Title: The Deliberative Theory of Self-Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits Abstract: The deliberative theory of self-knowledge---by which I mean the theory of self-knowledge articulated and defended by Richard Moran in Authority and Estrangement and elsewhere---is simultaneously one of the most interesting and important theories of self-knowledge among contemporary theories of self-knowledge and one of the most obscure, incomplete, and misunderstood theories. The obscurity and incompleteness of the theory makes it particularly difficult to evaluate a range of "scope objections" to the theory, objections which claim that the theory is limited in scope in one way or another and so must either be interesting and important not as the one true theory of self-knowledge in its intended domain, but only with respect to only a particular domain of self-knowledge, or perhaps even only with respect to issues outside of traditional concerns with self-knowledge. In this paper I defend the deliberative theory against such scope objections, arguing that, when properly understood, the deliberative theory has exactly the scope of application that a theory with its intended domain---that is, a theory of the distinctive means by which we come to know our own attitudes---should have.
When
Wed May 1, 2019 5:30am – 7am Coordinated Universal Time
