The History of a Change of Mind: Why Thinking It Through Does Not Establish Authorship

Abstract

We ordinarily treat a change of mind we have thought through as ours — as something we did and can answer for. This paper argues that whether a revision is ours to answer for is settled not by how completely the operative framing is integrated into our present reasoning but by the authority-history of that framing: how the construal which fixed what counted as a reason came to hold its authority for the agent. A framing may be fully integrated — endorsed, reasons-responsive, reflectively stable, available for revision — and this whole present signature can be installed by manipulation that bypasses the agent, a case intrinsically identical to one in which she appropriated the frame herself. The two should differ in authorship because authorship, in the sense relevant to attributing a reconstruction as the agent’s own achievement, must preserve the distinction between actual appropriation and the installed signature of appropriation — a distinction present integration cannot represent, since the two agents are integration-duplicates. This is a functional claim, not a demonstration that the concept must be historical on pain of contradiction: a synchronic concept of authorship is coherent but inadequate to the work the concept is meant to do. For that purpose revisional authorship does not supervene on the agent’s intrinsic present psychological organisation; it tracks the history by which the framing became answerably hers. The paper takes the responsibility literature’s notion of answerability upstream — from judgments and attitudes to the authority of the framing under which they are formed — and sorts a framing’s standing history into appropriated, available but unappropriated, and foreclosed. A consequence it embraces is that much of what we reason under, seamlessly and rationally, was never appropriated, and so is genuinely ours to reason under without being ours to answer for: absence of a defeater does not by itself confer authorship. Its paradigmatic defeaters are motivated capture — recast as stake-driven impairment of a frame’s accessibility to assessment — and manipulative bypass. The account is substrate-neutral, and in closing it constrains the debate over ‘agentic AI’: neither fluency within a frame nor runtime self-revision establishes a system’s authorship of it. The history that matters is not the history of the change of mind but the history of the frame’s authority.