International Philosophical Quarterly

published on June 16, 2021

Transparent Self-Knowledge of Attitudes and Emotions: A Davidsonian Attempt

In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran provides a fascinating account of how we know what we believe that he calls the “transparency account.” This account relies on the transparency relation between the question of whether we believe that p and the question of whether p is true. That is, we can consider the former by considering the grounds for the latter. But Moran’s account has been criticized by David Finkelstein, who argues that it fails to explain how we know our attitudes and emotions more generally. The aim of this paper is to show how Moran’s transparency account can be extended to meet this criticism by modifying it, using insights from Davidson’s view on attitudes and emotions.