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On Reasons and Animals: My Reply to Ben

Special thanks to Ben for his thoughtful feedback on my previous post (see comments). I concede that our ordinary linguistic practice often includes the metaphorical attribution of agency. But of course, that does not mean that such attributions are always metaphorical. For example, no one worth taking seriously (at least for the purposes of the present discussion) would say it is metaphorical in the case of fully competent human beings. So the question is, on which side of the divide does our agency-attributions to animals fall? Is it like our agency-attribution to inanimate objects, or is it more like our attributions to human beings?

Now there are clearly numerous respects in which animals are more like human beings than they are like inanimate objects. Hurley’s monkey, for example, has a heart, brain and haemoglobin bearing blood cells; as do we. But these points of similarity are not salient to the question at hand. Thus, in this post, my task will not be merely to show that animals are more like humans than they are like inanimate objects. That’s a given. Rather, it will be to show that they are similar to humans in ways that are salient to the question of agency. Consequently, when assessing my claims, one cannot simply ask if they are true; one must ask if they’re relevantly true. This is the question I wish to take up.

One striking difference between animals and inanimate objects is that the former are ordinarily assumed to possess motivational states while the latter are not. Moreover, the claim that animals possess motivational states is meant to be taken literally. This is a point made quite emphatically by Mary Midgley:

There is nothing anthropomorphic in speaking of the motivation of animals. It is anthropomorphic to call the lion the King of Beasts, but not to talk of him as moved, now by fear, now by curiosity, now by territorial anger. These are not the names of hypothetical inner states, but of major patterns in anyone’s life, the signs of which are regular and visible. Anyone who has to deal with lions learns to read such signs, and survives by doing so. Both with animals and with men, we respond to the feelings and intentions we read in an action, not to the action itself. (Midgley (1978), Beast and Man., pp. 105-6.)

I believe that the difference between animals and inanimate objects highlighted by Midgley is salient to the question of agency. In the knife case, the focus is on the event (the cutting of the hand). But in the animal case, the focus is on the animal’s inner (read: psychological) states. If one sees a lion walking towards you, it is important to be able to distinguish between whether it is being motivated by a desire to eat you or a desire to reunite with its pride that is gathered under a tree fifty feet behind you. Our folk psychology is what provides us with the tools we need to interpret the lion’s actions. But notice, we are not simply paying attention to the bodily movements of the lion, but also to the inner psychological states (e.g., the lion’s intentions), which we hope to opine by observing the bodily movements. Our concern is primarily with the lion’s psychological states since they will determine what the lion will do next. Moreover, while we may attempt to put ourselves in the lion’s shoes in order to help us opine what its intentions are, we nevertheless assume that these psychological states are real and that they belong to the lion.

The preceding claims are supported by a key assumption of any folk-psychological attempt to make sense of animal behaviour—namely, that when we attribute motives and intentions to animals, we may get things wrong. For example, we assume that it is possible for us to mistakenly conclude that the lion intends to reunite with its pride when it actually has its sights set on us; and this assumption entails that the lion’s inner states exist quite independently of our beliefs about them; that they are not simply hypothetical states we attribute to the lion. This does not seem to be true of inanimate objects, which occupy a very different place in our folk psychology. We do not, for example, think we can be mistaken about the motivations of an inanimate object. There is simply nothing to be mistaken about. I believe this difference suggests that while the motivations we attribute to inanimate objects are metaphorical, the same is not true in the case of animals. When we attribute a motive to an animal we typically take ourselves to be attributing something objectively real, something we may possibly be mistaken about.

I believe the above observations may reveal a difficulty with Ben’s alternative proposal. He writes:

We attribute rational agency to non-rational animals (and even inanimate objects) because we think about the relevant behavior/events (in these, but not necessarily all cases) by adopting the animal's (or object's) perspective from within our own first-personal point of view.

The problem with this proposal is that it overlooks what we ordinarily take to be an important difference between animals and inanimate objects. In the case of inanimate objects, like a knife, there is simply no perspective to adopt. The knife does not enjoy any representational states; it does not see, taste our experience the world in any way. It does not have desires, wants, or appetites. This is why talk of adopting a knife’s perspective can only be metaphorical. But animals, like Hurley’s monkey, are ordinarily assumed to have a perspective in the most literal sense imaginable. They enjoy representations of the world, and are plausibly assumed to be motivated by desires and appetites, and so on.

I hold that having motivational psychological states and being moved to act by them is sufficient for agency. Since the term agent, at least as it features in philosophical discussions, is a term of art, this definition may be seen as stipulative. Given the account of agency I favour (and one is of course free to suggest a better philosophical account), it follows from the conclusion of the preceding paragraph that animals may be agents (in a non-metaphorical sense). But terminological issues aside, the claim I actually set out to defend in my previous post has little to do with whether or not animals are agents and more to do with the concept of a reason and with what it means to be responsive to reasons. My contention is that there is an ordinary usage of the word ‘reasons’ that is consistent with the claim that animals may be responsive to reasons, and it is this usage of the word that I wish to subject to philosophical analysis.

In attempting to identify the ordinary usage of the word ‘reason’ that I have in mind, it may be helpful to distinguish between reasons-for-which an agent acts and the reasons-with-which an agent acts. The latter refers to considerations that an agent takes to be a justification for her carrying out a certain action. By contrast, let us say that the former refers to whatever motivates an agent to act. (Note: I may not be drawing this distinction in the same way others have.) When we specify the reasons-for-which an agent acts, there are typically two forms that our explanations take: We may say that a lion is walking towards me in order to devour me (an mode of explanation that emphasises the lion’s goals; think pull rather than push), or we may say the lion is walking towards me because it wants to devour me (a mode of explanation that cites specific desires that the lion possesses; think push rather than pull).

I believe that there is an ordinary and intuitive use of the word ‘reason’ according to which the following is true: to say that the lion approached the man because it desired to devour him is to give the lion’s reason for approaching the man. Likewise, to say that the lion approached the man in order to devour him is, again, to give the reason the lion approached the man. It is this usage of the word ‘reason’ that I am interested in preserving: reasons as reasons-for-which. I do not claim that it is the only usage of the word; I do not even claim that it is the only usage of the word that has a legitimate claim to being part of our ordinary linguistic practice. There may be multiple ordinary usages (i.e., meanings) of a single word. I only claim that it is a legitimate part of our ordinary linguistic practice (rather than my personal concoction), and it also happens to be a part of our ordinary linguistic practice that I wish my account of reasons and agency to preserve.

McDowell on Rational Animals

In my previous post on this topic, I described Burge's alternative to M-rationalism. Following Burge, I hold that justification is not the only type of warrant. Moreover, consistent with Burge, I hold that a psychological transition need not be motivated by a higher order attitude that takes the transition as its object in order for that transition to provide that agent with a justification for beliefs based on that transition. However, I part ways with Burge by advocating a broader and more inclusive conception of reasons; one that has application not only to justification but also to entitlement. In a slogan: only reasons warrant. I wish to say that the transitive inference performed by Hurley’s monkey provides it with a reason that warrants the monkey’s inference-based belief. On this view, a transition may count as reason-conferring even if the agent lacks the conceptual resources necessary to recognise that it accords with a rational principle. This less restrictive conception of reasons has application to all potentially belief-yielding psychological transitions, not only the psychological transitions of rational animals (in the sense reserved for mature humans). In short, one does not have to be a rational animal to have a reason.

The broader and more inclusive conception of reasons presently on offer is consistent with that of John McDowell, who draws a distinction between “responsiveness to reasons” and “responsiveness to reasons as such”:

The notion of rationality I mean to invoke here is the notion exploited in a traditional line of thought to make a special place in the animal kingdom for rational animals. It is a notion of responsiveness to reasons as such. That wording leaves room for responsiveness to reasons, though not to reasons as such, on the other side of the division drawn by this notion of rationality between rational animals and animals that are not rational. Animals of many kinds are capable of, for instance, fleeing. And fleeing is a response to something that is in an obvious sense a reason for it; danger, or at least what is taken to be danger. If we describe a bit of behaviour as fleeing, we represent the behaviour as intelligible in the light of a reason for it. But fleeing is not in general responding to a reason as such. (Italics his)

Following McDowell, I reserve the title “rational animal” for those agents that have the capacity to conceive of reasons as such. What makes one a rational animal (in the sense reserved for mature human beings) is not the ability to possess reasons—for this is an ability shared by some non-rational animals—but the ability to recognise one’s reasons as reasons. However, as McDowell’s “fleeing” example illustrates, an agent does not have to be a rational animal in order to possess or be responsive to reasons simpliciter. Hence, a distinction is drawn between the necessary conditions for possessing reasons; conditions that do not require the possession of the relevant concepts; conditions that some non-rational animals can meet; and the conditions for having beliefs about one’s reasons; conditions that do require the possession of the relevant concepts; conditions that only rational animals can meet. One does not have to be a rational animal to have reasons; but one must be a rational animal to reflect on them.

