn’t we notice that fact? Doesn’t this

proposal implausibly multiply mental states?

In fact, I think this second, more fundamental objection is easily met once one

rejects an overly phenomenalogical and linguisticized conception of judgment. In any sense

relevant to epistemology, judging is nothing like holding a sentence before one’s mind and

uttering an inner “yes.” That there are such psychological episodes is undeniable, but that

these constitute anything but the smallest fraction of our judgments seems equally certain.

Were this not the case, any science dedicated to explaining behavior in terms of judgments

could surely never get off the ground: there are simply not enough judgments of the

relevant, explicitly conscious sort to make any significant portion of our behavior rational.

Put another way, if behavior is rational only if it is motivated and justified by judgments, and

we are inclined to say that a large part of human behavior is rational in this sense, then we

cannot avoid the conclusion that judgments exist even when we do not consciously have

propositions floating before our minds.18 Once we reject this “floating proposition” view of

judgments, however, the phenomenological objection to there being multiple judgments in

cases when we typically only ascribe one has no pull.19

The idea that some judgments are contained in others will seem even more

innocuous once the notion of containment is clarified. It is clear that it cannot consist in

mere entailment, since there are clearly things entailed by our judgments that we do not so

much as grasp, much less endorse. (The fact that all necessary truths are entailed by any

proposition is just the most egregious example of this.) At the very least, a contained

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judgment must be one that could correctly be attributed to the subject; it must be

attributable as at least a non-occurrent belief. What’s more, in my sense of containment, to

the extent that a contained belief (p) is justified, the source of its justification must also be a

source of the justification for the containing belief (q), such that were one to lack

justification in believing (p) one would lack justification for believing (q). 20

The notion of containment might be clarified by the introduction of several notions

that will be relevant later in the discussion. These are the notions of epistemic ancestry and

epistemic offspring. A judgment is an epistemic ancestor of another if it is part of its epistemic

grounds, and its epistemic offspring are such in virtue of their being grounded by it. The sense

of grounding I have in mind is just the sense in which the justification of one judgment

depends upon the justification of another.21 A belief is part of the grounds for q if it can be

sincerely adduced as part of the reason one holds q. For p to be part of the grounds for q, it

need not—and usually will not—entail q. Ideally the whole sum of one’s grounds for

believing q will entail it—though that is surely not always the case—but there is no need for

a part of one’s grounds for a belief to entail its truth. Consider an example: Poirot is asked to

explain why he believes the moody debutante murdered the flirtatious heiress. He might

start by saying, his eyes shining green as a cat’s, “It was obvious to me that it was a woman,

because the derringer is a woman’s gun, and there were only three women aboard the ship.”

One hopes that Poirot will say more, because nothing he has said so far entails that the

debutante was the killer. He has, however, stated beliefs that constitute part of the grounds

for his belief. In the unlikely event that he is incorrect, and that the heiress’s female

companion was the murderer, he might likely attempt to vindicate himself by alluding to his

grounding beliefs, “Well, I knew it was a woman…”

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Given these distinctions, we can state the following definition of epistemic

containment.

(EC) S’s judgment p epistemically contains S’s judgment q iff i) P entails q, ii) all of

q’s epistemic ancestors are epistemic ancestors of p, iii) S would not be

justified in believing p if S was not justified in believing q, and iv) S would

not hold p if S did not hold q.

The particular brand of Epistemic Containment that is relevant to privileged access is what I

will call Cartesian Containment. At a first approximation, a judgment has Cartesian

Containment iff it contains within it a judgment that has CP. Judgments with Cartesian

Containment will be horizontally reliable in proportion to the degree that they are

constituted by judgments with CP. A judgment that contains within it a judgment with

Cartesian Containment can only be so far off, because a part of that judgment is infallible,

and the larger the infallible part, the less far off it can be.

This account faces what appears to be a rather straightforward counterexample.

Consider the judgment (pr) “I am in pain and the world is round.” This judgment obviously

contains the judgment (p) “I am in pain” which even if not CP surely contains a judgment

that is. Thus, since containment is transitive, (pr) has first-person privilege. But (pr) doesn’t

seem particularly first-personal, or certainly it is at least not wholly so, and it doesn’t seem

privileged in any special way. Thus, the epistemic containment account must be incorrect.

