Naive Action Theory: First Replies

Roman has some of the same questions I have. I’ll leave (1) until Chapter 8, ‘Action and Time.’ I think I know the answer to (2), but then again Thompson’s larger points get lost on me if I’m not paying sustained concentration, which is often enough that, well, Thompson’s larger points get lost on me at times.

Roman’s question, as I understand it, is as follows, but broken up: a) sometimes we rationalize (explain) an action by reference to another action. ‘Why are you going to Chicago?’ Answer: ‘Because I’m traveling to Evanston.’ But other times we don’t. ‘Why are you eating that?’ Answer: ‘Because I’m hungry.’ Being hungry isn’t an action. Nor is it a wanting/desiring, but it is more easily explicable in those terms, eg., I want to sate my hunger and believe that eating this will so sate, and so I sate myself. b) What is the relation between the trip to Evanston and the trip to Chicago. Going to Chicago appears at the same time to be both dependent and independent on the trip to Evanston. On a trip to Evanston, it would make sense to tell a friend, I went to Chicago.

As for (a), I still have to wait and see. Thompson has yet to deliver, from what I’ve read, on the claim that “a sophisticated position [SAT] cannot be defended...and that the role played by wanting...really is taken up...by what we might call the progress of the deed itself” (90). I am intrigued by his suggestion, on page 92, that we might build up from NAT to an SAT much like Sellars’ Jones graduates from the Rylean world to mind-reading. This seems promising, and I’m looking forward to seeing if Thompson can deliver. That said, with respect to the Sellarsian parallel, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the difference between explanatory and conceptual priority as they figure in Sellars’ argumentative strategy: overt behaviors (among the Ryleans) have conceptual priority to nonexpressed, nonovert mental states in the sense that a) they can be described independently of mental talk, and b) they provide the model for mental states as theoretical posits. However, once the theory is online, as it were, mental episodes have an explanatory priority for behavior: behavior is explained as resulting from inner mental states. Maybe more to the point, Sellars believed that there really are mental states, but Thompson seems to be telling us that wantings/intendings are “really taken up...by what we might call the progress of the deed itself.” (I can't yet make sense of that.) So the analogy potentially breaks down here: for Sellars, thinkings are modelled on speech-acts, but inner states motivating actions can't be modeled on the actions themselves, and so I don't see how naive actions can play the explanatory role that overt speech acts play for Sellars. Also, Thompson claims, again much like the Ryleans, that we can conceive of a form of life that explains itself solely in a naive fashion. Like Roman, I’m a little skeptical of this, but withholding judgment. I think we have to withhold judgment because if Thompson fails to deliver on this claim, then really his whole project fails (it would turn out that he is just analyzing a peculiar sub-species of action rationalization rather than action itself).

Which leads to (b). Naive rationalization explains smaller phases of an action by placing them in mereological fashion in a larger whole action. If I’m reading him right, maybe we can say the following: going to Chicago is an intentional action but is not an independent act? I’m not sure. This at first confused me: suppose I am moving a stone from point A to point E (in order maybe to open the door to Ganon’s lair). This is an intentional action (I intend to open the door so that I can kill Ganon and save the princess). Thompson wants to say that moving the stone from A to C is alsointentional. That doesn’t comport with my folk understanding of ‘intend.’ Of course I have to go through point C to get the stone to point E, and of course, since I mean to move the stone to point E, in some sense I do mean to move it over point C, but I wouldn’t describe that action as ‘intentional’ because that description (“I should move the block to point C”) never passed through my mind. Ah ha! I am being too sophisticated, Thompson tells me. That was my problem. The notion that, for an action to count as intentional, the concept expressed by its intentional description must have passed through the mind of the agent is, he says, “a prejudice” (108). So, an action is intentional just in case it is explicable as being part of a larger action. I am lifting the fork. Why? Because I am eating. I intend to sate my hunger, but as Thompson is using the term, in so doing, I intend to lift my fork even though no such thought ‘lift the fork’ passes through my mind and the fork may not even ever serve as an object of attentional awareness. All the same, I do seem to remember him writing that each of the ‘organs’ of a whole action are independent--I”ll have to go back and check. If not, then I think this review is fair, and maybe even right.

But this then leads to (3) in Rom’s list. What is it that explains a single whole action? So far Thompson has said that explicability is accomplished by explaining sub-actions as being parts of larger actions, but he hasn’t really said what a whole action itself is. And my folk intuitions tell me that he’s helpfully explained how I can be said to have intentionally lifted the fork in feeding myself, but he hasn’t explained what it means to eat dinner as such. Wouldn’t NAT require explicating that action in terms of another--but which one? Why am I eating dinner? Just because! Or, because I’m hungry, where hungry isn’t something else that I’m doing. Remember: Thompson is claiming that NAT is independent, and I think he also means adequate, in the sense that I should be able, with NAT, to describe something like just eating dinner--but how, if eating dinner is not itself a part of some larger doing?

I imagine these are obvious questions, and that Thompson has answers to them, so I’ll be on the look out. Let me quickly just mention three ideas I like: 1) there is a hint that Thompson is saying that actions are meaningful insofar as they are part of and presuppose something like a life-world or ‘form of life’ (his phrase; i don’t know if he means it in a technical sense). Obviously my interest in phenomenology explains why it’s interesting to perhaps find Thompson striking upon an idea already quite developed by that school. 2) not unrelated to (1), I’m interested in his claim that actions are essentially temporally stretched. As I said in my past post, this I think is something that the historian implicitly assumes, but is not something I find central to the action theory I have read (maybe it’s more common than I’ve seen; i haven’t read gobs.). 3) Actions are causes of themselves. This is the closest Thompson gets in what I’ve read so far addressing Roman’s (3) above. He says, eg., that building a house is intentional just in case it is a cause of its own parts (temporal phases or organs), eg., laying pipe becomes intentional because it is explicable as part of the act of building a house. But then--in what he acknowledges is cavalier--since everything, including an action, just constituted by its parts, that actions are therefore causes of themselves. This is clever, but I’m waiting to see it filled in.

