Pascal Engel

SELF-ASCRIPTIONS OF BELIEF AND TRANSPARENCY

Introduction

The access that we have to the contents of our own minds, in contrast with the access that we have to the minds of others, has three main prima facie features.

First, it is authoritative: we have a special authority upon what happens in our own minds, in the sense that if we think that we are in a certain mental state it seems that we cannot be challenged. We can indeed make mistakes: our mental states can fail to represent correctly our environment, but it seems that we cannot be wrong in thinking that we have them. Second, our self-access is privileged: it seems to us that we know the contents of our own minds always better than we know the contents of the minds of others. There is a characteristic asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. Third, self-knowledge is also transparent, in the sense that we seem to have access to our own mental states and to their content when they occur: the very fact that we have them is inseparable from our being conscious of them in the first person.

These three features seem so specific that they have been taken as characteristic of the mental as such within a whole tradition in philosophy.

Cartesianism, in its strongest form, is understood as the view that not only the knowledge that we have of our own minds is authoritative, infallible and transparent, but also that these features define the mental. But this seems to fly in the face of common sense, since it apparently excludes unconscious or dispositional mental states which are neither transparent nor authoritative nor privileged. The Cartesian theorist can bite the bullet and claim that unconscious thoughts and the like are just not mental states at all. But the price is high.

Moreover we often go wrong on the contents of our own thoughts, and the traditional appeal to a mysterious faculty of introspection does not convince any more. Anti-Cartesians squarely deny authority, privileged access and transparency. Thus Ryle famously argues in The Concept of Mind that there is no special first-person authority, and that our access to the contents of our own minds has no privilege over our access to the contents of the minds of others, hence that it is no less fallible. This claim has recently been revived by Daniel Dennett (1991) in his attacks against the "Cartesian theater" of consciousness, and it seems to be in line with much contemporary work in cognitive psychology (locus classicus: [START_REF] Moran Nisbett | Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes[END_REF]. In spite of these frontal attacks, the fact that we have a privileged access to our own minds seems to die hard. However selfdeceived, cognitively dissonant and in the grip of countless unconscious influences we can be, it remains true that by and large we know ourselves better than others know us.

The resilience of this feature of the mind raises two questions. The first is: can we accept it without adopting the distinctive tenet of Cartesianism, i.e that it is constitutive of the mental? In the second place how can we account of it? If, unlike Ryle, we take seriously the idea that our self-knowledge of our own minds is indeed a kind of knowledge and not an illusory stance, there seems to be only two possible ways of explaining it. We can take self-knowledge to be a form of inferential knowledge, that is knowledge inferred from other knowledge or from other beliefs. But this view clashes with the apparent immediacy of selfknowledge. Alternatively we can take it to be a kind of perceptual knowledge, something like a perceptual capacity directed inwards, some kind of inner sense.

But this capacity looks mysterious: why would an inner sense perception, in contrast to an outer sense perception be infallible? A third alternative consists in saying that self -knowledge is neither based on inference of perception, for it is not a kind of knowledge at all, but something which is true of us in virtue of conceptual necessity. Just as a sentence like "I am here now" is necessarily true and does not need the exercise of a particular cognitive capacity to be recognised as such, our self-access yields thoughts which are, like Descartes' cogito constitutively true and needs no explanation at all (so we can call this kind of account constitutive). In [START_REF] Boghossian | Content and Self-knowledge[END_REF] terms: self-knowledge is explained "either by inference, or by observation, of by nothing".

In what follows, I first review some of the main reasons why neither the inferentialist nor the perceptual models of self-knowledge are correct. It follows that only option left is the constitutive view. But not any version of it would do. I discuss two alternative conceptions of the constitutive view, one inspired by Peacocke (1998) and the other one inspired by Gareth Evans' reconstruction of the notion of transparency: the best way to discover whether one believes that p consists in asking oneself whether p. Our own beliefs are transparent to us in the sense that we do not need to self ascribe them, but only to look at whether their contents are true. How is this feature connected to the idea that we have an authoritative knowledge of our own beliefs? How can it explain the kind of warrant in which self-knowledge consists and what is the source of this warrant?

Before trying to answer these questions, a word of caution is needed to indicate where I think that the present kind of approach stands with respect to contemporary work in cognitive psychology. The relationships between, on the one hand, our common sense conception of mind and knowledge and, on the other hand, our scientific conceptions of these, are very complex. The familiar options are: reduction of the former to the latter, elimination, and complete autonomy. It is not the place here to state my own view, but none of these seem to me satisfactory 1 . Both eliminativism and reductionism seem to me to suffer from incomplete analysis both in descriptive and conceptual terms. In the present case 1 I have developped it in particular in Engel 1996, Engel 2002and Engel 2007 the very idea that we could get rid or explain in completely satisfactory scientific terms a feature of the mind like self-knowledge is preposterous. This does not mean that a large body of scientific literature is not relevant to explaining it: on the contrary, a lot of work in cognitive psychology bears upon it 2 . But before we can confront our folk psychological and epistemological concepts with empirical studies in cognitive psychology we need an accurate description of the folk concepts in question. We cannot directly bring to bear work on consciousness, agency or metacognition without having a kind of map of how we understand, within our ordinary scheme, these notions. A further problem has to do with the fact that in asking questions about self-knowledge we ask questions about how it is justified or warranted, which are, at least prima facie, normative questions, which cannot, at least on a number of views in epistemology, be settled in purely psychological or causal terms. Once we have a more refined description of our conceptual scheme, we can, at a later stage, establish where empirical evidence can confirm or infirm it (in other words this scheme is not fully a priori). This kind of top-down strategy is, no doubt, one which a number of eliminativists and of "experimentalists" in the philosophy of mind will find uncongenial and question-begging. But it is their strategy which I find question begging: most of these are actually versions of the inferentialist or of the perceptual strategy 3 . The present approach, which can be characterised as an "armchair" one, is, however, perfectly compatible with a kind of reductionism 4 . But before we can hope to reduce, we need to describe. One does need to subscribe to Brentano's program 2 Much work in the huge mind-reading literature, about the Theory of Mind, about mental simulation, pretense, the emotions, autism, psycho-pathology is relevant to it. The problem is: how relevant? It seems clear, for instance that children's abilities to attribute beliefs to others have a lot to do with the abilities that they have to attribute beliefs to themselves. But how are we to understand that kind of evidence in order to assess claims to knowledge in both cases? 3 E.g Stich and Nichols 2004 classify cognitive psychological conceptions of our self awareness in two broad categories: either as a Theory-theory account ( we have a theory of mind from which we infer beliefs about ourselves, or a detector-monitor account. The former is clearly a case of an inferentialist account, the second of the perceptual account. Indeed the way the psychological story in both cases is filled out in many more details than the rough sketch that I give of the inferential and perceptual analyses, but the essence of the view remains the same, however the details are filled. 4 In the style of Kim's conception of functional reduction, or in the style of Jackson's. and to a strictly first-personal phenomenological conception of the mind to grant its importance, even within a naturalistic framework.5

Self-knowledge : inferential or perceptual ?

Let us briefly review the reasons why the inferentialist conception of selfknowledge is implausible. According to the inferentialist, our access to our own thoughts has to be inferred from facts about our behaviour or about our other beliefs. The inferentialist denies the Cartesian claim that our access to our own thoughts is infallible and that we have a special capacity of introspection which would yield this privileged access, but he needs not deny that we have a better access to our own thoughts than to the thoughts of others; what he denies is that we owe this access to a special capacity of inner sense. According to him the reason why we have a privileged access is that we are better placed than others to infer our thoughts from our behaviour (Ryle 1949: 171). This may be correct for those of our beliefs which are typically associated to dispositions to act (e.g my belief that all spiders are dangerous), but it is utterly implausible for other beliefs (such as my belief that the Well Tempered Clavier is a masterpiece). This seems to fly in the face of the obvious fact that our access to our thoughts is immediate and direct, and not the product of an inference. The inferentialist conception implies, to paraphrase Robert Burns, that we have "some gifty grant to see ourselves as others can't". It would be nice to have such a gift. But it is utterly implausible to suggest that we have it anyway.

The alternative conception of self-knowledge as based on a specific capacity of introspection is no less implausible. But it makes more sense if one withdraws the claim, usually associated with the introspectionist story, that this faculty is infallible. The defenders of the perceptual model of self-knowledge hold that if we treat this capacity on the model of perception, we can understand both how it can be a specific capacity -a kind of sense -which gives us a privileged access, and how it can fail -as any sensory perception can. The perceptual view needs not even amount to the view that there is a particular sensory modality which delivers sensory information about our inner life, for we can conceive of perception as the acquisition of beliefs. Thus David Armstrong, one leading proponent of the perceptual view says: "Eccentric cases apart, perception, considered as a mental event, is the acquiring of information, or misinformation about our environment. It is not an "acquaintance" with objects, or a "searchlight" that makes contact with them, but it is simply the getting of beliefs. Exactly the same must be said of introspection. It is the getting of information or misinformation about the current state of our mind." (Armstrong 1968, p.326) On this view, self-acquaintance or introspection is analogous to sense perception, because just as sense perception allows us to acquire beliefs about our external environment, introspection allows us to acquire beliefs about our internal environment. Armstrong also emphasizes the fact that the beliefs that we thus get about our mental happenings need not be about a special object, a self. For him introspection is perfectly compatible with our being acquainted with a bundle of mental items, composing a Humean scattered self. He holds that the capacity of introspection is compatible with the denial of the existence of a mental substance.

