Rorty Discussion with Donald Davidson

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UW Graduate Student Conference

THE 5TH BIENNIAL UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY
November 13 & 14, 2009
Theme: Moral Psychology

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

Friday

3:30 PM KEYNOTE ADDRESS

“Responsibility and Mental Agency”
Pamela Heironymi (UCLA)
Savery Hall, Room 264

5:30 PM RECEPTION (Savery Hall Third Floor Philosophy Department Table)


Saturday (all sessions in Savery Hall Room 264)

9:00 – 9:30 LIGHT BREAKFAST PROVIDED (Savery Hall Room 264)

9:30 – 10:20 SESSION 1: “Responsibility and Affective Skills in the Psychopath”
Garrett Pendergraft (University of California, Riverside)
COMMENTS: Janice Moskalik (University of Washington)

10:30 – 11:20 SESSION 2: “Irresistible Motivation”
Todd Beattie (Princeton University)
COMMENTS: Jason Benchimol (University of Washington)

11:30 – 12:20 SESSION 3: “Hard Feelings and Forgiveness”
Grant Rozeboom (Stanford University)
COMMENTS: Patrick Smith (University of Washington)

12:20 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 – 2:20 SESSION 4: “Evaluation without Hyper-intellectualisation”
Avery Archer (Columbia University)
COMMENTS: Rachel Fredericks (University of Washington)

2:30 – 3:20 SESSION 5: “Liberal Universalism and How We Understand the Past”
George Tsai (University of California, Berkeley)
COMMENTS: Amy Reed (University of Washington)

3:30 – 4:20 SESSION 6: “Is Self-Binding Morally Wrong?”
Jeff Sebo (New York University)
COMMENTS: Fareed Awan (University of Washington)

4:30 – 5:20 SESSION 7: “Why So Serious? An Inquiry On Racist Jokes”
Luvell Anderson (Rutgers University)
COMMENTS: Elizabeth Scarbrough (University of Washington) &
Jonathan Rosenberg (University of Washington)

5:30 – 7:00 BANQUET (Savery Hall Third Floor Philosophy Department Table)

8:00 – ? PARTY (at the “Philosophy House”)

Towards a Teleological Logic (Part 2)

How are we to formerly represent the claim that the purpose of the human eye is to perceive visual stimuli? One suggestion, which will ultimately prove insufficient, may be put as follows: Let E refer to the set of human eyes, and let P refer to the set of things that perceive visual stimuli. The claim that the purpose of the human eye is to perceive visual stimuli may be formerly represented as follows:

(1.1) (∀x)(E(x) → P(x))

According to (1.1), for something to be a member of the set of human eyes is sufficient for that thing to be a member of the set of things that perceive visual stimuli. However, (1.1) clearly fails to capture what we mean when say that the purpose of the human eye is to perceive visual stimuli. Cases of blindness represent a counterexample to (1.1), but they do not represent a counterexample to the claim that the purpose of the eyes is to perceive visual stimuli. Thus, the former is not equivalent to the latter. The take home message seems to be that the claim that something has a telos allows for exceptional cases, and therefore cannot be represented by the universal quantifier. Another suggestion, which will also prove to be insufficient, is to replace the universal with an existential quantifier. This yields:

(1.2) (∃x)(E(x) → P(x))

(1.2) offers a clear advantage over (1.1) since it does not require that all members of the set of eyes also be members of the set of things that perceive visual stimuli. However, (1.2) also fails to capture what we mean when we say that the purpose of the human eye is to perceive visual stimuli since we can imagine a situation in which the former is false and the latter is true. For example, suppose that a global pandemic, a virulent eye-infection let us say, rendered everyone on earth blind. In such a case (1.2) would be false, and yet we would still wish to say that the telos of the human eye is to perceive visual stimuli.

I believe that (1.1) and (1.2) both fail because they attempt to represent the claim that the human eye has a certain telos by focusing solely on how things are in the actual world. However, I believe that our concept of what it means for something to have a purpose is an essentially modal notion; one that appeals to how things are in worlds other than the actual world.

In attempting to formerly represent our notion of purposiveness I will be taking as my starting point the accessibility relation introduced by Saul Kripke. Within the Libnizian framework, to say that φ is necessarily true means that φ obtains in all metaphysically possible worlds. By contrast, Kripke-style possible world semantics relativises the notion of necessary truth to a subset of the metaphysically possible worlds; namely, the set of accessible worlds. The upshot is that modal statements (it is necessary that φ, it is possible that φ) need not take the same truth value in all possible worlds.