This manner of speaking strikes me as more natural, from a terminological point of view, than that of Wallace and Burge. To say that a psychological transition is rational is, intuitively, to say something about that psychological transition. To say that an agent is a rational animal is, intuitively, to say something about that agent. But on the Wallace-Burge way of putting things, to say that a psychological transition is rational is actually to say something about the agent enjoying the transition. This is because both Wallace and Burge make the status of a psychological transition dependent on whether or not the agent enjoying the transition possesses certain conceptual capacities, a fact that I take to be independent of the nature of the transition itself. By contrast, the conception presently on offer makes a transition’s status as rational contingent on the transition’s non-arbitrary truth-conduciveness, and an agent’s status as rational contingent on the agent’s conceptual capacities. This preserves a clear distinction between the rational status of a transition and the rational status of an agent; providing us with at least the option of talking about the two independently, should we need to do so.

The need to speak of the rational status of a transition independently of the status of the agent performing it arises in the case of Hurley’s monkey. We can imagine circumstances in which inferences performed by Hurley’s monkey comply or fail to comply with the norms of rationality. It would therefore be useful to be able to talk about the rational status of such an inference even if we recognise that Hurley’s monkey is not a rational animal. Moreover, there may be instances in which there is simply insufficient empirical evidence available to determine whether or not a particular agent has the conceptual resources necessary to recognise reasons as such. It would therefore be useful to be able to talk about the rational status of a transition performed by an agent without having to take a stand on whether or not the agent is rational. As it happens, our ordinary linguistic practice already provides us with tools needed for such a task, for it is part of said practice to talk about the reasons that some nonhuman animal has to behave in such and such a manner or hold such and such a belief, while leaving fixed the question of whether or not that animal can respond to reasons as such. This brings us to the most straightforward motivation for adopting a conception of reason that has application to agents that cannot recognise their reasons as such, agents that may be entitled but not justified; to wit, such a conception comports with our ordinary linguistic practice.

The Perceptual Model as Ideal in McDowell's Account of Virtuous Agency

Avery has written a number of interesting posts about McDowell’s conception of virtuous agency. Here, I would like to offer a reason why McDowell thinks that the virtuous agent has a correct perception of what has to be done, when a particular situation calls for a particular ethically salient action.

Let’s begin by making a distinction between two ways of understanding the aetiology of a particular morally correct action: (1) the Perceptual Model, and (2) the Ratiocinative Model. (I’m trying to follow Avery’s terminology here.) On the Perceptual Model of morally correct action, a virtuous agent is moved to act by his or her perception of what that particular situation demands. Here, the virtuous agent does not think about what he or she ought to do before or while performing the relevant action. The sense in which the virtuous agent does not “think about” what ought to be done can be given an intuitive gloss: the agent is moved to act by an inculcated habit, which is very much like a reflex. In contrast, on the Ratiocinative Model of morally correct action, a virtuous agent is moved to act by his or her entertaining a thought to the effect that “That such-and-such is to be done, here and now”. On this model, the virtuous agent must first entertain such a thought and then act accordingly.

Now, McDowell elevates the status of the Perceptual Model to that of an ideal. Why does he set aside the Ratiocinative Model as being unworthy of the ideal status? Why might he think that Ratiocination ought not to be attributed to the ideal virtuous agent’s motivational psychology? I believe that McDowell elevates this model of virtuous agency to the status of ideal because he wants us to think of the ideal virtuous agent as having a special kind of non-inferential knowledge of a particular ethically salient matter of fact. The notion of non-inferential knowledge allows no room for the kind of error in reasoning in which one’s thinking begins with a correct apprehension of some segment of reality, and ends with a non-apprehension of any segment of reality. Non-inferential knowledge is both immediately ascertained and constitutes an accurate apprehension of some segment of reality. Coupled with McDowell’s account of the fundamentally relational and exhaustively conceptual nature of perceptual experience, non-inferential knowledge of a particular ethically salient matter of fact is perfect, indefeasible knowledge of what must be done, here and now, in the perceptible world. In effect, I believe that McDowell’s notion of the ideal virtuous agent is the idea of an Omniscient Agent.

But this does not yet constitute an answer to the question: Why is ratiocination ruled out? The answer, I think, is this: McDowell is assuming that we non-ideal (non-omniscient) agents use ratiocination as a means of discovering particular matters of fact about the empirical world, and that this means of gaining knowledge is simply not required by the ideal (omniscient) virtuous agent. The ideal (omniscient) virtuous agent registers each and every ethically salient fact, in each and every particular occasion, by perception alone.

I think this is a very provocative and plausible way of understanding the notion of an ideal virtuous agent, but I'm curious to know (1) whether anyone thinks that I've correctly described McDowell's position here, and if so, (2) whether anyone finds the position thus described plausible?

McDowell's Theory of Virtue and the Multivocality Objection

One objection to McDowell’s account of virtue is that it seems to give rise to a multivocal account moral aspirations. This multivocality is viewed as problematic since it makes it unclear what the appropriate target of our moral aspirations should be.

Intuitively, one should strive to be like the ideal agent. This seems to be, in part, constitutive of what it means to be the ideal. If this is right, then it would seem that the thing to do would be to emulate the ideal (i.e., virtuous) agent. For McDowell, this means not only acting as the virtuous agent acts, but also employing the same methodology for arriving at one’s moral judgements—namely, moral perception. However, since I know that I am not the ideal, and that I am therefore unable to arrive at what I ought to do via moral perception, I should really aspire towards ratiocination (i.e., all-things-considered judgements). Admittedly, this would represent a step down from the ideal, but given my less-than-ideal status, it seems to be the best I could aspire towards.

The worry that this objection points to is that once we recognise that we are less-than-ideal agents, the ideal can on longer serve as the target of our moral aspirations. In stead of asking, what would Jesus do (i.e., the ideal agent), we seem obliged to ask what would the impetuous-but-well-meaning-apostle Peter do (i.e., the continent agent). Or, to put the matter in more McDowellian and less New-Testament-theological terms, the appropriate question for agents who recognise that they fall short of the ideal moral agent is not “what would the virtuous agent do?” but “what would the continent agent do?” This seems to follow from the fact that on McDowell’s picture the difference between the cognitive methodologies of the virtuous and non-virtuous agents (i.e., perception and ratiocination respectively) is one of kind rather than merely degree. This difference in the respective methodologies of the virtuous and non-virtuous agent opens up the lacuna that allows the multivocality worry to take hold.

This worry may further motivate the desire to have ratiocination figure as a perfectly legitimate part of the virtuous agent’s cognitive moral apparatus. If both the virtuous and continent agent, alike, are pictured as relying on ratiocination, the path appears cleared for the continent agent to become (or at least make some progress towards becoming) the virtuous agent. But so long as their methodologies remain distinct, then our awareness of our own imperfection seems to normatively confine us to emulate (i.e., employ the methodology of) the non-virtuous agent.

I believe the multivocality objection (at least in its present form) errs by construing McDowell’s account of the methodology of the continent agent (i.e., ratiocination) as prescriptive when, by McDowell’s lights, it is purely descriptive. To wit, one is never supposed to aspire towards ratiocination. Rather, moral ratiocination is simply the default position of an agent who suffers from clouded perception. Recall, the virtuous subject’s moral perception constitutes an overriding reason that silences all other reasons. By contrast, the moral perception of the non-virtuous agent is not able to silence all other reasons, which leave several competing reasons in play at once. This leads to a weighing of moral reasons, and this weighing of moral reasons just is what I have been calling moral ratiocination. The upshot of this is that ratiocination, on McDowell’s picture, always amounts to a fall back position (i.e., faute de mieux) and never to an ideal to be aspired towards.

McDowell's Truth Theory and Frege Puzzles (Jackie Carter)

In what follows, Jackie Carter offers a clear and concise summary of McDowell's proposed solution to the Frege Puzzle. Enjoy!

So, I think that McDowell's concept of truth seems somehow unsatisfying on its face.... [H]owever, I came to find it much more palatable -- in part because of its implications for philosophy of language and in particular the Frege Puzzle. Anyway, this is my effort to explain why McDowell's truth theory, which makes "true" a status internal to a world view, helps solve the elusive Frege Puzzle. (Disclaimer: my grasp of this feels rather tenuous.)

Recall that (briefly put) Frege's Puzzle is that "Hesperus=Hesperus" seems to have a cognitive value different from that of "Hesperus=Phosphorus." The problem is that if all the proper names do is pick out some referent (some object in the world), then the two identities seem to do the very same thing - the latter seems no more informative than the former. Intuitively, Frege thinks we should avoid this conclusion, so he proposes that names not only pick out referents but also have "senses." So, in the first identity, the sense of the name is the same on both sides, while in the second identity the senses are different. QED, the second identity is of greater "cognitive value" because it involves equating two different senses.

But then the question is what exactly is the "sense" of a word? Frege wants it to play the intensional role of meaning, though he leaves the concept of sense rather mysterious (which then leads Russell and Searle to offer some rather problematic explanations).

