| Summary: | In recent years, the philosopher Charles Taylor offered to define human beings as « self-interpreting animals », meaning that self-interpretation is constitutive of self-knowledge. However, it is difficult how we should understand this constitutive role and it is true that a correct conception of self-interpretation should both give an account of first-person authority in self-knowledge and satisfy the minimal requirements of ordinary realism, in order for self-knowledge to be substantial. It appears that Taylor's constitutivism cannot satisfy such requirements since it says that a person's self-interpretation constitutes its object in the sense that the person's own interpretation of his state suffices for its being that very way. However, rejecting the voluntarist implications of the idea of constitution does not mean rejecting self-interpretation as constitutive, and it is possible to keep the idea of such a constitutive relation between the subject and his own mental life while accepting a certain independence of one's mental contents. This line of thought is to be found for instance in Richard Moran and David Finkelstein. According to Moran, we need a new definition of the very notion of interpretation, which does not refer to an ordinary and indifferent activity, but to a cognitive one. Hence his suggestion to think of interpretation as a belief implying the agent's endorsement of his own mental attitudes. Focusing on agency, Moran offers to adopt a practical conception of self-knowledge according to which the person's deliberation provides him with reasons to believe, desire, feel,..., such reasons also justifying his self-interpretation. Finkelstein's point is not the cognitive dimension of interpretation, rather its expressive function. He develops a practical conception of self-knowledge based on the subject's expressions, where self-interpretation also plays a contextual role.
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