For example, suppose that Δ is the only world accessible from Γ and that Γ and Δ are both accessible from Δ. Moreover, let us suppose that Δ ⊩ φ and that Γ⊮ φ. On the present model, it is necessarily true that φ relative to Γ since φ obtains in all worlds accessible from Γ. However, it is not necessarily true that φ relative to Δ since φ does not obtain in all worlds accessible from Δ. Significantly, Kripke-style semantics allows for the possibility that a given world may fail to be accessible from itself (as is the case with Γ but not the case with Δ in our preceding example). As we shall soon see, this feature of Kripke-style semantics will be crucially important when we attempt to formerly represent the concept of purposiveness. As has become standard, I will be defining the relation of accessibility as an (uninterpreted) binary relation R(Γ,Δ) that holds between possible worlds Γ and Δ just in case Δ is accessible from Γ. If we let Γ denote the actual world, then we have the following two fundamental translational schema for possible world sematics:

(2.1) □φ =def φ is true at every world Δ such that R(Γ,Δ)

(2.2) ◊φ =def φ is true at some world Δ such that R(Γ,Δ)

There are numerous applications of Kripke-style semantics. For example, in physics the accessibility relation is construed in terms of nomological accessibility. φ is nomologically necessary just in case φ is true at all possible worlds that are nomologically accessible from the actual world. In short, φ is true at all possible worlds that obey the physical laws of the actual world. In deontic logic, the accessibility relation is construed in terms of morally perfect worlds. φ is obligatory just in case φ obtains in all morally perfect worlds and permissible just in case it obtains in some morally perfect world.

An important difference between nomological necessity and obligatoriness (or deontic necessity) is that the class of nomologically accessible worlds includes the actual world (since the actual world is a member of the class of worlds that obeys the physical laws of the actual world), but the class of morally perfect worlds does not include the actual world (since the actual world is not a member of the class of morally perfect worlds). Thus, if we were to restrict the universe to the class of morally perfect worlds, the actual world would be omitted. The accessibility relation enables us to avoid this unwelcome result by allowing for imperfect moral worlds in our universe (a class that includes the actual world), while restricting deontic access to those worlds that are morally perfect.

The notion of purposiveness seems to fall somewhere between nomological necessity and obligatoriness. When applied to purposiveness, the accessibility relation may be seen as restricting access to the set of teleologically ideal worlds, defined as the set of worlds in which all aims are achieved, all functions are fulfilled and all purposes are realised. (Henceforth, I will refer to teleologically ideal worlds as T-worlds.) This yields the following fundamental translational schema for purposiveness:

(2.4) □φ =def φ is true at all T-worlds

(2.5) ◊φ =def φ is true at some T-world

Like nomological necessity, and unlike obligatoriness, purposiveness is a descriptive concept, it tells us something about the way the world actually is, and not merely about how the world ought to be. We may identify the descriptive dimension of purposiveness with the fact that an object’s purpose is determined by facts about the actual world. For example, in the case of a biological system, its purpose is determined by what that system was selected for in the actual world. In the case of a human artefact, its purpose is determined by the intentions of the human designer in the actual world. Thus, just as we can only tell which worlds are nomologically accessible by inquiring about which physical laws obtain the actual world, we can only tell which possible worlds are teleologically accessible by inquiring into what a biological system was selected for, or what an artefact was designed for in the actual world.

However, since purposes often go unfulfilled in the actual world, the actual world is not a member of the class of T-worlds. Consequently, there is also a prescriptive dimension to the concept of purposiveness. In this respect, purposiveness is like obligatoriness; both concepts construe the accessibility relation in terms of a set of worlds that excludes the actual world.

Percontations: The Nature of Probability

Towards a Teleological Logic (Part 1)

Teleology, broadly construed, is the study of design or purpose. Let us say that some object is teleological just in case it has an aim, function or purpose (what I will henceforth refer to as an object’s “telos”). For example, we may say that the telos of a hammer is to drive nails, and that the telos of the eyes is to perceive visual stimuli. Thus, both hammers and eyes may be described as teleological objects. Alternatively, we may say that an object is teleological just in case it displays design. In the case of artefacts, like hammers, the design is due to human ingenuity. In the case of biological systems, like the visual system, the design is due to evolution by natural selection. In sum, the telos of an object is the aim or purpose for which it is designed.

But how are we to formally represent the idea that some object has a telos? I wish to propose a Kripke-style modal semantics that has specific application to teleological objects. For example, let A be “X has eyes” and B be “X perceives visual stimuli”. To say that B is the telos of A means that, if all goes well (e.g., if the visual system is functioning as it ought), B follows from A. Of course, as in the case of blindness, having eyes is not always sufficient for perceiving visual stimuli; B does not always follow from A. In order to preserve the idea that B is the telos of A even in cases in which A is not sufficient for B, we must relativize the sufficiency claim. In keeping with our emphasis on design, we may say that A is prototypically sufficient for B, where the word “prototypical” is treated as a monadic modal operator. I will use □ to represent this operator. The claim that B is the telos of A may be formally represented as follows:

□(A → B) (literally: “prototypically, A is sufficient for B”)

