Korsgaard, Reasons, and an Internalist Problem

Korsgaard's view of reasons is an interesting one. She formulates it explicitly as attempting to fix the problems of the two dominant views, namely, the view that reasons are psychological states of the agent and the view that reasons are facts, or the good-making properties of some action or state of affairs. In place of both of these views, Korsgaard wants to defend what she takes to be an intermediate view, one that incorporates the idea that agents must take something as a reason into the constitution of reasons themselves. Agents, on her view, must be active with regard to reasons. But I worry that her view leans too far in the direction of the psychological states account.

Korsgaard's view is basically that a reason is a consideration in favor of doing something. The consideration is provided by a proper combination of both the end and what one is to do in order to achieve that end. (In her terminology, what one does is an act, and the action as a whole involves an-act-for-the-sake-of-an-end.) In asking for a reason, then, we are asking for a description of the proposed (or performed) action such that both the act and the end are specified in such a way as to make the action as a whole appear worth performing to the agent.

As she writes in "Acting for a Reason" (printed in The Constitution of Agency):

If Aristotle and Kant are right about actions being done for their own sakes, then it seems as if every action is done for the same reason, namely because the agent thinks it's worth doing for its own sake. This obviously isn't what we are asking for when we ask for the reason why someone did something, because the answer is always the same: he thought it was worth doing. What may be worth asking for is an explication of the action, a complete description of it, which will show us why he thought it was worth doing. (221)

And later:

Aristotle and Kant's view, therefore, correctly identifies the kind of item that can serve as a reason for action: the maxim or logos of an action, which expresses the agent's endorsement of the appropriateness of doing a certain act for the sake of a certain end. (226)

Now I wonder if Korsgaard has any means at all of accommodating any sort of externalist view of reasons. Reasons are, on her account, entirely up to the agent: a reason gives a description of the action such that it makes the action appear worth doing to the agent (or, to put it another way, it gives a description of the action such that the agent is motivated to perform that action). But on her account, as far as I can tell, there is just no grounds at all for saying something like this: "John has a reason to push that button, even though he doesn't know it." That is, on her account--from what I can tell--a consideration can only be a reason if it is taken as such by an agent.

I suppose there is a way of fixing this. One could say that a reason is either a consideration that motivates A (or makes the action appear worth doing to A), or it is a consideration that would motivate A, were he fully aware of the relevant facts. Similarly, one would have to add: Even when A takes something to be a reason for him, it may still not be a reason. For example, John might believe that pressing the button will launch a bomb, and so he has a reason not to press it. But in fact pressing the button will stop the bomb from being launched, so what he takes to be a reason isn't a reason at all. But I suspect Korsgaard does not want to go in this direction: this is why she refers, in the second quote above, to "the kind of item that can serve as a reason for action." If I am reading this correctly, then, the fact that pressing the button will stop the bomb from being launched will enter into "kind of item that can serve as a reason" for John, but it is not a reason for John. And that seems wrong, for if John were aware of the button's function, he would recognize it as a reason, and this suggets that it is a reason for him, albeit one he does not have access to.

Her account, then, seems to be far more internalist than the one proposed by Williams ("Internal and External Reasons"). Williams, after all, recognizes that something is a reason for an agent so long as there is a path to it from the agent's subjective motivational set. But Korsgaard seems to reject this requirement: unless something is taken as a reason, it doesn't seem to be a reason at all.

In other words, I think Korsgaard's account as given is false: just because an agent takes something to be a reason does not make it a reason at all (and the fact that he fails to take something as a reason does not mean that it is not). What makes it a reason is that he could take it to be a reason, were he fully informed. (Like Setiya, then, Korsgaard portrays reasons as supervening on the agent's mental states, but she doesn't even add the proviso that none of his beliefs may be false, the way Setiya does.)

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Knowledge in Explanation : A Reply to Avery Archer

This is a somewhat lengthy reply where I respond to Avery Archer's criticism of my review of Jennifer Hornsby's paper where Avery attacks my claim that knowledge has a central role in psychological explanation of action. According to Avery knowledge can only serve a justificatory role in acting for reasons and is therefore, in a sense, completely irrelevant for reason-giving explanations. I sincerely appologize for the length of this post but this topic gets me going as it is something I work on and need to think about in my own thesis.


It's time to respond to Avery Archer's ardent comment to my Hornsby review, which he posted on The Space of Reasons blog last week (see his commentary to my review below). To begin with let me just briefly delineate the issues I want to bring up in this reply to his response. Avery's main challenge to my review seems to be his rejection of knowledge as an factor that has an explanatory role in action as opposed to a mere justificationary role. The difference between these roles Avery explains best himself and it goes as follows:

Explanatory reasons (or what I sometimes prefer to call “motive-giving explanations”) have to do with our attempt to make sense of or explain the purposive activity of intentional agents (rational and non-rational alike). By contrast, justificatory reasons have to do with our attempt to ascertain whether or not the actions of an intentional agent are rationally recommended (and is therefore limited to agents with rational agents). Both explanatory and justificatory reasons are normative (since they both allow for the possibility of error); but while the former answers to a why question (vis-a-vis the actions of any intentional agent) the latter answers to a should question (vis-a-vis the actions of a rational agent).

Thus, for Avery there is two senses in which something can be a reason for action: (1) the reason that explains why someone F-s and (2) the reason that justifies F-ing. Obviously, he thinks knowledge is a fair constraint and necessary requirement on the latter whereas he is opposed to admitting knowledge any explanatory force. Roughly speaking, he positions himself among the orthodox and thinks that what is responsible for the causal workings in the agent can always be explained in terms of more kosher mental states like beliefs and desires. Good, that means we can agree about justification and that we're halfway through to the promised land. Of course, Avery wants to jump off halfway but we'll see about that. For Avery the knower can retreat from the world of causality to linger in a world of rationality and justification. In other words, in the explanatory world knowledge does not belong. This claim about the explanatory futility of knowledge is what I want to focus on in this reply and, of couse, I seek to refute it.

Let me start by granting that Hornsby's paper does not make the case for knowledge's explanatory role to the extent that I would have wanted her to. So her argument may or may not be liable to Avery's criticism that the argument for knowledge's role in action confuses a false claim about its explanatory role from true and obvous claims about its justificatory role in action. Maybe so. But the claim that knowledge has such an explanatory role - and thus the claim that knowledge operates in the agent's mind as a psychologically relevant factor as opposed to some mere rationalistic chimera or ineffective ought - is central if one wants to buttress the view that knowledge sometimes must figure in an explanation of an agent's action. Here Avery and I are in agreement about what goes together with Hornsby's view then; we disagree whether we think her view is falsely bringing these things together. Now let's briefly see why Hornsby needs to commit to the stronger claim that knowledge is an explanatory factor as well.

Hornsby's claim is that in any case where an agent acts for an objective reason to F she must know that this is a reason to be F-ing. Hornsby therefore takes it as a substantial psychological claim that agents sometimes do act out of knowledge. That is to say, in some cases knowledge is psychologically relevant and responsible for the events initiated by the agent. Thus, Hornsby's claim implicates that knowledge makes - at least in some situations, namely those where one acts for objective reasons - a significant contribution to those events. If Avery's right she would have needed to supplement her story, though, since her original story would only concern how the agent is justified in F-ing. What is needed to explain what the agent does is a proper explanation and a psychological story about how the actual F-ing came about. And Avery thinks that knowledge plays no role in the latter.

