Three Transparency Principles Examined

Abstract. 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 truthvalue
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 a number of (classes of)
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.