The semantic elements here are in large part analogous to that of standard deontic logic. Roughly, let Γ be a world in which A: “X has eyes” gets ⊤, and let Δ be a world in which B: “X perceives visual stimuli” gets ⊤. We may represent the fact that B is the telos of A in terms of the two-place relation ΓAΔ (literally: “Γ aims at Δ”). I will refer to any world that is aimed at by another world as a “target world”. Target worlds are ones in which the relevant aim, function or goal is fulfilled. The □ and ◊ of standard modal logic becomes:

□P = in all target worlds, it is true that P

◊P = in some target world, it is true that P

Significantly, the □ and ◊ of teleological logic satisfies Aristotle’s modal square of opposition; which is widely taken to be a minimal requirement for a modal logic. ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

(1A) □P = It is prototypical that P
(1B) ~◊~P = It is not true, in some target world, that not P

(2A) □~P = It is prototypical that not P
(2B) ~◊P = It is not true, in some target world, that P

(3A) ~□~P = It is not prototypical that not P
(3B) ◊P = It is true, in some target world, that P

(4A) ~□P = It is not prototypical that P
(4B) ◊~P = It is true, in some target world, that not P

Each of the above A-B pairs are equivalent. (1) and (2) represent contraries (cannot both be true), and (3) and (4) are subcontraries (cannot both be false). (1) and (3), and (2)and (4), respectively, are subalternatives (the former implies the latter). (1) and (4), and (2) and (3), respectively, are contradictories (cannot have the same truth value). This represents a rough outline of what may be referred to as a teleological (modal) logic. I will have more to say about the axioms, motivations and applications of a teleological logic in future posts.

Philosophy Workshop Series - New School

Beginning this semester, the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research will be hosting an ongoing series of workshops on a range of themes inspired or influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The workshop, in continuation of the workshops organized by Alice Crary last Spring, aims to foster intellectual community and conversation in an informal setting among those working not only on Wittgenstein but also more generally on themes in analytic and European philosophy, including ethics, aesthetics, action, normativity, mind, and meaning.

This semester we have scheduled three events. Each will feature a presentation, followed by a careful and brief consideration by a commenter and then a general discussion.

Thursday October 29th, 11-1pm, Rm. 802 at 80 Fifth Avenue
Speaker: James Dow, CUNY, "Shoegenstein on Self-Ascription and Immunity to Error"Commentator: Adam Gies, NSSR

Thursday November 19th, 11-1pm, Rm. 802 at 80 Fifth Avenue
Speaker: Will Small, University of Chicago, "Intention, Belief, and the Future"Commentator: Felix Koch, Columbia University

Thursday December 17th, 11-1pm, Rm. 802 at 80 Fifth Avenue
Speaker: Alex Madva, Columbia University, "Wittgenstein, the Psychology of Unconscious Bias, and the Publicity of Moral Experience"Commentator: TBA

As the dates approach we will send out a reminder email and an a bstractof the presentation. If you come, please come with your coffee and bagels and in a frame of mind conducive to collegial conversation! All are welcome.

We aim to make available the paper a week before each meeting. If you wish to receive the paper beforehand or have any question about theevents please send an email to Mark Theunissen (theunm57@newschool.edu)

USC/UCLA Graduate Student Conference

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

At the University of Southern California, Los Angeles

The graduate students of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, invite graduate students to submit papers in all areas of contemporary philosophy to be considered for presentation at the fifth annual USC/UCLA graduate student conference.

Submission Guidelines:

The deadline for submitting papers is November 1, 2009. Papers should be suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation (less than 4,500 words). Submissions should be suitable for blind review and include a cover letter and one-paragraph abstract. Please email papers as .doc or .pdf attachments to: uclausc.conference@gmail.com

For more information, please contact Alida Liberman at aliberma@usc.edu.

Notice of acceptance will be sent by December 20, 2009.

If electronic submission is impossible,please mail submissions to:

USC Mudd Hall of Philosophy
c/o A. Liberman
3709 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Intelligent Emotions

It has been suggested, most notably by Robert Solomon, that emotions are ways of engaging the world. This is an idea I find very appealing. Solomon has also insisted that emotions are a form of intelligence. The second claim—that emotions are a form or intelligence—is based on the thesis that emotions involve concepts. For example, Solomon claims that fear involves the concept of danger and that being angry involves the concept of offensiveness. There are at least two ways of interpreting what it means for emotions to involve concepts. On one reading, having an emotion requires that the agent be able to deploy certain concepts. So, being afraid actually requires that the agent possess and deploy the concept of danger. At times, Solomon seems committed to this view. However, he also attributes something like emotions (let’s call them proto-emotions) to animals that clearly lack conceptual capacities. (For example, he describes roaches that scatter when the light is turned on as exhibiting “something like” fear.)

