Research

My primary research program concerns the nature and scope of human self-knowledge, the relationships between our capacities for self-knowledge and self-expression, as well as the understudied social-epistemic nature and value of these phenomena.

Starting with self-knowledge, I have an abiding interest in the seemingly wide range of cases where we seem to achieve it directly, that is, without recourse to self-observation or self-study. If we really do possess self-knowledge of this sort, how do we have it and what does it do for us? What are we to make of apparent exceptions to self-knowledge, such as self-deception or confabulation? Why, if at all, should others take us seriously when we report our mental states to them? Literatures on these questions have been growing significantly since the latter half of the twentieth century, and my publications have sought to contribute to them in the following ways:

1. Accounting for some of the social-cognitive roles of self-knowledge, such as making us better interpreters of others’ speech, and enabling us to reason interpersonally
2. Arguing that self-knowledge is not indispensable for our non-social reasoning capacities
3. Considering the relationship between our inferential capacities and certain “transparency-theoretic” accounts of self-knowledge
4. Arguing that one way of directly and securely acquiring self-knowledge involves committing to our mental states through acts of reflective endorsement
5. Arguing that self-knowledge and knowledge of others’ minds differ in several important epistemic respects, even if both are acquired or justified inferentially
6. Theorizing about the relationships between self-knowledge and self-understanding

Turning next to the social dimensions of self-knowledge, and of the relationship between self-knowledge and self-expression, my interests often concern questions of first-person authority. This term denotes a social-epistemic phenomenon concerning your hearer’s general (though defeasible) entitlement to defer to you when you ascribe mental states to yourself. It has long puzzled epistemologists because self-ascriptions of mental states refer to psychological contingencies that are, qua psychological contingencies, no different than what we refer to in ascribing mental states to other people. And yet we are generally prepared to regard only self-ascriptions as first-person authoritative. On this topic I have offered the following contributions:

7. Explaining what exactly first-person authority amounts to at a fine-grained level, thus arriving at a pluralist conception of the phenomenon
8. Defending a “neo-expressivist” account of first-person authority against both highly general and niche objections, according to which first-person authority derives from our capacity to express our mental states through self-ascriptive speech
9. Examining first-person authority in peculiarextended mind scenarios

My works in progress build upon and branch out from my existing corpus. For example, I am now writing a paper that discusses a novel way in which self-deception can undermine self-knowledge. The idea is not that self-deceived agents already lack self-knowledge, but that reflecting on evidence of one’s being self-deceived can defeat self-knowledge that one would otherwise possess. I explore two ways in which self-knowledge might be salvaged or protected from this self-undermining situation: one preventative, and one reparative. The preventative solution provides reasons to think that considering evidence of one’s own self-deception self-deception does not destroy one’s self-knowledge. The reparative solution provides reasons to think that self-knowledge is easily recuperated even when self-reflection causes one to lose it.

I am also currently writing a paper about the reasonability of ascribing doxastic fragments to one another in various explanatory contexts. The impetus for the paper derives from serious consideration of ‘dispositionalism’ about doxastic attitudes, according to which beliefs and other doxastic states are composites of various cognitive, behavioural, and phenomenological dispositions. Given their mereological nature, it is worth considering whether singular doxastic dispositions, detached from full-blown doxastic states to which they might typically belong, can be instantiated by agents like us. I argue that ascribing doxastic fragments to people, rather than full-blown doxastic states, can potentially help to explain phenomena such as implicit bias and niche cases of first-person authority. I also argue that doxastic fragment ascriptions can replace ascriptions of so-called ‘aliefs’ to one another, thus simplifying our taxonomy of doxastic states.

Most central to my current research, though, is a monograph in progress titled Knowing Where You Stand: The Value of Reflective Commitment. The monograph is under contract with Routledge. It will contain seven chapters: one chapter introducing common intuitions the distinction between beliefs and desires as “commitments” and as “brute” or “purely dispositional” attitudes, a second chapter introducing contemporary work on self-knowledge of commitments, three chapters comprising a critical survey of extant ideas about why such self-knowledge matters, and two chapters articulating a new social-epistemic account of its value. The thrust of the book is that reflecting on one’s committed attitudes is cognitively indispensable in social-epistemic contexts such as interpersonal reasoning, rather than being indispensable to strictly self-directed cognitive activity. A précis and sample chapters are available by request.

Here are some related questions that I am beginning to work on:

• Whether the epistemic credentials of self-knowledge differ across ‘standing’ and ‘occurrent’ instances
• Whether different explanations of first-person authority are warranted when accounting for how the phenomenon manifests across different stages of ontogeny
• Whether our mental self-attributions (“avowals”) are to be regarded as testimonials, as opposed to some other sort of declarative or assertoric speech-act

Moving beyond my primary research program, I have been deepening my interests in social and digital epistemology. In recent days I have published on the value of thinking for oneself even when one is a novice in a domain of inquiry and on underdiscussed epistemic problems caused by the (believed) spread of deceptive bot-accounts on social media. I am now writing about ‘obscurantism’ which, on my definition, is the weaponized use of seductively unclear speech to induce hermeneutical exasperation in interpreters while simultaneously conveying an impression of epistemic authority. I take a non-ideal epistemological approach to discussing whether, and to what extent, our epistemic communities can adequately weed out obscurantists. This paper has recently received a ‘revise and resubmit’ verdict at Synthese.

Future works will expand upon my existing works in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. For more information about my research program you are more than welcome to contact me at ben.i.winokur@gmail.com or bwinokur@um.edu.mo.