Question: Think you can explain what exactly is at stake in the 'minimum movible,' 'minimum sensible' and 'maximum insensible' discussion? Why can't it be the case that actions bottom out into non-action-parts? Was that even the point?

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A Brief Interjection on History and Sin

A brief worry here: Michael will have to be disappointed. Thompson's naïve action theory may seem to go a step in the direction of providing historical explanation, but ultimately it cannot do that. It remains to be seen whether this step is, in fact, a step, and moreover what the step would have to imply; i.e., whether we should take it. Michael is interested in an action theory that can explain historical actions: Caesar ended the Republic. He did so by crossing the Rubicon. Now, the question is whether Caesar's ending of the Republic was an action of Caesars's. One way to approach this is through standard issues in action individuation, playing around with the accordion effect, and so on: are the consequences of our actions parts of the action? (Or—on Goldman's view—is the bringing about of consequences itself a different action from the means, i.e., is crossing the Rubicon a different action from ending the Republic, even if it should turn out that Caesar did both by performing the same basic action?) Naïve action theory might help us make sense of what Caesar did in crossing the Rubicon by seeing that crossing as part of a larger action: ending the Republic. But does it help?

Here is a worry: Consider non-Augustinian accounts of sin. Aristotle had already noted that we are blameworthy only for actions of which we are the principle, and in such a way that we do not perform them through ignorance. In Augustine, there is an even further internalization: the will is a power to desire ends, and we sin insofar as the ends we desire are wrong in a specific sense. This internalization is continued and radicalized in Anselm and Abelard. It is a distinctive feature of this view that sin—that for which we are blameworthy, in fact simply that which counts as evildoing (since acting without inordinate desire—libido—simply doesn't count as evildoing; libido just is the mark of evildoing)—depends on the internal state of the agent who does it. Now consider a non-Augustinian view, such as that developed in the Jewish tradition by Bahya or Maimonides. On this view, good and evil are fixed not by our mental dispositions, but instead by the 513 commandments handed down by Moses. The Jewish view here is fully externalist: an action counts as sin if it violates a commandment, so that the agent's internal disposition is irrelevant. If you sin by accident, you must still (in the days of the Temple) make sacrifice, or (post-Temple) perform the other rules of repentance. Bahya, in fact, notes that it is extremely likely that all are sinners, because we begin to use our bodies long before we begin to use our reason, and it is highly likely that our bodies will sin before we have a chance to exercise rational control over our limbs. That is: whether or not one sins depends entirely on external features. In fact, one can continue to sin against one's will: if I spread false rumors about my neighbor, then I continue to sin as long as others continue to spread the rumor, even if I have long stopped and seen the error of my ways.

The non-Augustinian view of sin seems to have one thing common with historical explanation: actions are explained (and/or evaluated) by reference to criteria outside the agent. Caesar's motives are irrelevant to understanding what he did in crossing the Rubicon, just as the sinner's internal state is irrelevant to determining whether or not she has sinned. An action is not the exclusive property of the agent; instead, the action is explicable in terms that do not depend on any specifically agential powers or states, and the agent is then merely the one through whom this action was performed, or a particular on whom the action depends, though not a particular that plays a role in explaining the action (so redness might be attributed to a ball, but we can explain the redness without reference to the ball, although of course every occurrence of red will depend on a ball or, at least, some item that bears the color). For a theory of action to do what Michael wants it to do, it would need to have this form.

Thompson's theory does not have this form. As he stresses on p. 86n.3, and especially p. 93, the real reason for an action is a thought, or consideration on the part of the agent: the belief component of the belief-desire complex found in Davidson. Thompson stresses that his aim is not to abandon this complex, but only to replace the desire component with an action component. And, again, the considerations or beliefs are "reasons in the strict sense" (p. 96n. 14). Thompson's specific aim is to explain the dependence of action on thought, and specifically what sort of consideration makes the thought of the "right kind" (p. 94) to serve as a reason for action. If action A is to be explained by action B through its dependence on the agent's thought, or if action A is to be explained through the agent's possession of a virtue, then the dependence of the action on thought is crucial.

We may wonder whether we might not be better off dropping this requirement. Perhaps we can best explain historical actions by reference to wider actions that the agent clearly did not consider, just as we may make more sense of sin—perhaps as violation of taboo rather than as evildoing—if we think of it merely as the lack of conformity of an action with a norm that has no essential relation to an agent. But this takes us very far out of the domain of making sense of reasons for action, whether instrumental or moral ones. Historical explanation may require an action theory that has nothing to do with explaining actions by rationalizing them. But if so, then naïve action theory will not ground historical explanation. At best, it will provide one side of a platform on which two very different kinds of action explanation (internal and external) can enter into a relation with each other. But then we may wonder whether plenty of other, non-naïve, action theories may not do this just as well.