Before rushing to fix the account, I want to argue that this counterexample might

not be so damning as it seems. Privilege is a matter of degree, and it seems that (pr) does

have at least some privilege in virtue of one of its conjuncts, i.e. in virtue of containing p.

The fact that it has a wholly non-privileged conjunct doesn’t seem to remove the privilege

entirely from (pr). This means, of course, that first-person privilege is not closed under

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entailment (otherwise, by simplification, “the world is round” would have first-person

privilege) but this is neither objectionable nor shocking. Perhaps we should simply accept

that (pr) has first-person privilege to a certain degree, while recognizing that because it is not

particularly horizontally reliable and because it epistemically contains much more than the

CP judgment, the degree of privilege is rather low.

One worry that this response raises, of course, is that our target class of judgments—

those judgments with privileged access that are not cases of knowledge—are less privileged

than they at first might seem. The judgment “I am having a 50 speckled hen image” can

plausibly be construed as a conjunctive belief, (hs) “I am having a speckled hennish image

and my hennish image has 5o speckles.” It might seem that just as all of the privilege in (pr)

above is provided by one of the conjuncts, (p), so in this case all of the privilege is provided

by the first conjunct making the 50 speckles judgment quite unprivileged. But surely this is a

bad result, at least dialectically, for my proposal. I am motivating the superiority of my

account in part by pointing to its ability to account for judgments with privileged access that

don’t amount to self-knowledge. If the only parts of those judgments responsible for

privilege, however, are known, and the whole judgments have no more privilege than “I am

in pain and the world is round,” then the motivations for my account are looking rather

strained.

This objection fails, however, and its failure highlights the crucial difference between

the judgments that have true privileged access and judgments such as (pr) which enjoy only a

partial privilege. The difference is that the conjuncts in (hs) are both horizontally reliable,

and both contain judgments that enjoy Cartesian Privilege. “My hennish image has 50

speckles” is arguably the same judgment as “I have a 50 speckled hen image” and it surely

contains the judgment “I am having a speckled hennish image.” So, if that conjunct has CP,

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or contains a judgment with CP, so does the former. What is distinctive about judgments

such as (hs) then, is that they cannot be broken down into a conjunction of judgments such

that some of the conjuncts fail to contain judgments that have CP. This suggests the

following notion of Cartesian Containment.

(CC) A judgment has Cartesian Containment iff i) the judgment epistemically

contains a judgment with Cartesian Privilege, and ii) all of the judgments it

contains also contain a judgment with Cartesian Privilege.

The final proposal, then, is that a judgment enjoys privileged access iff it has Cartesian

Containment. This avoids privileging judgments such as (pr) while privileging the judgments

that are not cases of knowledge but that still display earmarks of first-personal access.

IV. Privileged Access and the First-Person Perspective

I have articulated a conception of privileged access according to which that access does not

necessarily guarantee an epistemic advantage. There can be, in other words, privileged

access to oneself that does not yield self-knowledge. While I think this account best

captures the asymmetry between our access to ourselves and the access others have to us,

this is not its only advantage. Liberating privileged access from its tight connection to more

stringent epistemological notions also opens the door to an account of the first-person

perspective in similar terms. It can provide a clearer sense of what it means to think of

oneself “as a subject” instead of “as an object.”

What is the first-person perspective? In this connection, it is helpful to consider an oft

quoted passage from Wittgenstein:

There are two different cases in the use of the word “I” (or “my”) which I might call the “use as object” and “the use as subject”. Examples of the first kind of use are these: “my arm is broken,” “I have grown six inches,” “I have a bump on my forehead,” “The wind blows my hair about.” Examples of the second kind are: “I

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see so-and-so,” “I hear so-and-so”, “I try to lift my arm,” “I think it will rain,” “I have a toothache.” One can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: the cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it, the possibility of an error has been provided for. …On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing a person when I have a toothache. To ask, “are you sure it is you who have pains?” would be nonsensical.22

Wittgenstein’s remarks obviously reflect a linguistic approach to the matter, but the two

categories he introduces suggest a distinction between judgments.. The following list begins

to suggest how the distinction intuitively applies.

