Transparency, Self-Knowledge, and the Sociality of Belief

A prominent theory of belief holds that belief is transparent, in the sense that one should, and normally will, settle the question of whether one believes p by settling the corresponding question about whether p. Transparency is held to be a normative requirement and also crucial to understanding the distinctive nature of knowledge of one’s own beliefs. In this paper, we argue that the transparency requirement, as well as our doxastic self-knowledge, must themselves be explained by the social role of belief. We hold that to believe p transparently is to be prepared to contribute p to shared reasoning with others, and to self-ascribe the belief that p transparently is to make explicit that one would contribute p to shared reasoning. On this basis, we argue that understanding our normative epistemic relationships to other people is surprisingly fundamental to explaining distinctive features of knowledge of our own beliefs.