McDowell distinguishes between sense and reference as knowledge of truths on the one hand, and knowledge of objects on the other. So, someone who knows the sense of "Hesperus=Phosphorus" has knowledge of a truth, which someone who only knows "Hesperus=Hesperus" is lacking.

{McDowell writes, “Knowledge of the reference of a name…could reasonably be held to be knowledge which, in the context of appropriate further knowledge not itself involving the name, would suffice for understanding utterances containing the name – that is, precisely, knowledge of its sense” (McDowell's "On Sense and Reference," p. 163). }

But if we understand "sense" to be knowledge of truths, we run into problems if truth & truth conditions are purely extensional (as in a deflationary account like Rorty's or even Davidson's). Truth (and along with it, truth conditions) is a mere translational relation between object language and metalanguage, but the "sense" that a given individual associates with a word, sentence, or phrase is supposed to be intensional. Moreover, different people know different truths about different names; e.g., the truths that I know about the object "Hesperus" may differ from those of another. So, how can sense just be knowledge of truth conditions, which would be objective (external, the same for everyone).

The point here is when we say:

"Hesperus = Phosphorus" is true iff Hesperus is Phosphorus,

the right hand side (RHS), which captures the "sense" of the identity, may be different for different agents. For McDowell, truth is intensional, so when we disquote (ie, move over to the RHS), we are already talking about the conception of an agent (we are internal to the world view of an agent). Because truth and truth conditions are intensional, sense is intensional, which enables it to play to intensional role of meaning. That is, the notion of sense, knowledge of truths or truth conditions, can thus capture the intensional notion of meaning.

In short, McDowell’s understanding of truth as internal to the worldview of an inquirer allows him to make truth, and therefore sense, an intensional concept. For McDowell, an account of truth conditions cannot be decoupabled from an account of agents’ beliefs. The right hand side of a Tarski sentence gets at an agent’s worldview and tells us something about her beliefs.

For Davidson, by contrast, a truth theory must include both an extensional account of truth conditions and an intensional account that derives from empirical human behavior. For McDowell, there is no reason to separate these accounts. It is unclear how (and if) someone with an extensional, deflationary truth theory like Davidson's can explain meaning, i.e. sense. So the Frege puzzles seem to go unsolved if truth conditions (the RHS of T-sentence) do not get us to the intensional perspective.

McDowell, Akrasia and the Misguided View

In this post I wish to engage in a piece of philosophical exegesis in order to expose a certain misreading of McDowell. The passage I will be discussing reads as follows:

It would be a mistake to protest that one can fail to act on a reason, and even on a reason judged by oneself to be better than any reason one has for acting otherwise, without there needing to be any clouding or distortion in one’s appreciation of the reason one flouts. That is true; but to suppose it constitutes an objection to Aristotle is to fail to understand the special nature of the conception of virtue that generates Aristotle’s interest in incontinence. (Mind, Value, and Reality, p. 55)

Here, McDowell concedes that Akrasia, the phenomenon where an agent judges that some action A is the best course to pursue, but nevertheless freely chooses not to do A, is possible. On this point, McDowell agrees with Aristotle and Donald Davidson (and disagrees with Socrates who flatly denies such a possibility). More significant still, McDowell acknowledges that the best way of conceiving of Akrasia may not be in terms of “clouding or distortion in one’s appreciation of the reason one flouts.” In short, while McDowell conceives of the distinction between the virtuous agent, on the one hand, and the continent or incontinent agent, on the other, in terms of the latter having a clouded perception, he does not maintain that the possibility of Akrasia is also to be so explained.

This is an important point since some have mistakenly attributed to McDowell the claim that Akrasia can only be explained in terms of clouded moral perception. Let us refer to the thesis that it is possible for an agent to choose not to do A even if the agent’s judgement that A is the best course of action is unclouded as unclouded Akrasia. According to, what I will refer to as the misguided reading of McDowell, the above passage implicates a denial of unclouded Akrasia. The misguided reading rests on the false assumption that the “mistake” McDowell refers to in the passage in question is the idea that unclouded Akrasia is possible. However, the misguided reading overlooks the opening clause of the very next sentence in which McDowell grants “that [the possibility of unclouded Akrasia] is true”. What McDowell actually sees as the mistake is not the possibility of unclouded Akrasia per se but the idea that unclouded Akrasia poses a difficulty for his account. The upshot of the rejection of the misguided reading is that we do not need to see McDowell as attempting to account for the possibility of Akrasia in terms of “clouding or distortion” in an agent’s appreciation of her reasons. On the contrary, a careful reading of the relevant passages reveals that this is a question McDowell is altogether silent on—i.e., McDowell fails to provide any explicit positive account of how Akraisa in general (or unclouded Akrasia in particular) is possible, at least not in the essay presently under discussion.

That McDowell fails to provide a positive account of Akrasia is not surprising, nor should it be seen as a defect (i.e., a sin of omission) given his present purposes. This is because McDowell is only concerned with preserving the Aristotelian distinction between the continent and incontinent agent, and not with an account of Akrasia per se. Thus, the misguided reading errs first and foremost because it construes McDowell’s argument as attempting to establish a conclusion on a subject matter that falls outside the argument’s actual area of concern.

However, even if we reject the misguided reading, the possibility of unclouded Akrasia may still seem to pose a difficulty for McDowell’s account. Since (in the case of the virtuous agent) perceiving what one ought to do is sufficient for doing it, then the agent who manifests weakness of will must be displaying a clouded perception. While this is true by McDowell’s lights, this fact alone does not involve the denial of the possibility of unclouded Akrasia. To see this, we must distinguish between the following two types of cases: (1) ones in which an agent arrives at what she ought to do via the exercise of a perceptual sensitivity (alone) and (2) ones in which an agent arrives at what she ought to do via ratiocination. Strictly speaking, (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive since in the case of the non-virtuous agent (i.e., the continent and incontinent) both ratiocination and a perceptual sensitivity are typically in play. However, in such a case, the deliverance of the agent’s perceptual sensitivity is itself reduced to just another reason in the agent’s all-things-considered judgement. This follows from the fact that (in the case of the non-virtuous agent) moral perception does not have the silencing power that it does in the case of the virtuous agent. In fact, the absence of this silencing power is just what it means for a moral perception to be clouded on McDowell’s picture. By contrast, the virtuous agent, who has an unclouded perception, is one whose perceptual sensitivity silences all competing reasons (with certain qualifications that I will ignore for the time being) and who can therefore be described as not resorting to ratiocination at all. With these subtleties in mind, I will (for brevity) continue to talk of moral perception versus moral ratiocination as if the two are mutually exclusive phenomenon.

With the distinction between moral perception and moral ratiocination firmly in place, we can now appreciate that McDowell sees unclouded Akrasia as only relevant to the latter but not to the former. By McDowell’s lights, an agent cannot have an unclouded perception of what she ought to do and yet fail to do it since (as noted earlier) having an unclouded perception is sufficient for virtuous action. However, McDowell’s account allows that an agent may have an unclouded appreciation of her reasons and yet fail to act upon them. The upshot of this is that Akraisa (i.e., unclouded Akrasia) only applies to moral ratiocination and not to moral perceptions.

The significance of the above conclusion should not be under-appreciated. Recall, on McDowell’s view, the virtuous agent is able to perceive and act upon what she ought to do in a given situation without need for ratiocination. (In fact, this is what distinguishes the virtuous agent from the merely continent agent on McDowell’s picture.) Hence, the non-virtuous agent (i.e., the continent and incontinent) is the agent who has to resort to ratiocination since her perceptions (being clouded) are not sufficient to get her to the point of acting as the virtuous agent acts. In a slogan, the non-virtuous agent shall not live (morally) by perception alone. The upshot of this is that Akrasia can only arise in the case of a non-virtuous agent for whom ratiocination remains relevant. The virtuous agent, by contrast, relies solely on perception and therefore cannot ever suffer from Akrasia. This strikes me as just the sort of result one would want. In conclusion, McDowell’s distinction between moral perceptions and moral ratiocination allows him to preserve the following pair of desiderata: (1) it allows him to grant the possibility of unclouded Akrasia (vis-à-vis moral ratiocination) while maintaining that unclouded perception (alone) is sufficient for virtuous action, and (2) it implies that only non-virtuous agents can suffer from unclouded Akrasia.

McDowell On Virtue

The meta-ethical approach limned in John McDowell’s essay, “Virtue and Reason”, combines the Socratic thesis that “virtue is knowledge” with the Aristotelian thesis that a virtuous agent is one who exhibits a “reliable sensitivity” to the requirements of virtue. McDowell describes this sensitivity as a perceptual capacity—the ability to see, for example, what kindness requires. Significantly, McDowell’s picture does not require that the virtuous agent have the conceptual sophistication to nominally identify the particular virtue (for example, “kindness”) the agent happens to be acting from in a given situation. All that is required is that the agent be able to identify the act that kindness requires as “the thing to do”, whenever acting kindly is what ought to be done. The exercise of this sensitivity amounts to a type of knowledge, according to McDowell, because it involves getting things right.