Self-Ascriptive Judgments “as a subject”

I have a headache.

I am thinking.

I believe Elvis is dead.

Self-Ascriptive Judgments “as an object”

I have a five o’clock shadow.

My spine is curved.

I was a cute baby.

There are numerous quibbles about what should be included in each list—many

philosophers would consider the list of subject judgments too exclusive, omitting non-

mental self-ascriptions, for example. Gareth Evans, for one, nominates the judgments “My

legs are crossed” and “The wind is blowing through my hair” for first-personal status, at

least when they are made in the normal manner.23 The resolution of this debate can wait,

however. Wittgenstein seems to be getting at the general point that there are two different

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ways that we approach ourselves. Judgments made “as a subject” constitute what I am

calling the first-person perspective on oneself and stem from a mode of access that is not

available to others.24 Judgments made “as an object” are instead from the second or third-

person perspectives, and they stem from a mode of access that subjects can have to each

other as well as to themselves.

What sort of judgment security characterizes the judgments from the first-person

perspective? Traditional epistemic notions are not up to the task, for reasons we have

already seen. Cartesian Privilege is far too restrictive, and even a mere reliability criterion is

not liberal enough. Speckled-hen judgments clearly deserve inclusion on the subject list and

are part of the first-person perspective. Simply put, our first-person, subjective perspective

on ourselves outstrips what we know about ourselves. Nevertheless, that special perspective

is underwritten by a special access we have to ourselves: privileged access without

knowledge.25

It is tempting simply to identify that class of judgments to which we have privileged

access—those judgments that are horizontally reliable and have Cartesian Containment—

with the class of first-person perspectival judgments on ourselves. All of the judgments

made “as a subject” above are horizontally reliable, and they all enjoy Cartesian

Containment. This would, of course, result in a rather Cartesian list of first-personal

judgments, but perhaps that is the way the cookie should crumble.

Despite the simplicity of this story, I am inclined to believe a better one is available. The

simple, privileged access story seems overly exclusive. Not only does it exclude judgments

such as “my legs are crossed” from the first-person perspective making the view

objectionably “Cartesian” to at least some eyes, it also ignores the obvious fact that we have

a first-person perspective on the world as well as upon ourselves. Fortunately, a more

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accommodating account can be developed using the same resources we have already

employed. Like the simpler, privileged access proposal, this takes its start from the following

clue: even if first-person perspectival judgments are not exhausted by judgments that have

Cartesian Privilege or Cartesian Containment, they bear an important relationship to

judgments that do. In this case that relationship extends beyong Cartesian Containment to

include what I call “Cartesian Kinship.”

Earlier I defined the notions of epistemic ancestors and epistemic offspring. A

judgment is an epistemic ancestor of another if it is part of its epistemic grounds, and its epistemic

offspring are such in virtue of their being grounded by it. These notions suggest a third:

epistemic kinship. We can say a judgment p bears epistemic kinship to a judgment q iff i) p is

an ancestor of q, or ii) p is an offspring of q, or iii) p and q share an ancestor. A judgment

possesses Cartesian Kinship, then, iff it bears a relationship of epistemic kinship to a judgment

with Cartesian Privilege. My proposal, then, is that a judgment is from the first-person

perspective to the degree that it possesses Cartesian Kinship.

Cartesian Kinship comes in degrees because one judgment can provide justification

to another to varying degrees. The judgment that light is coming through the blinds plays a

large role in justifying my belief that it is not yet dusk, but it does not shoulder the

justificatory burden alone. I also have a belief that the light has a sort of sunny-quality, and I

have the belief that I started writing at noon and it has been no more than four hours since

then. Determining the degrees to which each of these judgments grounds my judgment that

it is not yet dusk is a dicey task, but it should be clear that my judgment that I am having

certain visual sensations plays a rather small role in justifying this judgment. Much less than

it plays in my judgment that I have light in my eyes, for example.

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At the risk of stretching metaphor, the degree of Cartesian Kinship depends upon how

much of the infallible blood is running in the judgment’s veins. Cartesian Kinship, then,

stands to limn the first-person perspective according to the epistemic role played by CP

judgments. Judgments that are Horizontally Reliable and have Cartesian Containment

(statuses that themselves come in degrees) are apt to be most clearly first-person

perspectival. Other judgments, however, such as “my legs are crossed” when made on the

basis of proprioception, are also first-person perspectival, though to a lesser degree.