I am reluctant to attribute anything like fear to roaches and other invertebrates that only exhibit (what ethologists refer to as) “fixed action patterns”; preferring to reserve the attribution of contentful mental states only to creatures that are capable of “instrumental learning”. Still, there seems to be a danger of hyper-intellectualisation in the claim that having an emotion requires the possession and deployment of certain concepts. It seems to me very implausible that, for example, a human infant can only be said to experience fear if it has the concept (in any robust sense of the word) of danger. I should, however, hasten to add that whether one finds the aforementioned proposal tenable depends on how one defines a concept. I tend to think of a concept as (at the very least) an inferentially promiscuous item; the upshot being that an infant who cannot employ the concept of danger in an inferentially promiscuous manner does not count as possessing the concept of danger. Still, there seems to be many different conceptions of concepts, and so there appears to be some wriggly room on this particular point.

Even so, I wish to point out that there is a weaker (and what I believe to be more plausible) reading of the claim that emotions involve concepts. On the weaker reading, emotions involve concepts in the sense that we must deploy certain concepts if we are to fully characterise or describe certain emotions. For example, when we describe what it means to be afraid, we must deploy the concept of danger. Otherwise, our description of the emotion will be incomplete. (In other words, merely referring to a set of physiological processes won’t be enough.) However, being afraid does not require that the agent experiencing the fear actually have and deploy the concept of danger. In short, we need to distinguish between needing concepts to describe a phenomenon or state of affairs and needing concepts to instantiate a phenomenon or state of affairs. For example, one needs the concept of mammary glands to describe what it is to be a mammal, but one does not need the concept of mammary glands to instantiate being a mammal. I believe an analogous point holds with respect to the emotions.

Ayer on Logical Positivism

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Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference

This weekend James Dow (of Selbsttatigkeit) and I will be taking part in the 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approach to Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference at the University of South Alabama. Below is a copy of the conference schedule with links to the abstracts of the various papers.

Friday	Speaker	Topic and Abstract
8:30-9:10	Michael S. Gordon	On the Division of the Senses
9:15-9:55	Jack Shelley-Tremblay	Event-related Potentials Index Aspects of Attention: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
10:00-10:45	David Bunch, Jonathan D. Walker & Alen Hajnal	Lateralization of sequence learning and transfer in a tactuo-spatial task
10:40-11:20	Kenneth Aizawa	Noe‘s Strong and Weak Enactivism
11:25-12:25	John Bickle	From Psychological Generalizations to Neuromolecular Mechanisms: Explanations ‘in a Single Bound'
Lunch at facility
1:30-2:10	James Beebe	Surprising Connections Between Knowledge and Intentional Action: The Robustness of the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect
2:15-3:05	Daniel A. Weiskopf	The Architecture of the Embodied Mind
3:10-4:00	Andrea Scarantino	Unconscious Emotions: Respectable, Useful, and Probably Necessary
Saturday
9:30 - 10:10	Avery Archer	Desires as Sub-agential Evaluations of the Good
10:15 - 10:55	Elise Labbé-Coldsmith	Mindfulness: Defining and Measuring from a Biopsychosocial Perspective
11:00-11:40	Richard Hine	Attention as Phenomenal Consciousness: For Richer, For Poorer
11:45-12:25	James Dow	Against Cognitive Descriptivism: Self-Ascription, Identification, and the Subject Principle

For more information, see the conference website here.

Fordham Graduate Philosophy Conference 2010

Despite our considerable cultural, scientific and historical distance from Aristotle his thought remains a fertile source of philosophical insight. The rise of virtue ethics in the 20th century furnishes a paradigmatic example of how Aristotle can still be brought into productive conversation with contemporary philosophical debates. Perhaps, however, Aristotle’s insights were not limited to ethics alone. Therefore, the goal of Fordham’s next biennial graduate student conference Aristotle in the 21st Century is to explore whether and how Aristotle’s work might advance contemporary debates in action theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political theory and other areas as well as ethics. We will welcome as plenary speakers Prof. Michael Thompson of the University of Pittsburg and Fordham’s own Prof. John Drummond.

The conference will be held the 5-6th of March, 2010 at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.

Graduate students wishing to submit a paper for consideration are asked kindly to email their submissions by 1 Jan 2010 to:

fordham.graduate.conference@gmail.com

Check out the conference website here.

3 Quarks Blog Competition

Voting is now open for the 3 Quarks 2009 Philosophy Blogging Competition. I originally nominated the post “Dilworth’s Functional Consonance”. However, there were two nominations for my recent post, “A Counterexample to Setiya”. Since I give priority to the opinions of my readers, I’m now rooting for the Setiya post (number 58 on the list). So I invite all my blog readers to check it out and if you think it deserving of the honour, please cast your vote here.

There are a number of quality posts on the list, so whether you decide to vote for mine or not I think you should definitely vote.


UPDATE:

Polling for the 3 Quarks competition is now closed and the list of semifinalists is now available here.

Special thanks to all those who voted for this blog!