One preliminary objection McDowell considers to the virtue as knowledge thesis is the claim that a mere sensitivity is insufficient to capture virtue since one may apprehend what one ought to do without being motivated to do it. According to this objection, some added appetitive component is needed, so that virtue is best conceived as a composite of reason and desire. I will refer to this idea as the composite conception. McDowell diagnoses the plausibility of the composite conception as stemming from the putative possibility of a non-virtuous agent perceiving the very same thing as a virtuous agent in a given situation and yet not act as the virtuous agent acts.

McDowell’s response to the composite conception appears to give rise to a dilemma, rooted in (what I shall argue are) conflicting sets of claims. On the one hand, he seems to deny the possibility of a virtuous and non-virtuous agent enjoying matching perceptions vis-à-vis what ought to be done:

If we are to retain the identification of virtue with knowledge, then, by contraposition, we are committed to denying that a virtuous person’s perception of a situation can be precisely matched in someone who, in that situation, acts otherwise than virtuously. (p. 54*).

On the other hand, he rejects Socrates’ claim that the difference between the virtuous and non-virtuous agent is one of ignorance, since this has the unattractive upshot that the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act as the virtuous agent does is involuntary. However, it is not clear that both of these positions can be consistently maintained.

McDowell’s proposed solution is “to allow that someone who fails to act virtuously may, in a way, perceive what a virtuous person would…but to insist that his failure occurs only because his appreciation of what he perceives is clouded, or unfocused, by the impact of a desire to do otherwise.” (p. 54) This reply preserves the idea that virtue is nothing more than a sensitivity since, by McDowell’s lights, the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act is not due to the agent lacking something that the virtuous agent possesses. Thus, there is no need to posit something, like say a desire, to bridge the gap between the virtuous agent’s action and the non-virtuous agent’s inaction. In stead, the reverse seems true by McDowell’s lights. To wit, it is the non-virtuous agent who actually possesses something that the virtuous agent lacks—namely, a perception-clouding desire to do otherwise. However, McDowell points out that the fact that there is an appetitive element present in the case of the non-virtuous agent does not mean that there is an appetitive element present in the case of the virtuous agent as well.

McDowell’s reply to the composite conception seems to concede that the virtuous and non-virtuous agents have the same sensitivity after all, albeit the latter’s sensitivity is accompanied by something extra. Recall, McDowell means to deny that the inactivity of the non-virtuous agent is to be explained in terms of ignorance. As such, he appears to allow that the non-virtuous agent possesses the same knowledge (i.e., sensitivity) that the virtuous agent has. However, if virtue is knowledge, then this seems to entail that the non-virtuous agent also possesses virtue. Admittedly, the non-virtuous agent possesses more than just knowledge (i.e., the relevant sensitivity) since he also possesses a competing desire. But, if virtue just is knowledge, then possession of said knowledge should be a sufficient condition for the agent counting as virtuous. If so, then the fact that the non-virtuous agent also has a perception-clouding desire to do otherwise seems beside the point. (Consider: if possessing mammary glands is sufficient for being a mammal, then the fact one also has a tail in no way ameliorates one’s fulfilment of the sufficient condition.)

The above objection illustrates why the Socratic response to the composite conception—i.e., equating a lack of virtue with ignorance—is so attractive. If one posits a sufficient condition for virtue and one wants to deny that a particular agent is virtuous, then the thing to do would be to deny that the agent meets the sufficient condition, not to say that the agent meets it but has some additional property. Thus, to the extent that Socrates employs the first strategy and McDowell employs the second, the former is preferable to the latter. As already noted, McDowell rejects the Socratic strategy because it has the unattractive upshot that the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act as the virtuous agent does is involuntary. But he seems equally unable (or unwilling) to say that the non-virtuous agent has the relevant knowledge (i.e., sensitivity) since, given the equation of virtue and knowledge, this would imply that the non-virtuous agent is virtuous.

There is a tempting reply to the above dilemma which I believe should be resisted. It is almost impossible to read McDowell’s claim that the virtuous and non-virtuous agents fail to have matching perceptions without thinking of a thesis McDowell advocates elsewhere—namely, experiential disjunctivism. Roughly, experiential disjunctivism amounts to the thesis that perceptual experiences are essentially relational, so that a subject who undergoes a veridical perceptual experience and one who undergoes a phenomenologically indistinguishable illusory experience actually have different types of experiences. On this view, there is no “highest common factor” shared between verdical and illusory experiences which may be cited as an explanation for their phenomenological indistinguishability. Applying this idea to the case of virtue, McDowell may well argue that although the perceptual experience of the virtuous and non-virtuous agents may be in some sense indistinguishable, the fact that the latter’s experience is clouded by a competing desire entails that the non-virtuous agent is having a different type of experience. That McDowell may have had something along these lines in mind is suggested by his carefully placed qualification “in a way”, in his description of the shared perception of the virtuous and non-virtuous:

This is to allow that someone who fails to act virtuously may, in a way, perceive what a virtuous person would…but to insist that his failure occurs only because his appreciation of what he perceives is clouded, or unfocused, by the impact of a desire to do otherwise. (p. 54, Italics mine)

“In a way” is supposed to flag the fact that though similar, perhaps even indistinguishable in some sense, they are ultimately different perceptions and involve the use of different sensitivities. On this view, moral perceptions are to be individuated, in part, by the presence or absence of competing desires to do otherwise.

However, the disjunctive reading of moral perceptions seems powerless to free us from the aforementioned dilemma. First, even if we grant that the virtuous and non-virtuous undergo different types of perceptual experiences, it does not follow from this that they are exercising different types of sensitivities. Presumably, the same sensitivity can be exercised in different ways and can even give rise to different types of experiences. But since it is the exercise of a certain sensitivity, rather than the type of perceptual experience the sensitivity gives rise to, which is to be identified with virtue, then a disjunctive conception of perceptual experiences does little to ameliorate the present worry. Second, even if we allow that the sensitivities exercised by the virtuous and non-virtuous agents are in fact different, this only pushes us unto the second horn of the dilemma outlined earlier. If the virtuous agent has a different sensitivity to that of the non-virtuous agent, then (given that the sensitivity in question is to be equated with knowledge) the non-virtuous agent lacks the relevant piece of knowledge. But that is just to say that the non-virtuous agent suffers from a type of ignorance. Hence, if this is the correct diagnosis of the non-virtuous agent by McDowell’s lights, then McDowell’s position is no better than the Socratic solution.

In sum, McDowell seems confronted with the following dilemma. If he denies that a virtuous agent may have the same knowledge (i.e., moral sensitivity) that the virtuous agent has, then it seems to imply that the non-virtuous agent had no choice but to act non-virtuously. If, on the other hand, he affirms that the non-virtuous agent may have the same knowledge (i.e., moral sensitivity) that the virtuous person has in a particular situation, then given the equation of virtue with knowledge, McDowell’s position would imply that the non-virtuous agent is virtuous.

*All page numbers taken from the Mind, Value and Reality anthology.

McDowell's Kant VI

We have come to my final post in this series on McDowell's Kant. Earlier I argued that the two-tier approach reduces Kant’s picture to the Lockean view, according to which the understanding is not active in experience but only in the judgements we make based on experience. Once the understanding has been removed from experience, we are left simply with raw sense-impressions that are now presumed to serve as a basis for judgement. But this means that sense-impressions must rationally constrain one’s empirical beliefs, which just is the “Myth of the Given” as Sellars understood it.

The alternative approaches I considered, {STRATEGY1} and {STRATEGY2}, are the Kantian analogues to the coherentist and bald naturalist positions respectively. Both conceive of the relationship between sense-impressions and beliefs as being merely causal. However, there are important differences between the two. {STRATEGY1} still preserves the notion of the understanding as the domain for rational inferences. But on {STRATEGY1}, sense-impressions can only exert causal but no rational (or justificatory) influence on the activities of the understanding. As Davidson’s famously (or is that infamously?) puts it, “only beliefs can justify beliefs.” On this view, the content of any one of our beliefs is determined solely by its relation to other beliefs, since the sense-impression (striped of all rational currency) can no longer determine their content. McDowell sees this view as ultimately self-defeating since it prevents us from “so much as making sense of the notion of a belief at all."(McDowell [1994]. p. 9.) {STRATEGY2} dispenses with the understanding altogether, reducing the entire chain leading from sense-impressions to empirical beliefs and judgements to a set causal relations. The price of {STRATEGY2} is that we are forced to give up the idea that rational relations are sui generis. In brief, according to {STRATEGY2}, saying that A justifies B is on a par with saying that A causes B.

