We are enjoined to be free from authority—both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims to knowledge. If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others. • The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility. This is both a political principle and an epistemic one. • We achieve this, ultimately, by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves. Reality is not self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it. • Attention is thus
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