For people like Hornsby and I, however, justification - or, better, what justifies - sometimes do have explanatory value. In other words, these features sometimes go together. The best way to argue for this intermingling I think one can find in that other source I mentioned in the review for thinking that knowledge is relevant in action explanations, namely Timothy Williamson (2000). What Williamson claims is that knowledge is sometimes relevant in action explanation because the attribution of knowledge to another agent provides one with the relevant generalization to explain the particular action (as well as other cases relevantly similar to this particular one but I'll return to this below). Basically, what is going is that Williamson wants to say that an agent F-es presicely because she knew that P was a reason to F and that this knowledge is essential for giving you the proper generalization for the case at hand. The important thing to notice is namely that in order to explain something - say, someone's action - one must also take account of the case's modale profile. When someone F-es because P there are certain events that could have happened that comprise the modale space surrounding the actual F-ing; and what a proper explanation seeks to do is to generalize and be sensitive to this modal profile. So suppose A would F if she believed that P is a reason to F. Likewise that she would F if she knew that P is a reason to F. What determines the attribution we ouht to make is the case at hand; that is to say, the modal profile we want to get a proper grasp of determines whether we need a belief attribution or a knowledge attribution to explain the case at hand. Williamson's claim is that in some cases, like in the burglar case I mentioned in the previous posts, only a knowledge attribution would do the job.

Let us see if we can get a firmer grasp of this at a more abstract level first. Start by noticing that there is a different modale profile function connected with the attribution of Bp and Kp. With this I mean that belief and knowledge have different properties and thus contributes differently to certain cases. Knowledge is, for instance, factive whereas beliefs admit of being mistaken. That difference is enough to give you a different function for knowledge than for belief, a function that would take you from a given knowledge attribution to a set of values or a structure in modale space for the case at hand; and, analogously, from a given belief attribution to a possibly different set of values.

Sometimes those functions will, of course, deliver the same modale space as a value to a situation. In these situations it would not make a difference whether one attributes Bp or Kp; so maybe conservatives would prefer to attribute Bp in those cases. However, in most cases Kp gives you a different modale profile than Bp. For one thing, Kp, besides from being factive, comes along with a certain required reliability relation: knowledge would not obtain unless all the epistemic alternatives for the agent are p-worlds. That is not the case with Bp. This difference will obviously influence the space of close worlds in a case at hand and thus influence the modal profile one can get by attributing Kp or Bp. If not for oher reasons so for the reason that the kind of reliabiliy associated with knowledge requires a certain ammount of epistemic credibility in terms of evidence. When one attributes Kp to an agent this required evidence follows suit, as it were, and their presence may make a difference to what goes on in this case as opposed to a Bp case.

Given that causality is, if not analyzed modaly, so at least sensitive to modal space, it is evident that knowledge as a cause would bring with it something that could turn out to be useful in certain instances of explanation. That is to say, knowledge as a cause could in some cases be what is needed to get a desired generalization or modale profile to a given case. The very existence of such cases is Williamson's crucial claim. Now that we have the general framework at hand we can perhaps better perceive this possibility and be tempted to use it. In any case, whether it is actually relevant or not requires a convincing case and it is here I think that the burglar case suffices.

Before we go on let me note in passing that what Avery's thinks is a point in favour of his dividing explanatory reasons from justificatory reasons is that he thinks knowledge fail to apply to non-linguistic animals who may still be said to act for reasons. However, this point could actually be flipped in Honsby's (or my) favour. Avery seems to think that animals could act for the belief that p whereas knowledge would require linguistic abilities in its possessor. Thus, Kp may be a justificatory requirement, which the animal cannot satisfy, whereas what moves the animal to act and thus explain its behaviour is Bp. I'm aware that there is such a view about knowledge; but one should be aware that there's also such a linguistic view about beliefs (e.g. Davidson, Dummett). None of which I would be inclined to give very much credit. More plausibly, in my view, beliefs do require certain language-like cognitive capacities since beliefs take propositions as their objects, which are object built up and grasped by the proper combination of concepts. They work much the same way as one would determine the meaning of a sentence from the combination of its constituent words; thus we get something like Fodor' postulation of the language of thought. That I think is needed for having a belief; and I hasten to add that animals who act for reasons they have beliefs about must have this capacity. For Hornsby, however, and I think I agree, knowledge is a non-linguistic relation to facts. So there really is no problem for Hornsby or me that animals can act for the objective reason that P; at least as long as this non-linguistic knowledge relation is available to us. On the other hand, the requirement of a language of thought for having beliefs could equally well support the presence of propositional knowledge, in the old-fashioned sense, in an animal. In any form, then, knowledge - either propositional or merely "factive" - could be applied to non-linguistic animals whom we are prone to bestow with a reason-giving explanation. Thus, the presence of these explanations does not pry apart explanatory and justificatory reasons in the way that Avery claims they do.

Back to the talk about modale profiles: I won't do the burglar case again but suffice it to say that Avery fails to pay sufficient attention to the generalization that comes with knowledge attributions in reason-giving explanations; although he poses a hallenge to my kind of view to say something about how one should do the generalization. For in order to prove the necessity of knowledge in action explanations two thoughts must be kept in mind: (1) that the Kp attribution matches the modale profile in the case at hand and (2) that Kp attributions is generalizable to a certain range of cases to serve as a unificatory explanation for those cases. Avery seems to agree that a Kp attribution can match the Burglar Case in the first sense; but then he goes on to provide us with a similar-looking case where it fails to apply since the burglar in this similar-looking case would do the same thing despite her obvious lack of knowledge. However, that knowledge lacks in Avery's case is no reason to think that knowledge is not the cause of the burglar's behaviour in the former. What would be required to show that knowledge fails to be the cause is a case where knowledge obtains without the desired effect and the additional argument that such a case is close enough and relevant to take down the claim of causation. Avery's case is more like saying that "Shakespeare did not write Macbeth since there is a doppelganger case where Macbeth gets written but by Marlowe." And even granted the presence of such a case Shakespeare surely wrote Macbeth and is the cause of Macbeth's existence. Likewise, there could be dozens of cases where the burglar acts in the same way but for other reasons than that he knew P. They say nothing whatsoever about whether Kp is the cause in our case for his behaviour (but maybe I'm missing something here?). And I think it is the cause in our case because it matches up with its modale profile. That is the claim to be challenged if one wants to turn down the burglar case.

One way to do that is to suggest, as Avery mentions, an alternative attitude. Suppose believing P with certainty matches the burglar case's modale profile. Then the question is why we should think of knowledge as the cause as opposed to the mere certain belief. Here one could cite certain rational constraints, of course, but not in order to slide away from explanation and over into a different topic, as Avery says we do, to begin discussing justification. The point is rather that we begin to pay attention to the other horn of our explanatory scheme, namely relevant generalization. We want to capture a certain range of cases by the use of our knowledge attributions. That range or class of cases is determined by considerations of rationality, I admit, but that's clearly different from saying that what we want to talk about is how the agent is justified to act. Rather, we want to explain this group of cases as they ar given to us by considerations about rationality.

So my final point is that Avery's certain belief that P may take on this-and-that particular case but surely would fail others where knowledge that P seems called for, i.e. those cases we get via considerations about rationality. We should, of course, wish for the richer and more general explanation and thus my claim is that knowledge will turn out to be more ammendable to the range of cases we want to explain. In the end this is what makes knowledge our candidate for explainging certain cases, namely all those cases where someone acts for the objective reason that P. Of course, that's a research project and not just for a single case or paper to establish. So we should definitely return to this issue.

The knower belongs in the world, I say. Otherwise there's is no way we can make sense of what we want to make sense of, namely those cases delineated by considerations about rationality where an agent acts for the objective reason that P.

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Hornsby's Paper : Section 2

I work myself through section 2 of Jennifer Hornsby's paper 'Knowledge, Belief and Reasons for Acting'. Here I remain fairly sympathetic to what she thinks is the connection between reasons, actions, beliefs, and knowledge. I conclude by summing up some of the problems we encountered in section 1 and indicate where one should go in future work to fix these problems and thereby be able to defend all the things that I'm sympathetic to in section 2.

MAIN TEXT: SECTION 2
As readers may recall Hornsby not only requires that we give an account of the objective and subjective sense in which someone can be provided with a reason for acting; one also needs to show how to connect these accounts. That is the topic for section 2 of her paper. To bring home such a story Hornsby starts out from the disjunctive principle (D) (which she claims is an analogous principle in action theory to McDowell’s (1982) disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception, a view she has discussed in further detail elsewhere (see ‘A Disjunctive Conception of Acting for Reasons’)):

(D) If A F-d because A believed that P, then EITHER A F-d because A knew that P (and (thus) A F-d because P) OR A F-d because A merely believed that P.

