Self-Consciousness, Transparency, and Privacy

In his essay "Transparency, Self-Consciousness, and Reflection", and in his book Transparency and Reflection, Boyle develops a solution to the problem of transparency according to which answers to suitable questions about the mind merely make explicit what is implicit in the modes of presentation contained in answers to associated questions about the world. Central both to this solution, and to Boyle's solution to a related problem ("the anti-egoist challenge"), is the idea that an answer to a question about the world contains a mode of presentation which itself contains "an implicit reference to [the] subject" whose answer it is - a first-person reference which is made explicit by the answer to the associated question about the mind. I suggest that this idea exposes Boyle's solution to a pitfall. For his solution to succeed, the relevant first-person reference needs to consist in a mode of presentation of the subject; but if this mode of presentation meets the standard Fregean specification, then it is private - and, as such, so is the mode of presentation in which it is contained: the privacy will spread, beyond the answers to the questions about the mind, to the answers to the associated questions about the world.