Why Care About "God"?

The 93rd Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

Setiya On Intentional Action

In this blog post I wish to articulate what I take to be the primary objection to Kieran Setiya's account of intentional action, as described in the first half of his book, Reasons without Rationalism. I begin by adumbrating a few of my own commitments, followed by a summary of Setiya's position, and I conclude with critical remarks.

I hold that intentional action is prototypically goal-directed action. On this view, the type of goal-oriented behaviour a cat engages in when it stalks a bird counts as intentional. By contrast, purely reactive behaviour, such as when a cat reflexively withdraws its paws away from a sharp object, is non-intentional. In sum, I take it to be paradigmatic of intentional action that it is purposive rather than merely reactive.

My primary reason for adopting the present definition of ‘intentional action’—one that conceives of it in terms of goal-directed action—is my belief that it closely matches our quotidian conception. Ordinarily, we identify an agent’s intention with the aim, purpose or goal they have in mind when carrying out some action. Moreover, I maintain that an agent may perform an action with a certain goal in mind even if that agent does not (or cannot) conceive of that goal as such. To conceive of a goal as such requires that one possess and deploy the concept of a goal. Thus, an account of intentional action that requires that an agent conceive of their goal as such would preclude non-linguistic animals—that lack such concepts—from acting intentionally. By contrast, to have a goal in mind is to be aware of one’s goal in the same sense in which one may be aware of the content of one’s perceptual experience. Since non-linguistic animals may be aware of the content of their perceptual experiences, there is nothing in the present account of ‘having a goal in mind’ that precludes its application to non-linguistic animals.

My second reason for defining ‘intentional action’ in the way that I have is that it roughly corresponds with that of Anscombe in her landmark text, Intention. Admittedly, Anscombe is not committed to the claim that intentional action just is goal-directed action since she holds that an agent may act intentionally even though she has no goal or end in view. However, she does take goal-directed action as the paradigm case of intentional action, such that there would be no such thing as intentional action if we did not sometimes act with an end in view. This is a subtlety in Anscombe’s account that I cannot fully explore here. But it is sufficient for our present purpose to note that Anscombe and I agree with respect to there being a conceptual connection between intentional action and goal-directed action. Significantly, Anscombe and I both concur that one may correctly ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals. She puts the point as follows:

Since I have defined intentional action in terms of language—the special question ‘Why?’—it may seem surprising that I should introduce intention-dependent concepts with special reference to their application to animals, which have no language. Still, we certainly ascribe intention to animals. The reason is precisely that we describe what they do in a manner perfectly characteristic of the use of intention concepts. . . . the cat is stalking the bird in crouching and slinking along with its eye fixed on the bird and its whiskers twitching. . . . Just as we naturally say ‘The cat thinks there is a mouse coming’, so we also naturally ask: Why is the cat crouching and slinking like that? and give the answer: It’s stalking that bird; see, its eye is fixed on it. We do this, though the cat can utter no thoughts, and cannot give expression to any knowledge of its own action, or to any intention either.

Since Anscombe is the locus classicus of the contemporary discussion of intention, I take her usage of the term to have the greatest claim to philosophical orthodoxy. Of course, we may find the need to make adjustments to her conception along the way; but I think one can hardly go wrong (from a methodological point of view) in taking her as a starting point. Moreover, I will take Anscombe’s observation that we ordinarily ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals as a touchstone for determining whether or not a particular theorist is working with the philosophically orthodox conception of ‘intentional action’. My reasons for this are far from arbitrary. It rests on the thesis that those theorists who deny the ascription of intentions to non-linguistic animals are actually working with a very different concept (and are therefore talking about something quite different) to those who affirm such ascriptions. When this fact is combined with a certain lack of self-awareness with regards to the differences in the concepts being deployed, the upshot is that theorists on both sides are often simply talking past each other. The preceding claim is not one I can fully defend here; so a dogmatic statement of my position will have to suffice. However, the central criticism I will be advancing against Setiya in this post does not depend on the undefended assumption.

The conception of intentional action employed in this blog post—one that defines intentional action in terms of goal-directed action—differs from that of Setiya, who sees the two terms as picking out fundamentally different domains of agential activity. According to Setiya, an agent φs intentionally only if that agent has the higher-order desire-like belief that she is φing for a reason. Setiya’s requirement seems to build on Anscombe’s insight that “intentional actions are ones to which a certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application.” In specifying precisely what that sense is, Anscombe notes that “this question is refused application by the answer: ‘I was not aware I was doing that’.” Setiya takes this to suggest a conception of intentional action according to which an agent must know that she is performing a certain action in order to count as performing that action intentionally. (I will refer to this as the knowledge requirement for intentional action.) However, after considering Davidson’s example of the teacher who intends to make 10 copies, but is unsure if he is pressing hard enough to successfully do so, Setiya concludes that the knowledge requirement is too strong. The assumption seems to be that since there are times we do not know that we are successfully performing an action we are intentionally performing, such knowledge cannot be a necessary condition for intentional action. He therefore falls back to a belief requirement, according to which one acts intentionally only if one believes one is performing said action.

Setiya’s makes a second modification to Anscombe’s knowledge requirement. He claims that one not only believes that one is performing a certain action, but that one also believes that one is performing it for some specific consideration that one takes as one’s reason (insofar as one is performing it for a reason at all). This leads him to distinguish between two aspects of what it means to take the consideration that P as one’s reason to φ. The “practical” aspect involves a desire-like attitude towards the proposition: the consideration that P is my reason to φ. The attitude in question is “desire-like” in that it motivates one to φ. The “epistemic” aspect of taking the consideration that P as one’s reason is the non-observation based belief that the consideration that P is my reason to φ. The practical and epistemic aspects combine to form what Setiya refers to as a “desire-like belief”:

Taking something as my reason is a kind of “desire-like belief”. It is a belief-like representation of P as my reason to act, and at the same time a decision to act on that reason, something by which I am led to do so.

In order to avoid the charge of circularity, Setiya later modifies the content of the desire-like belief from the proposition: the consideration that P is my reason to φ, to the proposition: my belief that P is my reason to φ. In short, the desire-like belief is a second-order belief; it takes as its object the belief that P is one’s reason to φ.

In an astonishing display of pluck, Setiya describes his approach as a “simple psychological theory” (Italics mine), according to which “taking something as one’s reason is a matter of taking one’s belief in that reason to play a causal-motivational role in explaining one’s action”. Whatever the merits of such an account of intentional action, it is clear that it precludes the possibility that non-linguistic animals may act intentionally. The requirement that one believe that one’s belief that P is playing a “causal-motivational role in explaining one’s action” is not one that non-linguistic animals (and even a few philosophers) can meet. Moreover, Setiya’s account precludes the possibility that intentional action is prototypically goal-directed action since a wide range of goal-directed actions (e.g., those performed by non-linguistic animals and pre-linguistic human infants) involve no such second-order beliefs. This clearly puts Setiya at odds with the account of intentional action we find in Anscombe, and (therefore) out of step with what I have been calling the philosophically orthodox conception. I believe this represents a problem for Setiya’s account because when he criticises Anscombe and advocates of the belief-desire model for their accounts of intentional action, it is not clear that he is talking about the same thing as those he criticises.

More importantly, the fact that Setiya’s account of intentional action (1) denies the prototypical connection between intentional action and goal directed action, and (2) precludes the ascription of intentions to non-linguistic animals, suggests that his account is revisionary with respect to our quotidian conception. This presents Setiya with the following dilemma. On the one hand, if his account of intentional action is supposed to coincide with our ordinary usage of the term, then his theory implies that the vast majority of competent English speakers are simply mistaken when they ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals. This may of course be the case, but we would need very compelling reasons for thinking that this is so along with an error theory of some kind. Setiya provides neither. On the other hand, if his account is not supposed to coincide with our ordinary usage of the term, then the relevance of his account is called into question. Why should we be concerned with this new concept Setiya is attempting to introduce? Moreover, why does he risk confusing the reader by using the expression ‘intentional explanation’ to refer to this novel conception, without the least indication that he is using it in an unconventional way?

Bloom and Szabo Gendler on Aliefs

Reply to Holmen on Williamson

In his review of Jennifer Hornsby’s “Belief and Reasons for Acting”, Holmen briefly considers Williamson’s example of the burglar who persists in searching for a diamond in a house at great risk of being caught. Holmen takes the burglar example to establish the following claim:

[K]nowledge sometimes must figure in the best explanation for why some agent F-d. According to him [Williamson], attributions of knowledge may be a better predictor for determining someone’s actions by lending more probability to a certain way of conduct.

Roughly, the idea is supposed to be that the burglar’s persistence can only be satisfactorily explained by attributing him with knowledge. Consequently, it is alleged that knowledge attribution allows us to better explain or predict what the burglar would do.

