tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949761534200395390.post4733288655948835557..comments2024-01-03T17:27:11.545+01:00Comments on The Space of Reasons: On the Nonexistence of Practical WithholdingAVERY ARCHERhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14313322464414110953noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949761534200395390.post-57041167047147396212013-02-13T15:48:31.541+00:002013-02-13T15:48:31.541+00:00Hey Liam, thanks for the very thoughtful feedback!...Hey Liam, thanks for the very thoughtful feedback! I am not convinced that my examples are disanalogous in the way you suggest. However, I suspect that I may need to phrase my examples more carefully in order to make the analogy between the two cases more transparent.<br /><br />Notice that Jesse does not deliberate about whether or not to adopt a certain intention (i.e., the intention to take a break or the intention to continue driving). She deliberates about whether she should take a break or continue driving. This suggests that the appropriate theoretical analogue to her practical deliberation is not deliberating about whether to "believe or not believe" P. Rather, it is deliberating about whether or not P is true. Moreover, I don't think we typically deliberate about whether to "believe or not believe" something (though we might). We typically deliberate about whether or not something is true. Consider: if I were to deliberate about whether or not it would be best or most advantageous to believe P, my deliberation may be accurately described as deliberating about whether to "believe or not believe" P, but it can hardly be described as deliberating about whether or not P is true. Moreover, if I switch the focus of my second example to deliberating about whether to believe P, rather than to deliberation about whether P is true (as you seem to be suggesting), there seems to be a danger of collapsing the distinction between the theoretical and practical deliberation. After all, many practical considerations may go into determining whether or not I should believe that P. (I think William James would like that point.) However, we would then have something less like an analogy and more like an equivalence.<br /><br />Another way of putting my point is as follows: The aim of theoretical deliberation (as I am conceiving it) is not the fixation of belief (Pierce be damned) but to bring my mental representations into conformity with the external world. Fixing belief is simply a matter of achieving a certain psychological state, and (in principle) this is something I can do without any concern for the extra-mental world. However, trying to bring my mental representations into conformity with the world betrays a fundamental concern with the extra-mental world. (I suspect that there are de re/de dicto issues in the vicinity, here, but I trust that my point is clear.) Analogously, the aim of practical reasoning (as I am conceiving it) is not the fixation of intention (i.e., achieving a certain psychological state), but to bring the extra-mental world into conformity with my mental representations. On this view, Jesse's coin toss (in both the theoretical and practical case) is meant to address an extra-mental concern. <br /><br />Perhaps I could bring out this analogy more clearly if I rephrased my first example so that Jesse is deliberating about whether or not to make it true that P, where P is the proposition: "I am stopping for a break". This rephrasing would coincide with my preferred way of describing how conative attitudes like intentions relate to a proposition: to wit, while the belief that P represents P as true, the intention to bring about P represents P as to be made true. Does that make the analogy clearer? Or have I missed the force of your objection?AVERY ARCHERhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14313322464414110953noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3949761534200395390.post-40635004218838482672013-02-12T21:25:16.572+00:002013-02-12T21:25:16.572+00:00Hey Avery, some thoughts on this. The uses of the ...Hey Avery, some thoughts on this. The uses of the coin toss in the two cases don't seem quite analogous. In the first story Jesse flips the coin over whether or not she should take the action in question. In the second story Jesse flips the coin over whether the proposition is true or false. But the analogy seems rather to be whether or not she should believe the proposition or not. (Or, alternately, she should be flipping the coin in the first story over whether it would be best to pull over or not). For in the first the outcome of the coin toss directly decides the matter, whereas in the second the coin toss seems to require the further step "And Jesse resolves to believe the proposition if it is true, and disbelieve it if it is false" if it is to tie directly into the belief.<br /><br /> This matters because in your analysis the coin toss is appropriate in the action-case because the matter at hand affords a natural binary division (where opting to do one is de facto opting not to do the other), whereas this is not the case for belief. But if the coin toss was telling us "Believe or not believe" (where covered under "not believe" was both "Disbelieve" and "Withhold judgement") then both cases would afford this binary division. Yet I should still agree that the coin toss was a sensibel decision procedure in the first case but not the second. This suggests to me that your analysis of what the source of the dis-analogy is is off.Last Positivisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11677699402952932577noreply@blogger.com