According to McDowell, the problems articulated in (Q1) and (Q2) never arise if we conceive of sense-impressions as themselves having conceptual content (McDowell [1994], pp. 9-10). Thus understood, it at once becomes clear how sense-impressions can stand in justificatory or evidential relation to beliefs and endow our beliefs with empirical content. McDowell sees Kant as pointing towards (if not actually arriving at) a solution along these very lines:

The way to stop oscillating [between the myth of the given and coherentism] is to conceive empirical knowledge as a co-operation of sensibility and understang, as Kant does. To avoid making it unintelligible how the deliverances of sensibility can stand in grounding relations to paradigmatic exercises of the understanding such as judgements and beliefs, we must conceive this co-operation in a quite particular way: we must insist that the understanding is already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves. Experiences are impressions made by the world on our senses, products of receptivity; but those impressions themselves already have conceptual content.(Ibid, p. 46)

By McDowell’s lights, when Kant says that the understanding is required for experience, he is not only saying that it is required for empirical knowledge or judgement—i.e., W-experience—but for sense-impressions themselves, that is for experience in a sense continuous with Lockean experience. Thus, McDowell straightforwardly rejects the two-tier approach described earlier. McDowell, as I understand him, can therefore be described as holding to a version of the three-tier account. Like Longuenesse and others, McDowell sees the role of the understanding within experience as different from its role in empirical judgement. However, he parts ways from most advocates of the three-tier approach by insisting that there is no pre-conceptual manifold of intuition upon which synthesis must operate. McDowell puts the point as follows:

The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity….It is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity. We should understand what Kant calls “intuition”—experiential intake—not as a bare getting of an extra-conceptual Given, but as a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content. (McDowell [1996], p. 9)

By McDowell’s lights, the only sensible impressions are those that are already endowed with conceptual content and can therefore stand in grounding relations to beliefs. Moreover, these sensible impressions are not in turn to be seen as arising from the exercise of the understanding on some more basic type of sensible impression. There is, as McDowell puts it, no “sheer receptivity”. The understanding is “already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves”.(McDowell[1996], p. 46) On this account, the problem of how “blind” intuitions can determine the rules by which they are to be synthesized does not arise.

McDowell therefore agrees with the Kantian slogan: “intuitions without concepts are blind.” [A51/B75] But he draws from it a very different conclusion to that underlying the views described earlier. Previously, this phrase was taken to highlight the fact that intuitions, conceived in terms of the pre-synthesised sensory manifold, are unable to play any guiding role in activities of the understanding when selecting which rule to apply to said manifold. This is supposed to emphasise the importance of bringing intuitions under concepts in order to make them understandable. McDowell grants the point, but then takes the Kantian suggestion to be, not that the synthesis of the imagination needs to act upon the manifold before it can serve in judgement (i.e., that what was blind must be made to see), but that sensory intuitions should never be seen as blind to begin with.

The questions, (Q1) and (Q2), with which I have been concerned may be put as follows: how can that which was blind (i.e., unconceptualised intuition) be made to see (i.e., intuition brought under a concept)? Admitting that sensory impressions are blind seems to suggest that they cannot guide the understanding in the application of the rules under which the manifold is synthesised. But this means that impressions can exert no rational influence on the understanding. But if impressions can exert no rational influence on the understanding, then it remains unclear how experience can justify our empirical judgements. The way to avoid this conclusion, McDowell suggests, is to deny that impressions are blind. Assuming that the Kantian dictum, “intuitions without concepts are blind”, holds, the only way to deny that impressions are blind is to say that they involve concepts. Once we picture impressions as conceptual, we are (to put the matter crudely) picturing them as speaking the same language as the understanding. Sense impressions are now able to play the guiding role necessary vis-à-vis the understanding’s rule application to the manifold.


References*:

Longuenesse, B. [1998], Kant and the Capacity to Judge.

McDowell, J. [1994], Mind and World.

McDowell, J. [1996], “Woodbridge Lectures”.

*Although not directly cited, my reading of McDowell's Kant is significantly influenced by the work of Hannah Ginsborg

McDowell's Kant (Part V)

We are only one post away from my summary of McDowell's own position (I'm sure the suspense has been just eating away at you by now!) But first, I want to consider two more alternative positions (for reasons that should become clear by the end of the post).

The first alternative response to (Q1) and (Q2), which I will henceforth refer to as {STRATEGY1}, would be to argue that unconceptualised intuition merely plays a causal, rather than normative, role in determining how the sensory manifold is synthesised. The difference between the causal and normative can be made vivid by contrasting the case in which A triggers B with the case in which A indicates B. On the present view, the intuition does not suggest or indicate which rule the imagination ought apply. Rather, it merely triggers the application of a certain rule. Take for example the case in which one’s vision is affected by a red cube. On the present account, the red cube causes one’s imagination to apply the red-rule and the cube-rule as opposed to the green-rule and sphere-rule. However, it does not indicate that the imagination ought to apply the red-rule and cube-rule.

One advantage of this view is that it allows us to preserve the Kantian doctrine that intuitions without concepts are blind. According to this picture, the intuitions do not tell the imagination to apply a particular rule, it merely causes the application of the rule. But its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. For once we conceive of the intuition as merely exerting causal influence on the imagination, then it becomes unclear how the intuitions can, as Kant says, provide the “matter” of the experience. One upshot of this fact is that the intuition plays no constitutive role in determining the content of experience. That is, intuition may determine whether the understanding applies the red-rule or cube-rule, but it plays not part in making up the rules themselves. Thus, the repertoire of rules available in the understanding for the imagination to apply is determined solely by the understanding itself.

Significantly, this view seems to be in opposition to the kind of approach Kant himself would endorse since it essentially collapses the distinction between pure and empirical concepts. Thus, insofar as we wish to remain true to Kant, we have good textual grounds for rejecting this picture. But even if we have no qualms with departing from Kant on this score there still seems to be non-textual grounds for being sceptical about this approach. Specifically, {STRATEGY1} makes unclear how experience could be about a mind-independent world. McDowell expresses the worry as follows:

But if our freedom in empirical thinking is total, in particular if it is not constrained from outside the conceptual sphere, that can seem to threaten the very possibility that judegments of experience might be grounded in a way that relates them to a reality external to thought. And surely there must be such ground if experience is to be a source of knowledge, and more generally, if the bearing of empirical judgments on reality is to be intelligibly in place in our picture at all.McDowell [1996], p. 5.

The problem with {STRATEGY1} is that by making empirical concepts (in addition to the pure concepts) solely the product of the activity of the understanding it eliminates any role the manifold may play in determining the content of our judgements.

A second strategy, henceforth {STRATEGY2}, would be to give up on the idea of normativity altogether in favour of a more thoroughgoing causal account. On this view, it is not simply the case that the unconceptualised intuition causes the imagination to apply the rule that it does, but the rule applying activities of the imagination, under the direction of the understanding, is itself to be understood in purely causal terms. Whereas on {STRATEGY1} normative rules guide the interaction between the understanding and the imagination, and causal laws guide the opposite direction from the unconceptualised intuitions to the imagination, on {STRATEGY2}, both directions are to understood in purely causal terms. On this picture, what are taken to guide all of the imagination’s activities are no longer rules, understood as concepts, but rather brute causal laws. This view has the advantage of eliminating any problem concerning how the unconceptualised intuition, understood as blind, could direct the imagination’s application of rules since the rules the imagination applies are themselves now seen as causal laws of exactly the same kind that govern the unconceptualised intuition.

However, this view suffers from the same defect as {STRATEGY1} since it fails to explain how experience can provide the “matter” of judgement. Moreover, {STRATEGY2} removes the activity of the understanding from experience altogether. It therefore entails the denial of (K3). Thus, whatever the merits of such a proposal, it is not a Kantian one. Rather than offering a solution to (Q1) and (Q2), it actually represents an abandonment of the philosophical approach that gave rise to the problem in the first place. In this regard, {STRATEGY2} can be seen as employing a type of quietism, albeit at great cost to the Kantian view of experience.

It should be clear to the observant reader that the three approaches to (Q1) and (Q2) considered in this and a previous blog posts parallel the three options McDowell considers and rejects in setting up the problematic of Mind and World; the Myth of the Given, on one hand, and the Coherentist and Bald Naturalist positions, on the other. In my next post, I will outline McDowell's alternative.

McDowell's Kant (Part IV)

In my previous post I adumbrated the three-tiered approach to (Q1):

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

If we adopt the three-tiered account, the problem raised by (Q1) begins to take a slightly different form. Commentators such as Strawson and Sellars have suggested that by Kant’s lights, we come to see some object α as φ by forming an image of α in accordance with the rule or concept φ. On this view, when one comes to see something as red, one is forming an image of that thing in accordance with the rule or concept red. However, the question quickly arises as to what determines which rule the imagination applies in its synthesis of the sensory manifold and what role (if any) does the manifold itself play in its own synthesis?

In the case of the “pure concepts of the understanding”, or the categories, the answer is relatively straightforward. Since all human experience is subject to the categories, then it is the understanding, and the understanding alone, that determines which rules the imagination applies to the sensory manifold. However, the above question becomes most relevant, not with regards to the pure concepts, but with respect to what Kant calls “empirical concepts”, such as red cube or green sphere. For example, we may ask: when confronted by a red cube, what directs the imagination to synthesise the sensory manifold according to the red-rule and cube-rule as opposed to, say, the green-rule and sphere-rule? If our perceptual experiences are going to be of or about mind-independent objects, then it would seem that the sensory manifold must play some role in determining which empirical concepts the imagination employs in its synthesis.

