Still Optimistic About First-person Authority

There is an ongoing debate about whether any of us are “first-person authoritative” when ascribing mental states to ourselves, and, if so, whether this constitutes a genuine philosophical puzzle. This may come as a surprise, since philosophers have been trying to explain first-person authority for several decades. It would be surprising indeed if this explanatory project turned out to be entirely bankrupt. In this paper, after improving and elaborating on earlier specifications of the phenomenon, I argue that first-person authority is real and worthy of the philosophical attention it has received.