In my previous post, I expressed reservations about whether Williamson’s burglar example establishes the conclusion Holmen claims it does. I consider the burglar’s psychophysical doppelgänger, who displays the same level of psychological conviction and engages in the same exact behaviour, but who nevertheless lacks knowledge because his belief has been rendered false by a highly improbably quantum occurrence. I maintain that so long as we keep his level of psychological conviction the same as that of the original burglar, we are equally able to explain (i.e., make sense of) and predict his behaviour. The upshot is that knowledge attribution is not necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the burglar’s conduct. What knowledge attribution adds (if anything at all) is not explanatory or predictive power, but rather a justificatory dimension—it helps us to understand why the burglar who has knowledge was justified in his conduct.

In his follow-up post, "Knowledge in Explanation: A reply to Avery Archer", Holmen attempts to sidestep my criticism by arguing that the fact that we can explain an agent’s conduct even when she lacks knowledge does not undermine the claim that knowledge is sometimes necessary for explaining or predicting an agent’s conduct. His point seems to be that, at best, my argument shows that something other than knowledge can explain or cause the burglar’s conduct. Even so, I have not shown that knowledge is not the explanation or cause of the agent’s behaviour in the particular example Williamson posits. Holmen summarises what is problematic about my argument as follows:

Avery's case is more like saying that "Shakespeare did not write Macbeth since there is a doppelgänger case where Macbeth gets written but by Marlowe." And even granted the presence of such a case Shakespeare surely wrote Macbeth and is the cause of Macbeth's existence. Likewise, there could be dozens of cases where the burglar acts in the same way but for other reasons than that he knew P. They say nothing whatsoever about whether Kp is the cause in our case for his behaviour.

However, it seems to me that Holmen mischaracterises the dialectical context in which my objection to the burglar example is articulated. He depicts my argument as attempting to establish a positive conclusion when the conclusion it seeks to establish is purely negative. This point may be illustrated by considering the following single-premise argument:

(1) The biological complexity we observe can only be satisfactorily explained by the existence of a Divine designer

(2) Therefore, there is a Divine designer

We may effectively refute (1)-(2) if it could be shown that:

(1*) The biological complexity we observe can be satisfactorily explained by natural selection.

If true, (1*) impugns (1)-(2) by revealing (1) to be false. However, (1*) only establishes the negative conclusion that (1)-(2) fails to establish its conclusion. It is not (nor should it be taken to be) a positive argument showing that (2) is false. For example, the following is clearly a bad argument:

(1*) The biological complexity we observe can be satisfactorily explained by natural selection.

(2*) Therefore, there is no Divine designer.

The lesson is that the same consideration can be effective in a negative argument (i.e., one intended to show that a specific argument fails to establish its conclusion) but ineffective in a positive argument against that same conclusion. It is therefore important to get clear on the aim of an argument (whether it is negative or positive) before one can evaluate its cogency. Since my objection only targets the efficacy of Williamson’s burglar argument it is clearly a negative argument.

Now Holmen’s point seems to be that my claim that beliefs are equally able to explain or predict an agent’s conduct does not entail that knowledge is not a cause. This is of course true if one assumes that I am offering a positive argument in which the conclusion “knowledge is not a cause” is supposed to directly follow from the claim that “things besides knowledge may also be causes”. But to construe my argument along these lines would be to overlook the dialectical fact that I am simply challenging one of the premises in Williamson’s argument (i.e., a purely negative endeavor). To see that this is so, we may summarise Williamson’s burglar example in terms of the following single-premise argument:

(3) The burglar’s conduct can only be satisfactorily explained by attributing him with knowledge.

(4) Therefore, knowledge is sometimes necessary for a satisfactory explanation of an agent’s conduct.

What Williamson’s burglar example alleges to show is that there are certain kinds of conduct (such as the burglar's persistence in the face of countervailing evidence) that simply cannot be satisfactorily explained without attributing knowledge to the relevant agent. (In this regard, his argument is analogous to the creationist who insists that a Divine designer is the only satisfactory explanation of the observed biological complexity.) Construed along these lines, all one needs to do in order to impugn Williamson’s argument is to show that the very same conduct can be satisfactorily explained without attributing knowledge. Since the agent’s conduct is one of the things that is held fixed between the burglar and his doppelgänger, then our ability to explain the doppelgänger’s conduct without attributing knowledge to him shows that knowledge attribution is not necessary to satisfactorily explain or predict the original burglar’s conduct. Thus, we arrive at my counterclaim:

(3*) The burglar’s conduct can be satisfactorily explained by attributing to him a belief with the appropriate level of psychological conviction.

If true, (3*) shows that (3)-(4) fails to establish its conclusion by revealing (3) to be false.

Humanity's Primate Heritage

Dilworth's Functional Consonance

In his paper, “Perception, Introspection and Functional Consonance”, Dilworth attempts to provide a broadly functionalist account of first-person authority with respect to how things perceptually seem to an agent. The account is functionalist in the sense that it individuates cognitive states in terms of their role in the aetiology of a disposition to engage in a certain kind of classification behaviour. For example, if I perceive that X is red or I believe X is red, then my perceiving or believing are to be unpacked in terms of my disposition to sort X as red in the relevant classification task (i.e., to engage in red-classification behaviour). When my perceptual experience and belief match in terms of classification behaviour, they are said to be “consonant” with each other. Moreover, Dilworth holds that in any given situation, S, it is logically impossible for an agent to be disposed to behave in two mutually exclusive ways in response to S. It follows that if an agent has both a perceptual experience and belief in response to a given situation, the experience and belief must be consonant with each other. This leads Dilworth to postulate what he refers to as the “perceptual consonance principle”:

(PCP): If one is having at time t a perceptual experience concerning the F-ness of X, and if at that same time t one is also having a perceptually derived belief concerning the F-ness of X, then the experience and the belief must be consonant with each other.

Unfortunately, it is possible to construct a counterexample to (PCP). Consider a case in which an agent is given the task of classifying objects as straight or bent. Moreover, let us suppose that the agent is unfamiliar with the phenomenon of refraction. Looking at a partially submerged stick the agent has the visual experience of the stick being bent. Given Dilworth’s dispositional model, this entails that the agent is disposed to classify the stick as bent. Suppose further that the agent slides her fingers down the length of the stick, giving rise to the tactile experience of the stick being straight. By Dilworth’s lights, this entails that the agent is disposed to classify the stick as straight. Since it is possible for the agent to have the visual experience that the partially submerged stick as bent (at time t) and have the tactile experience of it being straight (at t), it follows that an agent may be simultaneously disposed to engage in conflicting classification behaviours. Furthermore, we can imagine that the agent forms the perceptually derived belief that the stick is straight (based on her tactile experience). In such a case, the agent would have a perceptual experience concerning the shape of the stick (a la sight) and a perceptually derived belief concerning the shape of stick (a la touch), without the experience and belief being consonant with each other.

UPSHOT: What must be added to (PCP) is a restriction to a single sensory modality, and not simply a restriction to a given time or situation. However, as far as the paper under consideration is concerned, Dilworth fails to provide us with the theoretical tools we need for such a restriction.

Dilworth appears to anticipate this objection in his discussion of the Muller-Lyer illusion; a case in which a pair of equal vertical lines (A and B below) appear to have different lengths.

According to Dilworth, one can be said to perceive the lines as being of different lengths because one is temporarily disposed to classify them as such. However, this perceptual disposition is quickly displaced by one’s prior belief that the lines are actually the same length. Moreover, Dilworth points out that this offers no counterexample to his claim that there cannot be conflicting perceptual dispositions since the “relevant knowledge that the lines are actually the same length is clearly not a belief that is perceptually acquired...” He summarises the point as follows:

[W]hat we have in such cases is not a conflict of perceptual dispositions—which has already been shown to be, strictly speaking, impossible—but instead a refusal by a perceiver to believe what she would otherwise believe on ‘the evidence of her own eyes’, so that the temporary or initial consonant belief that the lines are of different lengths is rejected in favour of a longer-term belief based on prior knowledge.[1] (Italics mine)

CAVEAT: Insofar as Dilworth’s functionalist analysis commits him to the thesis that being disposed to engage in classification behaviour is a necessary condition for perception, his claim that one is only “temporarily” disposed to engage in the relevant classification behaviour already concedes too much. If one perceives that X is F only if one is disposed to engage in F-classification behaviour with respect to X, then the point at which one ceases to be so disposed one also ceases to have the perceptual experience in question. However, in the case of a Muller-Lyer illusion, the agent continues to have the perceptual experience of the lines being different lengths even after she is no longer disposed to classify them as such.

Putting aside the above caveat, Dilworth’s treatment of the Muller-Lyer illusion case fails to generalise to that of the partially submerged stick. In the latter the conflict is not between a perceptual experience and a prior belief (as is plausibly the case in the Muller-Lyer illusion), but rather between two conflicting perceptual experiences. In fact, we can imagine a modified partially submerged stick example in which the agent fails to form a belief altogether. We may suppose that, confronted with conflicting perceptual experiences, the agent simply decides to remain agnostic as to whether the stick is straight or bent. (Recall, we have assumed that the agent is unfamiliar with, and therefore has no prior beliefs about, the phenomenon of refraction.) However, even if the agent were to decide to withhold belief altogether, she may still continue to enjoy both sets of conflicting perceptual experiences. Thus, unlike the Muller-Lyer case, the partially submerged stick example presupposes no competing beliefs or knowledge.

