Volume 11, Issue 3, 2011
Hilan Bensusan, Manuel De Pinedo
Pages 257-266
Epistemic virtues and transparency
Transparency is commonly held to be a property of one’s beliefs: it is enough for me to examine an issue to establish my beliefs about it. Recent challenges to first-person authority over the content of one’s beliefs potentially undermine transparency. We start considering some consequences in terms of variations of Moore’s paradox. Then we study cases where, in the process of acquiring and managing beliefs, one pays excessive attention to how reliable, empirically adequate, coherent, or widely accepted they are from a third-personal point of view. We show that beliefs formed in a way that is insufficiently first-personal may not be transparently accessible to those holding them.