The first thing to notice about (D) is that it is a conditional and thus is consistent with a failure of the antecedent. For instance, it might be possible to act from knowing P and yet fail to believe P if knowledge does not entail belief (e.g. the unconfident student). In other words, (D) does not claim that one couldn’t act on knowledge without at the same time acting on belief. It is a problem that (D) fails to account for cases where an agent acts for knowledge without belief? Well, that depends on one’s views about the relationship between knowledge and belief. However, Hornsby is quite willing to admit the failure of accounting for such cases saying that (D) was never supposed to account for them: “(D) is designed to bring a wide range of cases of acting from knowledge under the head of acting from belief. And there is no need to deal with every possible case of acting from knowledge in order to do this.” That is, of course, a legitimate move since one is always allowed to restrict one’s own explanatory ambitions. Thereby she risks losing something that would be worth lumping under the same general account or principle but it might also be the case that no such phenomena is at hand here or; alternatively, one could contend that (D) takes care of all cases of acting from knowledge since it is arguable that intuitions concerning the unconfident student’s lack of belief vary greatly and that, at any rate, whatever state the agent is in when acting from knowledge it is one that is cognitively complex or belief-like enough to count as believing (Williamson 2000, p. 42). I won’t pursue the issue any further here.

Another thing worth noting about (D) is that EITHER is a conjunction. It says that A acts from knowing that P AND that A acts because of P. The reason is that the equation (E) from section 1 governs cases of acting from knowledge. When one does the latter one also acts from the objective reason that P given the equation between the two. In fact, knowing P is the only way one could act for the objective reason that P, according to Hornsby. (For problems about (E) I refer you to the previous blog post on section 1 of this paper).

An advantage of (D) is that it can accommodate cases like the following: A, who is neurotic, turns of the light and shuts the door. He now knows that the light is off and the door is shut. Still his belief that the light might still be on torments him so much that he reopens the door in order to turn it off. Such a case can be relegated to the second horn of the disjunction where the neurotic acts from a mere belief despite the fact that this belief conflicts with what he knows.

The connection between knowledge and belief that (D) relies on—and what it tries to keep track of—is the sense in which “knowledge sets the standard of appropriateness for belief” (Williamson 2000, p. 47). As Hornsby notes, the above cases (unconfident student and neurotic man) point to this appropriateness of believing only what one knows by displaying their agents as being somewhat less rational than what is optimal. Mere believing is, in Williamson’s words, “a kind of botched knowing” (2000, p. 47). To act on mere belief in the absence of knowledge or in the face of it could therefore be looked upon as a kind of botched rationality, which is an idea that Stanley, Hawthorne and Williamson explore in several places. After all, one who acts without knowledge, like our aforementioned skater, fails to act for the objective reasons there are—this holds, as we saw above, even when the skater skates at the edge of the pond for the Gettierized but true belief that the ice is thin in the middle—whereas the neurotic man has no objective reason for reopening the door and checking the light: on the contrary! Finally, there is a sense in which the unconfident student should behave as if he believed his answers; after all, he knows them and is thereby licensed by standards of appropriateness to believe them. The second horn of (D) therefore takes care of any number of cases where belief is found responsible for an act either in the absence of knowledge or in cases where beliefs are held and acted upon in the face of what one knows.

Let that suffice as a commentary of the advantages we get from holding (D) and let us turn to whether (D) also suffices to display the connection between the objective sense in which one acts for reasons and the subjective. Hornsby underlines the important role of beliefs in explaining actions. It is crucial that we attribute the neurotic with a belief to explain why he reopens the door whereas there are plenty of cases where agents act on the basis of mere appearances and false belief that could never be explained by applying only the objective sense in which one acts for reasons. These roles—acting in absence and in the face of knowledge—crucially rely on some fallible, non-factive state like belief so the extent to which reason-giving explanations or rationalizations are out to explain such everyday behaviour is the extent to which beliefs are needed in action theory. Some might object to this being within the scope of reason-giving explanations and they may argue as follows: that someone act because she believes P is no more the agent’s reason to F than the fact that a bridge collapses because it had a structural flaw is the bridge’s reason to collapse. Believing P is a mere psychological state, they may go on to argue, that may or may not cause the agent to act whereas the agent’s reasons—the reason they had for F-ing—is something different.

Properly speaking this is obviously wrong in a great range of cases: someone may come to F for the objective reason that she believes P, i.e. where she knows that she believes P. For instance, if A is asked “do you believe that Schopenhauer was the greatest heir to Kant?” the reason for acting—say, by nodding or exclaiming “yes!”—is precisely the fact that one knows in this case what one believes about the matter. This belief might be false—which it probably is in our case—but the fact needed to be known here is just that the agent believes the thing in question. In this sense beliefs sometimes do operate as objective reasons, as facts to be acted upon by knowing them.

Bracket that and we read that Hornsby agrees with the critics: in ordinary cases (where we’ve bracketed away the cases just mentioned) an agent believing that P is not the reason she has for F-ing. What she goes on to say is that when we ask someone for their reason to F they typically reply with P rather than saying they believed that P (except for cases where they retract their earlier evaluation due to being challenged and safeguards their answer by saying that “I acted on my belief that P”). Since ordinary agents know what their reasons are she suggests that we take their answer at face value. Their reason for F-ing is, in the ordinary case, P as opposed to Bp. Thus, it is the contents of one’s belief—those beliefs that are applied in reason-giving explanation of action—that give the reasons the agent had. But having a reason is not the same as there being a reason. The latter requires an objective reason to exist in order to be true whereas the former says something about what the agent takes to be her reasons for acting. What is crucial for understanding agency is, as Hornsby puts it, that it “is a matter of seeing what reasons they had.” That is in line with Davidson’s earlier contention that rationalizations lead us “to see something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his action.” (1963, p. 3) [My emphasis] Thus, to understand agents we need also to focus on what agents treat as if they were objective reasons. One way to know what reasons agents have is by knowing what they believe. The point here reinforces something that Williamson thinks about the relationship between knowledge and belief, namely that “to believe p is to treat p as if one knew p” (2000, p. 46). In other words, believing something is a way to populate one’s cognitive landscape with something—a thought or a proposition—that one is disposed to treat as facts or as reasons to act because believing something is treated as if it was knowledge.

Hornsby’s take-home message is therefore that we can understand the role of beliefs in reason-giving explanations because, as she says, “the thought that p plays the role that the fact that p plays for someone who acts because they know that p”. In this sense, we actually revert the scheme since we seem to get a better understanding of what it is to act from beliefs by understanding how an agent acts from knowledge and thereby showing how beliefs are treated as if their contents were known facts. In the same vein Williamson thought that he could illuminate the nature of beliefs in an account of epistemology via the nature of knowledge and the appropriate relation which says that beliefs aim at knowledge (2000, p. 47). So, pace the belief-desire proponents—who think erroneously that beliefs and desires can explain the whole truth about agency whereas they do fail to account for the objective sense in which one acts for reasons—it seems as if we can only understand what it is to act for beliefs when we first understand what it is to act for knowledge. According to Hornsby then, the belief-account is not wrong in the sense that it generates any falsehoods but because it fails to account for the whole truth about reason-explanation.