Williamson Interview

I came across this interview of Timothy Williamson by 3:AM Magazine (via Nothing of Consequence). Here are two questions from the interview, both of a meta-philosophical nature, that I found particularly interesting:

3:AM: In your last book you again insinuate yourself into contemporary philosophical thought and say that not only has it made errors but it has actually taken a disastrous wrong turn. You call this the ‘linguistic turn’, which develops into ‘the conceptual turn’. This is radicalism without a hat. Could you briefly outline the main argument that philosophy that thinks that its sole job is to analyse language/concepts is wrong and why this is such an important point?

TW: The linguistic turn and the conceptual turn took many different forms. All of them were, in one way or another, responses to a methodological challenge to philosophy that the development of modern experimental science has made more and more urgent: how can philosophers expect to learn about the world without getting up out of their armchairs to see what it’s actually like? The idea was that whatever philosophers have to do, they can do on the basis of their understanding of their native language, or perhaps of some ideal formal language, or their grasp of the corresponding concepts, both of which they already have in the armchair. In some sense philosophical questions are linguistic or conceptual questions, either because they are about our own language or thought, or because they are the kind of questions that can be answered from principles that we implicitly accept simply in understanding the words or grasping the concepts. In reply, I argue that the attempts to rephrase philosophical questions as questions about words or concepts are unfaithful to what contemporary philosophers are actually interested in. For example, philosophers of time are interested in the underlying nature of time, not just the word ‘time’ or our concept of time. As for the principles that we implicitly accept simply in understanding words or grasping concepts, I argue that there aren’t any. A language is a forum for disagreement; contrary to what many philosophers have thought, it doesn’t impose an ideology. People who take wildly unorthodox views, even about logic, are not ‘breaking the rules of English’. Although the linguistic turn and the conceptual turn involve radical misconceptions of philosophy, in my view, I don’t regard them as avoidable accidents. Probably they were stages that philosophy had to go through; we can only determine their limitations if lots of able people are doing their utmost to defend them. But by now we can see their limitations. As an alternative, I show how we can answer the methodological challenge to armchair philosophy without taking the linguistic or conceptual turn. For example, thought experiments, which play a central role in contemporary philosophy, involve offline applications in the imagination of cognitive skills originally developed through online applications in perception. Those skills go well beyond the minimum required for understanding the words or grasping the concepts. Our ability to perform thought experiments is really just a by-product of our ability to answer non-philosophical questions of the form “What would happen if …?” Philosophy is much more like other forms of inquiry than philosophers have often pretended.

And the second question, which I'm sure will get a few people worked up:

3:AM: Many of my friends are Wittgensteinians, others phenomenologists. Should they stop?

TW: It would be unhealthy as well as boring for philosophy if everyone did it in the same way. We need a wide gene pool of ideas and methods. Nevertheless, some ideas and methods are better than others. When it comes to writing the history of twentieth century philosophy, the works of Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger will presumably remain major texts, given their originality and vast influence. But from a historical point of view, it also seems clear that in recent decades the Wittgensteinian and phenomenological traditions have not adequately renewed themselves. Although books continue to be published in both traditions, they are recycling old ideas rather than engaging with new ones. Part of the attraction of such a tradition for its adherents is that it constitutes an intellectual comfort zone in which they are given pseudo-justifications for not bothering to learn new ways of thinking. At their best, the Wittgensteinian and phenomenological traditions share the virtue of patient, accurate description of examples. In that respect the analytic tradition has learned from them, I hope permanently. But once the examples started giving results that didn’t suit them, Wittgensteinians retreated into their dogmatic theoretical preconceptions while pretending to do the opposite. As for phenomenology, if a phenomenological description of experience is one that mentions only facts the subject knows at the time, fine. But it shouldn’t be confused with a description of facts about appearances, since one often knows facts that go beyond them. You can know that you are seeing a computer screen, not just that you seem to be seeing a computer screen. I argue in Knowledge and its Limits that the privileging of appearances results from the fallacy of assuming that we must have a cognitive home.

A Counterexample to Setiya

In his book, Reasons Without Rationalism, Keiran Setiya posits the following necessary truth about intentional action:

Belief: When someone is acting intentionally, there must be something he is doing intentionally, not merely trying to do, in the belief that he is doing it.

Setiya’s requirement builds on Anscombe’s insight that “intentional actions are ones to which a certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application.”(Anscombe [2000], Intentions. p. 11, §6.) 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’.” (Ibid.) 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. Thus, we arrive at what may be called the Strong Knowledge Requirement for intentional action:

Strong Knowledge Requirement: For all agents, φ, if an agent is φ-ing intentionally then that agent knows she is φ-ing.

However, after considering Davidson’s example of the teacher who is intentionally making ten carbon copies as he writes even though he is unsure that he is pressing hard enough to successfully do so, Setiya concludes that the Strong Knowledge Requirement is unsound. 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.