Clearly, if we are preserve the receptivity of experience, then the sensory manifold must play some part in determining which rule the imagination applies in its synthesis. This means that the manifold must, in some sense, be able to “tell” the understanding which rule the understanding should apply in synthesising the manifold. But therein lays the problem. In the “Transcendental Logic” Kant notes that “intuitions without concepts are blind.”(A51/B75) The blindness of the unsynthesised intuitions (i.e., before they have been brought under a concept) seems to preclude them being able to play any guiding role in which rule the imagination applies in its synthesis. But if unconceptualised intuition is able to guide the understanding in its rule application, then it would seem that unconceptualised intuition is not really blind after all. The question that now faces the three-tier approach may be put as follows:

(Q2): How are we to reconcile the idea that sensible intuition determines the content of experience (such that it serves as its matter) with Kant’s insistence that unconceptualised intuitions are blind?

I believe (Q1) and (Q2) are the questions that serve as the backdrop for McDowell’s appropriation of Kant in Mind and World. There, McDowell frames the present questions in terms of “the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to how things are"(Mind and World, p. xii). According to McDowell’s Kant, we can only make sense of the sensory manifold playing a role in determining which rule the understanding applies in its synthesis by conceiving of the manifold as in some sense “justifying” the application of one rule as opposed to another. I will have more to say on McDowell’s conception in my next post.

McDowell's Kant (Part III)

The Space of Reasons is Back! First off, a special word of thanks to all the commenters who kept The Space of Reasons active while I was away. They’re a number of great insights in your responses, many of which foreshadow much of what I was planning to say. To recap, we began looking at the following question:

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

As promised, I will like to sketch a response to (Q1) based on some thoughts gleaned from the work of Béatrice Longuenesse who limns what may be described as a three-tier approach (for reasons that will eventually become clear). On Longuenesse’s reading of Kant, the understanding is active not only in W-experience, but in N-experience as well (though she of course does not put the matter in exactly those terms). However, she distinguishes between two “aspects” of the activity of the understanding—namely, the “sensible” and the “discursive”.

According to the sensible aspect, “the understanding is a rule giver for the synthesis of imagination…In this first aspect the activity of the understanding, or actualizing of its rules, is nothing else than the productive synthesis of imagination.” [Longuenesse 1998, p. 63] The discursive aspect of the activity of the understanding, by contrast, “reflects sensible synthesis under concepts, whether empirical or pure.” [Ibid]

The first step towards solving the problem posed by (Q1), is to recognise that the activity of the understanding, as it factors in W-experience, is different from that which factors in N-experience. In W-experience the understanding is responsible for the “combination of concepts” in empirical judgements, while in N-experience, the understanding is responsible for the “combination of the manifold of intuition” in sensation.

The second step towards responding to (Q1) is to recognise that N-experience itself may be further subdivided in terms of pre- and post-synthesis manifolds. The pre-synthesis manifold represents simply that which is given by the senses while the post-synthesis manifold represents the end result of the synthesis of imagination, now understood as the sensible aspect of the understanding. Thus emerges the three-tier structure of the Longuenesse reading of Kant. The first tier is that of the un-synthesised sensory manifold, the second tier is the synthesis of imagination carried out by the sensible aspect of the understanding, and the third tier refers to the synthesis of concepts carried out by the discursive aspect of the understanding.
The three-tier account avoids the trivialising consequences of the two-tier account by preserving some of the anti-Lockean oomph in the Kantian account of experience. On this approach, judgement is involved in N-experience, though it now serves an intuitive rather than discursive function. In its intuitive capacity, the understanding results in one’s experience of the objective world being a certain way, without itself committing one to the claim that it is that way. This brings us back to the two ways in which I suggested that experience contrasts with judgement on the Lockean account. First, experience is seen as passive while judgement is seen as active. Second, experience involves merely a registering that things are a certain way while judgement involves a commitment to them being that way. What the three-tier account effectively does is sacrifice the empiricist idea that N-experience is purely passive, while preserving the empiricist idea that N-experience itself involves no commitment to things being a certain way. Thus, it makes good on one empiricist intuition while sacrificing another. This allows us to preserve one of the central insights of Kant’s Copernican revolution—namely, that experience itself consists of judgements—without sacrificing the empiricist contrast between experience as registering the way things are and empirical judgement as commitment to things being that way.

However, one may well question whether the three-tier account represents a genuine alternative to the two-tier account. Recall, on the three-tier model, N-experience is itself subdivided into pre- and post-synthesis stages. Moreover, the pre-synthesis stage (i.e., the first tier of the three-tier account) is now identified with the raw deliverances of the senses, before the understanding has had a chance to operate on them. The question may therefore be asked, what prevents us from simply identifying the first tier with Lockean experience and the second tier with empirical judgement? If this question goes unanswered, then the trivialising objection simply re-emerges.

I do not believe the attempt to reduce the three-tier account to the two-tier account in this way is successful. Notice, the reduction only gets off the ground if the first tier is identified with Lockean experience. But this identification is not right. Recall, that on the Lockean view, experience provides us with data which can be used in empirical judgment. However, the unsynthesised manifold that characterises the first tier could not possibly fulfil this role. It is only after the synthesis of imagination, which characterises the second tier, that the subject is in a position to exercise empirical judgements in the manner the empiricist envisions. It is this fact that gives teeth to Longuenesse’s observation that “the psychological data empiricist assume depend themselves on operations empiricists cannot account for.” [Longuenesse 1998, p. 38]

By denying (K3), the empiricist is removing all right she may have for treating experience as structured enough to serve as a basis for perceptual judgement, or at least so the Kantian thought goes. Thus, by Kant’s lights, it is first and second tiers combined that is to be identified with Lockean experience.


Reference:

Longuenesse, B. [1998], Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princton, NJ.: Princeton University Press.

McDowell's Kant (Part II)

In my previous post, I concluded that the question that motivates McDowell’s Kant may be put as follows:

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

One straightforward response to (Q1) is to distinguish between two meanings of the word “experience” as used by Kant in the Critique. The first, which I will refer to as narrow experience (or N-experience), refers to raw “sensory impressions”. N-experience corresponds with the Lockean conception of experience. The second, which I will refer to as wide experience (or W-experience), refers to “empirical knowledge”.

On the present proposal, when Kant talks about experience involving the understanding, it is W-experience that he has in mind. Thus, on this picture, the categories only apply to experience understood in terms of empirical knowledge or W-experience. However, N-experience, which corresponds to the Lockean conception, does not involve the activity of the categories or the understanding. The upshot of this distinction is that it is only for W-experience that the understanding is required, thus avoiding the problem articulated in (Q1). I will refer to the reply to (Q1) that trades on the two meanings of experience adumbrated above as the two-tier approach.

However, many would consider two-tier approach problematic since it seems to undermine the efficacy of Kant’s argument in the Critique as a reply to Hume. Recall, according to Kant, the purpose of the Transcendental Deduction is to show that the categories are a priori conditions of the possibility of experience (See: A 84/B 116—A 95/B 129).[2] Now, according to Hume, we do not perceive objective, publicly observable states of affairs, but only subjective “impressions”. The only way to gain access to the objective world is via an inference to physical objects as the cause of our impressions. However, Hume impugns any such inference as unwarranted. Thus, we are left only with the flux of unconnected subjective experience.

Kant’s strategy in the Deduction is to argue that Hume’s view of experience is mistaken since it omits certain structural features without which we could not have the sorts of experience we unquestionable do have. Kant begins with an assumption which Hume himself accepts:

(K4): Experience is possible

He then sets out to show in the Deduction that:

(K5): If experience is possible, the categories have objective validity

If successful, Kant’s argument is supposed to establish the conclusion:

(K6): The categories have objective validity.

Given (K6), Hume is no longer entitled to his denial of the reality of causation and his sceptical argument is thwarted.

But suppose we interpret the word “experience” as it appears in the Deduction to mean “empirical knowledge”. Then we must build into (K4) everything Kant means by empirical knowledge as set forth in the Critique. Now empirical knowledge, for Kant, is knowledge of an objective world governed by causal laws. However, if we take experience as it appears in (K4) to include all of this, then Kant’s argument would beg the question against Hume. Thus, if we interpret “experience” as empirical knowledge, we would no longer be entitled to see the Deduction as a reply to Hume. The upshot of this is that if we wish to maintain that the relevant arguments in the Critique are effective vis-à-vis Hume, we must also renounce the two-tier account.

In my next post, I will look at a more sophisticated reply to (Q1) that avoids the above criticism, and which is loosely based on the reading of Kant advanced by Béatrice Longuenesse.