So where are we? Well, it seems as if all that is said and done in section depends on the truth of the following two claims: (1) that knowledge is sometimes necessary to explain how someone could act for the objective reason that P; and (2) that there is no general way to distinguish between world-involving mental states and internal mental states. We saw that Hornsby fails to establish (1). Moreover, her principle (E) for how knowledge is involved with acting for objective reasons ran into problems of its own. Yet I think we can establish (1) by other arguments, probably drawing on lottery-type considerations where we show how the existence of a lottery-proposition—basically, a propositions that cannot be known despite immensely probably evidence which favours its truth by closing in, but never reaching, probability 1—precludes that the agent acts for this objective reason. When it comes to (2) I think we need to establish in order to preclude the proponents of a belief-desire account to come back and say that the objective kinds of reason-giving explanations fall outside the scope of psychology. Again, I can only refer to Williamson’s and Gibbon’s work on these topics but I do think that this claim is worth pursuing. In addition I think the kind of view that Hornsby is here championing would better suited if it could also prove and provide details from how we can understand the causal relevance of knowing. Basically what I’m asking for is to show how knowledge, as a causally potent mental property, better fits the explanatory goals of reason-giving explanations. In other words, I think pace the internalist belief-desire proponents that knowledge is operative in action. Allow this and we may be on our way towards a naturalistic conception of action, one that allows for externalist or world-involving mental states in psychological explanations.

Final words: as Hornsby notes at the end of this paper, plenty of philosophers and people thinking about actions and mind take it for granted that world-involving states - like knowledge - doesn't belong in a psychological explanation nor in rationalizations of actions. In another paper ('Agency and Actions') Hornsby quotes Strawson's old saying that it takes a really great philosopher to make a really great mistake (1974). Internalist reason-giving explanations seems to me to be such a great mistake. Or, as Hornsby goes on to say, "I can't help thinking that, these days, it takes a really great number of philosophers to contrive in the persistence of a really great mistake." At least Hornsby has by this paper positioned herself strongly on the right side of this divide.

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Review of 'Knowledge, Belief and Reasons for Acting': Jennifer Hornsby

Here I assess and evaluate the first section from Hornsby's paper where she tries to support the claim that knowledge is necessary for objective reasons to occur as reasons in a reason-giving explanation of the agent's activity. In the end I argue that her argument fails to establish this and that her formulation of the principle that governs acting for objective reasons must be revised. Yet, I remain sympathetic to her suggestion and think that arguments can be supplied to support knowledge's essential role in reason-giving explanations although I leave it to future work coming up with such a principle.

SHORT INTRODUCTION: KNOWLEDGE IN AGENCY
In this paper Hornsby tries to find grounds for thinking that an agent’s possession of knowledge is presupposed by the agent acting for reasons and thus for the claim that acting for reasons does not come into play unless the agent has knowledge. The tendency to explore knowledge’s role in action theory is one she shares with a number of other philosophers: Jason Stanley suggests in his paper together with Tim Williamson that knowing that p is a reason for F-ing is a necessary condition for rationally F-ing whereas Stanley together with John Hawthorne takes the step a bit further and explores and defends the idea that knowing that p is a reason to F is both necessary and sufficient for rationally F-ing. On the other hand, we have people like John Gibbons who thinks that intentional action without knowledge is impossible and thus that knowledge is presupposed in some form or another whenever one says of some agent that she intentionally F-d. Hornsby seems to be on roughly the same track as Gibbons since she too is exploring the metaphysical foundation for actions rather than merely asking, like Stanley, Hawthorne and Williamson, about the norms or ethical principles that govern rational conduct. Important as the latter question is Hornsby sees herself as going further than the normative question to pose questions about the metaphysical constitution of actions.

Hornsby seems to start out by picking up a clue from Williamson’s suggestion (2000, p. 62) that knowledge sometimes must figure in the best explanation for why some agent F-d. According to him, attributions of knowledge may be a better predictor for determining someone’s actions by lending more probability to a certain way of conduct. The intuitive example is the rational burglar who risks a lot by searching the whole building for a valuable diamond. The only way to understand why a burglar would take such a risk is, according to Williamson, by attributing her with the knowledge that the diamond is in the building. Otherwise it would be hard to explain why she apparently disregards evidence to the contrary—i.e. as the time goes and her search is not successful—on pain of diminishing her rationality (like declaring her to be just plain stubborn, insensitive to evidence etc.). Another example would be the case where someone, say your mother-in-law, comes to your door ringing the door bell and you consider whether to open the door or not. The outcome of one’s deliberation should depend on whether you have reason to think that she knows that you’re home or whether she has a mere true belief to this effect. In other words, the predictive outcome—i.e. whether your mother-in-law becomes insulted or just disappointed—depends on the presence or absence of knowledge. The relevant generalization needed for explaining these cases—which, by the way, is how Williamson likes to think about the notion of causality—thus seems to depend on knowledge in certain intuitive cases of human conduct. In this sense knowledge is causally and psychologically relevant for human conduct.

However, if such cases goes through they suffice to show that there are at least some cases where attributing knowledge to the agent provides the best explanation of his or her behaviour. Thus, knowledge is sometimes needed in psychological explanation since in those cases it would severely decrease the explanatory power of psychology if we were to restrict that discipline from attributing cognitive states like knowledge to the agent. Beliefs won’t suffice to rationalize or to provide a reason-giving explanation here so, pace Stephen Stich and psychology’s restriction to autonomous behavioural description (i.e. a description of a way of acting such that if you would act in a certain way in a given setting so would your replica that shares all your current, internal, physical properties (Stich, Folk Psychology, p. 167)), we should think that what knowledge adds to beliefs is psychologically relevant. (Of course, one could reply here that those limits to psychological explanations might be just what we should expect since this discipline is, after all, not an attempt to explain everything. Agreed, however, I do think that Gibbons’ paper on this topic provides us with plenty of cases that one would like to be explained psychologically and where one nevertheless would fail to do so without attributing the agent with knowledge. Thus we should reject Stich’s restriction to autonomous behavioural descriptions. The point is that since which psychological states there are is at least partly determined by what one needs in order to explain human behaviour it seems arbitrary to exclude knowledge as psychologically irrelevant unless one can provide a more principled distinction between which of these states are psychologically relevant and not: again, the failure of such attempts is discussed in both Gibbons (2001) and Williamson (2000, chapters 2 and 3)).

MAIN TEXT: SECTION 1
What Hornsby wants to do is to take these ideas a bit further and actually put knowledge into the constitution a specific kind of agency, namely the agency that goes by the label acting for reasons; or, as she puts it, “until it is allowed that our knowing things explain our acting, our acting for reasons is not in view”. In order to get there we need to make a couple of preliminary distinctions. An intuitive and much-discussed distinction in reason-explanations goes between the subjective sense in which something is a reason for F-ing and the objective sense in which something can be a reason. The latter is, according to Hornsby, a matter of fact that obtains regardless of whether the agent is considering that reason as a reason for F-ing. The former is another kind of fact: namely the fact that the agent considers some p (whether true, false or plain stupid) to be a reason for F-ing. The following schemas cash out this distinction:

OBJ: A reason for A to F was that p: p
SUBJ: A had a reason to F: she believed that p: Bp

The distinction can be appreciated with an example: suppose A goes skating on the edge of a pond and clearly avoids skating in the middle of it. Suppose further that the ice is too thin for skating in the middle of the pond. Now, according to Hornsby, that fact is a reason for A to skate on the edge of the pond as well as avoiding the middle of it. For short, call that fact P. A may now be acting for a reason in the objective sense, thus skating in the middle of the pond for the objective reason that P. On the other hand, there’s another way in which A may have a reason for skating at the edge of the pond and that is the subjective sense in which she believes the ice in the middle of the pond is thin. What’s more, her belief that the ice is thin might also be the fact that causes her to skate on the edge. Hornsby’s point is that both are reasons for the agent to skate at the edge of the pond given that she desires or wants to remain safe and dry. When we explain human actions we need both and we need to show how they are related. Hornsby’s claim in this paper is that in order to achieve both ends—i.e. explaining human conduct and how those different action explanations are related—it is required that we credit agents with knowledge. Let’s see if she can establish this claim.