The first revision Setiya makes to Anscombe is to switch from a knowledge to a belief requirement. This yields what may be called the Strong Belief Requirement for intentional action:

Strong Belief Requirement: For all agents, φ, if an agent is φ-ing intentionally then that agent believes she is φ-ing.

However, as Setiya acknowledges, the Strong Belief Requirement does little better than the Strong Knowledge Requirement vis-a-vis the carbon copy case. Insofar as the carbon-copier is unsure about whether or not he is making ten copies, he does not believe that he is making ten copies. Setiya therefore proposes a second modification to the Strong Knowledge Requirement. He claims that to count as φ-ing intentionally, one need not believe that one is φ-ing. One only needs to believe that one is performing some action ψ, where ψ is either identical with φ or an intentional action one is performing with the end of φ-ing. Moreover, he holds that one’s belief that one is ψ-ing must be true; to wit, ψ must be an action one is actually performing rather than merely attempting to perform. Thus, we arrive at what I take to be Setiya’s considered position with respect to intentional actions:

Moderate Belief Requirement: For all agents, φ, if an agent is φ-ing intentionally then that agent believes truly that she is ψ-ing, where ψ-ing is either identical to φ-ing or an intentional action performed with the end of φ-ing.

It should be clear that the Moderate Belie Requirement is nothing but a restatement Belief. This revision of Anscombe's (alleged) Strong Knowledge Requirement allows Setiya to successful address the carbon copy case since there is an intentional action (i.e., pressing hard while writing) that the carbon-copier believes truly that he is performing, and which is performed with the end of producing ten copies.

I wish to argue that Belief fails to capture a necessary truth about intentional action. To this end, I will be attempting to construct a counterexample to Belief; a case in which we would plausibly regard an agent as acting intentionally even though the agent fails to meet the necessary condition it specifies.

The Prosthetic Limb Example*:
Consider the case of an arm-amputee, Jesse, who has a thought-controlled prosthetic arm grafted to his shoulders. Let us suppose that Jesse has to demonstrate the functionality of his thought-controlled arm to a Research and Development panel. However, just before the demonstration, Jesse gets an anonymous letter saying that the researchers, out of fear that their funding will be cut, have conspired to trick him into thinking that his prosthetic arm is functioning properly even though it is not. According to the anonymous letter, the researchers will ask Jesse to perform a number of tasks and observe him closely for an indication that he is about to perform the requested action. Then they will remotely cause the arm to perform the various tasks using a wireless signal from a computer. Thus, according to the anonymous letter, while it would appear to him that he is controlling his prosthetic arm with his thoughts, it will actually be the researcher’s computers that will be determining the arm’s movements.

However, let us suppose that (unknown to Jesse) the anonymous letter is completely unreliable, and that the researchers have concocted no such plot. All the movements his prosthetic arm makes are in fact being caused by his thoughts rather than by the scientist. As he is standing before the panel, a ball is thrown towards Jesse and he catches it with his prosthetic arm. He is then asked to throw the ball, and he complies. Moreover, let us assume that the thought process preceding the movement of the thought-controlled arm are of the same kind as that which would precede the movements of Jesse’s normal (i.e., non-prosthetic) arm. However, since he is unsure about the reliability of the anonymous letter, Jesse remains unsure that it is his thoughts that are causing the arm to catch the ball. Even as he is performing the action he can’t help but wonder if it is actually the researchers who are controlling the arm’s movements with a remote device. In short, there is no action (i.e., moving his arm, catching the ball, throwing the ball) that Jesse believes he is performing. Still, it seems perfectly natural to say that Jesse caught and threw the ball and that he did so intentionally. The upshot is that, contra Belief, Jesse intentionally catches and throws the ball even though there is no action that he believes he is performing.

There are two strategies for resisting the unpropitious consequences of the Prosthetic Limb Example that appear worth considering:

(Strategy 1): Argue that Jesse has not performed an intentional action when he catches or throws the ball.

(Strategy 2): Grant that Jesse has performed an intentional action, but argue that there is an intentional action that he believes he is performing with the end of catching and throwing the ball.

I believe that (Strategy 1) is moribund. Firstly, we may say that Jesse either intended to catch and throw the ball, or he did not so intend. These exhaust all the relevant possibilities. Now, it seems highly implausible to say that Jesse did not intend to catch the ball. Clearly, his catching and throwing the ball was no accident. Nor was it the side-effect of some other action Jesse was performing. Moreover, we may safely assume that Jesse went before the panel with the intention of performing the various tasks asked of him (even if he was unsure he would be the one performing them). Additionally, when the ball was thrown towards him, it is clear that Jesse meant to catch it; this was the goal he had in mind when he moved his prosthetic arm to intercept it. Once it has been acknowledged that Jesse intended to catch and throw the ball, it is natural to regard his intention as the cause (in the broadest sense of the term) of his arm’s movements. In fact, since (ex hypothesi) the arm’s movements are not being controlled by the researchers, it is unclear what other explanation there could be of his catching and throwing the ball besides Jesse’s intention to catch and throw it.