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Naive Action Theory

The following few posts will show a naive action theorist trying to make sense of naive action theory. Naive action theory is a concept developed and defended by Michael Thompson, for example, in his book Life and Action. Naive action theory (NAT) takes off from the following observation: as often as not, folk reasons for actions are just other actions. "Why are you riding your bicycle?" Reason: "I'm going to the store." 'Going to the store' is itself another action. NAT is contrasted with Sophisticated Action Theory (SAT)."Why are you riding your bike?" Reason: "I want/intend to go to the store." 'wanting to go the store' is a mental attitude or state. The sophisticated answer is the sort that the philosopher will usually give. There's more to say about both, obviously, but that's the gist.

The contention behind NAT is that an action can rationalize another action as well as any reason or intention.* I'm not sure that Thompson's right that the folk usually do rationalize action in this way, but since I count myself, when it comes to action theory (I have never written on it nor studied up much on it), among the naive folk, and his examples sound pretty normal to me, I'm willing to grant Thompson's claim. Besides, whether or not the folk do commonly rationalize behavior in this way, Thompson's more interesting contention is that SAT is somehow derivative of and explainable in terms of NAT, while the reverse is not the case; SAT somehow presupposes NAT. For some preliminary reasons I'm going to discuss in just a second, I find this account of action intriguing, and the point of this diablog betweem Roman and I (and anyone else who wants to join!) is to understand it better.

*NB: My wife is making cookies right now. I just asked her to explain why. Her answer: "to take them to Taneka's [a friend]." Score, Thompson!

Why am I interested in Thomopson's work?

I'm interested in Thompson's work for reasons that originally emerge in the philosophy of history. Historians are in the business of providing explanations of past events. But these events are usually actions, collective or individual. Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Why did the Roman Republic develop into an Empire? What were the effects of Caesar's assassination? Why did Brutus eventually ally with the optimates?

Two things: first, actions as explained by historians are often characterized in ways that do not fit easily into SAT, but do, I think, mesh well with NAT. Most strikingly, intentions or wantings are usually dispensable in the explanation of historical action. 'Caesar's crossing the Rubicon marked the end of the Roman Republic,' or 'By assassinating the Archduke, Gavrilo Princip started the First World War,' or 'By luring the French into war, Bismark caused the destruction of the Second French Empire,' or again 'By attacking the Soviet Union, Hitler ended any chance at Nazi victory.' Each of these cases describes an action--ending the Roman Republic, starting the First World War, destroying Napoleon III's imperial ambitions, ending any chance at a Nazi victory--for which intention is besides the point. Caesar ended the republic, Princip caused the first world war, Bismark caused the destruction of the Second Empire, and Hitler sealed his fate regardless of whether any of these agents intended to do these things or not (in fact, almost certainly none of these agents intended to do any of these things!).

Second: a continuing debate in the philosophy of historiography (the business of writing history) is over the explanatory power of narrative sentences. A narrative sentence tells a story. History--especially fun history, the sort of history the non-historian really likes reading--often comes in the form of narratives. But do stories really explain actions? Is narrative history explanatory history? If an explanation is supposed to lay out the causes of an event, or subsume an event under some general law, then stories aren't explanatory. For instance, telling the story of Caesar's return from Gaul and forcing a renewal of his consulship might tell the story of Caesar's crossing the Rubicon, but it doesn't explain the fall of the republic. To explain that, we might appeal instead to the unsustainable pressures nearly a century of expansion into the East Mediterranean, Spain and Gaul put on the informal institutional infrastructure of the roman constitution. That's not a story, but it explains the fall of republic in terms of causes subsumable perhaps under more general laws. However that may be, one reason narrative history might be actual history is if actions are themselves narratively or historically structured--if so, then historical qua narrative explanation is real explanation because real actions really are structured in just that way.

My hope in reading Thompson is to make some headway in clarifying both of these ideas in the philosophy of history, and hopefully, reflecting some light back the other way as well. That is to say, I want to better understand: 1) what individuates actions? If historical explanation reveals something about actions in general, then intentions may play less of a role in individuating actions than is often supposed; 2) all the same, intentions fit in somewhere into the picture, but where?; 3) historical explanations have to take time into account; past actions as examined by the historian are not just embedded in a temporal context, they have, to introduce a term, temporal distension. 'Caesar ended the Republic,' 'Napoleon civilized the German states,' 'Bismark defeated Austria': it seems right to me to say that these were single actions, involving lots of dependent sub-actions as dependent parts or phases stretched out and unified over time. It takes time to make sense of the logical structure of sentences describing these actions ( a point I might elaborate on later if relevant). These larger actions I also want to say are typical of actions as such. 'Graduating college,' 'throwing a dinner party,' 'riding a bicycle', are shorter and more mundane examples of actions that all the same exhibit temporal distension. It's my suspicion that all actions must have this essential feature, and I'm hoping that Thompson will allow me to say something more about this.

Ok, now, onto Roman's questions.......

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Thompson’s “Naïve Action Theory”: Some Questions

Michael Thompson's "Naïve Action Theory", an article reprinted as Part II of his Life and Action, hasn't gotten a lot of attention. This is unfortunate, because he bills his account as an alternative to standard accounts of action theory, and those who have paid attention to this work do tend to insist that it is novel. (With the exception of Elijah Millgram, who focuses less on what Thompson takes to be his break with accepted action theory and views it instead as continuous with Humean causal theories—in fact, Millgram tends to treat Thompson's account as a paradigm of what action theory today comes to.) But what I have not seen is an account of just what Thompson's theory entails and—more importantly—how it can function as an alternative to the sort of action theory descended from Davidson.

