Die Entwicklung der Autorität der Ersten Person

Abstract

This paper defends an expressivist approach to explaining the epistemic authority with which self-ascriptions of mental states are made. Following other recent defences of cognitive expressivism, it is assumed that avowals (e. g. ‘I am feeling pain now’) have both a descriptive and an expressive function. Since these functions can come apart, expressivists face the problem of false avowals, which threaten to undermine any claim to epistemic authority. In response to this problem it is suggested that expressivists may draw a distinction between sincere avowals and avowals in the strict sense, and then argue that observing this distinction is part of a linguistic competence which is a precondition of reflective self-consciousness. From these plausible assumptions one can see that no appeal to introspection as a form of privileged access to the mind is needed for explaining the authority of mental self-ascriptions.