First Person Authority

Abstract

Abstract Attempts to explain the assumption that a speaker's sincere self‐attribution of propositional attitudes is justified, while such justification is lacking if the attribution is done by somebody else. By tracing the source of first‐person authority, the justification of such self‐attribution, to a necessary feature of language, Davidson offers both an original solution to the authority‐problem and an escape from sceptical solutions to the problem of other minds.