It is important to get clear on why this poses a problem for Dilworth’s account. The problem is not that the partially submerged stick case threatens to undermine Dilworth’s claim that any given perceptual experience may be accompanied by a corresponding consonant belief. Since Dilworth wishes to defend the claim that a belief about how things seem to one must be consonant with the corresponding perceptual experience (if one were to form such a belief at all), the mere fact that such a consonant belief is absent (as we may suppose it is in the partially submerged stick case) is no counterexample to the functional consonance thesis. (On at least this much, Dilworth and I agree.) Moreover, I hold that if the agent were to form beliefs about both her visual and tactile experiences, then each respective belief would be consonant with the corresponding perceptual experience. This is something I believe Dilworth would also wish to say; though I maintain that he is not entitled to do so until he has filled in the gap described by Upshot. However, this is not the worry I presently wish to press.

Instead, the present worry has to do with Dilworth’s claim that in any given situation, S, it is logically impossible for an agent to be disposed to engage in mutually exclusive classification behaviours in response to S. Insofar as he is also committed to the claim that an agent perceives that X is F only if that agent is disposed to engage in F-classification behaviour with respect to X, then the partially submerged stick example shows that an agent may be disposed to classify the same object as both bent and straight. Dilworth must therefore either give up the claim that it is logically impossible to have conflicting perceptual dispositions or the claim that being disposed towards classification behaviour (of the relevant kind) is a necessary condition for perception.

Another tempting (but ultimately unsuccessful) response available to Dilworth is to argue that the partially submerged stick example is an instance of a “mixed case”; one “in which several properties are simultaneously perceived, each of which would require its own separate experience versus belief consonance analysis.” The example that Dilworth provides is that of perceiving an object as being a certain colour (with one sensory modality) and perceiving it as having a certain shape (with another sensory modality). Regarding such mixed cases Dilworth maintains there cannot be any conflict:

Now arguably mixed cases of simultaneous perception of different properties would always be cases involving properties falling under different determinable, since one could not simultaneously perceive an object both to have determinate colour F1 and also to have a distinct determinate colour F2.

The above observations may be perfectly correct as far as they go, but they fail to address the issue at hand. Recall, the objection with which this post is concerned is not directed against the notion of experience/belief consonance per se (to which I am sympathetic), but against the conjunction of the claims that (a) it is logically impossible to have two conflicting dispositions and (b) that being disposed to engage in classification behaviour is a necessary condition for perceiving that X is F. Dilworth fails to consider cases in which different sensory modalities present an agent with conflicting information with respect to the same property. The partially submerged stick example is one such case; an instance in which both the visual and tactile sensory modalities provide information about an object’s shape. Thus, unlike the mixed cases that he considers, the partially submerged stick example appears to be a genuine instance in which Dilworth is forced to either (a) acknowledge that an agent may be simultaneously disposed to engage in conflicting classification behaviours or (b) give up on the idea that being disposed to engage in the classification behaviour is a necessary condition for perception.

Littlejohn and Comesana on Epistemic Justification

Reply to Holmen on Hornsby

I wish to respond to Heine Holmen’s very insightful analysis of Jennifer Hornsby’s paper, “Knowledge, Belief and Reasons for Acting”. Since Holmen already does a fine job adumbrating Hornsby’s position (see here), I will skip the summary and jump right into the analysis.

Let me begin by laying my philosophical cards on the table. I am very sympathetic with Hornsby’s claim that knowledge is a reason for acting. However, I believe Hornsby’s account suffers because of her failure to distinguish between (what may be referred to as) explanatory and justificatory reasons. Explanatory reasons (or what I sometimes prefer to call “motive-giving explanations”) have to do with our attempt to make sense of or explain the purposive activity of intentional agents (rational and non-rational alike). By contrast, justificatory reasons have to do with our attempt to ascertain whether or not the actions of an intentional agent are rationally recommended (and is therefore only applicable to agents with rational capacities). Both explanatory and justificatory reasons are normative (since they both allow for the possibility of error); but while the former answers to a why question (vis-a-vis the actions of any intentional agent) the latter answers to a should question (vis-a-vis the actions of a rational agent).

Note: I define a rational agent as an intentional agent with linguistic abilities.

According to Hornsby, “acting for reasons does not come into play unless the agent has knowledge” (I am here quoting Holmen’s summary of Hornsby’s position). Here, Hornsby clearly has justificatory reasons in mind, for we often are able to make perfect sense of the actions of agents who act from mere belief (including false ones) rather than knowledge. For example, suppose I’m playing catch with my dog in the park. I pretend to throw the ball, and the dog runs over to the place where the ball would have landed (had I thrown it) and proceeds to investigate the location(sniffing around without success). I can explain or make sense of the dog’s behaviour by observing that the dog believes that I threw the ball. The fact that I did not throw the ball (and that the dog’s belief is therefore false) does nothing to undermine my ability to explain the dog’s actions. Thus, as far as explanatory reasons are concerned, I am perfectly capable of making sense of the dog’s actions by simply referring to the dog’s beliefs. No recourse to talk of knowledge is required (in fact, since we are talking about a non-linguistic animal, some would argue that talk of knowledge is not even appropriate). Finally, it is worth emphasising that since there are correctness conditions attaching to the dog’s behaviour (i.e., the dog get’s things wrong when it believes I threw the ball), such explanations remain normative in nature. (I am here assuming that the possibility of getting things wrong is necessary and sufficient for normativity.) Thus, we arrive at my earlier claims that explanatory reasons do not require knowledge, are normative, and can be applied to non-linguistic animals.

If I am right, then Hornsby’s requirement that acting for reasons implicates knowledge is limited to justificatory reasons. Consequently, she errs by assuming that what may be a perfectly good point (i.e., that having a justificatory reason for acting requires knowledge) applies to explanatory reasons as well. Holmen observes Hornsby’s indebtedness to Williamson on precisely this score:

Hornsby seems to start out by picking up a clue from Williamson’s suggestion (2000, p. 62) that knowledge sometimes must figure in the best explanation for why some agent F-d. According to him, attributions of knowledge may be a better predictor for determining someone’s actions by lending more probability to a certain way of conduct. The intuitive example is the rational burglar who risks a lot by searching the whole building for a valuable diamond.

Holmen goes on to summarise what he takes to be the upshot of Williamson’s burglar example:

The only way to understand why a burglar would take such a risk is, according to Williamson, by attributing her with the knowledge that the diamond is in the building. Otherwise it would be hard to explain why she apparently disregards evidence to the contrary—i.e. as the time goes and her search is not successful—on pain of diminishing her rationality (like declaring her to be just plain stubborn, insensitive to evidence etc.).

I am sceptical about the above argument. It seems to me that what is really doing the work in the burglar example is the certainty or conviction with which the relevant beliefs are held, rather than the fact that the beliefs are true (or, a fortiori, that the agent has knowledge). First, consider the burglar’s psycho-physical doppelganger who is just as convinced that there is a diamond in the building (based on the same body of evidence), but does not have knowledge because (unknown to him) a ridiculously improbably quantum occurrence has transformed the diamond into a block of coal. We would not expect the behaviour of the doppelganger to diverge from that of his twin just because his justified belief turns out (quite improbably) to be false. In short, if we stipulate that the level of certainty is identical in both cases, this is sufficient to explain or make sense of why each respective burglar persists in his search for the diamond. It seems to me that the fact that in one case the justified belief happens to be false (thus baring the agent of knowledge) in no way reduces our ability to make sense of or explain the agent’s behaviour.

It may be objected that while we can still make sense of or explain the doppelganger’s actions in light of his firm conviction, we would also be inclined to regard him as rationally irresponsible for having such a firm conviction, given that he lacks knowledge. But even if we grant that this is so (and I have my misgivings) the question is no longer one of making sense or explaining why the burglar did what he did. Instead, it has become one of his rational standing. In other words, this is to switch our focus from one of motivation (why did he do what he did) to one of justification (is he justified in doing what he did). Since belief-desire explanations (as I understand them) are only concerned with the former, the burglar argument is simply changing the subject of debate. A similar point can be made with regards to Hornsby’s knowledge requirement. Hornsby endorses the following claim:

(E) Where ‘x Φ-d because p’ gives a reason-explanation: x Φ-d because p iff x Φ-d because x knew that p.

On the view I have been urging, (E) is true so long as we understand a “reason-explanation” as a justificatory rather than explanatory explanation. Since the latter (but not the former) is a necessary condition for intentional explanation, the truth of (E) is irrelevant to the type of intentional explanation that the belief-desire theorist is concerned with. Holmen, however, advances a slightly different criticism of (E)—namely, that it entails a version of the KK principle:

I think I see a problem with (E): it seems to be a version of the KK principle and thus leads one to the absurd consequence that follows when one applies an S4 model for the accessibility relation that operates on the epistemic operator.

However, it is not clear that (E) entails any such control principle. For example, consider a rudimentary reliabilist account of knowledge; one according to which the naive chicken-sexer counts as knowing the sex of the chicks she reliably sorts. Let us suppose further that the naive chicken-sexer, being naive, does not know that she knows the sex of the chicks. In short, her knowledge is strictly of the first order. According to (E), if the naive chicken-sexer sorts some male chick M as male because she knows that M is male, then she sorts M as male for a reason. This remains true even though she does not know that she knows the sex of the chick. Thus, (E) does not entail the KK principle.

