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Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge
Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's self-understanding. Today the idea of 'first-person authority'--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person. Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, he develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, he explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being objective toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others.
- GenresPhilosophy
256 pages, Paperback
First published October 29, 2001
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127 people want to read
About the author
Richard Moran
2 books3 followersRichard Moran is the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1995, serving as Department Chair from 2003–2009. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cornell University in 1989, and taught at Princeton University from 1989 to 1995.
Professor Moran has received fellowships from the National Humanities Center (1994–1995), the Princeton University Center for Human Values (1998–1999), and the American Council of Learned Societies (2014–2015). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Research School for Social Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, and an Invited Scholar at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, France.
He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An essay on self-knowledge (Princeton, 2001), and numerous articles in philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics, and philosophy of language, on topics including metaphor, agency and practical knowledge, testimony, Wittgenstein, and other minds. He is currently finishing a book on speech and intersubjectivity to be called The Exchange of Words.
Professor Moran has received fellowships from the National Humanities Center (1994–1995), the Princeton University Center for Human Values (1998–1999), and the American Council of Learned Societies (2014–2015). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Research School for Social Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, and an Invited Scholar at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, France.
He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An essay on self-knowledge (Princeton, 2001), and numerous articles in philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics, and philosophy of language, on topics including metaphor, agency and practical knowledge, testimony, Wittgenstein, and other minds. He is currently finishing a book on speech and intersubjectivity to be called The Exchange of Words.
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November 2, 2024
It’s interesting to see just how similar, it seems, Moran’s motivations behind his philosophizing is to my own, and how we end up in quite different places. Moran argues in this book that we are fated to relate to ourselves in ways which are distinct and irreducible to the ways by which we relate to other people; there are significant first- and third-person asymmetries. The distinct ways by which we relate to ourselves might be understood in terms of what Sartre called “radical freedom” or what Kant called “reflective consciousness.” Moran provides his own account of what this amounts to.
He locates it in its most basic form in how we know of our own beliefs in a way which is immediate and authoritative. When we know of other people’s beliefs, we must do so on the basis of observing their behaviors and drawing inferences. In contrast, when we know of our own, we can’t help but know of them. There is no data collecting to get there. Moreover, we are responsible for what we come to know. In many cases, in knowing our beliefs, we must “make up our minds” regarding what they are; and this is a primitive expression of what Sartre would call our radical freedom, and what Moran calls our rational agency. Since we make up our minds agentially, we are responsible for what our beliefs are, and are thereby authoritative over them.
The heart of this account of self-knowledge can be found in chapter 2. In chapter 1, Moran outlines the extant debate over how we come to have apparently immediate and authoritative knowledge of our own intentional states. He contrasts his sort of self-constitutive approach to this issue with other approaches, such as that which holds that there is some sort of internal scanner which picks up automatically on our states (the problem with this one is that self-knowledge is no longer an epistemic affair or shouldn’t be counted as knowledge at all); or that it is just a social practice that we take speakers to be authoritative over their own intentional states (the problem with this one is that it fails to account for asymmetries between how we know our own and other people’s mental states).
In chapter 3, Moran elaborates on the nature of this special first-person, authoritative way of knowing one’s own intentional states. It is not straightforwardly a matter of discovering one’s inner states. Rather, it is partly a matter of deciding upon one’s states. We are committed to viewing the world in a certain way in knowing what we believe, for instance. It is like committing oneself to a course of action which is binding.
In chapter 4, Moran elaborates on the process of holding such commitments. In knowing our own beliefs, for example, we need not update our beliefs through deliberate reasoning and consideration of evidence, but nevertheless our self-knowledge is not “wholly subpersonal.” We only need be “sensitive to reasons.” In chapter 5, Moran looks at upshots of his account for the issue of what it means to need to be impersonal/impartial in ethical conduct. This chapter also gets into an interesting discussion about how self-knowledge can be ambiguous and involve oscillation.