The reason why we need subjective explanations may seem obvious to some, especially to the Humeans in action theory, like Donald Davidson, who thinks that a reason figuring in a reason-giving explanation or rationalization must “lead us to see something the agent saw” (Davidson 1965, p. 3); but it might be worth rehearsing its intuitive appeal. Hornsby resurrects Bernard Williams’ example where someone makes a mixture of petrol and tonic because he wants to drink gin and tonic and believes the petrol being gin (despite the smell...). In such a case there was no reason for making this particular mixture. After all, what the agent wanted was something of a totally different kind; what’s more, the mixture could be quite toxic and dangerous to the agent’s health (no suggestion here that gin and tonic is particularly healthy either...). But all this does not mean A had no reason to making this mixture since A still had her reasons for making the mixture as she did. The distinction that we need to make here is the difference between two existential claims, namely the fact that there is no reason for A to F is non-identical to the claim that A had no reason to F. Or in symbols:

~$p (p is a reason for A to F) ¹ ~$q(q is A’s (or her) reason for F-ing)

In other cases one’s belief, although true, might be rather silly and not even remotely connected to what one wants to achieve by acting. Hornsby calls these cases benighted agency. For instance, if I believe truly that my 30th birthday is 10.02.2009 and I take that to be a reason for me to make a first bid at 30.100.220,09 $ for a flat in Queens, there’s a sense in which I’m clearly benighted in my activity. Such examples are supposed to show the need for the subjective sense in which something is a reason for F-ing: they may be true, false, silly or just plain stupid, still they are the reasons for which A, as a matter of fact, is F-ing since the agent takes those as reasons for F-ing and acts on them as such. What happens it those cases the agent acts on her belief that P is reason for F-ing and then, from A’s perspective, there would be an objective reason to F if P were true.

To account for the objective sense in which something is a reason for A to F we only need to point to the fact that P is reason for A to F, i.e. OBJ. However, to make that reason figure in a rationalization or reason-giving explanation of A’s activity it is not enough to just cite this objective fact. After all, there might be a perfectly good reason for me not to be writing this blog post at this moment; but that does not make it a good reason to cite, as it stands, in a rationalization for why I am struggling to write it. Would a belief do the trick? That is to say, would it capture the objective sense in which something figures as a reason in a rationalization of one’s activity if the agent truly believed that P was a reason for her to F and acted on this belief? According to Hornsby, the answer is clearly no and the true belief that P is a reason to F do not add up to all we want from the rationalization. The true belief could be result of a mere happy conjecture or just the result of a lucky happenstance in which case Hornsby thinks that “inasmuch as the skater’s belief could have been false, the skater’s believing what she did can hardly provide her with the reason that there was for her to keep to the edge.” For instance, if A was told that the ice was thin by an otherwise reliable friend who for some reason was out to trick her from skating at the centre of the pond, it will be true that the ice was thin (unbeknownst to the friend’s knowledge) and A will have and act on this true belief. Yet, there is a sense in which the friend’s attempted trickery ruins the way in which we expect the agent to be connected to her reasons for acting; it requires something more than just a Gettierized, justified, true belief that P is a reason to F to be provided with that reason in the objective sense.

Of course, any interesting or empirical belief “could have been false” so I guess we should read Hornsby’s suggestion here as saying something to the effect that a mere belief “could easily have been false” in order to retain a charitable reading. By that I mean that one’s belief, although true, could have been true as a matter of epistemic luck—as shown by the Gettierized case—and that Hornsby thinks this presence of epistemic luck suffices to block the agent from being provided with the reason there was for her to skate at the edge of the pond. If that reading is correct we can begin to appreciate the intuitive connection between agency and epistemology/knowledge: we could say that something goes missing in this case—i.e. the possibly Gettierized scenario—and that “what one needs for one’s true belief to provide one with a reason for skating on the edge of the pond is that the belief be not only true but also epistemically reliable (i.e. holding true in all of one’s epistemic alternatives)”. Here the reliability relation could be defined as an ordinary accessibility relation in modal logic that is defined as function from the world one is in (@) to the possible worlds one for all one knows have been in (i.e. the set of those worlds that are consistent with all one’s evidence in @). P is the reason for A’s F-ing then (i.e. the reason because of which A’s F-ing) only if P is (a) true; (b) believed; and (c) reliably based. In the Gettier case condition (c) fails and we will have to say that A kept to the edge of the pond not because the ice was thin but because he believed (correctly) that the ice was thin. So his true belief does not provide him with an objective reason for acting because it fails to be reliably based; so adding the true belief to the objective reason merely gives you another subjective sense in which P is a reason to F.

Now if A were to know that the ice was thin and thereby acting on her knowledge she would satisfy the reliability condition—after all, knowledge requires being reliable—and thus there would be no obvious reason to deny that the fact that the ice is thin now provides A with an objective reason for skating on the edge. So the presence of knowledge is enough to provide A with an objective reason for which she acted. But Hornsby makes the further claim that knowledge is also necessary or that a condition for F-ing for the reason that p is that one knows that p. Her Gettier case obviously does not establish that knowledge is necessary; reliability, for all that’s been said and done so far, could possibly be supplied for by other means. Yet knowledge is a plausible candidate and also one that frequently occurs in normative and rational evaluations of people’s activities (for evidence see: Stanley and Williamson; Stanley and Hawthorne). We might also think that the necessity requirement could be established via lottery considerations, i.e. cases where the requirement of justification needed for acting with an objective reason is pressed increasingly towards probability 1 (= knowledge); but I won’t go in this now. Suffice it to say that more is needed—and can probably be provided—in order to support Hornsby’s main claim that: “We act for reasons in virtue of our having knowledge of relevant facts. As agents, we rely upon our often being, so to speak, the conduits of facts.”

We should note, in passing, that Hornsby’s suggestion does not preclude that p could still be a reason for A to F even though he is unaware of it or fails to know it and merely believes it. The point is rather that as soon as he acts his F-ing can only count as F-ing for the objective reason that p if A also knows that p. Failing that he would merely be F-ing for his subjective reason in accordance with his objective reason, i.e. by acting for the correct belief that p was a reason for F-ing. So the fact that p is a reason for A to F can only occur as an explanation of A’s actual F-ing if A knows that p is a reason for A to be F-ing. In this sense, Hornsby’s suggestion is completely on a par with Davidson’s requirement that a reason can only figure in a rationalization of someone’s behaviour if it shows or “leads us to see something the agent saw” (1965, p. 3); when we explain that A knows that P is a reason for A to F just is a way to come to understand something the agent saw. Davidson also lists knowledge as one of the possible cognitive attitudes we can list and combine with a pro attitude (desires, wants, etc) to yield the primary reason that rationalizes A’s intentional behaviour.

Anyway, Hornsby goes on to suggest that (E) captures what she thinks established by her Gettier case:

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

I think I see a problem with (E): it seems to be a version of the KK principle and thus leads one to the absurd consequence that follows when one applies an S4 model for the accessibility relation that operates on the epistemic operator. That is to say, Hornsby’s suggestion can easily be shown to require much more reliability and knowledge than first assumed. Here’s why:

Read F(x, p) as ‘x F-d because p’
Read K(x,p) as ‘x knew that p’

Then according to my reading of (E) as an instance of what is troublesome in the KK principle it would follow from F(x, p) that F(x, K(x,p)): F(x, Kx(K(x,p))), and so on. In short, it follows that whenever one acts for the objective reason that p one would have to not only Kp but KKp, and KKKp, etc.. The reason why this is a problem is that, according to Hornsby, the presence of knowledge adds reliability and thus it adds a restriction on one’s epistemic possibilities: the space of epistemic possibilities shrinks with every addition or iteration of knowledge. Thus, the extent to which (E) can be shown to iterate knowledge requirements is also the extent to which one would require a higher epistemic standard whenever one acts for the objective reason that P. My allegation is therefore that (E) commits one to an impossibly strict epistemological standard in order to act for objective reasons.