Realizing that a judgment can be first-personal to a degree helps to resolve the

tension between traditional Cartesian self-conceptions and more liberal self-conceptions.

Evans complains that “The wind is blowing through my hair” and “My legs are crossed”

have been ignored too long as first-person perspectival judgments.26 Cartesians disagree.

But surely there is room for agreement that these judgments figure to some degree into the

first-person perspective—there is, after all, an asymmetry between my access to my legs and

my access to yours, and this is part of the reason that I consider them mine.27 Despite this

concession, it also seems that such judgments might not be as central to the first-person

perspective as “I am having a sensation as of my legs being crossed.” If so, the debate

merely stems from the assumption that a judgment’s being first-personal is an all-or-nothing

phenomenon.28

As we have seen, once it is recognized that beliefs can be first-person perspectival to

a degree, it is easy to accommodate the anti-Cartesian intuitions that bodily self-ascriptions

can be first-person perspectival. When I judge that my legs are crossed based upon my

feeling my legs being crossed, my judgment bears a reasonable degree of epistemic kinship to

a judgment with Cartesian Privilege. It is often overlooked, however, that the natural next

step is to say that the first-person perspective is not exhausted by self-ascriptive judgments.

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Just as there is something special about the judgment that my legs are crossed when made in

a particular way, there is something special about certain of my perceptual judgments, most

obviously demonstrative perceptual judgments such as “That car is red.” Recognizing this

allows us to say that there is such a thing as a first-person perspective on the world, and that

this perspective has the same source and is on a continuum with the first-person perspective

on ourselves.

Something like this first-person perspective on this world is described by

philosophers both in the continental and the analytic traditions. Sartre’s work is suffused

with the idea of a “non-reflective positional consciousness” which one occupies as one is

unreflectively but intensely chasing a streetcar.29 It is potentially part of what Heidegger has

in mind when he talks about Dasein being-in-the-world, and it is close to what McDowell

seems to mean when he talks about a view of the world that is not “sideways on.”30 It most

clearly matches what Nagel has in mind when he talks about the subjective point of view.31

These authors clearly mean subtly different things and discuss the issue in different contexts,

but the general idea is that of a perspective on the world that precedes a reflective pull to

objectivity; a perspective that stems from a particular point of view on the world. A benefit

of my account of the first-person perspective on oneself is that it is continuous with the

first-person perspective on the world. This provides a clear univocal sense to “first-person

perspectival” which is not otherwise obvious.

On my account, many of our judgments about the world are first-personal in the

following way. Each of the first-person perspectival judgments about the self licenses

existential generalizations that do not include any self-reference whatsoever. “I am thinking”

entails that someone is thinking, or even more generally the Lichtenbergian “There is

thought.” These judgments are no less special than the self-referential judgments, and our

18

view makes the reasons quite natural: they possess Cartesian Kinship with Horizontal

Reliability. By “discharging the ‘I’” we get at least a short list of non-self-attributional

statements that have first-personal or subjective status—based upon the way they are

known.

First-person perspective judgments about the world are made by discharging the “I”

from those judgments in two senses: the “I” is discharged as the subject of the judgment,

and the transparency of the self-ascribed presentation leads it to be treated as a presentation

of the world. So, for example, take the following three statements:

p) “I have a visual presentation of a book on the table.”

q) “I see a book on the table.”

r) “There is a book on the table.”

Of these three, p is obviously strained—it is not something we are inclined to say outside of

philosophical contexts, and this is easily explained by the oft-noticed fact that our

representational presentations are transparent: they take us directly to their objects.32 We are

much more inclined to say q). But the same transparency that explains why we rarely say p)

also explains why, when there is no reason to think one’s perceptions are merely perceptions,

we say r) instead. Due to the fact that our presentations are transparent, and there is a

general presumption of the reliability of our faculties, we are apt to overlook entirely the

justificatory role our own states are playing in our perceptual judgments.33 We therefore

have no problem in moving directly to statements like r, even if the full story of the grounds

of our judgments would include judgments like p and q. It is because of the way that it is

formed that r), though it lacks a self-referring aspect, still counts as a first-personal judgment.

