Moore’s Paradox and Doxastic Innocence

Abstract In this paper, I examine the comparison between two approaches usually employed to demonstrate the irrationality of Moore-paradoxical beliefs: (1) the introspectionist strategy, which locates its source in the failure of self-knowledge, and (2) the self-defeat strategy, which appeals to the fact that Moorean sentences cannot be both true and believed. I also introduce two criteria of choice: (1) ‘Generality’, which captures the idea that the proposed explanation should account for the rational unbelievability of all sentences we can intuitively classify as Moorean, and (2) ‘Doxastic Innocence’, which states that the preferred solution should make the weakest possible assumptions about epistemic rationality to meet the generality condition. I then demonstrate that we cannot show that two types of Moore-paradoxical sentences—anti-expertise equivalences and iterated Moorean conjunctions—are irrational given the self-defeat strategy’s implicit commitments vis-à-vis its picture of rationality. The introspectionist can, however, account for the rational unbelievability of these types of sentences by appealing to the “positive introspection” principle BB . I conclude that the introspectionist strategy has better prospects than the self-defeat strategy, as it allows for a more widely generalizable and uniform approach to epistemic and doxastic paradoxes.