Thompson contrasts his account with what he calls the "sophisticated" view, namely the view that actions are primarily explicable in terms of their ends or the agent's desires or pro-attitudes in favor of those aims. Instead, Thompson argues that there is—for lack of a better word—a more primordial sort of action explanation, which he calls "naïve" action explanation. On the naïve view, an action is explained by reference to an action of which it is a part. To take Thompson's most intuitive example: "Why are you breaking that egg?" "Because I am making an omelet." Here a wider action—making an omelet—explains the narrower action of breaking the egg. (I will use the terms "wider" and "narrower" for convenience; a "narrower" action on this usage will always be a "smaller" action which is a part, or constituent, of the "wider" action.) Thus, we seem to have a radically new account of action: we explain actions not by reference to something outside agency, but by reference to other actions.

Thompson's motto , so to speak, is given by what I take to be his definition of intentional action: "X's doing A is an intentional action (proper) under that description just in case the agent can be said, truly, to have done something else because he or she was doing A." (112)

Now, here are my major questions. Some of them are answered by Thompson, though in ways that, frankly, don't make much sense to me. Some he seems to avoid addressing. But I take these to require clear answers if Thompson's alternative to action theory is to work as an alternative at all.

(1) Thompson argues that, on his view, not only can we dispense with reference to "wantings" in providing action explanations (90), but we should also alter our account of what wanting are: he urges "a complete break with the apparently uncontroversial idea that they are properly called states." (92) I am all for this; I doubt that there are such things as "mental states." But I am unclear on what Thompson's alternative is. And I take it as a basic point that his alternative—as well as his entire account overall—will, in order to be a workable theory, have to be separated from his attempt to derive the account from a grammatical examination of aspect, or "that the linguistic appearances ought to be saved." (90) One can derive whatever theory one wants from an examination of grammar; but for that theory to be interesting—at least to me—it needs to have something going for it other than that it explains or fits our ordinary grammatical usage. (At least until I see a convincing argument for the view that metaphysics corresponds perfectly to the way we speak about it.)

(2) It is true that we often rationalize actions by saying what action they are a part of. But we also rationalize actions by giving their goal. So I might say "I am going to Chicago because I am going to Evanston," or I might say "I'm going to Chicago to visit my friend." The first, I think, is fully plausible by Thompson's lights, especially given that I have to take a flight to Chicago as part of my overall trip to Evanston; thus, the overall trip from NY to Evanston, say, would include a trip from NY to Chicago as a part of the action. But the second case seems different. It doesn't appeal to wanting—at least not explicitly—but it also doesn't appeal to a wider action. My friend is in Chicago, presumably; and my trip to Chicago is not, I think, most naturally taken as part of the action of visiting my friend. Rather, visiting my friend is what I will do after I complete the action of going to Chicago; it is a separate action that occurs after the first one. Here is another one: "I am going to the hospital because my throat hurts." "My throat hurts" isn't an action at all, and so doesn't rationalize any narrower action. Both the Chicago and the Hospital examples are, I think, quite naturally explained by a Davidsonian account or, say, a Korsgaardian one. Davidson: I want to see my friend and I believe that going to Chicago is a way of doing so. I want my throat to stop hurting, and I believe going to the hospital is a way of preventing that. Korsgaard: I am going to Chicago for the sake of seeing my friend; I am going to the hospital for the sake of making my throat stop hurting (where a reason is a description of the action, e.g., "doing act A for the sake of goal G" such that giving the reason shows why the action as a whole appears to the agent to be a good thing to do). These explanations seem to me more natural, more naïve, than Thompson's would be in such cases. How is his account supposed to explain this? (This is important, since if Thompson is explicitly offering an alternative to the standard views, his alternative needs to give a compelling reason to buy rationalization by actions over rationalization by ends or wanting.)

(3) I am puzzled by the claim that an action just is something that rationalizes sub-actions or narrower actions. I can't wrap my mind around how that is an action theory at all, and this is my central concern. Thompson sets up his account as if he is giving an alternative to the current theories. But to be an alternative, it has to either explain all the same things that the standard theories explain, or it has to explain why those things are not in need of explanation. But there seem to be two things missing when we look at either the narrowest or the widest actions.

(A) What does happen at the narrowest level? I suppose eventually the actions get so small that nobody would bother asking for an explanation of them; this would suggest that there is no ontology of actions: actions are just whatever we need our theory to pick out, and we don't need our theory to pick out the tiniest units. So Thompson's claim that we can explain what happens at the lowest end of the spectrum through some theory of vagueness seems to be missing the mark altogether: he seems to think that he is giving an ontology of action; but his theory doesn't fit an ontology at all. (A related point is raised by Millram in his Hard Truths, where he argues that Thompson's account—like all action theory—is ultimately a pragmatic one; it explains actions by explaining what we normally need our language to explain, but it leaves out "atomic actions"—such as blinking, or reading a stop sign in one glance—which don't seem to have component parts at all, because these are not actions we normally need to explain. Though I suspect Thompson can reply to this criticism by asking whether blinking and reading at a glance really are intentional actions; if they are, there is more to them than just the "atomic" component.)

(B) What happens at the wider end of the spectrum? I am breaking eggs to make an omelet. But what if someone asks me why I am making an omelet? I can't explain that by reference to a wider action, and Thompson doesn't claim that we do—his claim isn't, after all, that all actions can be explained by wider actions; only that all actions can explain narrower actions. (One suggestion here might be that wider actions are ultimately explained by reference to an agent's life; I like this suggestion and think it is probably right, but I'd like to see Thompson work it out, if this is what he has in mind.) But this means that every action is either explained by reference to a wider action, or it is explained by reference to something else—something that isn't an action. And the something else once again seems to call for a more traditional kind of action explanation, whether Humean or Kantian. I am not making an omelet, after all, because I am engaged in an action of feeding myself (in delicious ways). Here the contest seems to be between a Davidsonian pro-attitude in favor of ending my tinges of hunger, or even a McDowellian "conception of how to live" ("Virtue and Reason" (68-69) in Mind, Value, & Reality). Again, perhaps Thompson is rejecting the Davidsonian in favor of the McDowellian view; but then this needs to be clearly stated, and the McDowellian position—which is hardly clear or naïve—is going to require a lot more clarification before it starts to make sense. This may be what Thompson is doing in Part 3; the question is why this is still a naïve action theory if, ultimately, action is not explained by action but by something further and more primitive.