The important point, on this view, is that there is a belief-producing mechanism, which produces beliefs "about oneself". A mechanism , by definition, has a causal nature, hence is contingent. The fact that this mechanism causes some beliefs about the existence of some state of affairs-the mental items which populate our minds -means that the causes of these beliefs, and their effectsthat is, t the beliefs themselves-are logically independent from each other. In other terms, just as sense perception yields beliefs about external states of affairs though a causal regularity, inner-perception yields beliefs about internal states through a causal regularity. One can understand why, on this perceptual model of self-knowledge, self-knowledge is warranted. It is because the mechanism operates, in general, in a reliable way. "In general" because it is not without exceptions. In some circumstances, the mechanism can fail to produce true information about oneself; it can also produce misinformation, just as perception can lead us to mistaken beliefs. The causal mechanism of introspection is reliable, but it is not infallible.

To a certain extent, the perceptual model preserves the other features of selfknowledge, authority and privileged access, in so far as it admits that inner sense is a faculty which only its owner can have. But can it preserve the transparency feature associated with its necessarily first-personal character? Hardly. Think of ordinary perception. If we understand it, as Amstrong does, as an acquisition of beliefs, I can, through ordinary perception, acquire the belief, say, that this is a cat.

But I can be mistaken, and wrongly judge what I see to be cat, while it is in fact a Pekinese dog. Somebody can correct my mistake, or I can correct my mistake, by attending to my first belief and by revising it in the light of contrary evidence. In order to see that my perceptual belief that this is a cat is false, I must attend to my belief either in a third person way (when somebody points out to me that my belief is false), or in a second-person way, by reflecting on my previous beliefs. Hence access to the truth of my perception cannot be had in the first-person way, for if I only attend to the contents of my own thoughts, I cannot judge whether they are true or false. Now perception is not necessarily reflexive. Whether or not we take it to necessarily imply awareness, everyone agrees that our perceptual beliefs are not necessarily reflexive in the sense of having second-order beliefs. Now if selfknowledge rested upon a perceptual state, it would follow that I could entertain certain beliefs, and have a certain conception of the kind of states they are, without knowing that I have them, that is without being able to self-ascribe them to myself. In other words, I could say that I believe that P, without being able to say whether I believe that I believe that P. according to the perceptual model, a person could have an acquaintance with her own states, through a causal mechanism which is generally reliable, and therefore which yields knowledge in so far as reliability can be a necessary condition for knowledge, without conceiving of herself as having these states, that is without conceiving herself as the very subject of these states. [START_REF] Shoemaker | The first person perspective and other Essays[END_REF] calls a creature that would instantiate this possibility, a "self-blind" creature, and gives an argument to the effect that there cannot be any such creature. This argument purports to show that one cannot be a rational believer and be self-blind, hence that first-person knowledge cannot be a contingent feature of our mental constitution, but a necessary and conceptual one.

Self-blindness and the rationality account

"Moore's paradox" lies in the paradoxical sounding character of sentences of the form: "P, but I don't believe that P". The reason why it is not a paradox in the usual sense is that the first conjunct does not formally contradict the second, since both conjuncts might be true. It may well be true, for instance that the earth is round, but that I do not believe it. But the sentence is nevertheless contradictory, since the first conjunct implies that I believe that it is true, whereas the second denies this. As [START_REF] Wittgenstein | Remarks on the philosophy of psychology[END_REF] said, the paradox shows something about the "logic of assertion": asserting that P is the usual way of expressing that one has the belief that P, and therefore denying that one has the corresponding belief seems to contradict the belief expressed by the first conjunct. But, according to Wittgenstein, it is not a logical contradiction, because such sentences as "I believe that P" are not descriptions of one's state of belief, but expressions (Ausserungen) of them. When ascriptions of beliefs are made in the second or in the third person, there is no corresponding oddity. For instance there is nothing paradoxical in saying "The earth is round, but he does not believe it", because the "logic", or the "grammar" of such third person ascriptions of beliefs is such that they are actually descriptions, and not expressions of beliefs. The paradox is not a semantic, but a pragmatic one. We may put a similar point along Gricean lines. We could say that someone would asserts that P intends to convey to an audience that he believes that P, and has the higher-order intention of intending the audience to recognise his first-order intention. Assertion is an action done with the intention of producing the belief that one has the belief. The Moorean sentence defeats this purpose, and therefore does not successfully convey the intention conveyed by the first conjunct; indeed it cancels it.

All this is common wisdom about Moore's paradox. What is less often noted is that Moore's paradox is not only present at the level of language, or of the linguistic expression of thought, but at the level of thought or belief itself [START_REF] Heal | Moore"s paradox, a Wittgenstein solution[END_REF]). As remarked above, if we take the first sentence of the Moorean conjunction "P, but I do not believe that P" to express the belief that P, and the second sentence to express disbelief that P, there is no contradiction. There is no contradiction, because I may well believe something, and disbelieve it. For instance, I may at one time believe that de Gaulle was a great leader, and fail to believe that at a later time, or I may discover that I have both beliefs, without having noticed it until now. But of course there is a contradiction if I have both beliefs, and if I am aware that I have them, and if I go on believing them while being aware of this. In other terms, if the Moorean sentence is understood thus: " P, and I don't believe that P, and I believe that I believe that P and that I don't believe that P" then there is a genuine contraction. In other terms, the subject who entertains the beliefs expressed by the Moorean sentences can entertain such beliefs, but he cannot believe that he has these beliefs, unless he explicitly contradicts himself. In this sense Moore's paradox is a paradox because there cannot be such beliefs as those expressed by the sentences, not because there is something wrong in their linguistic expression.

We have not yet explained why there is a constitutive connexion between believing and believing that one believes. Nor have we explained what it is to believe that one believes. There are two possible explanations.

One explanation involves the notion of conscious belief. We can say that asserting a sentence implies that one is conscious of the belief that it expresses. On one analysis of conscious belief, a conscious belief is simply a second-order belief, a belief that one has the first-order belief (Rosenthal 1978). The explanation of Moore's paradox would then be that the content of the paradoxical sentence cannot be consciously believed. We can conceive of conscious belief as a sort of mental counterpart of assertion, a mental assent to a given content which is presented, in some way, to our mind. Thus the explanation of the constitutive link between assenting that P and assenting to "I believe that P" would be that if one assent to the first content, one assent to the second. But this first explanation ignores the fact that we can believe that P, while not assenting to our believing that P. Ordinary cases of self -deception or of Freudian unconscious beliefs provide numerous examples Similarly we can accept the existence of tacit beliefs, to which we can asset only in certain conditions ( Lycan 1986). The claim that assenting to P implies that one believes that P, and that one believes that one believes that P, comes down to the claim that if a belief P is available for assent , then the belief that one believes that P is available as well (Shoemaker 1996,p.79-81). The contrary claim just amounts to granting the possibility of self-blindness, the possibility of a being who would be able to have beliefs, but who would not believe, in a first-person way, that he has these beliefs, although he could believe that he has these beliefs in a third person way, for instance by gaining information about his behaviour. And, you will notice, this also amount to the possibility of a creature who could assert such sentences as "P, but I do not believe that P", and who would not find any impropriety in holding the beliefs expressed by such sentences. For instance there could be a creature who believes that P, expresses this belief by asserting that P, but discovers, in a third person way, that in fact he does not have this belief. I want to claim, with Shoemaker, that this is not possible.

Could the reason why it is not possible be that such a creature could not utter Moorean sentences ? This could not be the reason, because there is nothing which prevents such a creature from having acquired the appropriate linguistic rule "Do not utter sentences of the form "P but I don't believe that P". Such an individual could notice that, in her community, such sentences do not elicit successful communication. She could follow this rule, just in the sense of instantiating a certain regularity. She could notice, for instance, that assertion is the normal mean of expressing one's beliefs, and assert sentences with the intention of conveying to her audience that she believes that P. but given that, by hypothesis, she is selfblind, he would lack evidence for believing that he believes that P. But if this is so, the self-blind person would be unable to use the proposition that P in her reasoning. Here is why. Normally a rational person who believes that P should be disposed to use this proposition as a premise in reasoning, and should know that, if the proposition is true, it is in her interest to act on the assumption that it is true.

