If You’re Happy, Clap Your Hands!

A traditional source of support for internalist norms involves the idea that they are uniquely capable of being first-personally followable or action-guiding. Recently, however, this traditional argument has been rejected on the grounds that one’s own internal mental states are not luminous or transparent, i.e. always knowable. I argue that this rejection is based on a mistake. Some mental states are directly available for cognitive processing, without the need for knowledge that one is in that state. I argue that this allows us to recognize a category of behaviour that is implicitly norm-governed, and that the traditional argument that internalist norms are uniquely action-guiding can thereby be vindicated.

Daniel Waxman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. Before coming to Singapore, he taught at Oxford and Lingnan, and received his PhD from New York University in 2017. His research is mostly in the philosophy of mathematics, logic, and epistemology.