Self Knowledge and its Relationship with Rationality; Defending Richard Moran's Transparency Theory

We all have the intuition that self-knowledge is a special kind of knowledge that is distinct from the rest of our knowledge. The motivation of philosophers for addressing this issue as a philosophical issue is often the mentioned distinction. They have tried to explain the nature of this particular knowledge. Among their self-knowledge theories, rationalist theories have explained this particular knowledge based on its relation with rationality. According to them, rationality has an important relation to self-knowledge and to its distinctive nature. In this paper, after the general introduction of the rationalist theories in the debate of selfknowledge, we will analyze Moran's Transparency Theory as one of the most successful rationalist theories. After that, we will mention one of the most important challenges that this theory always faces, and then we will introduce and analyze an interesting solution that Boyle has suggested to solve this challenge and, in fact, to complete the Transparency Theory. Finally, we will mention some of the weaknesses of this solution and, ultimately, we will suggest two proposals to improve this solution and for the progress of the Transparency Theory.