McDowell's Kant (Part I)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged on McDowell. So for the next few posts I will be returning to this blog’s original inspiration with a series on McDowell’s Kant. In the next few posts I will be attempting to re-express the dialectic McDowell sets up in the introduction to Mind and World in Kantian terms, thereby displaying the deeply Kantian nature of McDowell’s project. I begin with Kant’s claim that “experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding” (Bxvii). Thus, we arrive at the first Kantian principle I wish to exploit in my discussion of McDowell’s Kant:

(K1): experience requires understanding

How are we to interpret the word “understanding” as used by Kant? Perhaps the closest thing to a definition can be found in A69/B94, where Kant writes: “We can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements, so that the understanding in general can be represented as a capacity for judging.” Thus, we arrive at our second central Kantian principle:

(K2): understanding =^def a capacity for judging

We can combine (K1) and (K2) to arrive at our third Kantian principle:

(K3): experience requires a capacity for judging

I take (K3) to be one of the key insights of Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. Broadly speaking, Kant’s Copernican revolution amounts to the claim that the formal features of the empirical world (i.e., space and time and the categories) are transcendental impositions of the subject’s mind. For example, when one takes one’s experience to be of a mind-independent object, one is essentially judging that that object is located somewhere in space. Kant makes this point explicitly in the first edition of the Critique, where he posits: “experience consists of judgements”.[Kant, 1998] p. 202. fn.]

Putatively, judgement involves commitment to something being the case. Thus, to say that experience involves judgment is to say that experience involves actively taking a stand on how things are. But this seems to run counter to the conception of experience as passively registering the way things are, prior to and independent of taking a stand on whether or not things are that way. This suggests at least two ways in which experience putatively contrasts with judgement. First, experience is passive while judgement is active. Second, experience simply registers that things are a certain way, while judgement involves being committed to things being a certain way.

The forgoing considerations are meant to register what I believe to be a set of pre-theoretical intuitions regarding the nature of experience. These pre-theoretical intuitions seem aptly captured in the Lockean empiricist idea that experience is the means by which objects are given to a subject. On this picture, one may proceed to make judgments based on experience, but experience itself consists in simply registering sensory impressions. Thus, on the Lockean empiricist picture, experience does not seem to require a capacity to judge. If this is right, then both (K1) and (K3) would be false on the Lockean empricist account. If we wish to preserve the idea that experience is the means by which objects are given, within a broadly Kantian framework, then we must find some way to reconcile these two sets of intuitions. I have suggested that this is what McDowell wishes to do. This brings us the first formulation of the question that motivates McDowell’s Kant:

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

Strongly Believe vs. Weakly Believe

Note: This post was originally composed as a reply to Rachael's insightful comments in response to my post, “Probable But Unjustifiable”, over at the Web of Belief. The proposal I canvas is still rough and needs further ironing out. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Occasionally, we use “I believe” to identify something we are certain about. For example, I believe that I am now thinking. Sometimes we use ‘I believe’ to describe something we are intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to. For example, I believe that 1 + 1 = 2. Often we use ‘I believe’ to identify something we take ourselves to know. I believe I'm currently looking at a computer monitor. This is also something that I know! However, we frequently use ‘I believe’ to indicate something we merely hold to be likely. Consider the following exchange:

A: “Is it 2:30pm yet?”
B: “I'm not sure, but I believe it is.”

B seems like a perfectly natural thing to say (though on at least one reading of “believe” it would be self-contradictory). I take B to express something along the following lines:

B*: “I'm not sure, but it seems likely.”

Thus, often when we say that we believe that p, we simply mean that we hold p to be likely or as having a high probability of being true. However, this cannot be the notion of belief that factors into a JTB account of knowledge since to know something we must be sure about it, and not merely think it likely. (Consider, for example, the contrast between merely believing your ticket will lose (read: likely to lose) and actually knowing that your ticket has lost after the results of the drawing have been announced.) If I am right that knowing p requires that one be intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p (rather than being committed to p being merely likely) the type of belief that factors into a JTB account of knowledge must implicate intellectual commitment to the truth of p.

There is, of course, an alternative way of construing the present debate (inspired by one reading† of McDowell's disjunctivism): To simply dispense with the JTB account altogether and offer a disjunctive analysis of knowledge and belief. On the disjunctive view one either knows that p or merely believes that p. The former is factive while the latter is evidential and probabilistic, and there is no common factor shared between the two. More precisely, knowledge is not to be understood as a special kind of belief or belief plus something else (e.g., justification and truth).

There are at least three objections to the disjunctive approach to knowledge and belief. First, the knowledge/belief disjunction seems out of step with how we normally speak. For example, how are we to reconcile the claim that we either (exclusively) know that p or believe that p, with the datum that we often say we believe things that we also take ourselves to know.

Second, it seems to present a problem for the intuition that known propositions can be justified. It is a necessary condition of a proposition being justified (as opposed to merely being justifiable) that a subject have some justification for believing the proposition. But while it makes sense to talk about someone having justification for believing that p, it does not make sense to talk about someone having justification for knowing that p. (For example, seeing that p may constitute justification for believing that p, but it does not constitute justification for knowing that p.) The latter (i.e., justification for knowing that p) would be a type of category mistake. “Knowing” simply is not the sort of thing one could conceivably have justification for. Now, if we keep believing as a constituent of knowing (à la JTB), then we may continue to hold that known propositions are justified since the believing implicated in the knowing is justified. However, once we chuck believing as a constituent of knowing, there is nothing left to be justified. Thus, we would be forced to conclude that known propositions are not justified.

Third, once we have renounced the idea that believing is a constituent of knowing it becomes unclear how we are to bridge the gap between being in a position to know that p and actually knowing p. This objection is particularly pertinent to McDowell's epistemology-oriented disjunctivism (in contradistinction from, say, Snowdon's perception-oriented disjunctivism). According to McDowell's epistemic disjunctivism, perceptual experiences (i.e., the good case) put a subject, S, in the position to know that p, but it does not actually confer knowledge on S. (See: McDowell's “Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge” fn 37.) McDowell stresses that it is important to keep the two separate since there may be situations in which a subject is in a position to know that p, but still fails to know that p. For example, imagine a subject with perfectly reliable vision, who (for some unknown reason) took her vision to be unreliable. (Perhaps she was tricked into believing that her coffee was spiked by a powerful hallucinogen.) In such a case, the de facto reliability of the subject's visual experience would put her in a position to know that p, but her belief that her vision was unreliable would prevent her from having knowledge. Now, the question is, what bridges the gap between a subject merely being in a position to know that p and her actually knowing that p?

I submit that this is where believing (as intellectual commitment to p being true) comes in. It is only when we adopt an attitude of belief towards p that we cross over from merely being in a position to know that p to actually knowing p. Absent the attitude of belief, we may continue to have p among our mental contents (and thus be in a position to know that p) but we would not know that p. In order to know that p, one must take a stand on p; one must be intellecutally/ rationally/ doxastically committed to the truth of p. Thus, believing p is indispensable for knowing p.

My proposal:
As an alternative to the knowing/believing disjunction I propose that a distinction be made within the concept of believing itself, what I will refer to as strongly believe and weakly believe. To strongly believe that p entails that a subject is intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p being true. To weakly believe that p entails that a subject is intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p being likely or highly probable. The primary goal of my distinction between strongly believing and weakly believing is to make sense of the different uses of “believe” in our ordinary speech. However, it is also an interesting question whether the proposed distinction may have implications for problems related to the concept of justification as well. This is a possibility I hope to explore in greater detail in the near future. But for the time being, the central contention of this post may be summarised as follows: To the extent that we are concerned with knowledge (i.e., true justified belief), it is belief as intellectual commitment to the truth of p that is at play. Thus, for a subject to know that p she must also strongly believe that p.

†This particular reading of McDowellian disjunctivism is implicit in Charles Travis' paper, “A Sense of Occasion”.

McDowell’s Direct Realist Reply to Scepticism

McDowell’s claim that in veridical cases of perception objects are “immediately present to the mind” has earned him the title of direct realist. Direct realism is the thesis that what we perceive are not merely appearances (insert: sense data, veil or ideas or whatever else suits your fancy) but rather objects themselves.

Direct realism can be used against arguments for external world scepticism (EWS) of of the following form:

P1: Our EW beliefs are based on sense data beliefs
P2: Sense data beliefs cannot justify EW beliefs
EWS: Our EW beliefs are not justified

The direct realist resists EWS by rejecting P1. There are two senses in which the direct realist can maintain that our EW beliefs are not based on sense data beliefs. First, they can deny that there are such things as sense data beliefs. This is certainly true in McDowell’s case since his rejection of the highest common factor view, a fortiori, includes the eschewal of any such mediating beliefs. Second, if we interpret the locution ‘based on’ in a strong inferential sense, then a direct realist may insist that our EW beliefs are not inferred from any other beliefs at all but are rather immediately grasped by the perceiving subject.