And -this is the important point-such a rational person should know that to act on the assumption that a proposition is true is to act as if one believes that proposition. She should also know that it is of her interest to manifest her beliefs through assertions, if she wants to communicate successfully with others. In other terms, even if we use a minimal definition of belief as a disposition to act, and if we assume a minimal notion of rationality as satisfaction of one's interests, a rational believer is a person who would act as if she believes that P. But could it be that although she acts as if she believes that P, she actually has grounds not to believe that P, and hence frame Moorean thoughts? Such a person would, at least, find an inconsistency in her own actions, not simply in her own thoughts. She would be unable to plan her own actions in the future, and to ascribe these actions to herself. In other terms, she would lack a capacity for normal rational action, because she could not find continuity in her own actions, indeed not even to find that these action are her actions. And if belief is a disposition to act, then she would be self-blind about her beliefs. But I have just claimed that this seems to be utterly implausible, given only minimal requirements on rationality. To the extent that a subject is rational, and possesses the concept of belief, believing that P brings with it the cognitive disposition to believe that P, either explicitly or tacitly.

In other terms, a self blind creature could not have genuinely the concept of belief.

Why does this argument cast doubt on the perceptual model of self-knowledge?

Because this model implies that a being could lack the perceptual capacity of introspecting herself in order to see what beliefs he has, without being in any way impaired cognitively. But if the preceding argument is correct, this is impossible.

The constitutive view of self-knowledge

If self-knowledge neither rests on an inferential nor on a perceptual ability, then on what is it based? Given that the two ordinary ways of justifying beliefs are perception and inference from other beliefs, it follows that self-knowledge is not based on any justified belief. The answer suggested by Boghossian's three terms alternative quoted above is: nothing. Self-knowledge, on this view, is not knowledge at all, in the sense of a cognitive achievement. Self-knowledge, on the constitutive view, is a necessary feature of our having mental states about ourselves.It is a conceptual necessity, which holds a priori, which we can formulate thus :

( CT ) Given certain conditions C, S believes that P if and only if S believes that he believes that P 6 . This can be decomposed, as any biconditional, into two parts:

(i) if S believes that P then he believes that he believes that P (ii) if S believes that he believes that P, then he believes that P

The if part (i) of (CT) follows, according to the self-blindness argument, from the very fact that one has a belief and is a rational thinker. The very fact that a subject believes that P entails, by a conceptual and a priori that he has the belief that he has the belief, or his first-order believes entails that he has the second-order belief.

This seems incorrect in the case of dispositional or tacit beliefs, which are, by definition, not necessarily conscious. But as we saw above with the anti-selfblindness condition, (i) needs not entail the overly intellectualistic thesis that all beliefs are reflexive : it is enough that a subject who has a belief has the capacity to have the corresponding second order belief.

The only if (ii) part of (C) also follows from the self-blindness argument. It says that having a first-order belief is actually entails by the having of the reflexive second-order belief: if you believe that you believe that P, you can't fail to believe that P. This, in effect is the Cartesian condition from which we started. This condition too, seems to be incorrect, for instance in cases of self-deception and other forms of irrational belief: a subject who has a conscious second-order belief that P may well not believe that P, if he is self-deceived about his belief that he believes that P, and for instance believes that Q instead. " [our entitlement to self-knowledge] derives not from the reliability of some causalperceptual relation between cognition an its object. It has two other sources. One is the role of the relevant judgments in critical reasoning. The other is a constitutive relation between the judgments and their subject-matter, or between the judgments about one's own thoughts and the judgments being true. Understanding and making such judgments is constitutively associated both with being reasonable and with getting them right.… To be capable of critical reasoning, and to be subject to rational norms necessarily associated with such reasoning, some mental acts must be knowledgeably reviewable. The specific character of this knowledgeable reviewability requires that it be associated with an epistemic entitlement that is distinctive… there must be a non contingent, rational relation, of a sort to be explained, between relevant first-person judgments and their subject matter or truth." (Burge 1996, p.98) Burge explicitly rejects here the perceptual model of self-knowledge. His claim is that the reason why we are entitled to have beliefs about our own beliefs is that a being who would not have the possibility of framing such second-order beliefs would not be able to engage in "critical reasoning".

The carrying out of a proof, for instance, presupposes the ability to reasoning of this kind. A non-critical reasoner, Burge says, would reason blind, without appreciating reasons as reasons (p.99). It follows in particular that a critical reasoner needs to have the concepts of the attitudes that he has, and needs to commit himself towards the contents of his attitudes. If we could not be critical reasoners in this sense, "there could be no norms of reason governing how one ought to check, weigh, overturn, confirm reasons or reasoning". And there could be no such thing as epistemic responsibility, whereby we could be able to review, reflexively our reasons.

We need not enter into the details Burge characterisation of what he calls critical reasoning to understand his claim. According to him, our capacity to have second-order thoughts, reflexive beliefs, is required by the very possibility of engaging in such reasoning and is, therefore, its main source. Indeed the requirement goes the other way too: critical reasoning requires the capacity to frame second-order thoughts. There is a constitutive, intrinsic relation between the two.

Burge's analysis of the source of our entitlement to self-knowledge is thus very similar to Shoemaker's analysis. On both views, the perceptual model of selfknowledge is rejected, because it makes the source of our entitlement a merely causal and contingent source. but the source is not contingent or causal: it is indeed a necessary or a logical one. And in this sense it is a priori. It is an a priori requirement for self-knowledge that we can be critical reasoners, who are able to follow rational norms. This is why we may call this the necessary entitlement or the constitutive thesis.

The redeployment account

The constitutive thesis, although it is supposed to render self-knowledge obvious, is not itself obvious. One can raise three questions.

1) One condition, as we have seen, for our capacity to self-ascribe beliefs to ourselves is that such beliefs must be available or accessible, either through some conscious assent to their contents, or because they are tacit, and at least subject to assent in principle. But what are the conditions of such an accessibility of availability? What are the "C" conditions mentioned in (CT)? The constitutive thesis is silent upon this, because it seems that asking this question would imply some causal account of the availability of contents for self-ascription, and this seems to be incompatible with its a priori or conceptual character.

2) This immediately raises a second question: if the conditions upon which we can assent to belief-contents matter for an account of self-knowledge, and if these conditions have a causal character, how can the necessary entitlement thesis avoid the introduction of such causal elements? And if such elements are present, does this not justify partly one of the suppositions of the perceptual model, namely that the connection between the belief-forming mechanism and the beliefs that it produces is a contingent, not a necessary or logical one?

3) This question in turn suggests a third one: given that, on the necessary entitlement thesis, a subject needs to have beliefs about its own beliefs in a reflexive way, that is to have or to possess the concept of belief, what is it to possess such a concept? In particular is it really necessary to possess such a concept in order to engage in the activity of reasoning?

Unless we come back to the perceptual or the inferentialist model, two sorts of strategies are open to us if we want to preserve the essentials of the constitutive thesis. Each of these consists in introducing causal or psychological elements into the account. Let us analyse one version in this section, [START_REF] Peacocke | Our entitlement to self knowledge[END_REF]Peacocke's ( , 1999) ) and a second one in the next.

To take up Burge's vocabulary, a number of self ascriptions are "selfverifying". For instance, if I make such self-ascriptions as: "I judge, herewith, that there are physical objects", such ascriptions are such that one cannot doubt their truth. But some self-ascriptions are not self-verifying. One is the case of ascriptions made from the existence of a memory. For instance if I ask: "What is the city to which both Garibaldi and Mussolini marched to?" and if my memory presents to me the answer: "Rome", my self-ascription of the belief: "I believe that Garibaldi and Mussolini both marched to Rome" depends upon two things: the fact that I seem to remember that it is Rome to which they marched, and the fact that I take my memory as correct. But this is not self-verifying. For my memory may be wrong. The example rests on the hypothesis that the self-ascriber is not Italian, but, say, French. It would be different with an Italian schoolboy, who knows, so to say, automatically, without attending to his memory, that it is indeed Rome to which Garibaldi and Mussolini marched to. In such cases, there is no need of a conscious memory nor of attending to it, just as when one is asked his phone number or his name. But here too I can misrepresent the information Now if we think of such cases, there is no reason to deny that the selfascriptions are made in virtue of a causal element: it is because memory serves up the information that Garibaldi and Mussolini marched to Rome that he can selfascribe this belief to himself. And it is also because there is some automatic access to the information in question in the Italian shoolboy that he can give the same answer. If the memory were not present, and if he were not willing to take his memory as correct, the thinker could not be entitled to the self-ascription of the belief in the first place. Therefore it seems difficult to deny that this causal route to the availability of the belief is at least an important component of the entitlement. It follows that the necessary entitlement thesis cannot be simply an a priori claim about the constitutive relationship between believing and believing that one does believes, and must include this causal condition as well. Or perhaps we should formulate the necessary entitlement thesis as a thesis to the effect that a thinker who has normal access to his beliefs should also be able to self-ascribe them to himself. But this normality condition just is the causal condition that we have mentioned. Nevertheless, it does not follow that we are led back to the perceptual model of self-ascription, and that we should conclude that there is nothing necessary nor logical in the constitutive link between belief and belief about belief. For it is still the case that once the thinker is caused to assent to P by his memory, and is willing to take his memory as correct, he is warranted in his ascription. Why? Because the content of the second-order belief "I believe that P" must be the same as the content of the first-order belief "P" that was entertained by the thinker. We can reproduce here Burge's argument: if the first-order belief is mistaken, then the second-order one is mistaken as well. It is the identity of the first level contents, and of the first-level concepts contained in those contents, which ensures the security of the second-order beliefs, to the effect that one cannot fail to have them, once one has them. And this is quite different from ordinary perception, because ordinary perception can lead to error. A perceptual experience is never sufficient for the correctness of a perceptual belief, whereas a second-order belief is always sufficient for the correctness of the self-ascription of it (i.e (ii) above is true). So the recognition of the fact that there is a causal factor in our entitlement does not imply that we come back to the perceptual model. In fact the presence of this causal factor is compatible with the necessary entitlement thesis. This answers our second question above. What about the third question raised about the necessary entitlement thesis, whether it is necessary that we have the concept of belief in order to have genuine beliefs and in order to be able to be genuine reasoners? Burge claims that it is necessary, because otherwise we would not be able to follow any norms of reasoning, and to recognise them as such.