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The Meaninglessness of Life: Camus vs. Nagel

In "The Absurd," Nagel argues that the sense of the absurd arises from two warring tendencies in us: on one hand, we take our lives, or at least the projects we undertake in our lives, seriously, and we cannot avoid doing so. On the other hand, we are also capable, upon reflecting, of undermining the reasons for any of our projects. Nothing we do can be justified from a point of view radically outside human interests; and yet we are capable of taking up such a perspective in reflection. Thus, absurdity is a condition we are condemned to by virtue of our reflective, yet engaged, nature. Nothing could make our lives less absurd. I want to consider whether Nagel's account here really is—as he says—superior to Camus's in diagnosing absurdity.

Here is Nagel's take on Camus:

Camus maintains in The Myth of Sisyphus that the absurd arises because the world fails to meet our demands for meaning. This suggests that the world might satisfy those demands if it were different. But now we can see that this is not the case. There does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise. Consequently, the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves.

Here, in turn, is what I take to be the most revealing bit from Camus on the topic:

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.

Nagel's argument seems to be that Camus is wrong to think that meaning in life is possible: Camus seems to suggest that life is absurd only because the world is itself not reasonable (or, better put, arational). I think Camus lends himself to such criticism. He does seem to suggest that the reason life is absurd is that we attempt to give meaning to a world that lacks it. So, for example, there is a difference between finding meaning in Hamlet and finding meaning in a random set of occurrences. The latter is what a paranoiac does. The former, on the other hand, involves—or can involve—finding something that is in fact there. There is meaning in Hamlet, and it is there because it was put there by somebody, perhaps Shakespeare. The paranoiac, on the other hand, is not actually finding meaning; he is, rather, projecting it. The random occurrences do not have meaning in themselves: they only seem to have meaning to the paranoiac because of the meaning with which he invests them. For Camus, our absurdity consists of this, that like the paranoiac we project meaning onto the world, always facing the threat that the world is in itself meaningless.

We can now see why Nagel's criticism of Camus appears to be justified: if God existed and created the world and, further, if God imbued the world with meaning, then our attempts to find meaning would not necessarily be futile. They would not necessarily be mere projections, since they could be acts of actually finding the meaning that God put there. This is the point Nagel criticizes when he notes that, for God to give meaning to our lives, God's purposes would themselves have to be understandable and meaningful to us. That is: we could find (rather than project) meaning in a God-created world only insofar as God's purposes could mean something to us. Thus the arguments we find in countless religious authors—like Anselm or Descartes—to the effect that God's purposes are not our purposes and we cannot expect to fully grasp them undermine the possibility of finding meaning. They merely assure us that there is meaning because God has put it there, but they leave us unable—at least in part—to grasp that meaning. But the assurance, without intellectual dishonesty, should not have the intended effect. For simply telling me that my life has meaning without telling me what that meaning is should not make it meaningful.

Nagel's point is two-fold. First, if there is a God, that fact could only give meaning to my life if I could understand what the meaning is. Second, even if I could understand it, I would need to furthermore see that it is meaningful. And if it is, then it must have some meaning-conferring features. And if we know what these features are, then we should be able to find meaning without God. This could be clearer—the basic idea, I take it, is that if God's existence is to justify my own, or to make it meaningful, then God's existence must be self-justifying and meaningful in itself, and it should be so in such a way that I would be unable to doubts its justification. But nothing can be self-justifying in this way, since we are capable of questioning every justification.

Now we can work out the criticism of Camus: Camus seems to suggest that life is absurd because there is no meaning in the world, and yet we inevitably attempt to find it. Since the meaning isn't there, we cannot find it; thus, all our efforts are mere projections. So if there were a God, and thus there were meaning in the world, then the attempt to find it would not be meaningless. Our lives would not be absurd, because the project of life—to find meaning in the world—would be no more absurd than the project of finding meaning in Hamlet. (It's interesting to note, in this connection, that deconstruction seems to involve making textual interpretation absurd: by rejecting the claim that the text has meaning to be found, and thus separate from whatever meaning the reader imbues it with, deconstruction makes all projects of interpretation absurd.) But Nagel rejects this possibility: if we can't find meaning in our lives, and we can't find it because there is nothing that could make them meaningful without itself requiring an external source of meaning, then God would make them no more meaningful than they are. Camus's account of the absurd, then, seems to fail: it assumes that finding meaning is possible after all.

