The Agential Point of View

Abstract

Agentialist accounts of self‐knowledge seek to do justice to the connection between our identities as rational agents and our capacity to know our own minds. There are two strategies that agentialists have employed in developing their position: substantive and non‐substantive. My aim is to explicate and defend one particular example of the non‐substantive strategy, namely, that proposed by Tyler Burge. In particular, my concern is to defend Burge's claim that critical reasoning requires a relation of normative directness between reviewing and reviewed perspectives. My defence will involve supplementing Burge's view with a substantive agentialist account of self‐knowledge.

How to commit to commissive self‐knowledge

“…Here is my argument in a nutshell. No matter how well you know your brute beliefs, your reflective perspective on them can clash with them; you do not automatically endorse them from your self‐conscious point of view (Burge, 1996; Sorgiovanni, 2019). After all, they are not wrought from your own considered judgement.…”