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Like other direct realists, Thomas Reid offered an alternative to indirect realist and idealist accounts of perception. Reid's alternative aimed to preserve the indirect realist's commitment to realism about the objects of perception, and the idealist's commitment to the immediacy of the mind's relation to the objects of perception. Reid holds that what you perceive is mind independent or external; and your relation to such objects in perception is direct or immediate. In his own words, "something which is extended and solid, which may be measured and weighed, is the immediate object of my touch and sight. And this object I take to be matter, and not an idea" {IP II xi, 154).1

Authority and Estrangement addresses a set of questions about self-knowledge and seeks to answer them in the context of the broader differences between the first-person and third-person perspectives on oneself. Attention to these broader differences takes the discussion from epistemology to moral psychology, and seeks to relate some of the issues of contemporary philosophy of mind to the concerns with self-consciousness in post-Kantian thought. One question is simply: why should there be any differences at all between how a person knows his own mind and how he may know the mind of another person? Two such differences in particular have attracted philosophical attention. First, a person can typically know what he believes or intends or wants "immediately", that is, without appeal either to behavioral evidence or observations of any kind. Secondly, this independence of evidence appears to contribute to, rather than detract from, the authority with which first-person reports are delivered and received. So the book seeks to provide a unified account of the immediacy of ordinary self-knowledge and the special authority of first-person reports of attitudes and states of mind. In particular I try to account for the special importance of the capacity for self-knowledge, both for rationality and for psychic health in general. As the book progresses, this becomes a question concerning what importance there could be of the specifically first-personal access to one's beliefs and other attitudes, given that this is not the only way of learning such facts about oneself. If knowledge of one's own attitudes matters to rationality in various ways, why should it matter what particular form this access takes (i.e., the form associated with immediacy and first-person authority)? Chapter Two connects the special features of the first-person position with respect to knowledge or awareness of one's state of mind to a related difference made by the first-person characterization or description of one's state of mind. Philosophers have sometimes claimed that the person's own charac