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<p>Rodriguez’s book offers an intriguing account of self-knowledge and privileged access in terms of how we non-relationally express our minds through behaviour. This paper argues that non-relational expressivism is fundamentally unstable, because it attempts to preserve a privileged, first-person perspective on one’s own mental states while rejecting the epistemic reading of the privileged access thesis. Section 2 explores the problems non-relational expressivism faces in accounting for psychological phenomena such as (in)sincerity and pretence, while Sect. 3 considers Rodriguez’s semantic analysis of expressive and descriptive first-person mental utterances, showing how he cannot avoid giving an account of the truth conditions of first-person self-ascriptions of belief. Section 4 formulates a dilemma for Rodriguez: in order to coherently explain how mental states can be non-relationally expressed, he must either give them an ontological status independent of the behavior that expresses them, or accept that, ultimately, there is nothing besides behavior. Neither option appears attractive for Rodriguez.</p>

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The Instability of Non-relational Expressivism

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月2日

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  • José Luis Bermúdez,
  • Agata Machcewicz-Grad

摘要

Rodriguez’s book offers an intriguing account of self-knowledge and privileged access in terms of how we non-relationally express our minds through behaviour. This paper argues that non-relational expressivism is fundamentally unstable, because it attempts to preserve a privileged, first-person perspective on one’s own mental states while rejecting the epistemic reading of the privileged access thesis. Section 2 explores the problems non-relational expressivism faces in accounting for psychological phenomena such as (in)sincerity and pretence, while Sect. 3 considers Rodriguez’s semantic analysis of expressive and descriptive first-person mental utterances, showing how he cannot avoid giving an account of the truth conditions of first-person self-ascriptions of belief. Section 4 formulates a dilemma for Rodriguez: in order to coherently explain how mental states can be non-relationally expressed, he must either give them an ontological status independent of the behavior that expresses them, or accept that, ultimately, there is nothing besides behavior. Neither option appears attractive for Rodriguez.