It’s epistemic status—whether or not the presumption of reliability is accurate—is neither

here nor there. What is important is that one moves, in normal circumstances, from first-

19

person perspective subject judgments to their world-based first-person corollaries through

this natural process of discharging the “I”. As a result of this process they no longer enjoy

horizontal reliability, and therefore do not have first-person privilege, but they have

Cartesian Kinship and are first-personal nonetheless. To what degree are these judgments

from the first-person perspective? To the degree that they have Cartesian Kinship—that is,

to the degree that CP presentations play a role in their justification.

On my view, self-ascriptive judgments that are first-person perspectival are “prior

to”, in some sense, first-person perspectival judgments on the world. Nevertheless, it is

clearly the case that we almost never explicitly make judgments such as “I am having an

image of a table” from which we infer the judgment that “There is a table.” Usually, in fact,

the judgments about the external world are “prior to” the self-ascriptive judgments. This is

coherent because there are two notions of priority at work. The self-ascriptive judgments

are epistemically prior, while the external world judgments are (often) psychologically prior.

To see that this can be so, recall the earlier discussion of epistemic grounding. For p to be

part of the grounds of q, q need not be explicitly inferred from p, and p need not even be

explicitly entertained. When I say that p is epistemically prior to q, I mean that p is part of

q’s grounds but not vice-versa. For various reasons, no doubt having to do with the obvious

survival benefit of having psychologically immediate beliefs about our environment, our

self-ascriptive judgments are not explicit or salient when making judgments about the

external world. It is nevertheless the case that the justification of the latter judgments

depends upon the justificational status of the former.34

It is a surprising, and some might think objectionable, feature of my account that in

fact almost all of our empirical judgments are first-personal to a degree. Since experiences

provide the majority of our information about the world, and our knowledge of those

20

experiences stems, at least at some point, from judgments that have CP, most of our

judgments have Cartesian Kinship to some degree. This might seem disastrous for an

account of the first-person perspective, since that perspective was supposed to be “special”

in some way, and it was explicitly defined in contrast to a third-personal or objective

perspective. If the first-person perspective is, ultimately, the only perspective, something has

gone wrong.

Ultimately, I think the ubiquity of the first-person perspective is a virtue of my

account rather than a mark against it. Though our perspectives become enriched through

testimony, inference and reasoning, it seems that we never really leave our own perspectives

behind. In our move to objectivity, the experiential grounds of our perspective play less of a

justificatory role, but they still play some role. This is simply because the beliefs that we

have—excepting purely abstract or mathematical beliefs—are justified by the deliverances of

experiences. This does not mean, however, that it is never true to say that we are occupying

the third-person perspective. It is just that the more objective perspective is not bereft of

first-personal features.

In my view, it is this fact that gives rise to much of the debate and disagreement

about which judgments are first-person perspectival and which are not. The view suggested

by my account is that the appellation “first-personal” is accorded variously depending on

context. There is a rather simple rule that governs such attributions: a judgment is called

“third-personal” when there is another way of making the same judgment that has a higher

degree of Cartesian Kinship, i.e. is more first-personal. Thus, looking at my table and saying

“That table is white” is judged first-person perspectival. Looking at my legs, however, and

saying “My legs are crossed” is considered third-person perspectival, despite the fact that in

both the case of the table and the case of the legs I am making a judgment based on visual

21

perception. The reason for the attribution of different “perspectives” is due to the fact that

in the latter case, but not the former, there is a way of making the judgment that is even

more first-personal: by proprioception.35

Thus, the notion of the first-person perspective is grounded in our experiences, and

has Cartesian roots, but it is ultimately contextual. This explains, in part, why the notions of

“subjective” or “first-personal” seem rather shifty and loose. It also recognizes an element

of truth in both the Cartesian and Anti-Cartesian views of subjectivity: the former are

vindicated because the first-person perspective is grounded in experiences; the latter are

vindicated because it is often true to say that we have a first person perspective on our

bodies and upon the world in general.