But is this right? Camus is certainly not careful in his phrasing, I suppose mostly because he is not raising an abstract question about the possibility of meaning, but rather describing our situation as we find it, something perhaps lacking in Nagel. But there are two important bits of Camus's account I want to point to. First, in characterizing the absurd through his literary style, Camus spends a great deal of time on examples of something we thought to be meaningful turning out to be meaningless. Of course this is just his point: all projects that seem to be meaning-finding can be unmasked as meaning-projecting. But his examples are interesting: you may think you know a person, understand what they are about. And yet, one day, you realize that you didn't know them at all. You realize even that you didn't know yourself at all. Humans are rational, at least in some sense. So it should be possible to understand them, the way we can understand Hamlet. But Camus suggests that this is too hasty: we can understand something about people, some of their behavior, but always imperfectly, because at bottom nobody is fully rational, no behavior—and certainly no life filled with sequences of behavior—is fully meaningful. Perhaps the deconstructionist is right in part: Hamlet has some surface meaning, but something in the text underlies this meaning, and if we dig deep enough we will find something that resists interpretation along traditional lines. Thus we must project further meanings to make up the deficit. If nothing turns out to be fully meaningful, then it's unlikely that God could: God would perhaps ensure that the world has some meaning, but ultimately—like Anselm and Descartes—we would have to admit that a grasp of the meaning eventually evades us. We are stuck with faith, and faith is "philosophical suicide": it involves giving up on the project of finding meaning, cutting short the philosophical investigation, and thus abdicating the further imperatives of thought.

Second, we must keep in mind Camus's rejection of hope. On the one hand, he speaks of hope in everyday contexts: in thinking that my life will get better and will thus becoming meaningful, I am making a mistake. If my life isn't meaningful now, nothing else will make it so. Hope is similarly problematic in the wider context: hope for another world, for a God that gives us meaning, isn't going to help. If our lives don't already have meaning, nothing further will give it to them. And if they already have meaning, then hope is superfluous.

These two points bring Camus closer to Nagel. But I want to suggest that Camus's argument does Nagel one better. Nagel, after all, argues that meaninglessness depends on our being able to take an objective, external standpoint—not, perhaps, a fully objective standpoint, but at least one far enough removed from our interests that we can see that those interests are not themselves justified. And he defends his claim that we can take such a standpoint. This, I think, few have denied. The standard objection to Nagel is that he thinks this fact is significant. That is: I can take a standpoint radically removed from not only my interests but any interests I can imagine. And from there it will indeed seem not only that my interests are silly, but that there are no non-silly interests—there are, in other words, no interests I could potentially have that would make my life more meaningful. But what exactly is the legitimacy of this standpoint? Why, taking such a non-human standpoint, should we think that what it discloses tells us something about meaning in a human life? If there is objective value for humans, then pursuing that value seems to be meaningful for humans. That is, it isn't just that it seems to humans that pursuing it is meaningful, but that it should—to anyone who can make sense of what humans are and what is objectively valuable to them—seem meaningful. The standpoint Nagel alludes to doesn't show that there cannot be meaning in human life; it only shows that, whatever meaning there may be, we can always call it into question by taking a standpoint wildly inappropriate to the field of inquiry. Or, to rephrase: the question shouldn't be about whether human lives can be meaningful from any possible perspective; the question should be whether human lives can be meaningful such that even a perspective that does not take what matters to us as mattering should still recognize that it matters to us, and thus makes our lives meaningful.

In other words, we can always view our lives sub specie aeternitatis as Nagel points out, but it is an error to conclude from that perspective that meaning is impossible. Camus's account, however, does not require our taking a super-human perspective as our authority. It is from the human perspective that the absurd arises. It arises when, in our everyday lives, we recognize our meaning-finding as mere meaning-projecting, so that even when we examine our genuine meaning-finding, we discover that it rests—at bottom—on projection. This is why Camus does not spend his time, like Nagel, constructing an argument against finding meaning. He demonstrates, instead, the way meaning-finding projects fail in everyday life, undermining our sense of belonging to the world. So there is a trade-off. Nagel may be right that Camus has not constructed a clear argument showing that the absurd is inevitable. But Camus has described, without recourse to a super-human standpoint, the way our very attempts to seek meaning undermine themselves, so that any attempt at grasping meaning through hope will appear only as a way of eluding the absurd.

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Deciding What to Do and Deciding What One Has Reason to Do

R. Jay Wallace: "The task of practical deliberation, after all, is the task of determining what one has reason to do." A page later, however, he refers to "the deliberative standpoint we adopt when deciding what to do."

Now, would you say that these are equivalent?

The second claim, that in deliberation we are deciding what to do, seems true by definition: that's just what deliberation is. But the first claim, that deliberation involves determining what we have reason to do, strikes me as obviously false. For one thing, I don't think we ever deliberate about things we do not already take to be reasons; if I don't think I have a reason to fail a student, then I will not deliberate about whether to fail the student. (Though there is another possibility, which may be somewhat Davidsonian: if I have a desire to fail my student, I thereby have a reason to do so. This view isn't so popular any more, and I think correctly; the mere fact that I desire to do something does not give me a reason. Davidson may have held it to be a reason, but not a strong one; but Frankfurt, Bratman, Korsgaard, and others place stricter requirements on reasons, such that to be a reason a desire must be endorsed, involve or at least not contradict a volitional necessity, etc.)

But more to the point: (A) "Should I do X or Y?" is just not the same question as (B) "Do I have reason to do X or Y?" Nor is it the same as what I take to be a more reasonable interpretation of B: (C) "Do I have more reason to do X or Y?" Aside from the objection mentioned above, it seems clear that deliberation is not merely about what I have reason to do; in any case, if the aim of deliberation is to decide what to do, then certainly deliberation must involve choosing among reasons. Thus, I will drop B and stick to the question of whether A or C may differ. (Of course on some interpretation of "reason", B and C mean the same thing: if I decide that, all things considered, it would be better to spend my last three dollars on ice cream than on a subway ticket, then I have a reason to spend it on ice cream. But talking in this way makes it a bit difficult to explain what it is that might rationally incline me in favor of the other course of action if not a reason, or a consideration in favor of it.)

