Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge

Self-ascriptions of mental states, whether in speech or thought, seem to have a unique status. Suppose I make an utterance of the form “I have a terrible headache”. This is a self-ascription of a mental state. It is true or false, depending on whether I am indeed having a terrible headache or not, which is a contingent matter. However, when self-ascriptions like this are made from a first person perspective, they seem to have two quite special features. The first feature is that they are resistant to ordinary forms of epistemic evaluation: We do not expect, for instance, that someone making the above-mentioned utterance will be able to provide us with reasons in support of her claim. We normally do not challenge those self-ascriptions either. The second feature is that such self-ascriptions are normally assumed to be true. Let us call self-ascriptions of mental states made from a first person perspective ‘avowals.’ Dorit Bar-On’s main project in Speaking my Mind is precisely to account for these special features of avowals.