VI. Conclusion

The first-person perspective stems from the special access that we can have to

ourselves that is not available to others. Defining the first-person perspective is thus bound

up with the traditional problem of explaining our privileged access to ourselves. There are

two reasons it has proven difficult to explicitly tie these two projects together. On the one

hand, it has been assumed that judgments with privileged access must constitute self-

knowledge. This has been problematic because it seems clear that judgments from the first-

person perspective are not all epistemically secure. On the other hand, judgments from the

first-person perspective are not confined to judgments that are self-directed: there is clearly a

first-person point of view on the world as well. This makes it appear as though the first-

person perspective and privileged access must come apart since we only have that privileged

access to our own states.

22

By urging a type of privileged access that does not constitute self-knowledge, I have

been promoting the idea that the special nature of our access to ourselves has more to do

with their relation to their experiential grounds than with the final epistemic status of the

judgment. This serves to eliminate both of the barriers to forging a satisfying connection

between privileged access and the first-person perspective. Judgments about ourselves that

don’t constitute knowledge can still be part of the first-person perspective, and judgments

about the world can be first-personal in virtue of being generated from privileged

experiential grounds.

We are cognitively tethered to the world and to ourselves by our experiences. Their

impact upon us fixes and establishes our particular point of view. We can transcend this

immediate point of view in an effort to establish more objective judgments—judgments that

are less immediately reliant on our particular experiential grounds. By this process, we

gradually depart from the first-person perspective and begin to adopt a point of view that is

available to other subjects. At bottom, however, our perspectives are ultimately grounded in

our unique relation to the states of our own minds.

23

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1 See, for example, Williams (1978) Nagel (1979b) and (1986), McGinn (1983), Shoemaker

(1996b) and Eilan (1995).

2 See Alston (1971), Fricker (1998) and Fernandez (2003). The link is more or less assumed

by most of the literature, especially the literature concerning first-person authority and

content externalism. See, for example, Heil (1988), MacDonald (1998), and the introduction

to Ludlow and Martin (1998). (It should be noted that the tension between self-knowledge

27

and externalism can still be articulated even with the broader notion of first-person authority

I am encouraging.)

3 It will be clear, I think, that more sophisticated versions of these accounts will ignore these

same sorts of cases, at least insofar as they focus on self-knowledge instead of privileged

access in general.

4 The locus classicus of reliabilism is of course Goldman (1979). Reliabilist views have

become more complicated, but we can ignore those subtleties for our purposes.

5 See Chisholm (1942) for the earliest explicit version of the problem. For relevant use of

the problem along the lines advanced here, see Sosa(2003a) and (2003b), and Fantl and

Howell (2003).

6 Despite the way it sounds, there need be no commitment here to an act-object conception

of mind, or a sense of “image” which is objectionable. The point concerning privilege or

lack thereof can be made assuming adverbialism, or really any realist account of imagining

one wishes.

7 In passing, it seems that the speckled hen provides similar problem for views such as Bar-

On (2004) which tie the authority of “avowals” to a security from a certain type of

misascription.

8 This status was initially proposed by Shoemaker (1968) but appeal to it is now widespread.

For a discussion of the Immunity to Error strategy, as well as a critique of it, see ****.

9 See Wright (1998)

10 See Moran (2001)

11 Additionally, others in the literature have done a good job, in my opinion, of criticizing

these views. Against the sort of view Wright endorses, see for example Moran (2001) on

28

Wright, as well as Fricker (1998) and Bar-On (2004). Against Moran, see O’Brien (2003),

Shoemaker (2003b), Heal (2004), Reginter (2004), and Wilson (2004).

12 Thus, I also think the notion of first-person privilege that is presupposed by Davidson

(2001) is too narrow, and that the notion I have in mind cannot be captured by views such

as that suggested by Wright (1986) that first-person privilege consists in a presumption of a

subject’s accuracy in self-ascription.

13 In fact the experimenter is likely to have epistemic-privilege in this case, but not access-

privilege.

14 Sosa makes this point in his (2003a), (2003b) and (2003c).

15 I have chosen the speckled-hen example, but it should be noticed that this conception of

and privilege restores some of the specialness of access to our own mental states that

Dennett and others denigrate in their attacks on qualia. See, for example, Dennett (1988)

and (1991).