In summary, while I share both Holmen’s sympathy for and critical attitude towards Hornsby’s knowledge requirement for reasonable action, I do so for very different reasons. I believe Hornsby’s analysis goes wrong due to a conflation of explanatory and justificatory reasons. While Hornsby’s claims may be be true of justificatory reasons, they are not true of the type of explanatory reasons that constitute the bread and butter of the belief-desire theorist. Moreover, I have argued that Holmen’s primary objection to Hornsby’s theory—i.e., that it commits her to an implausible KK principle—misses its mark.

The 91st Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

Dilworth's Propositional Indexing

In his paper, “Semantics naturalised: Propositional indexing plus interactive perception”, John Dilworth advocates a propositional indexing view according to which cognitive states (understood as concrete causal occurrences) enjoy an isomorphic correspondence with propositions (understood as abstract truth-value bearing items). Maintaining such an isomorphism requires that we have some method for indexing a given proposition (such as the proposition “X is red”, with respect to some worldly object X) with a corresponding perceptual or cognitive state (such as an agent Z perceiving that X is red).

This method, whatever it may be, may be identified with the specific epistemic conditions under which we would accept that the isomorphism in question holds. Moreover, Dilworth maintains that the epistemic conditions must be ones that can be met by individuals without any technical or specialised scientific knowledge. After all, it is part of our folk psychological practice to describe the contents of perceptual and cognitive states in propositional terms. This imposes the constraint that the method for indexing propositions to cognitive states must be one which is available to everyone, including those lacking any specialised philosophical or technical expertise. Dilworth puts the point as follows:

Our understanding of propositional indexing is not intended to be restricted to specialised cognitive science procedure requiring technical expertise and detailed knowledge of such matters as the cognitive structures involved in perceptual functioning. Instead, the idea is that the everyday understanding by people in general, of when a particular proposition, such as “X is red” is true of a particular object X is to be correlated with a related understanding by such people of what kinds of behavioural evidence would justify a claim that the person had indeed correctly perceived the relevant fact. So the predominant epistemic issue is not the theoretical nature of propositional indexing as such, but rather the everyday conditions under which people in general would agree that it had successfully occurred.

Dilworth recommends that propositional indexing be unpacked in terms of classification behaviour:

For example, a paradigm kind of colour-related classification behaviour would be that of a person assigned a task of sorting some miscellaneous objects by their colour, and then putting object X into a box containing only red objects. This classification behaviour would provide evidence that the person P had perceived that object X was red. Consequently, if the person Q observing person P is considering the proposition that X is red, then Q would take person P’s classification as evidence that P had perceived that X is red, and hence that P’s relevant perceptual state S, whatever it may be, is indexed by the proposition ‘X is red’.

Significantly, Dilworth describes propositional indexing in third- rather than first-personal terms. This suggests a view according to which an agent’s cognitive state may be described as propositional just in case it is, in principle, possible for that cognitive state to be correlated with a proposition. However, the act of identifying the correlation need not be performed by the agent that is actually undergoing the cognitive state in order for the cognitive state to count as propositional. One upshot of this view is that the cognitive states of non-linguistic animals, which lack the ability to actually engage in propositional indexing, may nevertheless count as having propositional attitudes.

Dilworth’s observations about colour-related classification behaviour generalises to less overt types of classification behaviour. For example, a dog may be said to perceive a bone is edible just in case it is disposed to ingest the bone. Ingesting the bone, then, amounts to a type of classification behaviour (akin to the act of sorting bones into the set of edible items). Since the heuristic of classification behaviour is understood in dispositional terms, it is not necessary that the ingesting of the bone actually take place for the dog to count as perceiving that the bone is edible. Moreover, since a dog may engage in such classification behaviour without us having to attribute to the dog the concepts of “bone” or “edible”, the present account does not require concept possession as a prerequisite for having an agent’s perceptual state indexed by a proposition.

There is much that I find attractive in Dilworth’s framework. Specifically, I believe it provides the resources for an account of propositional attitudes that allows for such attitudes to be attributed to non-linguistic animals. (Admittedly, Dilworth may be reluctant to speak of propositional attitudes in this way, but that would only be because of his refusal to attribute semantic content to cognitive states in general and not because of any prejudice against such attributions in the case of non-linguistic animals. In short, both Dilworth and I agree in the even-handedness of our treatment of the cognitive states of linguistic and non-linguistic animals.) However, I want to conclude this post by highlighting a minor problem in Dilworth’s account of perceptual states.

Dilworth is committed to what he refers to as an "interactive theory of perception", the considered version of which he puts as follows:

IP2: An organism Z perceives an item X to have the property of being F just in case X causes some sense-organ zi of Z to cause Z to acquire an X-related disposition D, such that D is an F-classification disposition.

Dilworth defines an F-classification dispositions as “a disposition, the manifestation of which is some F-classification behaviour. For example, on this account, to perceive that an object X is red is to acquire a disposition to classify object X in some red-related way.”

However, it is not clear that IP2 can accommodate cases in which an agent perceives things to be a certain way and yet fails to believe that things are that way. For example, suppose that I am led to believe (erroneously) that a room is equipped with special lighting that makes all the white objects in the room appear red. (However, there is no special lighting and all objects in the room are actually the colour they appear to be.) Due to my misinformation, I am disposed to sort all objects that appear red into the white box. According to IP2, it follows from my having this disposition that I do not perceive that the objects are red. But this gets things wrong. The thing to say is that I perceive the object as red, but I believe it is white. Consequently, IP2 is unable to accommodate cases in which the two—perceiving X is F and believing X is F—come apart.

What Lemmings Believe

Toronto Graduate Student Conference

Action, Agency and Explanation
May 8-9, 2009
Keynote: John McDowell, University of Pittsburgh

Friday, May 8, 2009

8:00-9:00:

Breakfast

9:00-10:00:

“A Plea for Practices”,
Octavian A. Busuioc (Queen’s)
Commentary by Alexander Shoumarov

10:15-11:15:

“Naturalism and Moral Skepticism”,
Brian Ballard (UC, Santa Cruz)
Commentary by Kyle Menken

11:15-12:45:

Lunch

12:45-1:45:

“A Dilemma for Setiya’s Virtue Theory of Reasons”,
Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (UC, Riverside)
Commentary by Mark Schranz

2:00-3:00:

“Agency, Self-Knowledge and Functionalism”,
Ariel Zylberman (Toronto)
Commentary by G. Anthony Bruno

3:15-5:00:

Keynote: “What is the Content of an Intention in Action?”,
John McDowell (Pittsburgh)

5:30-7:30:

Reception at the Faculty Club

Saturday, May 9, 2009

8:00-9:00:

Breakfast

9:00-10:00:

“Thomson’s Turn, Dual Process Theories of Moral Judgment and the Epistemic Status of Ethical Intuitions”,
Mark S. Makin (Yale)
Commentary by Steven Zylstra

10:15-11:15:

“Dewey on Thinking and Acting”,
Christopher Collins (Virginia)
Commentary by Diana Heney

11:30-12:30:

“The Epistemology of Embodied Action”,
Andreas Elpidorou (Boston)
Commentary by Kenneth Boyd

12:30-2:00:

Lunch

2:00-3:00:

“Desires as Sub-Agential Evaluations of the Good”,
Avery Archer (Columbia)
Commentary by Chris Langston

6:30:

Conference Dinner

See conference website here.

The 90th Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

Wittgenstein on the Essence of Grammar (Adam See)

In the early notes and lectures entitled The Blue Book that would eventually make up the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein claims that human beings have an inherent “craving for generality” [Blue Book, 20]– that there is something natural in the disposition of mature human beings to seek the essence of things. In the Investigations Wittgenstein continues this line of thought claiming that modern man is “dazzled by the ideal” and – as we recall from Katie’s presentation last week – “seduced” into thinking that an analyzed form of language is essential to our understanding of its ultimate machinations. This word “essence” occurs frequently in sections 65-137 and many commentators (Stanley Cavell, David Bloor, and G.E.M. Anscombe among them) have written that how Wittgenstein deals with this issue constitutes the drive of his later philosophy.

In this blog post, I will be offering a reading of the Investigations to the effect that Wittgenstein’s response to those seeking an “essence” to language leads to what has been called his “linguistic idealism.” From this idea, I believe that the concept of “family resemblance” may be unpacked and clearly differentiated from that of “universals”. I hope that what I have to say about these things will stimulate discussion on some tricky issues in Wittgenstein’s thought.

Section 65 of the Investigations marks an inward turn in the trajectory of the text. Wittgenstein’s interlocutor accuses him of talking about various “sorts” of language games, but never saying “what is common to all these activities” – or, what is the “essence” of language games. Throughout the proceeding sections Wittgenstein responds to various demands for an “ideal” of, and “form” of, language. Further in the text – section 371 – Wittgenstein finally claims that “essence is expressed by grammar.” I would like to rephrase this statement into a question, and ask, “How does grammar express essence?” –or, rather, how does grammar essence? I am here taking Heidegger’s claim that “language essences” – that “essence” should be seen as a verb when speaking of language. I think this is what Wittgenstein is implying when he writes essence is expressed by grammar, namely that language does not latch on to independent “essences” in the world – meaning universals – but rather that language is “self-referential”, entailing that linguistic practices are utilized and authorized by linguistic practices.