Shoemaker is less committed to the idea of there being such norms, but, as we saw, he claims that a creature who would not have such capacities would not qualify as a rational creature in her actions, in at least a minimal sense.

But this seems too strong, or too idealised. We can grant the view that to be able to reason is to be able to asses certain rational relations among one's beliefs, that is to revise them in the light of new evidence, and to act accordingly. But does it imply that the thinker has or possesses the relevant concepts of belief, or desire, or of other propositional attitudes, as the necessary entitlement thesis seems to imply? No, for there can be more primitive forms of reasoning which do not involve the possession of such concepts. Plenty of cases of belief revision involve beliefs which need not be reflexive. One needs no have fully the concept of belief in order to engage into such reasonings. There is no reason why creatures more primitive that adults, say infants and some animals, would be incapable of engaging into such kinds of reasonings.

All this is by no means incompatible with the necessary entitlement thesis. We can say that the source of our entitlement is the result of the combination of the capacity for such elementary reasonings together with the capacity, in Burge's sense, to be a critical reasoner. The answer to our third question, therefore, could be given along these lines: a belief content can be available when at least trains of primitive reasoning of the kind suggested can occur. This does not exclude the rational or normative requirements upon belief adduced by Shoemaker and Burge, for the beliefs may be tacit. But if they are tacit in our sense, they must be at least accessible through some causal route. And this why the causal or psychological element matters. This corrects the picture given by the necessary entitlement thesis. But it still does not explain why we are entitled to our self-ascriptions of beliefs. Peacocke's answer is this. In a self ascription, the thinker must entertain, in his second-order belief, the very same concepts as those that he entertains in his first-order belief.

For such ascriptions to be possible, the following "redeployment claim" must hold:

"The concepts (senses, modes of presentation) that feature in first-level thoughts not involving propositional attitudes are the very same concepts which feature in thoughts about the intentional contents of someone's propositional attitudes." (Peacocke 1996, p.131).

A thinker who self-ascribes beliefs to himself must redeploy, in his second-order beliefs, the very same beliefs contents as those that he deploys at the first level of his beliefs. The redeployment claim has a semantic motivation which is familiar from the literature on propositional attitudes ascriptions, but which I shall not consider here. Its main motivation, however, is that in order for self-ascriptions to be possible, the very same concepts as those of first order thoughts must be redeployed at he level of second-order thoughts. Peacocke gives us examples dealing with demonstratives, such as: (1) I believe that that man over there is French. Suppose also that I believe, on the basis of evidence that I have, that (2) that man over there does not like croissants. Given that most French like croissants, it seems that there is a sort of inconsistency in my beliefs. But if the demonstrative "that man" does not have the same sense in (2) as in (1), the inconsistency would not go through. Indeed the inconsistency is very similar to the one that we discussed earlier with Moore's paradox, for we could conjoin ( 1) and ( 2) in (3) That man over there is French, and I do not believe that he is French (for he does not like croissants). But in order to see the inconsistency, the demonstrative concepts must be the same.

Peacocke's Redeployment claim seems plausible, and reinforces the conclusions reached earlier: it is indeed a requirement that when I ascribe beliefs to myself, I must employ the same concepts as those that I employed when I entertained these beliefs, so to say, unreflexively. But for the very same reason, it is hard to understand why Peacocke claims that this principle is "explanatory" (1996 p.118) and "contributes to an explanation of the near infallibility of a thinker's knowledge of the contents of his conscious beliefs" (p.147). For it is one thing to say that such a principle has to hold if our self-ascriptions of beliefs are to be warranted. And it is another thing to say that because it has to hold, our selfascriptions are warranted. For there is something which is left unexplained, which the nature and the source of the identity of concepts. We could ask: why do we have the capacity of redeploying our thoughts so that the very same concepts are entertained? And how do we know that they are the same? As Peacocke mentions himself (p.150), a sceptic about all this could claim that when we redeploy our first-order contents in second-order beliefs, we do not need to rely on the latter's identity with the first, but only upon their similarity with them. After all many views about propositional attitudes ascriptions rely on the view that such ascriptions can be successful even when there is only an overall similarity between the concepts of the ascriber and the concepts of the ascribee.

According to a well known view, we just project the contents of our own beliefs upon the other's beliefs, and this guarantees successful ascriptions in most cases.

Why could it not be the same when we self-ascribe beliefs to ourselves? But the considerations which precede seem to cast doubt upon this possibility. If the mechanism by which we ascribe beliefs to ourselves was such a mechanism of projection or of simulation analogous to the one that is said to operate in the ascriptions of beliefs to others, we would have to ascribe beliefs to ourselves in the same way as we ascribe beliefs to others, in the third person way. But this is impossible, for the mechanism of ascription by projection supposes that we have already an access to our own beliefs. So even the projective method of ascription, we need some sort of self-access. If this self-access were not warranted in some way, even our ascriptions to others could not be successful. So even on a similarity of content view, we would need privileged access.

Self knowledge and transparency

( CT) is only a schema and unless we make the conditions C more precise, it is either false -since it obviously clashes with the existence of dispositional or tacit beliefs -or empty, since it does not tell us what is the source of the entitlement to self knowledge which is supposed to flow from it8 . There is, however a well known psychological fact which is obviously related to the condition (i), although it is distinct from it, and which can serve as an explanans of this condition. It is the feature which has been noted long ago by Gareth Evans in the following well-known passage of The Varieties of Reference:

[I]n making a self-ascription of belief, one's eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward -upon the world. If someone asks me 'Do you think there is going to be a third world war?,' I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question 'Will there be a third world war?' (Evans 1982 : 225) The idea that one can discover whether one believes that p simply by considering whether p is called the transparency of belief . In determining what one believes one 'looks through' the belief and focuses directly on the state of affairs that the belief concerns9 .

But transparency can be interpreted in several ways. It can be understood as expressing the fact that having a given belief entails a form of commitment to it.

Thus Richard Moran says: ...as I conceive of myself as a rational agent, my awareness of my belief is awareness of my commitment to its truth, a commitment to something that transcends any description of my psychological state. And the expression of this commitment lies in the fact that my reports on my belief are obligated to conform to the condition of transparency: that I can report on my belief about X by considering (nothing but) X itself. (Moran 2001, p. 84) This view is close to the constitutive thesis. But in this sense, the transparency of belief is hardly explanatory of our warrant or entitlement to self-knowledge. If it is only a stipulation, on the part of the believer, that , as a rational agent, he ought to commit himself to her belief by believing it to be true -by holding it true -then we are again confronted with the difficulties that we have encountered with Burge's and Peacocke's accounts. In order to give to transparency some bite, we need to treat it not as a a stipulation, but as a psychological fact, and as a method to yield true beliefs. This is what [START_REF] Byrne | Introspection[END_REF] proposes. According to him we can treat transparency as a method, encapsulated in the following rule: BEL If p, believe that you believe that p. (Byrne 2005: 95) norm of truth regulates belief: when, in the context of asking ourselves whether P is true, we determine the answer by thinking or asserting that P, we implicity follow the norm. In doing so, we need not ascent to a second-order judgement "Do I believe that P?" and even less ask ourselves "What are my best reasons to believe that P?". Our recognition of this standard of correctness for belief is tacit, not explicit.