The best way to deal with this objection would be if one could point to the scope of the principle since the principle’s application is supposed to be guarded by a qualification to apply only where ‘x F-d because p’ gives a reason-explanation. One could hope that this qualification could be enough to block the reiteration that would make (E) an instance of the fallacious KK principle; however, (E) is easily turned into an instance of the KK principle by Hornsby’s own words since she regards both the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the equivalence as a reason-explanation. Thus, whenever ‘A F-d because p’ is a reason-explanation it follows from the equivalence in (E) that ‘A F-d because A knew that p’ is a reason-explanation too. Since that is the case nothing stops us from reapplying (E) to ‘A F-d because A knew that p’ since (E) is a universal principle that is supposed to apply whenever something of the form ‘x F-d because p’ gives a reason-explanations: and, guess what, ‘A F-d because A knew that p’ has that form since ‘A knew that p’ is a fact too. It’s just that on the reapplication the variable ‘p’ in the schema is replaced by ‘A knew that p’ rather than ‘p’; so when we put that into the formula (E) it gives you back that ‘A F-d because A knew that A knew that p’. This process can now be repeated as many times as you want giving you an infinite number of iterations of knowledge as a general requirement for objective reason-explanations. In other words, to have reason-explanation for F-ing of the form ‘x F-d because p’ requires not only that one knew p but also that one knew that one knew p, knew that one knew that one knew p, and so ad infinitum. Again, the trouble is that knowledge adds further reliability thus restricting the epistemic possibilities: in short, one would need to know so much that it rules out any epistemic possibilities and thus one would need to know exactly which world one resides in order to act because that P. And no one, except for an omniscient being, knows that much which is an intolerable consequence of Hornsby’s suggestion. At least, so it seems to me.

A possible solution is to insist on two senses of because here: we could read ‘A F-d because that P’ as the sense in which something is objectively a reason for F-ing without being the ‘because’ that figures in a reason-giving explanation; and think of ‘A F-d because* she knew P was a reason for her to F’ as the ‘because’ that does figure in a reason-giving explanation. But that runs counter to the qualification or what we seek to explain, namely what we need for the citing objective sense of being a reason to F as a reason figuring in the reason-giving explanation for F-ing. As far as I can see, Hornsby is in real trouble here and I see no easy way out of it. (Note: it won’t help replacing the biconditional with a conditional, either; since the consequences only hinges on one direction of the biconditional).

Bracket this problem and I’m in sympathy with Hornsby’s general idea that, as she says, adding knowledge to the soup is an elegant way in which something can be a reason for F-ing at the same time as one can account for the agent’s motivation. Knowledge is factive and therefore Kp entails p; also knowledge is arguably a cognitive or mental state and thus can figure as a causal factor in the explanation of one’s acts. We still need a story about the subjective sense in which something is a reason for F-ing; or rather, we need to connect such a story to the one about knowledge. That is Hornsby’s topic for section 2 of this paper but I will return to that project in a blog post that is soon to follow.

REFERENCES:
Davidson, D, 1963, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’
Gibbons, J. 2001, ‘Knowledge in Action’
Hornsby, J. 2007?, ‘Knowledge, Belief and Reasons for Acting’
Williamson, T. 2000, Knowledge and Its Limits

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Intentionality and the Object of Moral Perception: Ricoeur's Challenge

Ricoeur tantalizingly challenges the Husserlian (and common sense) notion that the intentional object remains the same throughout various intentional acts. Consider, for example, the following: “that person with the heavy bags needs a seat” vs. “that person is standing with heavy bags.” On the common view, the intentional object, “the person standing with heavy bags,” is the same in both cases. This view, that the intentional object is given an identity through an act of understanding, is central to standard accounts of moral perception and is an important point for philosophy of mind and agency.

To work out the common view, let me take a version of the standard account from Angela Smith, who takes moral perception to be a case of “seeing under an aspect” (I do not mean to imply that this is Smith's own view; she suggests that it may be mistaken in the paragraph that follows):

A morally insensitive person may, in a literal perceptual sense, “see” exactly the same thing as a morally sensitive person—for example, that a person is standing on a crowded subway with two very full grocery bags. What differs is that the morally sensitive person sees this person as uncomfortable and in need of a place to sit down, while the morally insensitive person does not. (1, 259)

This point is taken to be independent of the further point about moral perception that a morally sensitive agent is more likely to notice features of her surroundings that call for a moral response (perceptual salience). Here, the issue is rather of how, or under what aspect, the morally sensitive or insensitive person perceives a situation provided that both have already noticed it. And this view—that intentional objects are somehow basic particular units of meaning that, already constituted, can enter into various intentional acts—has some obvious support: If, for example, I am to want to have chicken soup for dinner, then “having chicken soup for dinner” or something of the sort must have a meaning independently of my particular act of wanting it; after all, the very same object must be able to play a role in my epistemic judgments, or else I would never know how to satisfy my desires.

This is the sort of view Ricoeur has in mind. He calls on us to consider the following infinitive proposition: “I am to go on a trip.” This grammatical form

Is a neutral signification which could be incorporated in acts of different quality. It will occur some day that “I shall go on a trip”: here the meaning is at the same time called and held in suspension by its hypothetical modifier. In a decision the meaning is inserted into a positing of existence which is not stated but is affirmed as depending on me… (2, 43)

So what is the common meaning in these intentional acts? Ricoeur rejects the idea that the common meaning is given by a founding act of understanding, which allows it to enter into other intentional acts such as willing, hoping, predicting, etc. Nor “is it a primitive judgment of existence modified afterwards as a wish or a decision” (44).

Ricoeur's own view is that,

this meaning is distinguished only by abstraction from the concrete act of stating, wishing, ordering, or deciding… This proposition is not a judgment about that which I state, hope, command, or will, but a convergent product of abstraction, formed in the context of a reflection on acts and their objects (43-44)

Thus, the intentional object of a wish is not identical to the intentional object of the understanding; the identity of the two objects is not primary, but is established through a later act of abstraction. Similarly, the perception of a person standing with heavy bags will not be identical to the perception of a person with heavy bags in need of a seat: these intentional acts have a different quality, and are filled by different objects. (Ricoeur makes a similar point in “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology of the Will,” published in (3), though in similarly vague terms and also without any clear analysis of the implications. If anyone is familiar with further sources, please let me know.)

One way of bringing this out is by going back to the distinction I mentioned above, between seeing something under an aspect and noticing it at all. We can, of course, make this distinction in abstraction, but it is not at all clear that we can draw any fine line. For one thing, to take the example Smith uses, it seems a fact about the situation that the person with heavy bags needs a seat. So the morally sensitive observer is not adding something of his own to the situation; rather, he is simply seeing the situation for what it is. That the person with heavy bags needs a seat is part and parcel of the perceived situation, and it is a feature of the situation that the morally insensitive person simply does not notice. Similarly, an even less sensitive person might fail to notice that the bags are heavy, or might fail to notice a person standing with them at all. “Seeing under an aspect” is easily distinguishable from perceptual salience only if we assume that the “aspect” under which a perception might be seen is something added by the agent’s subjective attitudes, in opposition to what is objectively there to be perceived. But if we accept a moral realist picture, the “aspect” is really there, to be noticed by any sensitive observer in the way that the person with bags is really there.

So why does this matter? For one, if Ricoeur is right, we have to reexamine the standard classification of cognitive and conative acts in terms of directions of fit. For another, it suggests that valuation is integral to perception rather than projected on it, perhaps as some secondary quality. Of course the account would—to pose any serious challenge—still require a serious work-up of how a secondary act of abstraction, through which sameness of meaning is determined, could serve to unite our various judgments (say, judgments about what we want and judgments about how to get it; or judgments about moral responsibility and judgments about moral desirability). In any case, I suspect there is a way to pull off such an analysis by working out exactly how second-order acts govern first-order acts.

PS. What looks like a blue jay just pooped on my copy of Smith's paper. A spirited philosophical debate at last!

References:

(1) Angela Smith, “Responsibility for Attitudes,” Ethics 115 (January 2005): 236-271

(2) Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1966.

(3) Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Chicago: Northwestern, 2007.

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Dreyfus and McDowell, Concepts and Coping

I have finally gotten around to reading the Dreyfus-McDowell exchange in Inquiry. It’s fun and quite clear, and I recommend it to everyone. No doubt I will be scribbling more about it in the future, but at this point I want to raise a point about Dreyfus’s odd insistence that expertise is somehow non-conceptual. Not only does McDowell throw clear doubt on the need for such a view of expertise, but Dreyfus’s own examples seem to undermine his point. Sorry about the length of this; I had to write it out to get clearer on it. If I come back to it, I'll keep my points tighter.