Reading Moran got me thinking that it seems wrong to ask for a singular account of first-person knowledge of our beliefs. I’d think we need different accounts for different sorts of belief individuated on the basis of the nature of the subject matter of belief; and maybe there could be an overarching account which explains why these accounts are distinct relative to their different circumstances of application. Particularly, it seems that when a first-order belief under consideration is one that either involves evaluative properties (e.g., the beauty of a painting; the goodness of a person) or “socially constructed” phenomena taken to be real (e.g., a god of one’s religion; one’s own gender) there is real wiggle room as to what one comes to believe about one’s belief such that how one settles one’s mind upon this would partially constitute that first-order belief. This is because this sort of belief will be partially constituted by one’s interests and values. Whether certain evaluative properties hold of some object or event depends upon what values/interests you hold regarding it, and whether some socially constructed phenomenon taken to be real seems to obtain or not depends upon what way of life you undertake. In contrast, there is another sort of belief, one which is about only “value-free” things (e.g., the color of an apple; the weight of a purse). For these there’s no such wiggle room. The second-order belief you have about your first-order belief does not constitute that first-order one, which is exclusively responsive to reality. Instead, this second-order belief might be thought of in terms of being a property of the first-order belief; in having such first-order beliefs, they are automatically transparent to you.
So I think Moran is right in his account when applied to a certain subclass of beliefs. I think he’s wrong to think that it is a general account of self-knowledge of our beliefs. Our radical freedom ought not be understood as extending to our choosing what to think of basic physical facts of the world, for example.
I’m also interested in how Moran’s key distinction in this book is between taking a “practical stance” towards one’s own beliefs vs. a “theoretical stance” towards them. He aligns this practical stance with the distinctively authoritative and immediate first-person knowledge of one’s own beliefs. The theoretical stance can be taken towards either one’s own or other people’s beliefs; this includes considering whether reasons legitimate a certain belief, or whether that belief is true, for example, whereas the practical stance would include concluding upon something which propels you to act accordingly.
I’d like to see an explanation as to why we end up taking up one stance over the other in certain situations. It seems that sometimes when we aim to take up a practical stance in this way we end up falling into a theoretical one, as in cases of akrasia and cognitive dissonance (e.g., telling oneself that one doesn’t desire to pick the pear off of the neighbor’s tree but still finding oneself propelled to do it). Moran addresses such cases in chapter 5, but there his only analysis is descriptive: he says that in these cases one fails to access the practical stance, or one’s actual first-order beliefs are failing to be transparent to them. I’m curious about a different sort of analysis: an explanation of why such failures happen. Given the work I’ve been doing, I’d guess that a starting point for such an explanation could be found in identifying what Moran calls the “practical stance” with successful emotion regulation, and the “theoretical stance” with failed deliberate emotion regulation. Sometimes, when we’re depressed for example, we may remind ourselves of what we’re grateful for, and this does shift one’s mood; but other times, this fails. Telling oneself of what one believes to be true where this act fails to budge one’s emotion and motivations amounts to the belief’s satisfying one’s sense of truthfulness but failing to satisfy one’s sense of reality. I think framing matters under this context is useful because there is much everyday intuition and psychological research about why attempts at regulating emotion sometimes succeed and other times fail. The idea of emotion brings more resources to the table than the ideas of practical and theoretical stances.
I was also interested in a topic Moran touches upon; I’d like to see the exploration go further. This is the topic of that in order to be rationally agential, we need not explicitly or deliberately reason but only need to “sensitive to reasons”—where this sensitivity is not a “wholly subpersonal” matter. If this sensitivity were solely subpersonal or dispositional, it wouldn’t be self-knowledge anymore, for knowledge is subject to epistemic norms, which requires our (conscious) reasoning; it would rather be like sensory perception, something causally reactive or triggered by stimuli. What is this “third space” (a term a friend used recently)—something which is within the realm of reasons and yet seems to be unconscious, or at least some sort of reasoning the steps or content of which we cannot know personally or articulate? I’ve also seen this called a “primitive rational transition” by Michael Martin in a paper he wrote in response to Christopher Peacocke on this topic.
I have a few preliminary thoughts on this matter. Maybe a way of explaining how we can remain unaware of what happened in our rational sensitivity, such that it is practically impossible to remember or report about it, is to think of the reasons of which we’re conscious but unconscious under this context as “indeterminate” in nature. When something is indeterminate, it is under-determined relative to our conceptual repertoire and language use, such that we won’t be able to remember it or talk about it. This is a fanciful proposal perhaps, for obviously there are various ways of dealing with this tension (that the reasons to which we’re sensitive are not purely subpersonally/dispositionally handled, and yet we don’t know about them or can’t report on them—we only know of the conclusion we arrive at, but not the path our mind has taken to get there). Alternatives include: it’s unnecessary to think that the only categories available are the conscious and the subpersonal/dispositional, and rather there is a third category which need not be understood as requiring features that are familiar to the category of the conscious in order to explain what goes down there; it’s just a primitive/basic rational transition, and that explanation could be made out to be satisfactory, if a case could be made that asking after its breakdown amounts to a sort of category error (cf. Wittgenstein’s examples about asking after how you knew to acquire five red apples and looking for a type of answer on the model of that you retrieve memories of concepts of “five,” “red,” and “apple” individually). This is a living issue for me, and I hope to find a way forward.