Secondly, suppose it is later revealed to Jesse that the anonymous letter was unreliable and that he was actually controlling the movements of the prosthetic arm. In such a case, I believe we can imagine Jesse thinking to himself, “so I did catch the ball after all!” In other words, it is plausible that Jesse would take ownership of the action in the way one would take ownership of something one intentionally performed. Moreover, it would be implausible to suggest that Jesse’s belief that he performed the action retroactively made his action intentional. Jesse’s belief does not change the (metaphysical) status of his action from unintentional to intentional; at most, it changes his knowledge of the action’s status. Thus, we must conclude that Jesse’s actions were intentional all along, if we are to hold that it is intentional at all. It follows that Jesse’s actions were intentional even when he did not believe he was performing them.

According to (Strategy 2), there is in fact some intentional action that Jesse believes he is performing—namely, whatever thoughts caused the movement of his thought-controlled prosthetic arm. Unfortunately, (Strategy 2) also seems moribund. Ex hypothesi, Jesse’s prosthetic arm is controlled by the same kind of thought processes that are at play when he moves his normal arm. There is some debate over whether thoughts—particularly of the kind that features in the aetiology of bodily movements—may be considered intentional actions. But let us grant, if only for the sake of argument, that the relevant thoughts are themselves a kind of intentional action. Even so, the present proposal only seems remotely plausible if we identify the thought in question with ‘trying’ to catch or throw the ball, in the sense of ‘trying’ that accompanies all cases of intentional action. This is the sense of ‘trying’ that Davidson attributes to the carbon-copier, and which Davidson takes to be sufficient for the carbon-copier’s actions to be intentional. Thus, if we buy into Davidson’s framework, we can easily accommodate the intuition that Jesse’s actions are intentional.

However, this is not an option available to Setiya, who explicitly denies that ‘trying’ (in the above sense) fulfils the criterion imposed by Belief. He writes:

Despite what Davidson suggests, it is not enough that the carbon-copier is intentionally trying to make ten copies, in the paradigm sense of “intentional action” that involves belief. He is and must be doing specific things—for instance, pressing hard on the paper—in that paradigm sense.

In brief, Jesse’s act of trying to catch the ball (even if it is regarded as an intentional action) fails to meet Setiya’s specifications. Consequently, Belief entails that Jesse does not catch the ball intentionally. It follows that, by Setiya’s own lights, (Strategy 2) gets things wrong. Assuming that (Strategy 1) and (Strategy 2) exhausts all remotely plausible strategies for responding to the Prosthetic Limb Example, it remains a counterexample to Belief.

Admittedly, the Prosthetic Limb Example is an unusual case. Moreover, it is clear that in the vast majority of cases of intentional action, the agent is not in the position that Jesse finds himself in. Consequently, I do not see the Prosthetic Limb Example as posing a challenge to the claim that when we act intentionally we prototypically know that we are acting. Moreover, since I take Anscombe to be offering a prototypical generalisation, I do not believe the Prosthetic Limb Example represents a refutation of Anscombe’s account of intentional action. However, what Setiya purports to provide is not a prototypical generalisation, but a necessary truth. Unlike prototypical generalisations, necessary truths allow for no exceptions. Thus, as unusual as the Prosthetic Limb Example may be, it is sufficient to undermine Setiya’s claim that Belief is a necessary truth.

*This example is loosely based on the real life case of Jesse Sullivan. Here is a short video of Jesse's arm in action:

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Might Intentions be Reasons? (Ben Mitchell-Yellin)

In this post, I want to gesture at a sense in which intentions might be reasons that is consistent with the view defended by John Brunero (“Are Intentions Reasons?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88: 424-44), that intentions do not provide reasons for actions or for adopting other intentions. I will begin by briefly presenting Brunero’s view. Then I will make a distinction between different “directions” in which a reason may “push” and suggest that intentions might be reasons that push in one direction even if not the others.

Brunero rejects both the intentions-provide-reasons view and the tie-breaker view, according to which intentions are reasons only in tie-break situations. He puts forward the following positive view:

[I]n cases where we are dealing with some already reasonable end, there is a reason to do what would facilitate that end (a reason that exists not because you intend the end, but because the end is reasonable), but your intending the end may be relevant to whether this reason transfers to the specific actions which are necessary, but not sufficient, for the realization of the end.

Brunero’s idea of a reason transferring from an adopted end to a necessary (but not sufficient) means relies on the notions of the “facilitative principle” and “facilitating plans,” borrowed from Raz. A facilitating plan is a set of actions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for achieving some end. According to the facilitative principle, given reasonable end E, agent A has a reason to perform each individually necessary (but not sufficient) means M1, M2, …, Mn, as part of his facilitating plan P. But this does not mean that A has a reason to perform M1 by itself. That “would seem a pointless and unreasonable waste of time.” This is where intentions affect our reasons. A’s intention to E “provides us with some assurance that he will undertake the other parts of the plan that, along with [M1], will jointly suffice to bring it about that he can” E. So A’s adoption of the intention to E transfers the reason for P as a whole to each of its individual parts M1, M2, …, Mn.