However, the locution ‘based on’ need not be taken in this strong inferential sense. A sceptic may insist that there can be a weak sense of ‘based on’ that is non-inferential. For example, we may interpret the phrase ‘based on’ in causal terms. Putatively, it seems undeniable that our EW beliefs are causally based on appearances or sense impressions. According to an empirical-psychological account of vision, the act of seeing an object involves several complex physiological processes. Moreover, we never see objects themselves, but merely the light bundles reflected off an object. Thus, there are several causal intermediaries between our EW beliefs and the objects in the eternal world. Thus, our sceptical argument may be reformulated as follows:

P1*: Our EW beliefs are (causally) based on sensory appearances
P2*: Sensory appearances cannot justify EW beliefs
EWS: Our EW beliefs are not justified

Significantly, P1* does not assert that sensory appearances are the intentional object of our perceptual experience. For instance, by P1*’s lights we are free to view sensory appearances as the means rather than object of our perceptions. In other words, P1* merely asserts that sensory appearances form part of the causal chain linking our beliefs to the EW that gives rise to our beliefs. Thus, P1* can be construed along purely direct realist lines—to wit, we may hold P1* while simultaneously maintaining that objects themselves (and not some mental intermediary) are the intentional objects of our perceptions. Thus, even if we grant direct realism’s denial of an inferential intermediary, P1* still stands.

Unfortunately for the sceptic, this reply fails in the case of McDowellian direct realism. McDowell may gladly concede that the causal descriptions (with all its various intermediary steps) of empirical psychology are true. However, McDowell maintains that the empirical-psychological account is not only one available. In fact, McDowell draws on the Sellarsian idea of there being a sui generis “space of reasons” for precisely this reason. When McDowell describes perception as being direct, he is speaking in terms of the logical space of reasons, not in terms of the logical space in which the subject matter of empirical science falls. Things like photons or electrical impulses are  not of the right sort to act as a reason for one's beliefs. Trading on this ambiguity in the locution ‘based on’, McDowell may accept P1*, but point out that P1* cannot plausibly be combined with P2* in order to generate EWS.  P1* (explicitly) exploits the epistemically insignificant notion of being ‘causally’ based on, while P2* (implicitly) exploits the  epistemically significant notion of being ‘justificationally’ based on.  This equivocation in the explicit notion of "based on" in P1* and the implicit notion of "based on" in P2* prevents the inference from going through.

In sum, McDowellian direct realism is effective against sceptical arguments of a certain form. Specifically, sceptical arguments that ride on there being an inferential or causal intermediary between our EW beliefs and the objects we perceive are easily defeated by direct realist considerations. Of course,  arguments for EWS may take other forms as well.

What (Else) is Going On...

First, I should call everyone's attention to the most recent issue of the Philosopher's Carnival, here, which is being hosted by Trent Dougherty. I'm really liking the tone and quality of posts in the most recent Carnivals, especially the previous issue, here. Let's hope these high quality Carnivals continue.

Update: In the comments of the Carnival there is a short exchange between Trent and Clayton Littlejohn about my post, in which Clayton comes to my defence. Surprise, surprise...I happen to agree with Clayton on this one (even if I am somewhat of an 'innie').

Second, all you McDowell fans can find an interesting paper, here, by Adam who brings the theoretical apparatus of Virtue Epistemology to bear on McDowell's theory of knowledge.

Third, I owe a word of gratitude to Brian Leiter for mentioning my blog on his Leiter Reports. During the week my blog was featured I had over 900 new visitors! Hopefully this increase in blog traffic will eventually translate into more feedback. Please? Oh, and my humblest apologies to Jerry Fodor for whatever part I played in inspiring Brian's snide remark.

The Wright Objection

Following J. M. Hinton [1973], Paul Snowdon [1990] has argued that indistinguishable veridical and hallucinatory perceptual experiences belong to fundamentally different genera. Thus, veridical perceptual experiences (henceforth e1) are of one sort while hallucinatory perceptual experiences (henceforth e2) are of another fundamentally different sort, the only thing common to both being that they are introspectively indistinguishable from each other. The difference between e1 and e2 is, for Snowdon, is rooted in the fact that perceptual experiences are essentially relational.

John McDowell takes up Snowdon’s disjunctive conception and applies its insights to epistemological questions relating to our perceptual beliefs.¹ According to McDowell, the epistemological upshot of the disjunction between e1 and e2 is that e1 places us in a better epistemic position than e2 does. On its own, this claim hardly seems controversial. For example, a reliabilist would agree that e1 places us in a better epistemic position than e2 since veridical perceptual experiences are a reliable source of true beliefs while hallucinations are not. However, what is most striking about McDowell’s claim that e1 puts us in a better epistemic position to e2 is that he rejects (extreme) forms of epistemic externalism:

[O]ne’s epistemic standing on some question cannot intelligibly be constituted, even in part, by matters blankly external to how it is with one subjectively. For how could such matters be other than beyond one’s ken? And how could matters beyond one’s ken make any difference to one’s epistemic standing? [McDowell 1998, p. 390]

I interpret ‘how it is with one subjectively’ to mean from the subject’s point of view. However, many critics have insisted that if e1 and e2 are subjectively indistinguishable, then from the subject’s point of view e1 could not possibly put one in a better epistemic position than e2. In this post I will sketch the version of this criticism put forward by Crispin Wright [2002].

Wright presents the following challenge to McDowell’s disjunctive analysis. Suppose S came to hold the demonstrative belief that that is an F. Does S’s justification for believing that that is an F transmit to the claim that S is not merely having a hallucination of an F? According to Wright, there is a ‘strong intuition’ that it does not since we have done nothing to rule out the unpropitious possibility [2002, p. 342]. Moreover, since ex hypothesi the hallucination in question is subjectively indistinguishable from a veridical perceptual experience, there is no way for the subject, based on that experience, to know that she is not suffering from a hallucination rather than having a veridical perceptual experience.

Wright applies the above argument to disjunctivism by appealing to the following four presuppositions, which he describes as the disjunctive template [Ibid, p. 343]:

(i) that A entails B;

(ii) that my justification2 for A consists in my being in a state which is subjectively indistinguishable from a state in which the relevant C would be true;

(iii) that C depicts a situation of a general kind incompatible with the reliable operation of the cognitive capacities involved in generating the putative warrant for A; and

(iv) that C would be true if B were false.

We may fill in the details of the disjunctive template thus: Let A be the proposition that that is an F. Let B be the entailed proposition that that is not a hallucination of an F; and let C take the form of a generalisation of the negation of B: It is not the case that I am having a perfect hallucination of an F. Given the above disjunctive template the question, according to Wright, is

What…can justify me in taking it that I have a warrant for A? Why not just reserve judgement and stay with the more tentative disjunction, Either (I have a warrant for) A, or C? [Ibid].

Wright maintains that to get beyond the disjunction [A V C], we must somehow discount C. That is, we can only maintain that ‘that is an F’ if we can discount the possibility that ‘that is not an F but merely an indistinguishable hallucination of an F’. However, to be entitled to discount C I must also be entitled to discount ~B since, ex hypothesi, C is merely the generalisation of B’s negation. However, to discount ~B I must have some prior entitlement to B independent of its entailment by A. Consequently, on pain of circularity, my justification for A fails to transmit to B.

The upshot of the above analysis is that, given the possibility of there being hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences, we cannot take ourselves to be justified (as far as our perceptual beliefs are concerned) in believing anything beyond the disjunction [A V C].

We may further unpack the Wright objection as follows: Let us presuppose an internalist conception of epistemic justification such that for S to be justified in believing that P means that S has subjective access to that which constitutes her justification for believing that P. Let [E1 … En] stand for the maximal set of subjective properties of some experience e1. If there is some experience, e2, which is subjectively indistinguishable from e1, then e2 must also possess [E1 … En], or at least so the thought goes. (I am here assuming that the circle encompassing what is introspectively accessible is coextensive with the maximal set of subjective properties of a given experience.) Given the internalist requirement that S’s justification for believing that P must be introspectively accessible, S’s justification for believing that P must be derived from [E1 … En] or some subset thereof. Since e1 and e2 share [E1 … En] in common, and given the internalist requirement that S’s justification for believing that P be derived from [E1 … En], any evidence derived from e1 in support of S’s believing that P can also be derived from e2 in support of S’s believing that P. Thus, insofar as e1 and e2 are subjectively indistinguishable, there can be no difference between what being in e1 makes S justified in believing and what being in e2 makes S justified in believing. Ergo, e1 does not put S in a better epistemic position, from an internalist perspective, than e2.

Endnotes:

1 It should be borne in mind that there are a number of significant differences between Snowdon’s and McDowell’s formulation of disjunctivism. For example, Snowdon focuses on locutions of object-perception, ‘S sees o’, while McDowell is interested in locutions of fact-perception, ‘S sees that p.’ Following McDowell, I will be using a version of fact-perception statements, ‘S sees that that is an F’.

2 Wright uses the word ‘warrant’.

References:
Hinton, J.M. [1973]. Experiences. Clarendon Press: Oxford.

McDowell, J. [1998], ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 369-94, London: Harvard University Press.

Snowdon, P. F. [1990], “The Objects of Perceptual Experience” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 64: 121–150.

Wright, C. [2002].‘(Anti-)Sceptics Simple and Subtle: G.E. Moore and John McDowell’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65: 330 – 48.