He locates it in its most basic form in how we know of our own beliefs in a way which is immediate and authoritative. When we know of other people’s beliefs, we must do so on the basis of observing their behaviors and drawing inferences. In contrast, when we know of our own, we can’t help but know of them. There is no data collecting to get there. Moreover, we are responsible for what we come to know. In many cases, in knowing our beliefs, we must “make up our minds” regarding what they are; and this is a primitive expression of what Sartre would call our radical freedom, and what Moran calls our rational agency. Since we make up our minds agentially, we are responsible for what our beliefs are, and are thereby authoritative over them.
The heart of this account of self-knowledge can be found in chapter 2. In chapter 1, Moran outlines the extant debate over how we come to have apparently immediate and authoritative knowledge of our own intentional states. He contrasts his sort of self-constitutive approach to this issue with other approaches, such as that which holds that there is some sort of internal scanner which picks up automatically on our states (the problem with this one is that self-knowledge is no longer an epistemic affair or shouldn’t be counted as knowledge at all); or that it is just a social practice that we take speakers to be authoritative over their own intentional states (the problem with this one is that it fails to account for asymmetries between how we know our own and other people’s mental states).
In chapter 3, Moran elaborates on the nature of this special first-person, authoritative way of knowing one’s own intentional states. It is not straightforwardly a matter of discovering one’s inner states. Rather, it is partly a matter of deciding upon one’s states. We are committed to viewing the world in a certain way in knowing what we believe, for instance. It is like committing oneself to a course of action which is binding.
In chapter 4, Moran elaborates on the process of holding such commitments. In knowing our own beliefs, for example, we need not update our beliefs through deliberate reasoning and consideration of evidence, but nevertheless our self-knowledge is not “wholly subpersonal.” We only need be “sensitive to reasons.” In chapter 5, Moran looks at upshots of his account for the issue of what it means to need to be impersonal/impartial in ethical conduct. This chapter also gets into an interesting discussion about how self-knowledge can be ambiguous and involve oscillation.
Reading Moran got me thinking that it seems wrong to ask for a singular account of first-person knowledge of our beliefs. I’d think we need different accounts for different sorts of belief individuated on the basis of the nature of the subject matter of belief; and maybe there could be an overarching account which explains why these accounts are distinct relative to their different circumstances of application. Particularly, it seems that when a first-order belief under consideration is one that either involves evaluative properties (e.g., the beauty of a painting; the goodness of a person) or “socially constructed” phenomena taken to be real (e.g., a god of one’s religion; one’s own gender) there is real wiggle room as to what one comes to believe about one’s belief such that how one settles one’s mind upon this would partially constitute that first-order belief. This is because this sort of belief will be partially constituted by one’s interests and values. Whether certain evaluative properties hold of some object or event depends upon what values/interests you hold regarding it, and whether some socially constructed phenomenon taken to be real seems to obtain or not depends upon what way of life you undertake. In contrast, there is another sort of belief, one which is about only “value-free” things (e.g., the color of an apple; the weight of a purse). For these there’s no such wiggle room. The second-order belief you have about your first-order belief does not constitute that first-order one, which is exclusively responsive to reality. Instead, this second-order belief might be thought of in terms of being a property of the first-order belief; in having such first-order beliefs, they are automatically transparent to you.
So I think Moran is right in his account when applied to a certain subclass of beliefs. I think he’s wrong to think that it is a general account of self-knowledge of our beliefs. Our radical freedom ought not be understood as extending to our choosing what to think of basic physical facts of the world, for example.