It seems to me that they may differ. I can answer A without considering C at all; on reflection, I might recognize that I decided to do X—through deliberation—without taking myself to have a reason to do X rather than Y. A lot of people—as diverse as Davidson and Korsgaard—dispute this claim. They think that if I decide, through deliberation, to do X, I must normally have more reason to do X (if I decide that I have more reason to do Y but then do X, the situation is no longer normal, but akratic). And I think there is a sense in which this is right: if we reconstruct my deliberation, we can describe me as deciding that I had more reason to do X, and that explains why I did X; or we describe me as having more reason to do Y, and this explains why doing X was akratic. But the fact that I can describe a situation in reconstruction in a certain way does not mean that that is what actually goes on in the situation; the description is a machinery I bring in to make sense of what I did.

So it seems like "deciding what one has (more) reason to do" and "deciding what to do" come apart: we may settle the questions in isolation from each other; neither question necessarily implies an answer to the other. Moreover, only the latter seems to be the question normally at issue in practical deliberation. It may well be that in some cases of practical deliberation (call it rationalistic deliberation) we do ask "what we have reason to do" or "what we have most reason to do." But this is a very different kind of deliberation: it is, for one, deliberation that does not resolve the question of what to do without some further process, one that either involves further deliberation ("should I do what I have most reason to do?") or a choice ("I will do what I have most reason to do")—a point Wallace discusses extensively in "Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason." At the same time, it is possible to redescribe standard deliberation in terms of "deciding what one has (more) reason to do." But that I can describe my actual deliberation in terms of a rationalistic model of deliberation does not show that my actual deliberation just is rationalistic deliberation, any more than describing relations between bodies in terms of gravity need imply that there is indeed a mysterious sui generis, mathematically constituted force governing their respective motions.

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Regan on Animal Rights

This has been bothering me for years. Tom Regan's "Case for Animal Rights," as far as I can tell, comes to the following:

If animals do not have rights, then harming them is not doing a wrong to them. But harming animals is doing a wrong to them. Therefore, animals do have rights.

Can anybody tell me which logical fallacy Regan is committing?

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Oops.

I don't know if this belongs on Philosophers Anonymous, the Philosophy Smoker, or (alternatively) the recent Women in Philosophy blog, but since nobody's picked it up I'll just have to throw it out there as a warning to maybe have a native speaker proofread little things like job postings. Two consecutive lines from a German job post (they seem to use these in all their postings):

We welcome applications from severely handicapped people. We particularly welcome applications from women.

Uhm. Oops?

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What Should We Learn From Arguments for Atheism?

In his recent contribution to NYT's "The Stone," Gary Gutting wrote a somewhat bland column on philosophy of religion. Perhaps bland isn't the right word: I am guessing plenty of non-philosophers may have appreciated it. It is only uninformative to someone who has taught philosophy of religion and may thus be puzzled by just what Gutting is recommending (actually, I read it with great interest up until the last few paragraphs, and then felt a bit let down). While his argument—that reason has a place in making sense of faith—is appreciated, one may have liked to see a stronger defense of that point. His claim here is mainly that reason and philosophy are needed in helping believers to justify their own particular religious narrative against other traditions. This is a legitimate point, but I think far stronger defenses for the place of reason in religion can be found in classic sources like Augustine, Anselm, Averroes ("the Law has rendered obligatory the study of beings by the intellect"), Maimonides, and Aquinas, among others. While Gutting is surely right that students—especially those already strongly committed to a particular faith tradition—need a hook to help them see the value of philosophy for faith, I wonder whether such a hook is something that needs to be given to them up front, or whether it is not best to help them uncover it through a study of the texts themselves.

In any case, here I want to take a look at Gutting follow-up article, where he attempts to defend his claim that defenses of atheism by Dawkins (and others) are "entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments." Two points in particular interest me; while I am no fan of the so-called new atheists, I find the arguments Dawkins uses persuasive. Dawkins is not, of course, the originator of these arguments; they are ones many atheists immediately and naturally appeal to, and I've found them fairly compelling since long before I had even heard of Dawkins. They've been around for a while, and I am not likely to say anything new about them here. My aim is only to look at the appeal of the arguments (and not at Dawkins's formulation or use of them), take a glance at Gutting's responses to them, and suggest that he is far more dismissive of them than he should be: they say something important about the relation between theism and atheism and, also, about the relation between reason and faith, that both theists and atheists too often overlook. The two arguments are (1) the complexity argument and (2) the "no-arguments argument." Let me take them up in turn.

(1) The basic idea behind the complexity argument goes something like this: The world is complex. If God is to serve as an explanation of the world—as its creator—then God must be, if anything, even more complex than the world. But if so, then an appeal to God helps us explain the world's complexity only by means of inserting an even more complex explanandum—God—and thus fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of the initial perplexity. Gutting's response is that the argument begs the question by postulating that God is complex and material, or at least functions in a way similar to creatures. But, as Gutting correctly notes, there is a long history in the philosophy of religion of attempting to explain how a simple God can create a complex world, of trying to make sense of God's simplicity, and so on, and by failing to address these issues, Dawkins fails to make his case. This may be right as far as it goes, but a deeper problem lurks here. The conclusion that God must be even more complex than the world and thus fails to provide an explanation of the world's complexity is only one direction we could go here. What happens, from the atheist perspective, if we claim that God is simple, immaterial, and so on? Well, from the atheist perspective, this takes us nowhere: for now we have gone from trying to explain natural phenomena to trying to explain a supernatural phenomenon. But the argument seems to depend on a theist premise: that (a simple and immaterial) God can explain the complexity of the natural world. If you've granted this premise, you are already at least half-way to being a theist. But most atheists would simply reject it: they would respond that it makes no sense to try to explain natural phenomena by means of an appeal to supernatural ones. So the atheist response here could be that the theist argument doesn't even get off the ground unless one has already accepted the theist perspective, or at least something like it. So what we have here is not a genuine argument, but an incommensurability of perspectives: on one perspective, it makes sense to think of God as providing a feasible explanation of the world's complexity; on the other perspective, it does not. Whether or not one then moves on to defend some version of such an explanation, then, depends on whether or not one is already a theist. But then we run into a problem: the world's complexity can function as support for the existence of God only for someone who is already disposed to believe in God. There is no argument genuinely addressed to the atheist.