McDowell repeatedly makes it clear that, in saying that our experience is permeated by rationality, he does not mean that reflection is constantly operative, nor does he mean that there are general principles in the background of everything we do. Conceptual action and perception are situational, and conceptualization need not be explicit. Thus, McDowell distinguishes between experience that “is embraced by conceptual capacities… that we already had before we enjoyed the experience,” other experience can be isolated and articulated by “annexing bits of language to” it, and “some of the content of a typically rich world-disclosing experience never makes its way into constituting part of the content of our repertoire of conceptual capacities” (347). So while obviously not all of our experience—not even most of it—is articulated in the perception itself, “all its content is present in a form in which… it is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities” (idem).

Dreyfus finally seems to pick up on what McDowell means, and responds with a rather feeble call for proof: “This conclusion [that our coping is permeated with rationality] is supposed to follow from the fact that if one has a capacity—in this case the capacity to use situation-specific concepts—this capacity must be “operative”, as McDowell puts it, in all situations whether or not I am aware of exercising it.” And this, we discover, is a “category mistake”: “Capacities are exercised on occasion, but that does not allow one to conclude that, even when they are not exercised, they are, nonetheless, “operative” and thus pervade all our activities” (372). This is quite weak: Dreyfus is no longer insisting, as he did in earlier parts of the debate, that conceptual capacities cannot be operative in our coping. McDowell’s account has dealt with all the objections to that effect (i.e., the generality objection and the reflection objection I mention above). [There is a pretty amusing bit, where Dreyfus tries to use Aristotle, via Heidegger, against McDowell, pointing out that general principles are not guiding phronesis and thus it cannot be permeated by rationality. Someone whose knowledge of Aristotle seems to be on a par with mine shouldn’t be challenging McDowell on that point, and McDowell immediately points out that obviously neither Aristotle—nor Heidegger—ever suggests that phronesis acts outside the domain of logos.]

Now Dreyfus’s argument is weak in that it is no longer a positive claim about what role conceptual capacities can play in coping. Rather, he is making the point that McDowell’s claim is unproven. Of course he tries to strengthen this appeal to ignorance as refutation, as the above quote suggests: (1) The fact that human beings have a conceptual capacity does not mean that it is always operative. And (2) McDowell has no grounds for claiming that it is always operative, since we cannot find conceptual capacities within the phenomenology of our absorbed coping! Two points strike me as particularly odd. First off, McDowell is clearly not insisting that any capacity that we have must always be operative—that would, indeed, be a lousy ground for the conclusion that a capacity is always operative (I have the capacity to urinate but it is, thankfully, not always operational as such). Second, Dreyfus has apparently reverted to the flaccid, though currently popular, view of phenomenology as description of surface-level phenomena as they are experienced at the time they occur.

It strikes me that McDowell has already answered these objections in the passages cited above; and this exchange makes me wonder how much clearer he would need to be for Dreyfus to admit that he’s picked the wrong fight. Perhaps the problem is that McDowell hasn’t phrased his response in phenomenological terms. So here is a brief attempt: It is true that, when we are engaged in absorbed coping, we are not explicitly aware of any conceptualization occurring. But it makes no sense to take an experience out of context: something happens after my absorbed coping as well: I reflect on it. And something happens before: I am aware, generally, of what I will be doing (though of course I need not have it planned out) and, in the past, have performed similar tasks with explicit conceptual guidance in play. Dreyfus admits this point, but he thinks that after one has gone through the learning phase, where one is guided by concepts, one transcends that stage, becomes and expert, and no longer needs concepts at all. But this is quite odd: if I needed concepts to play chess in the past, is it not reasonable to think that, as I’ve gotten better, I have lost the need to rely on keeping those concepts explicit? But how can this be evidence that they are not present? Dreyfus’s model has the Grand Master playing chess with his body alone but, as McDowell notes, this only makes sense metaphorically.

Moreover, a phenomenological account should recognize that, after my absorbed coping, I know what happened during that time. If asked why I made a certain move, I can give a reason, although I may have to think about it in order to make it explicit. No doubt I cannot explain every feature of my actions, but so what? The fact that I cannot describe every feature of a blade of grass I saw does not mean that I did not see something that fits under the concept “grass.” A correct description of coping experience is going to be misleading, precisely because it involves an attempt to describe an experience that, by definition, was not explicitly thematized at the time it occurred. But a retrospective look can bring out the conceptual features. Why, then, should we focus on the unthematized experience as authoritative, rather than the thematized reappropriation of that experience?

In fact, for someone who supposedly puts a great deal of faith in phenomenology, Dreyfus regularly makes arguments that are underdetermined by the phenomenology. He brings up the example of Chuck Knoblauch who, after thinking too much about what he was doing, lost the ability to throw the ball effortlessly. Dreyfus insists that this supports his view: that conceptualization cannot be behind the throwing, and if it is, then it can only interfere with the absorbed coping. But of course it doesn’t mean that at all. Knoblauch’s inability to throw the ball does not show that the ability relies on a lack of conceptualization, but only that it depends on a lack of explicit conceptualization. As McDowell points out: Knoblauch is now thinking about how to perform a basic action instead of simply performing it. But that does not show that performing the action correctly involves no conceptualization. Dreyfus argues that Knoblauch cannot be using the same conceptual capacities when pitching expertly and when screwing it up, because the content of his intentional states must change: “if it was the same sort of content as before reflection, there would be no way to explain why Knoblauch performs so well under one condition and so poorly in the other” (360). But isn’t it obvious that Knoblauch’s problem is not with the content, but with how he makes use of that content? The entire line of though appears misguided.

Here is the basic issue, then. Dreyfus keeps missing McDowell’s insistence that our experience must have a form that makes it suitable for conceptualization. It is in this sense that experience is permeated by rationality. And—as McDowell keeps stressing here and in Mind and World—without this suitability, it is unclear how we could articulate our experience at all, or how we could explain what we were doing when we were absorbed.

What drives the point home for me, however, is Dreyfus’s list of absorbed coping activities. Aside from Grand Master chess playing, “something similar happens to each of us when any activity from taking a walk, to being absorbed in a conversation, to giving a lecture is going really well” (373). And this looks bizarre from the start: perhaps I can take a walk without conceptual guidance (at least, this is plausible on its face), but giving a non-conceptual lecture is something only a true Master—like Avital Ronell—can pull off. (Yes, I just saw “The Examined Life”… No, I can’t get over her claim that “meaning is fascist” or whatever.)

Here is the clearest example Dreyfus gives to explain how he thinks we monitor our absorbed coping without being guided by concepts: An airport radio beacon signals a pilot if his plane is off course; but if everything is going well, if the plane is on course, the beacon is silent. But the beacon is doing something, since “the silence that accompanies being on course doesn’t mean the beacon isn’t continuing to guide the plane. Likewise, in the case of perception, the absence of tension doesn’t mean the body isn’t being constantly guided by the solicitations” (358). In other words: the body guides itself, based on past experience. Conceptualization is needed only in case something goes wrong. But this cannot be right. Consider: When I am lecturing, no matter how absorbed, I never swear, although I swear habitually over beer with friends. I do not swear during a lecture and suddenly, realizing something is wrong, snap out of my absorption. So at the very least my lecturing is conceptually guided: I am speaking in lecture mode, not in arguing with friends over beer mode. And while I need not be explicitly aware that I am lecturing in order to lecture well—while that awareness would obviously detract from my absorption, since it would involve one thought too many—it must be guiding my activity. Perhaps my body knows how to tell lecturing apart from heatedly defending a point to a friend, but if my body is so smart, what does it need me for? Our concepts become explicit during a breakdown, when things go wrong. But—and this is the key question McDowell must pose to Dreyfus—those concepts could not become explicit in a breakdown unless our experience was of the form to be conceptualized in the first place.