The fact that the norm of truth enters as a reason for our believing that P in the kind of conscious reasoning in which we engaged when we ask ourselves whether P is true constitutes the best way of understanding how this norm can regulate -or guide, or govern -our doxastic behaviour. Of course we cannot always -and indeed in most cases we don't -reach truth for our beliefs: sometimes we have only strong evidence, or perhaps only a certain degree of subjective probability for a given belief. For instance on asking myself whether it will rain tomorrow, I may not come with the answer "Yes", or "No", but only with a "maybe". But it does not show that the norm of truth does not operate here. For even if I cannot, in such cases, determine whether my belief that it will rain is true, I need to recognize the condition that it would be correct only if it were true. Now what about the troublesome cases where we do not deliberate explicitly and consciously about whether to believe that P, such as wishful thinking, selfdeception and other kinds of irrational beliefs? Should we say that transparency does not apply and that these are not regulated by the norm of truth? Certainly the wishful thinker, for instance the man who believes that he is going to pass his logic exam by reading the Coran, does not care for the norm of truth and does not consider it. Neither does the man who is under the delusion that his wife has been replaced by an impostor, or that he is dead. Certainly there can be exceptions to the norm. But does it mean that these people do not have the concept of belief and that they are unable to recognize the norm? Hardly so. Even though these people obviously do not reason consciously with and from their beliefs, and do not consider norms of evidence, it is less clear that they have no understanding at all of what a proper belief should be. The wishful thinker is wrong when he believes that reading the Coran will help in his logic exam. But he is at least conscious of the fact that he needs a reason to believe that he will pass his exam, and even if he is wrong on the reason, he has some dim idea of what it might be. There are degrees here, obviously. The self-deceived wife may forget, or pass under silence for herself the evidence that she has that her husband is trumping her. But the very fact that she reasons to the contrary shows that she is aware of some evidence that her husband is unfaithful, and that attending to evidence is relevant to her believing. So it is not clear that the norm of truth does not in such cases regulate thinking tacitly.

I have only suggested here how an account of self-knowledge based on transparency can give us not only a normative condition on self-knowledge, but also a psychological one. In this sense it shares both features of the causal account and of the constitutive account. Indeed much more needs to be done to make it a genuine explanation. But it is promising one 10 . 10 Other accounts using the transparency feature are [START_REF] Fernandez | Privileged Access Naturalized[END_REF][START_REF] Gertler | Self knowledge and the Transparency of Belief[END_REF] The first argues that one can go all of the way down the empirical path to explain transparency. The other is critical and rejects the transparency account. I cannot deal wit the here, but they illustrate the tensions to which this view is subject;

An ancestor of this paper was written in 1996 at the invitation of Gloria Origgi for a seminar in Bologna, which did not take place. Christophe Heintz proposed me to rewrite a new version for this occasion.. I am grateful to him and to the referees for their excellent comments and for their generosity.

  accessing his own thoughts in a privileged and transparent mode, and can't be wrong about them. This seems neat, but it also looks a bit like magic. For we would like to know in virtue of what the conceptual necessity holds. What explains it? But this question is misplaced, on the constitutive view.

	If (CT) is true a priori and as a matter of conceptual necessity, then there is no
	need to explain it further, not any more that one needs to explain more what it is to
	be bachelor than to say that it is true of unmarried individuals. But this still seems
	a bit too good to be true.
	There are a number of versions of the constitutive thesis 7 , but we can, in order to
	But here again, (CT) is
	supposed to hold for a rational agent. It actually holds, as we saw about
	Shoemaker's version, for a rational believer. This is what the reference to
	conditions C in (CT) means: unless a subject is irrational, or in some sense
	deceived, it is constitutive of his believing that P that he can't be wrong about his

believing that P. Hence the Cartesian condition holds by conceptual necessity. The constitutive thesis entails immediately the Cartesian features of authority, privileged access and transparency: a subject who satisfies the C conditions is by definition capable of see where the problem lies, consider Burge's version of it. Rather that talking about self-knowledge of our own mental states, Burge talks of our entitlement to have these thoughts. I am always entitled to have such thoughts or beliefs about my own thoughts and beliefs. What is the source of this entitlement? Burge's answer is very close to Shoemaker's:

See Thomasson

The formulation adopted here comes from[START_REF] Byrne | Introspection[END_REF] Coliva 2009

Although it can be said to have a Kantian flavour, he constitutive thesis can be traced back, in contemporary philosophy, to Wittgenstein. See[START_REF] Wright | Self-knowledge: The Wittgensteinian legacy[END_REF][START_REF] Heal | Moore"s paradox, a Wittgenstein solution[END_REF]. For a recent version seeColiva 2009.

For similar criticism of Peacocke, see[START_REF] Coliva | Peacocke's Self Knowledge[END_REF]. She argues that either Peacocke's account is explanatorily inadequate, or it fails to explain self-knowledge , being trivial.

Evqns does not use the term "transparency", which is used Moran 2000 and it has been discussed widely since[START_REF] Shah | How Truth Regulates Belief[END_REF][START_REF] Engel | Making up one's Mind[END_REF]

Note the similarity with condition (i) in (CT). What BEL adds is in the antecedent condition: the transparency of belief is used in the transition from the (first-order) awareness of the fact that P to the second-order belief. BEL is not a definition nor a stipulation as it is the case with the constitutive view. It does not hold a priori, but involves a contingent fact and a method. As Byrne proposes:

[A]s a contingent matter, trying to follow BEL will usually produce knowledge of what one believes. Venturing out on a limb -of course the matter requires more discussion -we may tentatively conclude that privileged access is thereby explained. (ibid., 98) This accounts, according to him for the authority as well as the privileged character of self ascriptions of beliefs [START_REF] Shah | How Truth Regulates Belief[END_REF][START_REF] Engel | Belief and Normativity[END_REF], one can attach to main features to the possession of the concept of belief: that it answers a certain kind of reasons, and the fact tha it obeys the norm that one ought to believe that P if an only if P.

Transparency is a fact about our reasons to believe that P: that P is the best reason we can have for believing that P. Of course here "that P" is elliptic for "that P is true", and the transparency of belief is the direct counterpart, in the psychological mode, of the transparency of truth itself: to say that P is true is just to say that P.

There is also a direct connection between the transparency of belief and the norm of truth: if the fact that P is our best reason to believe that P, it is because belief is the only attitude whose correctness condition is truth. The very fact that belief is in this sense "transparent" seems to account for the way in which the


est destinée au dépôt

Metamorphic hornblende frequently yields spectra with progressively increasing Ar/Ar age steps, often interpreted as caused by partial resetting due to thermally activated radiogenic argon loss by solid-state diffusion. Yet, in many cases rising Ca/K ratio spectra for such samples imply the presence of minor inclusions of K-contaminant minerals. In order to avoid parts of grains with mineral inclusions or compositional zoning we drilled tiny discs from thin sections under a petrographic microscope. Laser step-heating of such micro-sampled biotitefree hornblende discs yielded flat age, Ca/K and Cl/K ratio spectra. In contrast, furnace stepheated hornblende separates from the same samples produced spectra with progressively increasing apparent ages and Ca/K ratios. Biotite-free samples yielded flat age and ratio spectra by both laser and furnace analysis. So, apparent loss spectra result from degassing of included much younger biotite before its hornblende host during laboratory step-heating.

  Apparent partial loss age spectra of Neoarchaean hornblende (Kola Peninsula, Russia): the role of included biotite shown by Ar/Ar laserprobe analysis Koenraad de Jong, Jan R. Wijbrans To cite this version: Koenraad de Jong, Jan R. Wijbrans. Apparent partial loss age spectra of Neoarchaean hornblende (Kola Peninsula, Russia): the role of included biotite shown by Ar/Ar laserprobe analysis. 2006, 1p. hal-00120361 Apparent partial loss age spectra of Neoarchaean hornblende (Kola Peninsula, Russia): the role of included biotite shown by Ar/Ar laserprobe analysis Koen de Jong 1 et Jan R. Wijbrans 2 1 UMR CNRS 6113, ISTO, Groupe Géodynamique, Rue de St Amand, F-45067 Orléans 2 VU, Sciences de la Terre & de la Vie, De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Pays-Bas


Pascal Engel

WHEREIN LIES THE NORMATIVE DIMENSION IN MEANING AND MENTAL CONTENT?

That meaning and mental content have a normative dimension is a quite common claim in contemporary philosophy of mind and language. It is often held that this dimension is a necessary condition of thought and meaning: a meaning could not be a meaning if it could not be correctly or incorrectly applied to an expression, a thought could not be a thought if it could not be rational or justified, and in this sense if it did not obey "normative conditions". It is held further that these normative conditions prevent any sort of reduction of semantic and mental content to naturalistic or causal properties. Some philosophers seem to find these claims obvious. Others find them baffling. What could it mean to say that meanings and thoughts have normative properties? What are exactly these properties? And why should the fact, if it is a fact, that such properties can be ascribed to these things imply that one cannot have a naturalistic account of them?

