Abstract

The paper introduces a new puzzle about reflection—albeit one that is reminiscent of the famous paradox about inquiry in Plato’s Meno. We often make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. Our puzzle is that, on the one hand, coming to know what we are thinking seems to require finding words that would express our thought; yet, on the other hand, finding the words seems to require already knowing what we are thinking. I argue that the puzzle cannot be solved by accounting for the knowledge that we gain in such cases on the models of self-interpretation and self-constitution. The primary purpose of introducing the puzzle is to provide a tool for systematically investigating this category of non-interpretive and non-constitutive self-knowledge, and I conclude with some words about the scope of the category and the value of finding a solution.