In a famous essay entitled “The Question of Linguistic Idealism” Anscombe argues that in Wittgenstein’s philosophy ‘language does not reflect an independent reality, but rather creates what it refers to;’ that when we think we are referring to something in the world (whether an object or an act) we are in fact referring to semantic concepts generated through linguistic practices. There is no truth or meaning inherent in the world; we construct it ourselves and then refer to it as objective reality – this is what Anscombe means by the self-referential character of language. She claims that there is an “active, creative element in concept formation.” I interpret this “creative” element – in line with Heidegger’s thought – as possessing an active quality only in the subconscious – that for all intents and purposes it appears to us as a passive quality. Heidegger claimed that the way an individual or group of individuals determine the essence of a particular object is by selecting from a series of infinite properties a subset that matters to us or concerns us most in relation to how we are disposed towards the world. That way certain properties are salient while others seem trivial. Something thus essences when it moves us or concerns us. Take for example a brick of gold, which may be mere building material to a people living in an environment that abounds with it, or of the utmost value to those for whom it is a rarity. Wittgenstein’s chess piece example works as well – it is a block of wood for a child, perhaps for building, and a piece in a game for others.

Hans Gadamer, taking from Heidegger, expressed this idea as follows: “In truth, the illusion that things precede their manifestation in language conceals the fundamentally linguistic character of our experience of the world.” (Nietzsche expresses a similar view in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense where he claims that reality as we know it is merely a plethora of arbitrary metaphors generated by arbitrary concepts). Wittgenstein uses the word “illusion” – Täuschungen – himself in a similar context in section 110 where he mocks the philosopher’s statement, “Language (or thought) is something unique” to which he claims that “this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions.” The grammatical “illusions” here are explained in the next section as stemming from philosophical problems that are misinterpreted as having depth – meaning that they speak of the form or essence of language – this being an illusion and a “grammatical joke.” The claim that language is something unique is not a “mistake” because it is true, however it is a superstition and an illusion to think that this claim expresses its essence.

Section 119 expresses this point more clearly: “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.” The point as I see it is this: we cannot rupture the everyday semantics of language to find some underlying structure – this is a superstition –, but if we try (as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus) we realize that language is in fact self-referential. The “limitations” of language do not designate some impenetrable bulwark to logical structure (like in a pseudo-Kantian idealism), but rather demonstrate a necessary circularity inherent in self-referential linguistic practice. David Bloor claims that for Wittgenstein our semantics are circular in the sense that “essences can be created in the course of being expressed,” and if this is the case, “what is it that is being expressed, if it is the expression which does the creating?”[Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, 356] This may sound convoluted; the point is simply this: there is no foundation for “essence” to latch on to since essence is both expressed and created at the same time; essence is created via self-referential activity. The reality expressed by the activity of essencing consists in precisely the practices of invoking that reality. Language is performative for Wittgenstein, and this means that language does not find essence in world, but instead in the performance of itself.

Bloor claims that this isn’t a vicious circularity, but rather just an enclosed system.[Ibid.] I think that part of the reason we find this initially confusing is ironically because we possess what Wittgenstein describes as that seduction of foundationalism that I mentioned at the outset. In section 107 Wittgenstein takes on a semi-Nietzschean tone in writing, “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to rough ground!” This force that the philosopher feels, that demands a foundation to build up from is what Wilfred Sellars would later call the “myth of the given” and what J. L. Austin called “the pursuit of the incorrigible” – both claiming that there are no such things as non-inferential beliefs.

By this Wittgenstein and his followers do not mean that particulars in language find their meaning by linguistic “universals” though. In section 101 Wittgenstein speaks of the idea that “absorbs” us – that there “must” be something in common between certain concepts that allows us to speak of them as such – games, rules, conventions, or even colors and shapes. Section 100 tells us not to be “dazzled by the ideal,” and section 97 directs us away from the “illusion of the profound;” this leads to Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances,” which I believe can be understood in just this self-referential framework. I think that the notion of family resemblance is absolutely crucial to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

In The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell writes that, “all the idea of family resemblances is meant to do, or need do, is to make us dissatisfied with the idea of universals as explanations of language, of how a word can refer to this and that and that other thing, to suggest that it fails to meet ‘our real need’. Once we see that the [very] expression ‘what is common’ has ordinary uses, and that these are different from what universals are meant to cover; and, more importantly, see that concepts do not usually have, and do not need ‘rigid limits’.”[Claim of Reason, 187] I think that Cavell is absolutely correct that the notion of spotting a family resemblance and then expressing the commonality of two things is not “an alternative to the idea of ‘essence’,” nor does it directly counter the idea of universals, but rather demonstrates “…that I know no more about the application of a word or concept than the explanations I can give, so that no universal or definition would, as it were, represent my knowledge – once we see all this, the idea of a universal no longer has its obvious appeal, it no longer carries a sense of explaining something profound.”[Ibid, 188] So making salient a family resemblance is a move in a language game; there are no more “profound illusions” to be sought because all such concepts are relative, contextual, many-faceted and historically evolving, and therefore unable to be universalized or declared as an essence.

Since language itself essences, the essence of language is not “hidden from us” as Wittgenstein’s interlocutor declares in section 92, but is instead always in plain sight! We are, remember, not speaking of essence as a noun, but as a performative verb. The “essence” of a “game” then is (1) its self-referring character, and (2) its performative aspect as a “form of life.” What makes a game a game is that it is played or performed in reference to itself – to the parameters and rules that are agreed on by all. Family resemblances are totally unlike universals in that they draw their own boundaries. For example, the essence of gift-giving – as Wittgenstein describes in section 268 – is not achieved by passing an object from one hand to the other, but what makes all occurrences of gift-giving similar is that gifts are given ­as gifts – that there is a moral component in the “spirit” (as we recall from section 36) of the performance.

So if Wittgenstein’s thought is fueled by the self-referential circularity of linguistic idealism – which I believe to be the case – then it can be ultimately described as follows: Wittgenstein does not deny that there is an independent or material reality that we can interact with; the claim is that this reality has no semantic content outside of language – that we understand it as reality only as it is acted out through linguistic practice. The essence of this reality is simply that which we give it in our everyday thoughts and activities. To not see this initially does not surprise Wittgenstein, for as he writes in section 103: “[The idea of the ideal] is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at, [yet] it never occurs to us to take them off.”

Mommy's Little Hack

Columbia Philosophy Colloquia

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

ALISON SIMMONS
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

“Cartesian Consciousness Revisited”

Thursday, April 23, 4:10-6:00 PM
716 Philosophy Hall

Reception will follow

Wisdom Workshop

April 17th, 2009

11:00 am -12:45 pm
Gabriel Richardson Lear (University of Chicago)
"Aristotle on Leisure, Flourishing, and Wise Deliberation"
Respondent: Katja Vogt (Columbia University)

2:00 - 3:45 pm
Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota)
"Wisdom and Work"
Respondent: David Velleman (NYU)

4:00-5:45 pm
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
"Wisdom and Virtue Epistemology"
Respondent: John Greco (St. Louis University)

12th Floor Lounge
Lowenstein Building
113 W. 60th St.
New York City

Free and open to the public.


Presented by the Philosophy Department at Fordham University
For information, please contact Allan Hazlett

Parent Teacher Conference

The "Guise of the Good" Theory of Desires

I wish to outline what may be called the Animal Objection to the "guise of the good" theory of desires. In his paper, “The Judgement of a Weak Will”, Sergio Tenenbaum describes what (following Kant) he refers to as the “old formula of the schools”:

We desire only what we conceive to be good; we avoid only what we conceive to be bad.

I wish to focus on the first part of the formula; the claim that desiring φ involves conceiving of φ as good. One motivation for this account of desires is that it preserves the idea that there is a conceptual connection between evaluation and motivation. I will refer to any theory of desire that posits such a connection as a “guise of the good” theory of desires. In their most unqualified form, such accounts involve something like the following necessary condition for desiring φ:

(D1): For all agents, φ, if an agent desires φ then that agent believes that φ is good.

However, I find (D1) problematic since it seems incompatible with the widespread practice of attributing desires to nonlinguistic animals.

One may take (D1) to be inconsistent with the claim that nonlinguistic animals have desires; either because one holds that nonlinguistic animals cannot have beliefs simpliciter, or because one holds that they are incapable of having beliefs with the required content. The word ‘belief’ is a term of art. There are philosophical usages of the word according to which only animals with conceptual and linguistic abilities are capable of having beliefs. Whatever the merits of such usages, they are not the usage that features in pieces of instrumental reasoning.