The issue turns upon whether the alleged normative features of semantic and thought contents are essential to these contents. This is not, however, the question which I intend to adress here, at least directly. 1 My aim is more modest: what, in the first place, are the so-called "norms" of meaning and of thought? I shall argue that they do not belong to meanings and thoughts directly, or categorically, but are conditional upon our ascriptions of meanings and thoughts. This much is

recognized by so-called "interpretationist" accounts of meaning and content which emphasize this normative dimension. But this conditional normativity rests in turn upon another kind of ascription, ascription of meaning and thoughts to oneself, or self-ascriptions.

I.CATEGORICAL VS RELATIONAL NORMATIVITY

To say that the question whether meaning or mental content is normative is unclear is an understatement. We may formulate it in the following way: do If we raise these familiar questions about linguistic meaning and thought contents, the claim that they have a normative dimension seems to amount to asking whether judgments to the effect that an individual means something by an expression, or thinks a particular thought implies normative judgments of the form :

(1) If X means that P, then X ought to (should, has a reason to, etc) mean that …

(2) If X thinks that P, then X ought to (should, have reason to, etc.) think that … With respect to meanings, judgments of the form (1) are often framed as judgments to the effect that words and expressions in a natural language are attached to particular rules of usage, or as judgments to the effect that there are particular holistic connexions between meanings. For instance it is said that if it is rule of English that "cat" means cat , then one ought to comply with this rule, or that one ought to recognize that cats are animals. Similarly with thoughts. For instance, it seems that if one believes that cats are furred, one ought to believe that some animals are furred. But such claims, as it is often noticed, are not obvious. First, it is not clear that these implications hold. If there is a rule of English about "cat", why should I comply with it? And if I believe that cats are furred, but do not believe that some animals are furred, why should I believe the contrary? Perhaps I should just reconsider my initial belief. Even if we agree that an "is" statement about what I mean or believe entails an "ought" statement about what I should mean or believe, it is not clear what statement is thus implied. Second, claims like (1) and ( 2) seem to say that the normativity of meaning or thought somewhat resides in them categorically, as a real property of meanings and thoughts, which prevents any factual account of the entities in question. But rules of meaning, as other kinds of rules, although they are often expressed by statements which contain normative terms, do not necessarily imply that these statements express normative judgments, which fall short of being descriptive or factual. For instance the rule "In Britain one should drive on the left" contains a normative term, but it does record a fact about British drivers. Similarly something is a thermometer if it is accurate or inaccurate, but this does not imply that we cannot account for it in factual or descriptive terms.

We need not, however, charge the theorists who maintain that meaning and thought are normative for being committed to such dubious assumptions. They do not mean that the rules of a natural language or the existence of thoughts and concepts do not record factual regularities. Neither do they mean that the rules registrate a special variety of facts, normative facts. What they mean, rather, is that the interpretation of these rules or of these thoughts obeys certain correctness conditions, and that these conditions do not record further facts about their application. For instance when Crispin Wright says: "Meaning is normative. To know the meaning of an expression is to know, perhaps unreflectively, how to appraise uses of it; it is to know a set of constraints to which correct use conform" [START_REF] Wright | Realism meaning and Truth[END_REF] he is actually saying that the normativity of meaning is attached to the "constaints" to which correct use should be in conformity with. To know the constraints is to know how to interpret the particular rules. But whereas the rules and uses of words and concepts are responsive to facts, the interpretation of these rules and concepts is not a purely factual matter. What underlies this idea is Wittgenstein's argument about rule-following. There are semantic conventions of a language, as that "plus" means plus , and there are psychological regularities and dispositions of thinkers, as that the concept of "addition" applies to the activity of adding , and these are facts, but there are no further rules, no further conventions, and indeed no facts about the correct application of rules or concepts, to which judgments about what it is correct to say or or to think should correspond. This is why "following a rule" is not itself a rule or an interpretation: there are no rules for rule-following, no interpretation of interpretations. In this sense, rules are not norms, although instructions about how to follow rules carry norms (a rule is a fact, although following a rule is not a fact). These norms or correctness conditions, according to this line of thought, do exist and are objective-Wittgenstein is not proposing a sceptical view about them -but that they exist and are objective is not a fact in the world, a fact about the speakers dispositions, or a species of "superfact" about norms as platonic entities. 3 A central tenet of this view is that these specific norms for meanings and concepts can only be assessed communally, by speakers and thinkers who must be able to conform to public normative standards.

If we take this sort of view seriously, these interpretative or intellectual norms are distinctive. They are not practical nor epistemic per se , in the sense that they would bear directly on what one ought to do or to believe, or on what one has reasons to do or to believe. This is why implications (1) and (2) above do not hold. If I mean cat by "cat", or if I believe that cats are furred I incur no commitment as to what I should mean or think. The mere rule about the linguistic use of "cat" or the mere psychological fact that I think something about cats carry no normative force of their own. But to interpret the rule as a rule, and the thought as a thought, I must respect certain correctness conditions, which are prior to questions about what I ought to do or to think There are, however, two different conceptions of the nature of these interpretative norms 4 . One says that these norms are specific , in the sense that they are attached to each particular expression in a language, or to each concept in a thinker's psychology, or perhaps to each kind of expression or each kind of concept. Thus there are specific norms for words like "cat", "plus", "arthtritis" or "sofa", or for the concept of addition..This does not imply that these norms correspond to necessary and sufficient conditions of applications of the words or concepts. It comes close to Wittgenstein's view, at least one one familiar interpretation, that there are "criteria", possibly defeasible ones, for the use of words and concepts. Such specific norms do entail, on this view, which one might call particularist , normative judgments to the effect that if one's community or society uses a certain word to mean a certain thing, then one must use that word with that meaning. But such normative judgments do not have any compulsory impact. We have the choice to interpret someone who uses the word "arthritis" as meaning a disease of the joints or as meaning a disease of the muscles. The fact that an individual uses a word with a different meaning than the standard one does not prevent us to interpret him.

This contrasts with an other view, according to which the interpretative norms are not specific to particular kinds of words or concepts, but are general, and pertain to highly abstract, context-free, standards of thought. Thus on Davidson's view of interpretation, there are certain gobal rationality requirements for a correct interpretation of speech and thought -such as the requirement that an individual's beliefs be by an large true and coherent. A similar claim is pervasive in Dennett's writings about the "intentional stance". [START_REF] Dennett | The Intentional Stance[END_REF] Such general normative principles are situated at a higher level than the level of specific kinds of meanings or concepts, since they register norms for the use of any sort of meaning or concept, and indeed of the very "conditions of thought" in general. Unlike the specific norms, they are compulsory, in the sense that a speaker or a thinker would not be a speaker or a thinker if he were not interpretable through the use of such rationality requirements. Such a generalist view, as we may call it, is well expressed in Mc Dowell's comments upon Davidson's claim that there is "a constitutive ideal of rationality" which shapes of thought about propositional attitudes : "To recognize the ideal status of the constitutive concept is to appreciate that the concepts of propositional attitudes have their proper home in explanations of a special sort: explanations in which things are made intelligible by being revealed to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be [my emphasis, P.E.]. This is to be contrasted with a style of explanation in which one makes things intelligible by representing their coming into being as a particular instance of how things generally tend to happen." [START_REF] Dowell | Functionalism and Anomalous Monism[END_REF] Although this "rational ought" operates at a much higher level than the particular "oughts" which go with the "specific constraints" on meanings and concepts that Wright envisages, Davidson's and Mc Dowell's general line of thought about the nature of the interpretative norms is quite similar to the Wittgensteinian one in this respect: these norms do not registrate a further fact from the fact that speakers mean or believe certain things. For Davidson, interpretation is indeed an empirical matter: it aims to provide an empirical theory of what speaker mean or think, and it does not have to presuppose the existence of specific rules or conventions which would have a normative force of their own . [START_REF]See in particular D. Davidson "Communication and Convention" in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation[END_REF] But it must obey certain general constraints which are independent from the specific constraints of words and concepts, in which cannot be facts about individuals. Interpretations record facts. But normative principles about interpretation, such as the principle of charity, are not themselves facts. The reason why they are not facts is that they cannot be made precise in the way facts could be made precise. If they could be made precise, the standards of rationality could be codified, in such a way that the patterns of oughts derivable from an ascription of thought could always be specified. For instance one could say that someone who believes that cats are furred ought to believe that animals are furred. But acording to Davidson no such specification is to be had. In other terms: there are norms of rationality, with respect to which one can assess contents, but there are no norms of norms of rationality, no "super-norms" against which rationality itself could be assessed. [START_REF]See in particular W. Child, Causality, Interpretation and the Mind[END_REF] We can now see what is wrong with (1) and (2). What is wrong here is similar to what is wrong in conditionals of the form " If such and such is the case, you ought to do such and such". Nothing follows from such conditionals with an "ought" in their consequent but not in their antecedent, i.e we cannot detach. But something follows, and one can detach when such conditionals have an ought in their antecedent. In other terms, it is correct to infer that you ought to do Y from "If you ought to do X then you ought to do Y". In the case of the interpretative norms the corresponding conditionals would be:

(3) If X ought to mean (or think) that p , then X ought to mean or think that … (4) If there are correctness interpretative conditions for ascribing the meaning or the thought that p (or: if it is rational to think that p ), then X ought to mean or to think that … where a "rational ought" occurs in the antecedent. [START_REF] Gibbard | Thought, Norms and Discursive Practice: Commentary on Robert Brandom: Making it Explicit[END_REF] If such conditionals are valid, then the normative features of meanings and mental content are not direct and intrinsic to them , but indirect and relational, and doubly so: they are relative both to the ascriptions and interpretations of meanings and contents, and to the particular norms or correctness conditions for these ascriptions and interpretations. This removes partly the worry expressed above, that norms for meaning and content could figure categorically in meaning and thoughts. They figure in them only hypothetically.That I believe that p is a fact, but that I have reasons to believe that p is not itself a fact.

