Person:

Moran, Richard

In this article, I respond to the comments of six philosophers on my book Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. My reply to Joseph Corbi mostly concerns the relation between the two modes of self-knowledge I call 'avowal' and 'attribution,' and the sense of activity involved in self-knowledge; in responding to Joseph Prades I try to clarify my picture of deliberation and show that it is not 'intellectualist' in an objectionable sense; Komarine Romdenh-Romluc's paper enables me to say some things about the idea of unconscious beliefs, specifically in relation to the phenomenological tradition; the paper by Hilan Bensusan and Manuel de Pinedo helps me to clarify my sense of the relation of the first person perspective to the specifically normative relation to one's believes and other attitudes; and Carla Bagnoli's paper provides an opportunity to explore some connections between the deliberative stance and the notion of recognition in Hegel and in contemporary philosophy.

It is undeniable that the assumption of sincerity is important to assertion, and that assertion is central to the transmission of beliefs through human testimony. Discussions of testimony, however, often assume that the epistemic importance of sincerity to testimony is that of a (fallible) guarantee of access to the actual beliefs of the speaker. Other things being equal, we would do as well or better if we had some kind of unmediated access to the beliefs of the other person, without the risks involved in the overt act of speaking, and the assumption of sincerity in speech is the closest we can come to this access. Contrary to this picture, I argue that sincerity has a quite different epistemic role to play in testimony than that of an indicator of the speaker's beliefs. The epistemology of testimony requires reference to the speaker as agent, and not just the speaker's beliefs, as well as a sense of 'expression of belief that links it to the specifically addressive relation to another person.