16 Interestingly, Davidson (2001b) recognizes something similar to this notion of privilege,

despite justifying it in a radically different way. See especially pp. 12-14.

17 It should be obvious here that these concepts also help to elucidate a notion of privacy,

one overlooked and that does not, as far as I can tell, run against any of the plausible

Wittgensteinian attacks on privacy.

18 Perhaps the claim that we make multiple judgments at once would not be so odd if it was

phrased in terms of beliefs. Everyone recognizes the phenomenon of implicit or non-

occurrent belief, and here I simply extend that to a recognition of implicit judgments.

Nothing particularly “active” is implied by the term “judgment” however, and if one

preferred the containment account could be put in terms of beliefs instead.

29

19 I am presently indifferent between saying that in such cases we make multiple judgments

and saying we make a judgment that has multiple layers of content. Perhaps there is a reason

to choose a side here, but I don’t see one.

20 Caveat: unless the justification for (q) is overdetermined. The possibility of justification

overdetermination will require a more specific formulation in terms of particular justificatory

paths. For the purposes here, the simpler formulation should suffice.

21 Analyzing the basing relation is no easy task, and it would take us far afield to discuss it

here. For an excellent discussion see Audi (1993). The sense of basing here is basically the

sense of “having a reason for” discussed in Peacocke (1998) p. 72, and the sense

distinguished by Fricker (1998) pp.169-174.

It is important to note that here I am talking about grounds of particular judgments, given

the particular way they are formed. The notion of justification here can be indifferent to

externalist or internalist analyses of what it is for a belief to be justified. For my purposes

here, I do not wish to presuppose one or the other.

22 Wittgenstein (1958, 66-7)

23 Evans (1982)

24 Something can be said to be “first-personal” in many different ways, and I don’t claim to

be covering all the senses of the term here. In particular, I am not concerning myself with a

sense of the first-person that is more closely related to practical reason—for example the

sense in which reasons can be first personal. I think these various senses are probably

related, but I will not attempt to canvas them and relate them here. Work on this more

practical notion can be found in Burge (1988), Moran (2001) and MacDonald (2004).

25 It will seem to some that I am overlooking the account of Wittgenstein’s remarks, and the

corresponding account of first-person privilege, that is provided by Immunity to Error

30

through Misidentification (IEM) as in Shoemaker (1968) and Evans (1982) among others. I

have argued elsewhere *** that IEM cannot do the job expected of it, but going into those

details here would be too much of a sidetrack. Suffice it to say that it seems that if my

account works, it serves as a replacement for IEM that in fact explains why the judgments

with IEM have that status.

26 See Evans (1982) p.208

27 A version of this suggestion concerning body “ownership” is advanced by Ayer (1963b)

and Martin (1995).

28 This way of conceiving the first-person/third-person division also has the advantage of

resolving any appearance that the two perspectives are necessarily in conflict, as is suggested

in Eilan (1995).

29 Sartre (1993) pp.49-49.

30 See Heidegger (1982) p.297 and McDowell (1994) p.36, for examples.

31 See Nagel (1979) and (1986).

32 See G.E. Moore (1922b), Harmon (1990), Martin (2002) and Stoljar (forthcoming).

33 Whatever else is right about direct realism, I am inclined to believe that it has the

phenomenology correct. This is not to say that we are never aware of sensations as

sensations, but rather that in normal contexts the transparency of our presentations invokes

an implicit presumption of the veridicality of those presentations. This fact has explanatory

value no matter what theory of perception you hold.

34 It might be that some philosophers will want to say that there are not these self-ascriptive

judgments at all in most cases. I think this is mainly terminological: “judgment” can be

reserved for an explicit conscious mental act if one wishes. All that matters is that there is

an epistemically evaluable cognitive stage that corresponds to such a judgment. The

31

particular analysis of this stage does not matter—the important thing is that it is the truth-

maker for statements such as “I believed I was thinking” made after the fact.

35 What about someone paralyzed from the waist down? Is it the case now that their

knowing their legs are crossed by looking at them is first-personal? I’m not sure I have a

strong feeling here, but my inclination is to insert a “for typical observers” clause in the

rule for contextualization for handling cases like this. Thanks to ***.

32