Three Transparency Claims Examined

This paper derives from Richard Moran’s work three different accounts of doxastic Transparency—roughly, the view that when a rational person wants to know whether she believes that p, she directs her attention to the truth value of p, not to the mental attitude she has vis-à-vis p. We investigate which of these is the most plausible of the three by discussing examples. We conclude that the most plausible account of Transparency is in tension with the motivation behind Transparency accounts: it is disconnected from the deliberative stance.