I’m also interested in how Moran’s key distinction in this book is between taking a “practical stance” towards one’s own beliefs vs. a “theoretical stance” towards them. He aligns this practical stance with the distinctively authoritative and immediate first-person knowledge of one’s own beliefs. The theoretical stance can be taken towards either one’s own or other people’s beliefs; this includes considering whether reasons legitimate a certain belief, or whether that belief is true, for example, whereas the practical stance would include concluding upon something which propels you to act accordingly.
I’d like to see an explanation as to why we end up taking up one stance over the other in certain situations. It seems that sometimes when we aim to take up a practical stance in this way we end up falling into a theoretical one, as in cases of akrasia and cognitive dissonance (e.g., telling oneself that one doesn’t desire to pick the pear off of the neighbor’s tree but still finding oneself propelled to do it). Moran addresses such cases in chapter 5, but there his only analysis is descriptive: he says that in these cases one fails to access the practical stance, or one’s actual first-order beliefs are failing to be transparent to them. I’m curious about a different sort of analysis: an explanation of why such failures happen. Given the work I’ve been doing, I’d guess that a starting point for such an explanation could be found in identifying what Moran calls the “practical stance” with successful emotion regulation, and the “theoretical stance” with failed deliberate emotion regulation. Sometimes, when we’re depressed for example, we may remind ourselves of what we’re grateful for, and this does shift one’s mood; but other times, this fails. Telling oneself of what one believes to be true where this act fails to budge one’s emotion and motivations amounts to the belief’s satisfying one’s sense of truthfulness but failing to satisfy one’s sense of reality. I think framing matters under this context is useful because there is much everyday intuition and psychological research about why attempts at regulating emotion sometimes succeed and other times fail. The idea of emotion brings more resources to the table than the ideas of practical and theoretical stances.
I was also interested in a topic Moran touches upon; I’d like to see the exploration go further. This is the topic of that in order to be rationally agential, we need not explicitly or deliberately reason but only need to “sensitive to reasons”—where this sensitivity is not a “wholly subpersonal” matter. If this sensitivity were solely subpersonal or dispositional, it wouldn’t be self-knowledge anymore, for knowledge is subject to epistemic norms, which requires our (conscious) reasoning; it would rather be like sensory perception, something causally reactive or triggered by stimuli. What is this “third space” (a term a friend used recently)—something which is within the realm of reasons and yet seems to be unconscious, or at least some sort of reasoning the steps or content of which we cannot know personally or articulate? I’ve also seen this called a “primitive rational transition” by Michael Martin in a paper he wrote in response to Christopher Peacocke on this topic.
I have a few preliminary thoughts on this matter. Maybe a way of explaining how we can remain unaware of what happened in our rational sensitivity, such that it is practically impossible to remember or report about it, is to think of the reasons of which we’re conscious but unconscious under this context as “indeterminate” in nature. When something is indeterminate, it is under-determined relative to our conceptual repertoire and language use, such that we won’t be able to remember it or talk about it. This is a fanciful proposal perhaps, for obviously there are various ways of dealing with this tension (that the reasons to which we’re sensitive are not purely subpersonally/dispositionally handled, and yet we don’t know about them or can’t report on them—we only know of the conclusion we arrive at, but not the path our mind has taken to get there). Alternatives include: it’s unnecessary to think that the only categories available are the conscious and the subpersonal/dispositional, and rather there is a third category which need not be understood as requiring features that are familiar to the category of the conscious in order to explain what goes down there; it’s just a primitive/basic rational transition, and that explanation could be made out to be satisfactory, if a case could be made that asking after its breakdown amounts to a sort of category error (cf. Wittgenstein’s examples about asking after how you knew to acquire five red apples and looking for a type of answer on the model of that you retrieve memories of concepts of “five,” “red,” and “apple” individually). This is a living issue for me, and I hope to find a way forward.
July 29, 2014
I read this book for a philosophy class appropriately called "Self-Knowledge." I recall being baffled more than satisfied with the sundry insights cascading through each chapter. I will say this with confidence: it deserves to be re-read if misunderstood. The topics it fleshes out are fascinating and impinge on our sense of moral responsibility, our entitlement to purports of self-knowledge (about who we are and what we know or believe). At the very least, the text is a perfectly suited introduction to these questions at the very forefront of modern research in anglophone epistemology.
