 Many contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and self-knowledge, accepting a modern variant of the assumptions of Cartesianism, are committed to the view that in using mental predicates, we (or the subject) attribute(s) to the subject a mental state or condition of which her subsequent behaviour is a causal, contingent manifestation. But once the assumption is made that mental verbs function to pick out such underlying states or events, then seemingly incompatible demands are placed upon these states and the traditional philosophical problem of self-knowledge is revealed. Construed as speaking from and expressing an occurrent state the speaker is authoritative; construed as speaking from or referring to a dispositional state she is not.