Three Transparency Principles Examined

Abstract

This paper derives, from Richard Moran’s work, three different accounts of doxastic Transparency—roughly, the view that when a rational person wants to know whether she believes that p, she directs her attention to the truth-value of p, not to the mental attitude she has vis-à-vis p. We investigate which of these is the most plausible of the three by discussing a number of (classes of) examples. We conclude that the most plausible account of Transparency is in tension with the motivation behind Transparency accounts: it is disconnected from the deliberative stance.