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Question If I read something I wrote long ago, am I engaged in a different sort of activity than reading something someone else wrote? What if I don't remember writing it?

Accepted:
October 5, 2005

Comments

Perhaps the best way to approach this question would be to ask: Inwhat ways is your epistemic situation different when you are readingsomething you wrote yesterday? We writers are in thissituation all the time. One of its dangers is that one can fail to recognizepotential ambiguities. Suppose I were to write: Fighting administrators can be distracting. I may know that what I meant was that administrators who are fighting can be distracting, and so the sentence just reads that way to me. But it is ambiguous: It could also mean that fighting with administrators can be distracting.

What the example shows is that, when one is reading something one wrote oneself, one has access to more (or at least different) information that someone elsewould, but it's not obvious that one has access to better informationthan others do.

Now, if you don't remember writing something, then presumably it is, to you, as if you didn't write it, though I suppose you might find yourself just understanding certain things, because they are the kinds of things you might say or think. But even if you do remember writing it, your situation will probably be different than it is when you're reading something you wrote yesterday. For those of us who've been doing philosophy a while, this situation is quite common. I can go back and read old papers of mine, and sometimes I find myself thinking, What on earth did I mean by that? (Embarrassment has even been known to set in.) I suppose that, in my attempt to figure that out, again, I have access to information to which others might not have access, but there is no guarantee that my information is better or more complete than theirs.

As an example, some years ago, I sat in on a seminar given by a famousphilosopher who was by then near retirement. During the seminar, hetalked about some papers that he had written some time before, in somecases, as much as thirty years before. I found some of the things he said about what he had "meant" in those papers completely unconvincing. I suppose he had come to see certain ideas he developed later as somehow latent in those papers. But frankly, it was a bad case of "reading in".

Question If I read something I wrote long ago, am I engaged in a different sort of activity than reading something someone else wrote? What if I don't remember writing it? Accepted:October 5, 2005

Question If I read something I wrote long ago, am I engaged in a different sort of activity than reading something someone else wrote? What if I don't remember writing it?

Accepted:
October 5, 2005