Abstract

I seem to attribute thoughts and feelings to myself with more ease, accuracy, and authority than I'm able to attribute them to others. What accounts for this? When philosophers address this and related questions, they are drawn in two directions. In one direction lies what I call 'detectivism'. A detectivist is someone who thinks that the authority which attaches to my mental state avowals is due to my being in an especially good position to find out about my own states of mind. Detectivism stands opposed to 'constitutivism'. A constitutivist thinks that the authority with which I speak about my own states of mind is explained--not by my being especially well-placed to learn about some range of facts, but rather--by its being the case that what I think and feel is constitutively determined by what I judge myself to think and feel. ;Ludwig Wittgenstein has been read as a philosopher who rejects detectivism in favor of constitutivism. In the first two chapters of the thesis, I argue that we should see Wittgenstein as pulling the rug out from under this controversy rather than as taking a side in it. I attempt to show: that neither detectivism nor constitutivism succeeds as an approach to understanding first-person authority; that although detectivism and constitutivism take themselves to be utterly opposed to each other, ultimately they participate in a common error; that Wittgenstein seeks to excavate the error common to detectivism and constitutivism; and that we can make sense of first-person authority by coming to appreciate Wittgenstein's real views about the expressive character of our mental state avowals. ;It emerges in Chapter 1 that an explanation of first-person authority ought to help us to understand what it is for a mental state to be conscious. In Chapter 3, I address this issue by providing an account of unconscious mental states; what's distinctive about conscious states of mind comes into view when we see what is lacking in those that are unconscious. I argue that while any genuinely mental state may be expressed in a subject's behavior, what makes a mental state conscious is that the subject has the capacity to express it simply by avowing it