Expression and Self-Knowledge (Great Debates in Philosophy)

Provides a timely and original contribution to the debate surrounding privileged self-knowledge

Contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of mind continue to find puzzling the nature and source of privileged self-knowledge: the ordinary and effortless ‘first-person’ knowledge we have of our own sensations, moods, emotions, beliefs, desires, and hopes.

In Expression and Self-Knowledge, Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright articulate their joint dissatisfaction with extant accounts of self-knowledge and engage in a sustained and substantial critical debate over the merits of an expressivist approach to the topic. The authors incorporate cutting-edge research while defending their own alternatives to existing approaches to so-called ‘first-person privilege’.

Bar-On defends her neo-expressivist account, addressing the objection that neo-expressivism fails to provide an adequate epistemology of ordinary self-knowledge, and addresses new objections levelled by Wright. Wright then presents an alternative pluralist approach, and Bar-On argues in response that pluralism faces difficulties neo-expressivism avoids. Providing invaluable insights on a hotly debated topic in epistemology and philosophy of mind, Expression and Self-Knowledge:

• Presents an in-depth debate between two leading philosophers over the expressivist approach
• Offers novel developments and penetrating criticisms of the authors' respective views
• Features two different perspectives on the influential remarks on expression and self-knowledge found in Wittgenstein’s later writings
• Includes four jointly written chapters that offer a critical overview of prominent existing accounts, which provide a useful advanced introduction to the subject.

Expression and Self-Knowledge is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind and language, psychologists with an interest in self-knowledge, and researchers and graduate students working in expression, expressivism, and self-knowledge.

DORIT BAR-ON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and Director of the Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning Research Group which she established in 2010, while at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, and metaethics, and has published on topics such as translation, conceptual relativism, expression and expressivism, and origins of meaning.

CRISPIN WRIGHT is Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling. Specializing in epistemology, the philosophies of language and mathematics and the later Wittgenstein's philosophy, he has taught at leading universities including Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, and St. Andrews, where he founded the philosophical research center, Arché.