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Embryonic Souls and Moral Standing

You gotta love the religious argument pretending not to be a religious argument.

Princeton University politics professor Robert George, a Catholic and another member of the Bush-era Council on Bioethics, said the moral argument over embryonic stem cell research is not rooted in religion but in ethics and equality. He said research shows that an embryo is a human being in its earliest form of development, so we have to ask ourselves whether all human life should be treated equally, with dignity and respect.

Wait, what? How do we read the claim that "research shows that an embryo is a human being in its earliest form of development"? Let's look at the claim: "embryo"="human being in its earliest form of development." Well, uhm, duh. If we're talking about human embryos, and we agree with the (to my knowledge uncontested) research that humans develop from human embryos, I suppose this is mostly right. Of course it is also ambiguous and clearly unfit--at least as it stands--as a premise in a moral argument for the moral considerability of embryos.

1: The statement might be claiming that an embryo is the earliest form of development of a human being. This may, however, be viewed as arbitrary: Why is the embryo the earliest form? Why not sperm and ova?

2: If we take the statement literally, however, it is claiming that a human embryo is a human being, though one in its earliest stage of development, just as infants are human beings in an earlier stage of development than tenured professors. This reading seems to me to resolve the arbitrariness problem above. But it obviously fails as a premise for any moral argument:

(a) If "human being" is meant simply in some biological sense of having the right sort of genetic make-up, no moral conclusions can follow from the true premise that a human embryo has human genes. (Unless having human genes guarantees possession of a soul, but George rules out this reading.)

(b) If the claim is one of potentiality, that a human embryo can, under appropriate conditions, develop into a human to whom we have moral obligations, then it gives in itself no reason why embryos should have the same moral status as the humans into which they will develop--if anything, it seems to support the opposite conclusion.

(c) If, finally, the claim is that human embryos are human beings in the sense of having the moral standing properly accorded to, say, adult human beings, it is obviously question-begging as a premise in the argument that embryos have the same moral standing as adult human beings.

"I don't think the question has anything to do with religion or pulling out our microscope and trying to find souls," George said. "We live in a pluralistic society where some people believe there are no such things as souls. Does that mean we should not have moral objections to killing 17-year-old adolescents?"

I can't imagine how this is relevant. Obviously if the only reason human beings have moral standing is that they have souls, it will follow that anyone who does not believe in souls has no reason not to kill 17-year-olds. Fortunately, soul-ownership is not the reason why killing people is wrong. (I am still not entirely sure how it could be any kind of moral reason in the first place.) The question, then, is whether our moral reasons for not harming other human beings can be extended without degradation of meaning or moral force to embryos. But that question obviously cannot be resolved by simply stipulating that embryos are human beings in the relevant sense, in the way that 17-year-olds clearly are human beings in the relevant sense. So if you don't assume from the outset that moral considerability depends on having a soul and that, furthermore, embryos have souls, the supposedly research-based claim that "an embryo is a human being in its earliest form of development" is hardly helpful.

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Aristotle on Virtue: A Question About Circularity

I have a question about the Nicomachean Ethics that has been driving me nuts. I'm sure there is an obvious answer, but I still seem to be missing it after my third read. How do we determine the good in action?

Here's the issue I am having: The end of action is set by wish (boulesis). The means are decided on through deliberation (prohairesis). And prudence, it seems, is the virtue of deliberating well. The virtuous agent wishes for what is noble (kalos) and correctly deliberates about the best actions to attain the noble. So we have an account of the end of the virtuous agent, the faculty by which he pursues that end (deliberation) and the virtue of that faculty (prudence). We also have the faculty by which he chooses/recognizes the end: wish. But is there a virtue of wishing? In other words, it does not help us to have an account of how one attains the end if we have no account of how the end is to be found. (Of course Aristotle could just say that the noble is the end that the virtuous person chooses and leave it at that. But he does leave it at that in the case of deliberation, which he fills out at length with an account of prudence. So if this were his strategy, some account would be needed for the difference between deliberation and wish.)

Aristotle does say that the end is grasped through virtue (1151a), so I suppose the doctrine of the mean is supposed to give us the end. That is: someone who has reached the mean will also correctly grasp the end. But how do we figure out what the mean is? Aristotle repeatedly tells us that we find the mean through correct reason, and correct reasoning is the virtue of prudence. But this raises a further problem. Since deliberation is about means rather than ends, we cannot deliberate at all without some end in view. And it seems that we cannot deliberate prudently without having grasped the noble. That makes it seem like no one can be prudent—and thus find the mean—without already possessing the correct wish. But if the correct wish is grasped through virtue, this is circular.

Now circularity is not a huge problem for Aristotle, I think. Or, rather, I think it is a problem, but he does not see it that way. For example, his account of praise and blame in Book III.5 uses a similarly circular account. The problem there is this: We shape our character through our actions, and so we become virtuous by choosing and performing virtuous actions. But we can only choose for the good, and our apparent good is dependent on our state (virtuous or not). So while our character is (partly) up to us, since we choose the actions that shape it, our ability to choose the right actions hangs on our character. Aristotle thinks this resolves the problem of blame, but of course Galen Strawson uses a variant of this very argument (though without reference to ends) for the impossibility of moral responsibility. The circularity implies that no one can be ultimately responsible for their actions, and thus that no one can deserve praise or blame except in a very tempered sense.

But if we accept Aristotle's answer to my earlier question as similarly circular, then I cannot see any reason to insist that virtues are a matter of quality rather than degree. That is: for Aristotle, one cannot be kind of prudent, or sort of brave; one either has the virtue or one doesn't. And it seems like it is in response to something like my concern that Aristotle, in VI.13, brings up the thesis of the unity of the virtues. He argues there not that virtues cannot be partial or admit of degrees, but rather than one cannot have one virtue without having the others. The point is roughly the same, however. If we take Aristotle's argument there to be convincing, however, it doesn't seem like he has proven that the virtues are unified. If anything, by analogy to Strawson's reversal of the III.5 argument, he has proven that virtue is impossible. Here is why:

Aristotle's tendency to circularity can be justified by his constant insistence that he is giving a general rather than a universal account, since ethics does not allow of the same level of precision as mathematics. If so, then it makes sense to allow that someone is blameworthy insofar as his control of his character depends on his character: while he cannot be sui generis (which Strawson argues is necessary for moral responsibility), he can be jointly responsible for the creation of his character. And as he adjusts his ends to his virtues (the products of his choices) and his choices to his ends through something like an internal process of reflective equilibrium, his level of responsibility (and his deservingness of praise and blame) increases. Well and good. But this sort of account cannot allow for absolute judgments. It makes no sense to speak of someone being absolutely blameworthy or not at all blameworthy when the condition for blame is itself a matter of degree, as it must be if the circularity account is to work. But then Aristotle's insistence that virtue is an all-or-nothing affair must be inconsistent with his entire project in the Ethics.

I'm sure there is a massive field of Aristotle scholarship on all these issues, and I'll be happy to get to it eventually. But I am wondering if others have thoughts or references they could share.

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Altruism and Self-Interest: An Example

Here's an example I used with my students to show how altruism could be included in self-interest. Feel free to borrow:

Let's say you're watching South Park. It's funny. But you enjoy it more if you're watching it with a friend. Of course, if your friend is incredibly bored and thinks the show is stupid, then you enjoy it less: even if you don't have to deal with your friend's complaining, you still feel stupid rolling on the floor laughing all by yourself in front of someone else. But of course you don't want your friend to be faking enjoyment; you want him to actually enjoy it, as much as possible, so that you can both enjoy watching the show. So your enjoyment is maximized only when your friend's enjoyment is maximized.

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Inside/Outside CFP

Martin Shuster of Johns Hopkins asked me to post this conference CFP. Notice Terry Pinkard's name on there:

Inside/Outside

an interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

hosted by the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University

April 2nd and 3rd, 2009

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

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

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

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

Deadline for all submissions is January 15th, 2009.

www.insideoutsideconference. com

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