 Although both Finkelstein and Bar-On maintain that avowals may qualify as knowledge, providing an epistemology of self-knowledge is, for them, at most a peripheral goal. These views are concerned with avowals that issue directly from the states they express, in something like the way a dog's moaning issues directly from its pain. But to some critics, this spontaneous, reflexive quality of avowals—that they are not informed by evidence or reasoning—means that they cannot represent to the kind of epistemic achievement required for knowledge.