One, however, may welcome the conclusion that normativity is not a genuine, but a derivative, feature of contents, or that it is relative to an ascriber or an interpreter of thoughts and meanings, without granting what this claim purports to imply: that meanings and thoughts themselves are not real, but are also derivative features. As many writers have remarked, the claim that meanings and thoughts are "normative" seems to go hand in hand with the claim that meaning and thoughts are a product of the interpretation of meaning and thoughts. This view, which is associated with the names of Davidson and Dennett is often called interpretationist . 10 According to interpretationism, meaning and thought are essentially interpretable. As Davidson puts it: "What could not be arrived at by these methods [of interpretation] is not thought, talk or action." 11 Indeed the fact that interpretationism seems to yield the thesis that meaning and thought are intrinsically normative if often held to be a reason for rejecting the interpretationist view. [START_REF] Fodor | Pore Holism, a Shopper's Guide[END_REF] I want, on the contrary, allow that meaning and thought have a normative-although a derived one-dimension, without granting the interpretationist view.

II. BRANDOM ON THE NORMATIVITY OF THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE

To see what is wrong in the association of the claim that meaning and thoughts are essentially normative with the claim that meaning and thought are essentially interpretable, let us consider a recent proposal along these lines made by Robert Brandom in his book Making it Explicit [START_REF]Brandom Making it Explicit[END_REF] . Brandom presents his work as an attempt to explain why meaning and thought are normative.

He combines most explicitly the themes which we have distinguished above.

First, his account adopts the interpretative strategy: there are norms of speech an thought because we ascribe them to people. Hence the norms are not "out there" as independent entities from our interpretative practices and attitudes towards people. They are not platonic entities which would be antecedent to our recognizing them as such. They are created by us. Brandom calls this strategy "phenomenalist" (291-297). Norms are in the eye of the beholders. This does not mean that they do not exist, or that they are merely fictions, instrumental in our making sense of others. They supervene (292) upon real genuine practices which are in order in a community, and which are essentially linguistic and discursive . This latter feature of his account is related to what I have called the particularist view: together with the meaning of each expression in a language there is a certain kind of rule, which sets the proper conditions of application of its use. Brandom calls these the "discursive statuses". For there to be a discursive status of an expression it is not enough that there be regularity of use of this expression within a community. There has to be also a recognition, or an acknowledgment of a commitment , or of an entitlement that this discursive status exists, on the part of the individuals who use the expressions and understand them. For there to be a regularity of uses, individuals have to keep score of theses statuses or to keep track of their own commitments and of other's commitments and entitlements to these commitments. Commitments and entiltlements are what Brandom calls deontic statuses (166), and they are in turn understood in terms of deontic attitudes (ibid.) that one takes upon the statuses.

Third, Brandom claims that discursive statuses do not come one by one, but as interrelated with others through various typical inferential links.

Here he advocates a form of conceptual or inferential role semantics (95-116). He holds, further that there is no way to sort out the formal inferences that are based on logical concepts, such as conjunction and disjunction, from the material inferences based on non logical concepts, such as "cat" or "animal" (125-137). To know the meaning of an expression, and to be able to use a concept is to be able to grasp these inferential relations.

From these claims various consequences follow, which, according to him, allow us to give a full-blooded sense to the claim that content has a normative character .

An implication of the generalist theme above is that to conceive of a subject as interpretable at all, and to ascribe to her meanings and thought contents, is to conceive this subject as a rational being. But the purely interpretationist view takes this rationality to flow from the "normative" principles of interpretation, which are instrumental in making sense of an individual. It denies (at least in Dennett's version) that there has to be any real states of the individual which instantiate the normative principles.

Brandom rejects this (55-62): the intentionality and the rationality of a creature is not a merely derived or as if intentionality and rationality, but a genuine, original one. But this does not mean that it can be made sense of apart from anyone taking the states of the individuals as contentful (60).

According to Brandom, the intentionality and rationality of content is both derivative and objective: it derives from "the implicit practical taking of states, performances and expressions as intentionally contentful" (61), that is from the recognition of the implicit rules which are already present in the practices and instituted by it.

So where does the rationality of the contents lie? It lies in the explicit recognition, by the individuals, of the discursive statuses already present in their speech practices. They have implicit commitments, and the exercice of thought is their "making explicit" these commitments. This is what, following Sellars, Brandom calls the "expressive rationality" of the thinkers (105-106).

Two other important consequences follow. The first is that the nature of intentional contents springs from the linguistic contents of expressions which have acquired a "discursive status" within a language. Hence the intentionality of thought seems to be explained by the intentionality of meanings given by public practices, not the other way round (229-233). But in other places (151-152) Brandom claims that his approach is like Davidson's in not giving a prior status to either the intentionality of thought or the intentionality of speech.

The second consequence is that meanings (and hence thought contents) are instituted by the linguistic practices. It is these practices which account for their "normative" character: they give rise to certain sorts of regularities of uses, and to sanctions for those who do not follow these uses.

One might be tempted, here, to reduce these norms and rules to regularities of use, and to dispositions of individual or of communities, as the first theme above seems to imply. But Brandom denies that this can be done. He uses the familiar Wittgensteinian regress argument (23-30). So norms and rules cannot be reduced to causal fact, and are thus ineliminable. There is no way of expressing normative facts in terms of more basic facts. The very distinction between normative and non normative or causal vocabulary has itself to be drawn in normative terms. It is, as Brandom says "norms all the way down" (625).

Brandom's theory of the normativity of content suffers from the same difficulties as those that I have raised from the various themes listed in the first section of this article. [START_REF]I have been much helped[END_REF] First, it claims that the intentionality of thought derives from the intentionality of linguistic or discursive practices of speech. This is in line with a general feature of the interpretationist theme, as characterized above: not only meanings and thoughts would not be what they are unless they were interpreted, but no thought content can be had unless it is linguistically expressible and unless it has a social background. Let us, however, accept only the conditional claim that if meaning and thought involve a normative component, then this element is interpreter-relative. This will entail a rejection of the view that the norms in question could be genuine, non observer-relative, properties of meanings and thoughts. In other terms, if there "are" norms in meanings and thought, these norms are not "out there", as natural or causal features. So a normativity claim will imply some view to the effect that the norms are a product of certain attitudes and practices of individuals, and not genuine properties of the contents they entertain, but properties which are projected from an interpreter's point of view.

The next question to ask, then is: what exactly is the source of this interpretative normativity? Brandom gives us an answer: the norms are instituted by the linguistic practices, then recognized through "deontic attitudes" towards those practices, whereby speakers feel entitled to them, and then ascribed to other people. But in what sense is the ordinary interpretation of someone else's speech the taking of a normative attitude towards him or her? Suppose that you say to me: "Flagstaff is north of Tucson", and that I interpret you as saying, or as expressing, sincerely and plainly, that Flagstaff is north of Tucson. According to Brandom, I take you as committed to this belief through the discursive practice of assertion, and as committed to give these words a meaning instituted by a regular practice. But does my understanding of your sentence involve any sort of such commitment on your part that I need to ascribe to you, and to acknowledge myself if I say the same thing? This sounds odd, for I simply hear you saying this. To account for the contrast between the ordinary phenomenology of understading speech and the complex commitments that he claims to be involved, Brandom says that these commitments do not feature explicitly in my understanding, but implicitly. Brandom makes a further claim: he says that even an external observer or interpreter of conversational exchanges has to take a normative attitude to what people say. Here again, let us suppose that it is the case. If Brandom equates understanding with the recognition of a normative attitude and the capacity, on the part of an interpreter to take also this attitude, the attitude which the interpreter identifies in others and the ones that he takes himself, must be the same attitude. But is it the same? We may agree, prima facie, that two speakers who converse share certain norms and attitudes towards these norms, in Brandom's sense. But does it follow that an external observer of the conversation has to share the attitudes that she attributes? Certainly the observer must be able to share, in some sense, the contents which he ascribes. But it is a different, and a stronger claim, to say that the interpreter must himself take a normative attitude, and share the normative attitude that he ascribes. Suppose, for instance that I understand that you are strongly committed to creationism. I may understand that you are, through the understanding of some statements of yours, such as "Darwin was wrong", "God created the species", and so on. But do I need to share your normative attitude of strong conviction to understand what you mean? It seems that I do not. On the contrary I can be quite cold and detached about it.The same can be said about the generalist view of interpretation: if I must think of you are rational, does it follow that you also think of yourself as rational in the same sense? Brandom says that in attributing thoughts, "we are placing ourselves and each other in the space of reasons, by giving and asking for reasons for our attitudes ad performances." (5). But are we in the same space of reasons? And is the space of reasons of an external observer again the same space as ours? Maybe Brandom has in mind something much weaker than the idea that an interpreter must endorse, or be committed to the deontic attitudes of speakers.