January 22, 2021
This is a really enjoyable read. Moran aims to defend a notion of self-knowledge that is "immediate" and, in some sense, privileged, but is neither deflationary nor based upon a spectator notion of knowledge. He calls this "avowal," involving a deliberative stance towards oneself. Essentially he generalizes the notion of practical knowledge defended by Anscombe (but prominent in Aquinas and Kant) to include both self-knowledge involving one's intentions and one's beliefs. In both cases, the agent knows what she thinks by determining what she ought to think.
Sebastian Rödl has defended very similar claims. At one point Rödl faults Moran for failing to fully articulate the self-conscious validity of practical knowledge, i.e., for failing to develop a disjunctive account of belief. This criticism is warranted though it doesn't detract from the value of the book. Specifically, Moran focuses much more on the how self-knowledge may go wrong, how we may be unable to adopt a deliberative stance toward ourselves, drawing upon psychoanalysis adeptly for this purpose.
Moran is focused on distinguishing between the deliberative stance that we must adopt towards ourselves and the third-person stance that we adopt toward others. But Rödl might have also faulted Moran for putting too much emphasis on the distinction between the 1st and 3rd person perspective. While it is true that we frequently adopt an explanatory stance toward others explaining their actions in terms of irrational factors, in way that would be extremely odd in the case of one's own thoughts and feelings (outside of the therapist's office), as Rödl has shown, in the focal case we must understand others by subsuming their actions under the same order of reason that informs our own deliberative stance toward ourselves. If we could not do this, we would not be able to view others as having beliefs or forming intentions.
Sebastian Rödl has defended very similar claims. At one point Rödl faults Moran for failing to fully articulate the self-conscious validity of practical knowledge, i.e., for failing to develop a disjunctive account of belief. This criticism is warranted though it doesn't detract from the value of the book. Specifically, Moran focuses much more on the how self-knowledge may go wrong, how we may be unable to adopt a deliberative stance toward ourselves, drawing upon psychoanalysis adeptly for this purpose.
Moran is focused on distinguishing between the deliberative stance that we must adopt towards ourselves and the third-person stance that we adopt toward others. But Rödl might have also faulted Moran for putting too much emphasis on the distinction between the 1st and 3rd person perspective. While it is true that we frequently adopt an explanatory stance toward others explaining their actions in terms of irrational factors, in way that would be extremely odd in the case of one's own thoughts and feelings (outside of the therapist's office), as Rödl has shown, in the focal case we must understand others by subsuming their actions under the same order of reason that informs our own deliberative stance toward ourselves. If we could not do this, we would not be able to view others as having beliefs or forming intentions.
November 3, 2025
bit subtle for my taste. i think this is the way to go if you want to defend something distinctive of self-knowledge. and it dovetails quite gently with expressivism, which is always a boon. funny thing, i am to read a four page précis of this as the sole reading for a two hour long seminar. perhaps we will spend half an hour on each page
March 16, 2025
af en toe zeker wel interessant maar over het algemeen niet zo'n aangenaam boek. het is dat ik dit moest lezen voor m'n opleiding
January 11, 2016
It's analytic philosophy, so Moran didn't really have the audacity to present his views in any other fashion than some kind of pointless academic dispute. Sadly so, because though his views aren't incredibly exciting and sometimes even a bit mundane, they are well thought-through. Its basic insights make for a pretty satisfying and stimulating read. Consequently, it can definitely inspire further philosophical considerations concerning the self.
January 3, 2008
Excellent work on the nature of the self. But for some reason it's one of those philosophy books whose specific contents I find it hard to remember.
May 20, 2022
Good stuff
March 26, 2025
moest het lezen voor een seminarie over zelfkennis en agency. niet slecht, leest redelijk vlot, goed beargumenteerde inzichten, maar verder wekte het weinig enthousiasme in me op.
February 11, 2024
The author delivers a fascinating and nuanced account of the asymmetries between the first-person (or deliberative) and third-person (or spectatorial) stances. But still, throughout the book, it remains hard to see how one's avowal of her own (e.g.,) belief (roughly speaking, "making up one's mind") could count as a way of *knowing* the very mental attitude, which minimally requires one's representation of the very psychological fact - a fact that does not need to be built up by the person at this stage but has "somehow" already been built up? Though we should be careful here not to fall into the trap of the "attribution" view...
March 4, 2008
I believe I would like this book more on subsequent readings when it makes more sense. I think it potentially would be able to provide anomalous monism with some teeth, even though it may be susceptible to similar epiphenomenal claims.
April 4, 2010
Pretty tough stuff...
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews