AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

“First-person authority” refers, roughly, to the deference that we owe one another’s self-ascriptions of mental states in ordinary contexts. What justifies this deference? Here I argue for a pluralistic answer. I argue, first, that the hearer of a self-ascription is justified in deferring to the speaker in part because the speaker expresses her attitude to the hearer by self-ascribing it, and in part because the hearer inferentially determines the content of the attitude expressed by the speaker. I argue, second, that the hearer is justified in deferring to the self-ascriptions of young children because those children thereby express their mental states, whereas the hearer is justified in deferring to at least some self-ascriptions of older people because hearers recognize that more mature cognizers have the authority to self-determine at least some of their mental states through reflective reasoning. I argue, third, that an agent’s justification to regard her own self-ascription as first-person authoritative differs from the justification that others have to regard her self-ascription as such, and that this makes a difference for navigating contexts where one’s first-person authority is challenged.