Sometimes he just seems to imply that the interpreter must recognize that someone who said that p is making an assertion, and that assertion is the normal expression of belief. But then talk of norms reduces to talk of rules, in the more descriptive sense of regularity and normality , and not in any prescriptive or evaluative sense. So why should we need a stronger sense of "norm"? I don't see that we need such a stronger sense, in the sense in which a norm is understood as an imperative, or as entailing an ought statement. So the theorist of the normativity of meaning is committing here the fallacy denounced above, of deriving a categorical "ought" from a derived one.

The normative character of a content, therefore, is not a direct property of the content itself, but a property which derives from the attitudes that one has taken towards the content, about the way it is proper to assess it, to assert it, or to think of it rationnally. It is a feature of a reflexive attitude that we take towards our own propositional attitudes and their content, but it is not lodged in these attitudes and contents. Brandom is right to say that the norms of the mental come from the normative or deontic attitudes that we take towards our own thoughts. But it does not follow that contents are themselves "normative". In most cases, we simply have the thoughts, without thereby having normative stances towards them. The normativity becomes a property of the thoughts and of their implications only at a later stage, when we reflect upon them. But it remains to be seen how this can happen.

III. NORMATIVITY AND SELF-ASCRIPTIONS

I can only give here the outline of an account of the source of our normative attitudes. I have just suggested that it has to do with our capacity to be reflective about our own thoughts: we are able to know what thoughts we have, that is to self-ascribe them to ourselves. Self-knowledge of one own contents of thought depends upon having second-order beliefs about the contents of our beliefs, of the form "I believe that I believe that p ", but it does not simply consist in our having such second-order beliefs, for these second-order beliefs have also to be knowledge. As many writers have noticed, there is a sort of immunity of selfascriptions of thoughts, to the effect that we are always correct in ascribing them to ourselves, even on the externalist hypothesis their content is determined by our social, or our physical environment. 15 In other terms, we are always entitled to ascribe beliefs contents to ourselves, even when the contents themselves are erroneous. But what is the source of this entitlement?

In recent papers, Burge 16 has claimed that self-knowledge of our own attitudes, as expressed in such statements as: "I judge, herewith, that there are physical entities" are "contextually self-verifying", i.e are always true in all contexts. He locates the entitlement that we have to such statements in two sources: 1) the role of relevant judgments in critical reasoning, and 2) the constitutive relation between the judgments and their subject matter 17 . 1) is the essential source, for Burge, but it is closely tied to (2). It means, according to him that "To be capable of critical reasoning, and to be the subject of certain rational norms necessarily associated with such reasoning, some states must be knowledgeably reviewable. The specific character of this knowledgeable reviewability requires that it be associated with an epistemic commitment that is distinctive." ( ibid. 98)

In other terms, for Burge, there is a "constitutive" link between being a rational inquirer, who commits himself to certain norms of critical reasoning, and his epistemically responsible for his beliefs and inferences, and the possibility of being able to review one's thoughts knowledgeably. As he says: "The first person point of view bears a distinctive relation to the relevance of rational norms to rational activity. For a review of a propositional mental event or state to yield an immediate rational ground to defend or alter the attitude, the point of view of the review and of the attitude reviewed must be the same and must be first personal." (ibid. 115) Such a view is quite compatible with the conclusion that we have reached above: in order for there to be a normative element in a thought content entertained by a subject, the subject must be able to take a stance towards his own thoughts, that is to assess them as rational. What Burge adds is that this goes necessarily with the capacity of a subject to know about what she thinks, in a secure way. His claim is that the role of self-ascriptions in critical reasoning the source of a thinker's entitlement to make them, so that it is a precondition of this entitlement to self-knowledge that the subject can conceive of herself as a rational inquirer, subject to epistemic norms. This view, however, comes quite close to Brandom's view, if we add with Brandom that in order to be a rational inquirer, capable of normative attitudes towards his own thoughts one must be embedded in a social context of public assessment of one's claims. Whatever line one takes on this matter, Burge's conception is problematic, because he excludes the possibility that the source of our entitlement to self knowledge might be a psychological capacity that we could have independently of its role in critical reasoning. On Burge's view, one needs to have attitudes about one's own attitudes in order to be able of critical reasoning.

But we can doubt that the normative element in mental content arises only at this level. There may be more primitive capacities of reasoning, which involve assessment or support, without the subject having the concept of a propositional attitude or being able to "review" them. Suppose, for instance that someone comes back home and sees that his spouse's car is not in the driveway, who believes on the basis of this information that his wife is not home yet, but then suspends this belief on the basis of his remembering that she may have taken the car to the garage for repair, and as a result of that believes that she is at home. As Peacocke notes about such an example, "nothing in this little fragment of reasoning seems to involve the self ascription of belief." [START_REF] Peacocke | Entitlement,Self-knowledge and Conceptual Redeployment[END_REF] Such a reasoning needs the existence of thoughts about thoughts, but it does not need any particular sort of self-knowledge of them. If this is correct, then the normative assessment of our beliefs may come at a much more primitive stage, in pieces of reasoning which are not "critical" in Burge's sense. Critical reasoning itself may be dependent upon such reasoning abilities. In this sense, as Peacocke says: "There is a basic system of normative relations in which a content stands, a system of relations which a thinker will respect in his thinking, and basic in the sense that the thinker can respect these relations without yet employing concepts of propositional attitudes. These are the normative relations which specify what justifies acceptance of a content, what justifies its rejection, what partially confirm it; and so forth." 19 The existence of a normative element in mental content does not need, therefore, to be only a feature of our self-ascriptions of thought: this element can be, so to say, prepared by more primitive psychological capacites that the taking of normative epistemic attitudes towards our thoughts. It remains true that most of the "normativity" that is present is due to our reflexive attitudes as critical reasoners, without being a feature of contents themselves. But this is not incompatible with the idea that the more primitive capacities of assessment of thought contents have a causal character in the formation of such normative epistemic attitudes. If this is so, there is no reason to think that we cannot explain, in some psychological sense, the kinds of attitudes that give rise to the normative element in mental contents, and thus that, contrary to what Brandom and others say, it is not "norms all the way down".

I have tried to sort out the various senses in which we could talk of the normativity of meaning and thought. I have argued that when this normativity is said to be a feature of our interpretations, it is not obvious that

  judgments about what a linguistic expression means or about what mental content an individual entertains entail normative judgments? A normative judgment is a judgment about what an individual ought to or should do or think, about what it is rational to do or to believe, or about what it is correct or incorrect , right or wrong , or good or bad to do or to think. The occurence of such terms in judgments signals the existence of certain features which are not descriptive or factual, but evaluative or prescriptive. We call such features norms. Usually, these norms are divided into two broad classes: practical, about what to do, and epistemic , about what to believe. This raises some traditional questions. What is the relation between norms and facts? Do they form an autonomous ontological domain, or do they supervene upon the world of natural facts? In other terms, are normative judgments or assertions genuine judgments or assertions about a particular realm (the realm of the "normative"), or are they pseudo-judgments, mere expressions of our feelings or of our psychological attitudes? And what are the relationships between the different classes of norms? Are they exclusive? Are they exhaustive?

there is anything prescriptive about the thoughts themselves. I have tried to show that when there is an authentic normative dimension in thought contents, it is not a direct and categorical feature of these contents, but a feature which springs from our attitudes as would-be rational inquirers and which is conditional upon the existence of such attitudes. I have also suggested that these attitudes are based upon our capacity of self knowledge of our own thoughts, but I have allowed that this kind of self-knowledge is not necessary for the existence of normative liaisons in contents. [START_REF]Language, rationality and cognition[END_REF]