In order to reason instrumentally, an agent must be able to engage in a nonlinear decoupling and recombination of means and ends. This means they must be able to recognise that X may be both a means and an end, that X and Y may be means to the same end, and that X may be a means to two different ends. This means/end decoupling and recombination is engaged in by many nonlinguistic animals, including all mammals. In order to decouple and recombine ends and means in this way, an agent must be capable of assenting to a proposition of the form, “X is a means to Y”. Moreover, I define belief just as assent to a proposition. It follows that insofar as a non-linguistic animal is capable of means/end decoupling and recombination, it must have beliefs.

I will refer to nonlinguistic animals that have beliefs (in the above sense) as proto-rational agents. Even if we grant that nonlinguistic animals may have beliefs, there are clearly certain kinds of beliefs that (due to their content) only rational agents—animals with conceptual and linguistic abilities—can have. I will refer to such beliefs as judgements. This presents the possibility of the following necessary condition for desires:

(D2): For all agents, φ, if an agent desires φ then that agent judges that φ is good.

(D2) clearly precludes the possibility that proto-rational agents may have desires. Insofar as we take a “guise of the good” theory of desires to involve judgements, then such an account cannot be reconciled with the intuition that proto-rational agents may have desires. However, if we take the type of belief implicated in (D1) to be of the sort that proto-rational agents can have—i.e., the kind which stands in contrast to judgements—then there is no reason why the necessary condition for having a belief simplicter should preclude proto-rational agents having desires.

Nevertheless, there remains the problem of whether or not proto-rational agents can have beliefs with the content in question—i.e., that having to do with the goodness of some φ. Since proto-rational agents lack the capacity to entertain the concept of the good, the belief implicated in (D1) is not the sort that a proto-rational agent can have. Due to its content, the belief implicated in (D1) is one that falls under the umbrella of what I have been calling judgements. Consequently, (D1) simply collapses into (D2). Thus, (D1) fails to preserve the intuition that proto-rational agents are capable of having desires.

I believe that (D1) and (D2) both fail because they conceive of desires in terms of agential level evaluations on the good. This requires that the agent have a criterion for the good, which in turn requires that the agent have a concept of the good. Since proto-rational agents lack concepts, they cannot have desires so conceived.

NYU/Columbia Graduate Student Conference in Philosophy

Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at NYU
5 Washington Place, Room 101 (Ground Floor)

Conference schedule:

Breakfast 9:30-10:00am

"Modality: Norms and Naturalism" Sean Aas, Brown University;
Commentator: Jeff Russell, NYU
10:00?11:15am

"The Concept of Belief and Epistemic Rationality" Ivy Tsoi, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Commentator: TBA
11:30am-12:45pm

Lunch 12:45-2:00pm

"New Dynamics for Epistemic Modality" Malte Willer, University of Texas-Austin; Commentator: Katrina Przyjemski, NYU
2:00-3:15pm

"Why Do the Numbers Count?" Tom Dougherty, MIT;
Commentator: Michael Seifried, Columbia
3:30-4:45pm

Keynote Speaker: Karen Bennett (Cornell)
"Putting Things Together"
5:00-7:00pm

Towards a Plausible Control Principle (Part 3)

The final type of moral luck I wish to consider is what Nagel refers to as constitutive luck, or luck with respect to what one is like. Roughly, the problem of constitutive luck arises from the alleged fact that we typically hold agents morally responsible for aspects of their character—such as emotions, beliefs and predispositions—over which they have no control. This again gives rise to a paradox since the ‘alleged fact’ conflicts with widely held intuitions in favour of the control principle. It is common ground to both sides of the constitutive luck debate that there are at least some aspects of our character over which we do have control. Otherwise, constitutive luck simply collapses into causal luck. The disagreement between both sides, then, turns on whether or not it is legitimate to hold agents morally responsible for aspects of their character over which they have no control. Opponents of the control principle insist that it is.

In her paper, “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment”, Angela Smith sides with those philosophers who “question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility.”(Smith (2008), p. 367.) Instead, she defends what she refers to as the “rational relations view”, according to which an agent is morally responsible for some thing just in case it is appropriate, in principle, to ask her to defend or justify it. In her paper, Smith defends her view against the charge that, by impugning the control principle, she eliminates the distinction between moral responsibility and weaker non-moral types of responsibility. Emphasising the robust nature of the types of moral assessment supported by her rational relations view, she makes the following claim:

If a person’s judgements, as manifested in her actions and attitudes, appear to violate certain normative standards (whether those be moral, philosophical, prudential, or whatever), it is appropriate (in principle) to ask her to reassess those judgements and to explain, justify, modify, and in some cases apologise for her actions or attitudes in light of this reassessment. Criticism, in this case, is not mere unwelcome description, but calls upon a person to re-evaluate the grounds of her attitudes and intentions and to modify them if those grounds seem faulty or insufficient. (Smith 2008, p. 386., Italics mine)

As the above passage makes clear, Smith’s rational relations view includes the claim that a person’s judgements can only be said to violate a normative standard if it is appropriate (in principle) to ask her to modify those judgements in the light of criticisms. However, it is only appropriate to ask someone to modify φ if it is possible for them to modify φ. Moreover, if it is possible to modify φ, then φ must be under one’s control. Thus, Smith appears committed to the claim that one is morally responsible for a judgement only if making that judgement is under one’s control. Smith anticipates this objection in a footnote following the above passage:

It might be thought here that a demand to “modify” one’s attitudes implies that one must have volitional control over them. But this is a mistake. We cannot modify our attitudes “at will,” though we can re-evaluate the grounds upon which they are held and we may come to see that those grounds are mistaken. In making such an assessment, our attitudes will usually change; but we have not changed them “at will.” (Smith 2003, footnote 23)

It is clear from this passage that Smith takes the defender of the control principle to be committed to something like (CP2)—namely, the claim that we are only morally responsible for φ if φ is under our direct control. However, as the blood pressure example illustrates, (CP2) is a highly implausible version of the control principle to begin with, since we typically hold agents responsible for things over which they only have indirect control. Thus, by depicting the defender of the control principle as committed to (CP2), Smith erects a strawman. Moreover, since Smith stipulates that the judgements in question are open to modification, then they must (at the very least) be open to something like the kind of indirect control one has over one’s blood pressure. The upshot is that, by my lights, Smith’s talk of “at will” amounts to little more than a red herring, since neither side of the moral luck debate need be committed to the claim that we are only morally responsible for what we can control “at will”.

Once the requirement for direct control has been appropriately dispensed with, I believe the domain of things over which we have control becomes significantly larger. In fact, if the above arguments are correct, then it can even accommodate the very types of judgements that Smith’s rational relations view countenances. The defender of the control principle may freely acknowledge that there are some aspects of our characters over which we have neither direct nor indirect control. However, her principled position is that we may not legitimately hold an agent morally responsible for those aspects of her character.

Towards a Plausible Control Principle (Part 2)

In my previous post, I articulated the following control principle:

(CP3): A is morally responsible for φ only if φ is under A’s direct or indirect control.

I now wish to explore the implications of (CP3) for the problem of moral luck. I begin by considering what Nagel refers to as resultant luck, or luck with respect to how things turn out. Although Nagel acknowledges that most of our moral intuitions favour a version of the control principle, he maintains that we frequently make moral judgements about people based on factors that are not within their control.

For example, consider the case of two equally skilled gunmen who are equally determined to murder someone. While the first gunman succeeds, the second, due to factors outside his control, fails to kill his target. According to Nagel, we would hold the successful gunman to be deserving of greater blame than the unsuccessful gunman. Given that the difference between the two gunmen is due to factors outside of their control, the fact that we assess them differently entails that facts outside their control may make a moral difference. Since this fact about our moral assessments conflicts with our intuitions about such assessments (or so it is alleged), Nagel labels the moral luck problem a paradox.

I believe the account of moral responsibility articulated above provides a potential solution to Nagel’s paradox. First, I wish to grant Nagel’s claim that we tend to view the successful gunman as deserving of greater blame. This seems to follow from the fact that we hold the successful gunman morally responsible for something (i.e., killing another human being) that we do not hold the unsuccessful gunman morally responsible for. However, I maintain that this poses no challenge to the control principle. According to the control principle, one is morally responsible for φ only if φ is under one’s control, where control is understood as one being free to do otherwise.

Now, in the case of the successful gunman, it is clear that he was free to do otherwise. Thus, according to the control principle, the successful gunman is morally responsible for his actions. Luck only enters in the case of the unsuccessful gunman. Since, ex hypothesi, the fact that unsuccessful gunman missed is due to factors outside of his control, then his failure to kill his target is a matter of luck. But, and here is the rub, the unsuccessful gunman is not held morally blameworthy for missing his target. Nor is he held morally praiseworthy for missing his target. In fact, he is not held morally responsible for missing his target at all. On the contrary, he is only held morally responsible for the one thing he had control over—namely, his attempted murder. The upshot is that the present account (1) preserves the intuitively plausible claim that one is only morally responsible for φ if φ is under one’s control, and (2) allows for our differential treatment of the successful and unsuccessful gunman.