(2) The no-arguments argument is one I have always found appealing, and I want to quote at some length from Gutting's summary of and response to it:

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins' arguments against theism are faulty, can't he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God's existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God's existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell's example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God's existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable atheism [sic].

I haven't heard Russell's orbiting teapot suggestion before, but have been using a similar analogy for some time, and Gutting's response once again strikes me as the sort of response that could make sense only to a theist. The comparison he gives is with a physical object, and surely we know what it means to have evidence of a certain kind of physical object. But the difference between God and physical objects seems to vitiate the comparison: what would it mean to have evidence suggesting that God exists? In the case of a physical object, we might have eyewitness testimony ("several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot") and data ("showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object"). But God is not physical, and we haven't got a clue as to what could count as analogous evidence of his existence. Gutting seems to disagree: "sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being" and "competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God's existence" are his analogues. But are these analogues? For one, I recognize that there are people, even sensible people, who claim to have had direct awareness of a divine being. But I don't have a clue what that could mean. This is, after all, an appeal to some kind of experience, and it falls into some well-known standard traps: How could these people know that their experience is an experience of a divine being? I've had all sorts of experiences that I've interpreted in various ways; perhaps their experiences are like some of these, but they interpret them differently. And surely "competent philosophers" endorsing arguments are not like "competent scientists" endorsing an interpretation of data. For one thing, although scientists might disagree about especially vague data, provided there is more data to be gathered, the scientific community should be able to come to a consensus. Non-scientists, ultimately, must rely on expert testimony (either that or become experts themselves). But in the domain of philosophy, we philosophers are the experts and can evaluate for ourselves whether or not the arguments are worth endorsing—after all, if an argument genuinely makes no sense to me and I can correctly use all the terms that make it up, I am unlikely to accept "X is a sensible philosopher and X finds this a plausible argument" as convincing; instead, I am likely to simply be puzzled by why X would find this plausible, or even to doubt whether X is sensible across the board. In fact, if expert consensus is the issue, surely Gutting is on the wrong side of this one: a recent survey of philosophers shows 72.8% of philosophers are atheists compared to only 14.6% theists, surely a fairly decisive consensus! (I am not, of course, claiming that philosophical debates can be resolved by appeal to majority views; my claim is only that Gutting's response to the no-arguments argument rests on a problematic analogy.)

So what, then, should we conclude from this? In the case of (1), I suggested that whether or not one finds the complexity argument decisive depends on whether or not one already has theistic leanings. The same seems to be the case in the no-arguments argument. The argument rests not (I think) on the claim that arguments for God's existence are inconclusive, but rather on the claim that the "evidence" in favor of theism only counts as evidence from the perspective of a theist. It is not that an atheist will not find the suggested "evidence" convincing; rather, the atheist will not recognize it as evidence. This is why debates about whether or not God exists tend to be massively unproductive: the theist will produce arguments; the atheist will accept them as arguments and respond to them as such. But both are speaking past each other: the atheist will not recognize the force of the arguments, that is, he will recognize them as arguments only because of the context in which they are presented. The evidence they adduce will not strike him as evidence: it will not be something that appears to him rationally sound, and he will—in puzzlement—attempt to figure out why someone could find this rationally sound. Meanwhile, the theist will take the atheist's rejection of his evidence as stubbornness, as if the atheist is intentionally failing to recognize good (or at least plausible) arguments as such. But I propose that the problem is more simple than that: theists take as conclusive, or at least strongly suggestive, propositions that to atheists are already loaded. To grant even the plausibility of either the claim that natural phenomena can have supernatural explanations, or that there are people who really do have experiences of the divine is already to go half-way toward abandoning atheism; but there is no argument available to convince atheists to take that step.

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Reason Says What?

One problem raised by Euthyphro is, of course, the question of why, if "good" is determinable independently of the gods, we would need the gods to tell us anything. If moral laws are rational, then we should be able to figure them out by using our reason; so why do we need divine revelation? Saadia Gaon, the first major systematic Jewish philosopher (post-Philo, at least), suggests that reason just isn't precise enough; it tells us what things are right and wrong, but doesn't give us the details regarding how to act rightly. That's where revelation comes in. Here is a particularly interesting example:

Whereas reason regards fornication as reprehensible, it does not define how a woman is to be acquired by a man in order to be considered as belonging to him. [It does not state, for example,] whether that is to be effected by means of a word only, or by means of money only, or with her consent and the consent of her parents only, or by the testimony of two or ten witnesses, or by having all the inhabitants of the town bear witness thereunto, or by marking her with a sign or branding her.

So one of the options is "her consent" while another option is "branding her." Apparently, reason alone doesn't tell us whether women are human beings or cattle. I find this a bit disturbing; if reason can't figure that out, I'm not sure about reason's prospects for anything else!

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