I'm a believer : Evans' transparency remark and self-knowledge

Abstract

The central goal of this thesis is to understand self-knowledge through understanding a particularly difficult and promising remark of Gareth Evans’, from his The Varieties of Reference (Evans, 1982), a remark which has formed the basis of so called ‘Transparency’ accounts of self-knowledge. Evans’ Transparency Remark is sometimes read as deflationary of self-knowledge in some respect, and I hope to show that although Evans’ account is indeed deflationary of our ordinary idea of self-knowledge, it retains what we might consider central features of an account of self-knowledge.

I do this by giving an overview of the literature surrounding Evans’ remark and making a distinction between Rationalist and Inferentialist accounts of Transparency. I also suggest that the goal of an account of self-knowledge is to explain, or explain away, the phenomenon of Privileged Access. Having done this we return to Evans’ development of his remark, and from that I develop a novel Rationalist account of self-knowledge of belief which hews closely to Evans’ own development but differs in one significant way, which leads to an answer to one of the central objections to Transparency accounts of self-knowledge, the Puzzle of Transparency. Having developed this Simple Account of Transparency and defended it against what I take to be the major objections to Transparency accounts, I turn to the best developed Inferentialist account, Byrne’s Transparency and Self-Knowledge (Byrne, 2018), and suggest why we might find his account wanting. Finally, I suggest ways in which the Simple Account of Transparency might be extended into a general account of self-knowledge, and suggest there is one important unanswered question remaining.