Transparent desires and the uniformity of self-knowledge

Abstract

The transparency method claims that we can gain knowledge of our own minds by considering the world. In particular, it says that a subject can know whether she believes that p by a world-directed question of the form “Is p true?”. Something similar could be tried regarding desires: I can know what I desire by considering the qualities of the intentional object of desire. Defending this last claim involves formulating a world-directed question for the method and defending that this method possesses a strong degree of epistemic warrant. The most prominent theories of the transparency method applied to desire are the bypass view (Fernández 2008), the desirability rule (Byrne 2018), and the conceptual approach (Andreotta 2020). This paper argues that none of these proposals apply successfully the transparency method to desires. Finally, I argue that the transparency method can be partially applied to desires if we take into consideration the distinction between passive and active self-knowledge (Boyle 2009).