Notably, on Brunero’s view, the intention to E does not give A any new reasons. Instead, it affects the structure of the reasons he has. Both E and E’ may be reasonable ends. So A has reason to undertake both facilitating plans P and P’. But supposing A adopts E, and not E’, we do not want to say that he has a reason to M and M’, where these are individual parts of P and P’, respectively. Brunero’s view allows us to say that A’s adopting E, and not E’, makes it the case that A has a reason to M (as a part of P) but not M’, and this is so because A’s adopting E makes it reasonable to suppose that A will complete all the necessary and jointly sufficient means to E, of which M is one. I think this view is reasonable. I also think it allows that intentions might be reasons, albeit in a different sense than concerns Brunero.

Brunero follows the literature in concerning himself with the question whether intentions might be considerations that favor performing actions (that are necessary (but not sufficient) means to executing the intention) or adopting other intentions. We might say that in the first case the question is whether intentions are reasons that “push down” and in the second case whether intentions are reasons that “push across.” Such talk makes sense if we think of levels of rational agency (perhaps along the lines of Bratman’s theory of planning agency). We might delineate the various levels as follows. At bottom, we have facts. Then we have actions, facilitating plans, intentions, non-facilitating plans and policies, in ascending order of hierarchy. One natural question, given this hierarchy, is whether the adoption of an intention exerts rational pressure that “pushes down” to the level of facilitating plans. Does A’s adopting the intention to E give her a reason to M, where M is a necessary (but not sufficient) means to E? This is the sort of question that concerns Brunero. He gives a negative answer. A’s adopting E does not give her a reason in this sense. She already has a reason to M, but only as a part of facilitating plan P. A’s adopting E transfers the reason for P to each of the jointly sufficient actions that constitute it. One may even think this claim can be generalized, such that no reasons “push down.”

But, it seems to me, even if the general claim is correct in answer to the above question, we might also ask a different question. We might wonder whether the adoption of an intention to E exerts rational pressure that “pushes up” to the level of non-facilitating plans. Does A’s adopting the intention to E give her a reason to adopt non-facilitating plan X, where E is a necessary (but not sufficient) means to X? Perhaps we can give a positive answer. So intentions can be reasons in a sense. They can be considerations that favor adopting non-facilitating plans. The claim that reasons “push up” is not at all foreign. Facts are commonly thought to favor actions, for example. So a negative answer to the general question whether reasons ever “push up” is not likely forthcoming. This adds interest to the question about intentions in particular.

Let us take as basic the notion of a reason as a consideration that favors something (following Scanlon). If A’s adopting an intention favors something (in a way that thing was not favored before the adoption of the intention), then we can say that A’s adopting the intention gives A a reason. This is consistent with Brunero’s view because he accepts the claim that reasons are basic and denies that A’s adopting an intention favors anything (in a way that thing was not favored before the adoption of the intention). I want to suggest (but not argue for the claim) that once we notice the above hierarchy, we might see that the adoption of an intention might favor something (in a way that thing was not favored before), namely, a non-facilitating plan. We are familiar with the notion that a fact can favor an action. So we are familiar with the notion of reasons that “push up” from facts to actions. Indeed, it is because some fact F already favors M that we need not take A’s adopting E to favor M in order to say that A has a reason to M. And we can say that E is reasonable because it is favored by certain facts. This is another familiar way that reasons “push up.” So what stands in the way of our saying that another way reasons “push up” is by intentions favoring non-facilitating plans?

Here is one possible objection. We might think that only facts can stand in the favoring-relation to things (e.g., actions, intentions, etc.). The two familiar ways that reasons “push up” both appeal to facts favoring something. We might say that facts, not intentions, favor non-facilitating plans in just the same way that facts favor actions and intentions. Call this a “buck-passing” account of rational agency. At each level, the relevant thing is reasonable only if favored, but it is always facts that do the favoring. So intentions do not favor non-facilitating plans, facts do. Thus, intentions do not give reasons.

This is an interesting objection. Let me conclude by suggesting one reason why we might not want a buck-passing account of rational agency. I think we want our adopted goals to factor into the reasonableness of our higher-order agential attitudes. We want our intentions to affect the reasonableness of our non-facilitating plans and our non-facilitating plans to affect the reasonableness of our policies. This is not to deny that the facts affect the reasonableness of our non-facilitating plans and policies. But the facts may not (do not?) determine uniquely reasonable non-facilitating plans and policies. And this is where we might find that intentions are reasons. That A adopts an intention to E might favor her adopting certain reasonable (according to the facts) non-facilitating plans over others.

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.”