I believe the above resolution to the problem of resultant luck generalises to cases of circumstantial and constitutive luck. Roughly, circumstantial luck has to do with how being at the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time may influence the way one is morally assessed. Nagel gives an example of a person living in Germany during the Second World War who “behaves badly”. Undoubtedly, we would hold such an individual morally culpable for his actions. Nagel invites us to contrast this person with a German national who moves to Argentina for business just before the war. Stipulating that the expatriate would have acted the same way as the person who remained in Germany, Nagel observes that we would not hold the expatriate blameworthy for the actions of his counterpart.

The account of moral responsibility outlined above preserves our differential moral assessment of the German resident and expatriate. Recall, one of the necessary conditions for moral blameworthiness is that one be guilty of wrongdoing. Since, ex hypothesi, the expatriate has done nothing wrong, then he is not blameworthy for the actions of his counterpart. This acknowledgement may seem to pose a challenge to the control principle since the fact that the expatriate does not find himself in the same circumstances as his counterpart is due to factors outside of his control. But this appearance is misleading. We do not hold either of the two agents in Nagel’s example morally responsible for whether or not they happen to be in Germany during the war (a fact over which they are presumed to have no control) but for how they react to the circumstances they find themselves in (something they presumably do have control over).

Admittedly, the fact that they are faced with the particular circumstances with which they are confronted is a matter of luck. And since the difference in circumstances gives rise to a moral difference, then presumably luck has contributed to his difference. But the problem of moral luck is not simply that luck may make a moral difference. Rather, it is that our differential moral assessments appear to undermine the intuitively plausible control principle. But since both gunmen in Nagel’s example are only held responsible for what is under their control, the control principle is preserved.

Towards a Plausible Control Principle (Part 1)

In the next two posts I will be attempting to articulate a philosophical account of moral responsibility that (1) preserves the widespread intuition that one cannot be morally responsible for something that is not one’s fault, and (2) avoids Nagel's criticisms with respect to resultant and circumstantial luck. In this post, I will begin by attempting to arrive at what I take to be a plausible control principle.

According to Nagel, the problem of moral luck arises out of a conflict between our ordinary practice and a widely held intuition about morality. Nagel summarises the intuition in question as follows:

Prior to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control.

I will refer to the intuition that one cannot be morally assessed for what is not one’s fault as the pre-philosophical position. Nagel expresses the pre-philosophical position in the form of a disjunction, with “what is not their fault” as the first disjunct and “what is due to factors beyond their control” as the second. One may read these two disjuncts as being independent of each other, in which case they would constitute a pair of independent necessary conditions for moral responsibility. However, given the context, I believe it would be more natural to read the second disjunct as an elaboration of the first, in which case Nagel can be seen as supplying a single necessary condition for moral responsibility (albeit expressed in two different ways).

On this reading, Nagel is committed to there being a constitutive connection between X being one’s fault and X being under one’s control such that X is only one’s fault if and only if X is under one’s control. If one buys into the present reading—which equates X being’s one’s fault and X being under one’s control—then the pre-theoretical position is equivalent to the following control principle:

(CP1): A is morally responsible for X only if X is under A’s control.

I take the claim that X is under one’s control (at least as it features in the control principle) to mean that one was free not to do X. The paradigm case of something that is under one’s control is the act of raising one’s arm at will. I will refer to any act one may perform ‘at will’ as being under one’s direct control. This allows for the following revised version of the control principle:

(CP2): A is morally responsible for X only if X is under A’s direct control.

However, I do not believe that (CP2) is a plausible formulation of the control principle since we routinely hold individuals responsible for things they do not have direct control over. For example, we can imagine a doctor chastising a patient because he failed to lower his blood pressure as he was instructed to do on a previous visit. Of course, no one can lower their blood pressure “at will”. However, one can take indirect steps (such as exercise, making the appropriate changes to one’s diet, etc.) to lower one’s blood pressure, and this seems to be sufficient to make one responsible for lowering one’s blood pressure. Moreover, it is not clear that there is any reason why (in principle) there could not be moral cases like the physician case. I therefore propose that (CP2) be reformulated to include indirect control:

(CP3): A is morally responsible for X only if X is under A’s direct or indirect control.

In my next post, I will attempt to show how the control principle articulated here avoids the problems of resultant and circumstantial luck.

New York Philosophy Events Wiki

A new wiki has been created for keeping track of New York and
surrounding area philosophy-related events. You can find it here.

Gardner and Duties to Succeed (Part 2)

In my previous post, Gardner and Duties to Succeed (Part 1), I suggested that Gardner's argument that there may be duties to succeed relies on the following claim:

(G2**): That I am aware that the man needs to be rescued (and horrified by my inability to rescue him) entails that I have a reason to rescue him.

In this post, I will argue that (G2**) is much too strong to constitute a plausible premise in Gardner’s argument.

According to (G2**), the fact that I am aware of a need, and horrified by my inability to fulfil it, is sufficient for me to have a reason to succeed in fulfilling that need. This remains true, according to Gardner, even if I have no reason to try because it is impossible for me to succeed in doing so. By parity of reasoning, the fact that I am aware that my daughter has an inoperable brain tumour, and horrified by my inability to cure her, entails that I have a reason to succeed in curing her. Consequently, as far as Gardner is concerned, the sense in which I may be said to have a reason to succeed in rescuing the drowning man (a la the clifftop example) is the same as the sense in which I may be said to have a reason to succeeding in curing my child of an incurable cancer. Undeniably, there is a usage of the locution “I have a reason to…” according to which both of the preceding claims amount to nothing short of platitudes. To wit, there is a sense in which I clearly have a reason to both save the drowning man and to cure my child of cancer. However, I submit that the sense of “I have a reason to…” in which these claims are obviously true is not the sense that Gardner needs for his argument in favour of strict liability wrongdoing to work.

The problem with (G2**) is that it makes the sufficiency condition for possessing a reason to succeed so low that the notion of reasons to succeed is no longer able to play the type of normative role Gardner wants it to play. In his paper, Gardner’s strategy is to argue that failing to live up to one’s reason to succeed represents a certain type of rational shortcoming. He then attempts to generalise from reasons simpliciter to reasons that are both categorical and mandatory (i.e., duties); with the upshot of his argument being that there are duties to succeed. Such duties to succeed are then supposed to form, not only a rational basis, but also a moral justification for the legal notion of strict liability. But before we can get to the conclusion that there is strict liability wrongdoing, we must first buy into the idea that, in the clifftop example, I am guilty of some rational shortcoming. However, once we generalise the point to cases like the inoperable tumour example, the claim that I am guilty of a rational shortcoming begins to seem much more tendentious. The conclusion that I am guilty of a rational shortcoming because I am unable to cure my child of an incurable disease seems surprising, if not counterintuitive.
Gardner attempts to ameliorate the unpalatableness of the above conclusion by drawing a distinction between “performing a morally deficient action” and “being a morally deficient person”. Having extended the notion of reasons to succeed to include duties, he maintains that not all failures to fulfil one’s duty reflect poorly on the agent. By his lights, the clifftop agent performs a morally deficient action but does not, therefore, constitute a morally deficient person. Presumably, Gardner would take this distinction to apply to rational conduct as well; so we may suppose that a distinction may also be drawn between performing a rationally deficient action and being a rationally deficient person. On this view, by failing to cure my child of cancer, I have performed a rationally deficient action, but I do not, therefore, constitute a rationally deficient person.

While the above distinction seems plausible in its own right, it only seems to push the present objection one step back. Insofar as performing a rationally deficient action is supposed to implicate some type of blame (however small), it would be a mistake—perhaps even offensive—to call my inability to cure my child’s cancer a rationally deficient action. However, if we hold that rationally deficient action implicates no blame at all, then it is not clear that it can serve as a basis or justification for strict-liability wrongdoing. For even if we hold that the transgression of the strict liability tortfeaser do not reflect negatively on his standing as an agent, we nevertheless hold the agent liable (and, where possible, expect him to make restitution) for the consequences of his actions. Otherwise, there would be no reason for strict liability torts. It follows that, on this picture, my inability to cure my daughter of cancer would entail that I am liable for her death, albeit free of rational or moral reproach. But this conclusion seems patently absurd. We do not hold (nor would we think it appropriate to do so) a parent liable, if their child died of an incurable disease. Thus, Gardner seems confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, if he defines reasons to succeed in such a way that their violation engenders any type of blame, then his account fails to give a plausible characterisation of cases like the inoperable tumour example. On the other hand, if he characterises reasons to succeed in such a way that they implicate no blame at all, then they no longer lend support to the claim that there is strict liability wrongdoing.

Gardner and Duties to Succeed (Part 1)

In his paper “The Wrongdoing that Gets Results”, John Gardner (2004) argues that there may be moral duties to succeed. Gardner takes this conclusion to have the following two significant implications: (1) that there can be strict liability wrongdoing, and (2) that there can be resultant moral luck. Gardner summarises the conclusions of his paper as follows:

It follows that the argument of this paper supported the view that, within morality in the broad sense, there can be duties to succeed even where trying does not entail success, so that there can be strict liability wrongdoing…. In the only sense of ‘moral’ that has real philosophical significance, viz. the broad sense, I argued that there can be moral luck in the way our actions turn out…(Gardner, 2004, p. 86).

