ABSTRACT
Amongst contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of perception, there is a substantial plurality of opinion that Wittgenstein’s critique of the “Cartesian” conception of first-person authority is important and successful. 1 Thus, Crispin Wright describes Wittgenstein as being the first to accomplish “a deconstruction of the privileged observation solution to the problem of self-knowledge” (1998, 108), and Akeel Bilgrami credits him with showing us that rejecting Cartesian dualism does not force us to construe self-knowledge on the model of inference from observable behaviour (2006, 9). Richard Moran endorses what he sees as Wittgenstein’s commitment to “a complex sense of the irreducible distinctiveness of the first-person position, combined with a rejection of the tenacious picturing of this difference in terms of inner and outer realms” (2001, xxxiv). 2 Most notably, Dorit Bar-On (2004) defends with ingenuity a comprehensive view that she describes as “Neo-Expressivism” about self-knowledge, taking clear inspiration from Wittgenstein. 3
Even some philosophers who are not given to warm or frequent mentions of Wittgenstein must acknowledge the significance of his attempt to turn us away from thinking of first-person authority in terms of what Ryle called “privileged access” (1949, 14). It is much more difficult, for example, to imagine Donald Davidson’s treatment of first-person authority as an aspect of linguistic competence (1984a; 1987; 1989) in the absence of
Wittgenstein’s radical critique of the epistemic interpretation of first-person authority.
