We Know Better Than You Why You Did That!!   The Methodological Problem of Systematic Reinterpretation of First-Person Mental State Attributions

Mark Perlman
Western Oregon University

Psychological Egoism claims that all actions are motivated by self interest. It explains that people who believe their own motives to be unselfish are merely deceiving themselves. More generally, the theory allows itself to systematically reinterpret first-person evidence of mental state content in accordance with the psychological egoist theory. We can take advantage of this license to reinterpret to defend other theories of motivation, admittedly silly theories, but which contradict psychological egoism using the very same evidence it uses. Moreover, this systematic reinterpretation of mental states is a methodology present in many other, more widely held and respectable theories, including Freudian psychology, some radical feminist theories, Marxism, and evolutionary biology. They all make the same mistake in permitting systematic reinterpretation of first-person judgments of mental state content, and this is a serious problem which has ramifications for epistemology and deeply affects our judgments of the rationality of other people. Yet we still must acknowledge that we do not have incorrigible access to our own though contents. So this creates a dilemma-some reinterpretation seems warranted, but systematic reinterpretation is methodologically unsound and makes a theory non-empirical. I do not propose a solution of this dilemma, but rather to clearly identify the problem.