Download or read book Speaking My Mind written by Dorit Bar-On and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004-11-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dorit Bar-On develops and defends an original view of avowals and self-knowledge which offers systematic answers to many persistent questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. According to Bar-On's Neo-Expressivist view, avowals - those everyday spontaneous pronouncements that we make about our own present states of mind - are acts through which we directly express, rather than merely report, the very mental conditions the avowals ascribe. Verbal acts of speaking ourminds are thus similar to natural expressions, such as sighing, or smiling; they show, rather than simply telling of our present states of mind. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language and of mind, the theory of action, and epistemology, Bar-On argues, as against many expressivists andtheir critics, that an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states.