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At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the
special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about
our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. "Expression and the
Inner" contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy
of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority
because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion
of expression. Following what he takes to be a widely misunderstood
suggestion of Wittgenstein's, Finkelstein argues that we can make
sense of self-knowledge and first-person authority only by coming
to see the ways in which a self-ascription of, say, happiness (a
person's saying or thinking, "I'm happy this morning") may be akin
to a smile--akin, that is, to an expression of happiness. In so
doing, Finkelstein contrasts his own reading of Wittgenstein's
philosophy of mind with influential readings set out by John
McDowell and Crispin Wright. By the final chapter of this lucid
work, what's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge
and first-person authority, but also what it is that distinguishes
conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental
life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of
mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the
philosophy of mind.
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