Since (with the exception of cases in which trying entails success) whether one succeeds or not partly depends on factors outside of one’s control (i.e., luck with respect to how things turn out), then moral duties to succeed must implicate what Nagel refers to as "resultant luck". It is generally held that reasons for succeeding just are reasons for trying. However, Gardner argues that sometimes the two kinds of reasons may come apart, such that one has a reason to succeed even though one lacks a reason to try. One case in which this seems to be true is when trying makes one less likely to succeed. For example, we can imagine someone who has an annoying song stuck in his head, but finds that the more he tries to stop thinking about the song, the more he is unable to stop thinking about the song. In such a case, it seems plausible to say that while the agent has a reason to succeed, he lacks a reason to try. However, it is not clear that there are ever cases in which one has a duty to succeed even though trying makes one less likely to succeed. Thus, even if cases in which trying makes one less likely to succeed are also cases in which one has a reason to succeed and no reason to try, it is not clear that such cases lend support for the claim that there are duties to succeed. The lesson, here, is that it is not sufficient for Gardner to show that there may be reasons to succeed that are independent of reasons to try. The reasons to succeed must be of a certain kind, if they are to lend support to the claim that there are duties to succeed and/or strict liability wrongdoing. Gardner presents the following example in support of his claim that there are reasons to succeed that are independent of reasons to try:

Suppose that, since I cannot swim a stroke (and have no boat, and no helicopter, and no telephone, and am perched on a clifftop in the middle of nowhere, etc.) it would be quite futile for me to try to rescue a man who is drowning in the stormy sea below. That this man needs to be rescued is a reason for me to rescue him. If I had no reason to rescue him, after all, I would not be so horrified at the realisation that it would be so utterly futile for me to try. I could walk past without compunction. But, by the logic of satisfactoriness, the futility of my trying does have the consequence that my reason to save the man is not a reason for me to try to save him. No amount of trying on my part will allow me to save him.

Gardner claims that the agent in the clifftop example (who, following Gardner, I will refer to in the first person) has a reason to succeed, but no reason to try, saving the drowning man. The argument relies on three major premises. First, he stipulates that, under the particular circumstances, it is impossible for me to save the drowning man.

(G1): “No amount of trying will allow me to save the man.”

Second, he claims that the fact that the drowning man needs to be saved is sufficient for me to
have a reason to succeed in saving him.

(G2): “That this man needs to be rescued is a reason for me to rescue him.”

Third, he invokes what he (following Anthony Kelly) refers to as “the logic of satisfactoriness”:

(G3): “I have reason to do whatever is sufficient to achieve whatever I have reason
to achieve...” (Gardner, 2004, p. 55)

Gardner emphasises that the type of sufficiency he has in mind, in (G3), is not logical but rather contingent. That is, it only need be the case that my trying can (or will eventually) lead to success, for me to have a reason to try. Since, (by G1) no amount of trying is sufficient to save the drowning man, then (by G3) I have no reason to try to save the drowning man. However, since (by G2) I still have a reason to succeed in saving the drowning man, this is a case in which I have a reason to succeed but no reason to try.

Unfortunately, as it stands, (G2) is highly implausible. One straightforward way in which this is so—and for which, I believe, a charitable reading of Gardner ought to correct—is (G2)’s failure to distinguish between an objective reason and a subjective reason to perform a certain action. While the fact that the drowning man needs to be saved may be a reason for someone (i.e., an objective reason) to save him, it does not follow that it is a reason for me (i.e., a subjective reason) to save him. For example, suppose that I simply fail to see the drowning man. While there still remains a reason for someone to save the man, it fails to constitute a reason for me, in the sense that it is not a reason I am aware of or have subjective access to. Without this distinction between objective and subjective reasons, there would be no way to differentiate between the type of reasons I may have to save someone who is drowning right before my eyes, and the type of reasons I may have (if any) to save someone who, unbeknownst to me, happen to be drowning 10,000 miles away at this very moment. Thus, we would do well to reformulate (G2) in a way that specifies that the reason in question is one to which I have subjective access.

(G2*): That I am aware that the man needs to be rescued is a reason for me to rescue him.

Earlier, I opined that it would be more charitable to read Gardner as being committed to (G2*)
than to (G2). That this is so is suggested by the single piece of evidence Gardner presents in
favour of (G2):

That this man needs to be rescued is a reason for me to rescue him. If I had no reason to rescue him, after all, I would not be so horrified at the realisation that it would be so utterly futile for me to try. I could walk past without compunction. (Ibid, p. 55).

Thus, Gardner seems committed to something like the following claim:

(*) That I feel horror at the realisation that I am unable to φ entails that I have
a reason to φ.

I have serious reservations about the legitimacy of (*), as will eventually become apparent. However, for the time being, I wish to point out that (*) presupposes that I am aware of the circumstances that generate my reasons to act since I could not be horrified by something I was unaware of. Moreover, by Gardner’s lights, not only must the agent be aware of the need in question, but he must also be horrified by his inability to fulfil said need. This imposes an additional qualification to (G2), which we may now capture with following revised premise:

(G2**): That I am aware that the man needs to be rescued (and horrified by my inability to rescue him) entails that I have a reason to rescue him.

Although (G2**) is much more plausible that (G2), in my next post on this topic I will argue that Gardner's argument outlined above still fails.

The 83rd Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

Johns Hopkins Graduate Student Conference

Inside/Outside

An interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
hosted by the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University

April 2nd and 3rd, 2009

Keynote Speakers: Espen Hammer (University of Oslo/Essex) and Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)

Foregrounding the relationship inside/outside, this conference seeks to consider the effects of this pervasive structuring relation across philosophy, literature, the human sciences, politics, and the arts. What work does this distinction do? How do we understand its ubiquity? Furthermore, what is our contemporary relation to this (perceived?) opposition: do we overcome, dissolve, ignore, work through, maintain, or dialectically negotiate this relationship? Papers exploring these and related questions are welcome.

Some suggestions: scheme and content, content and form, mind and world, interiority and exteriority, self and other, inclusion and exclusion, human and inhuman, literary, aesthetic, and political strategies and figures, historical investigations and genealogies, theological figurations and disfigurations, contemporary philosophical approaches ("continental" and "analytic") to this question, etc.


Please send full papers (for a 45 minute presentation), abstract (300 words max.), and contact information (including institutional affiliation) to insideoutsideconference@gmail.com

Deadline for all submissions is January 15th, 2009.

For details, see conference website here.

Williams on Moral Luck (Part 4)

In this post, wish to examine Williams' account of retrospective justification as its own special type of justification, independent of the type of justification implicated in justified action (as defined in my previous post).

Williams does not describe, at length and in a systematic way, what makes retrospective justification different form other types of justification. However, he does identify the Gauguin case as being special in that his decision involves a life-defining project. Williams unpacks this idea by noting that the evaluative standpoint Gauguin occupies once he has become an artist is quite different from that which he occupied when he first made the decision to travel to Tahiti. This suggests the following possibility for making sense of what is special about retrospective justification. Let us suppose that Gauguin was a stockbroker before he became an artist. I will refer to the perspective from which Gauguin would assess his own life at the time he decided to travel to Tahiti as that of Gauguin the stockbroker. The perspective of Gauguin the stockbroker contrasts with that of Gauguin after he has become a famous artist. I will refer to this second perspective as that of Gauguin the artist.

Following Williams, we can suppose that Gauguin the artist feels some regret about the decision of Gauguin the stockbroker to leave his family. Nevertheless, Gauguin the artist also recognises that if Gauguin the stockbroker had not acted as he did, then Gauguin the artist would not exist. Thus, although Gauguin the artist regrets the immoral actions of Gauguin the stockbroker, he is nevertheless grateful that Gauguin the stockbroker acted as he did.

By Williams’ lights, the gratitude of Gauguin the artist points to a special type of justification, which is both success-dependent and fundamentally retrospective. The fact that Gauguin the artist feels grateful is taken to show that he thinks the action was the right course or (in some meaningful sense) justified. However, since the perspective from which Gauguin the stockbroker’s decision is justified only comes to exist many years after the decision was made, there was no way for the justification in question to exist contemporaneously with the decision. In brief, the justification in question must be retrospective since it is located in a perspective that did not exist at the time the relevant action was performed. This presents us with an intelligible difference between the type of justification at play in Williams’ example, and the type of justification we earlier identified with justified action.

But how does this relate to Williams’ claim that if we hold to (M1) we are forced to give up (M2)? Williams observes that even those of us who subscribe to the moral requirement to take care of one’s family may feel grateful for Gauguin’s achievements. However, since his achievements came at the cost of fulfilling his moral obligations, our gratitude is taken to be evidence that we sometimes rank non-moral considerations above moral ones. This conclusion flies in the face of (M2); the claim that moral considerations are supreme. Moreover, we are forced to accept it so long as we hold to (M1), the claim that morality is luck-free, since this precludes the possibility of retrospective moral justification.

In sum, Williams maintains that there will always be cases in which retrospective justification takes priority over all others, a fact that our gratitude for Gauguin’s achievements illustrates. Since moral judgements cannot be retrospective (a la M1), then on such occasions they will always take second place (contra M2).