ABSTRACT
We sometimes deliberate carefully about what is true, or about what to do, judiciously assessing our evidence or painstakingly evaluating possible courses of action. Weighing reasons and forming judgments or intentions on their basis seem agential: it seems to be something that we do. It involves effort, and we regard each other as responsible for it: we praise or blame people according to whether their beliefs and intentions are well-supported by reasons. This agential dimension of attitudes differentiates them from mental states that we simply undergo, such as sensations. This difference suggests, to some philosophers, that a single account of self-knowledge will not apply to both sensations and attitudes. In particular, it suggests that knowledge of one’s own beliefs and intentions is not simply a matter of being affected by those attitudes, as it ignores the agential dimension of those attitudes. On this agentialist view, self-knowledge of our attitudes is linked with the authority we possess over our attitudes: specifically, our authority as rational agents. Agentialists differ as to how, precisely, the agential is linked to the epistemic. On some accounts, the thinker’s authoritative knowledge of her attitudes is guaranteed by her agential responsibility for those attitudes. On others, judging that one has a particular belief or intention is a creative act, one that simultaneously expresses self-knowledge and constitutes the subject’s commitment to a belief or intention. Critics argue that agentialist accounts rest on an idealized picture of human cognition and fail to appreciate the extent to which non-rational factors shape our beliefs and intentions.
