Rational requirements and ‘rational’ akrasia

Can akrasia be rational? Can it be rational to resist the motivational force of your own practical judgment? While I do not believe that akrasia can be rational, I think there is something revealingly right in recent arguments for the proposition. I aim to defend that insight in a way that does not entail that akrasia can be rational but more fundamentally addresses the normative structure of rational requirements. The fundamental issue lies in the relationship between two conceptions of rationality. Previous treatments of ‘rational’ akrasia have tended to regard rationality as a responsiveness to reasons. Previous treatments of rational requirements have tended to regard rationality as an attitudinal coherence. I’ll reformulate the question of rational akrasia within a framework that construes rationality as coherence. And I’ll reformulate the question of rational coherence to admit the possibility of reasoning as the apparently rational akratic does—from failure to follow through on a judgment to abandonment of that judgment. I’ll argue that rational requirements codify an agential coherence that you negotiate through a dynamic of self-trust and self-mistrust. It is not reasoning to abandon your judgment through forgetfulness, confusion or perverse self-rebellion. But it can be reasoning to abandon your judgment through reasonable self-mistrust. The difference lies in how self-mistrust can manifest a sensitivity to the norm of rational coherence that gives normative force to rational requirements. The core insight of those who defend the possibility of ‘rational’ akrasia lies in their emphasis on the rational force of self-mistrust.     

Veritism and the normativity of logic

The idea that logic is in some sense normative for thought and reasoning is a familiar one. Some of the most prominent figures in the history of philosophy including Kant and Frege have been among its defenders. The most natural way of spelling out this idea is to formulate wide‐scope deductive requirements on belief which rule out certain states as irrational. But what can account for the truth of such deductive requirements of rationality? By far, the most prominent responses draw in one way or another on the idea that belief aims at the truth. In this paper, I consider two ways of making this line of thought more precise and I argue that they both fail. In particular, I examine a recent attempt by Epistemic Utility Theory to give a veritist account of deductive coherence requirements. I argue that despite its proponents’ best efforts, Epistemic Utility Theory cannot vindicate such requirements.     

Photography as unconcealment: revisiting the idea of photographic transparency

What distinguishes photography from other visual mediums? This deceptively simple but fundamental question has been at the centre of both past and current debates on the aesthetics of photography for quite some time. In this article, I will first address the premise that this question is intrinsically ontological and unfolded in pioneering debates as a sequence of implications about photographic indexicality. I will then argue that the ontological implications of photographic indexicality have been largely overlooked in subsequent research due to scholars’ concerns with how photography appears to us rather than what photography is in itself. To this end, I will specifically examine Kendall Walton's highly contested transparency thesis and some of its rebuttals, which have exerted a sprawling influence on debates on the aesthetics of photography. I will also argue that, having been exceedingly implicit in his account, what appears as indexicality to Walton and the implications thereof with respect to the transparency argument has operated on a phenomenological level; thus, the thesis itself has failed in instances in which the problem of representation and the very existence of the medium come into play. Finally, I will suggest that indexicality can be regarded as a distinctive feature of photography only when it is considered a predicate of transparency as an interstice of ‘unconcealment’ in the Heideggerian sense that would call into question the very existence of the representation and the photographic medium.     

How Doxastic Justification Helps Us Solve the Puzzle of Misleading Higher‐Order Evidence

Certain plausible evidential requirements and coherence requirements on rationality seem to yield dilemmas of rationality (in a specific, objectionable sense) when put together with the possibility of misleading higher‐order evidence. Epistemologists have often taken such dilemmas to be evidence that we're working with some false principle. In what follows I show how one can jointly endorse an evidential requirement, a coherence requirement, and the possibility of misleading higher‐order evidence without running afoul of dilemmas of rationality. The trick lies in observing the difference between attitudes it is rational to hold (= propositional justification) and rationally holding those attitudes (= doxastic justification).     

The Conflict of Evidence and Coherence

For many epistemologists, and for many philosophers more broadly, it is axiomatic that rationality requires you to take the doxastic attitudes that your evidence supports. Yet there is also another current in our talk about rationality. On this usage, rationality is a matter of the right kind of coherence between one's mental attitudes. Surprisingly little work in epistemology is explicitly devoted to answering the question of how these two currents of talk are related. But many implicitly assume that evidence‐responsiveness guarantees coherence, so that the rational impermissibility of incoherence will just fall out of the putative requirement to take the attitudes that one's evidence supports, and so that coherence requirements do not need to be theorized in their own right, apart from evidential reasons. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake, since coherence and evidence‐responsiveness can in fact come into conflict. More specifically, I argue that in cases of misleading higher‐order evidence, there can be a conflict between believing what one's evidence supports and satisfying a requirement that I call “inter‐level coherence”. This illustrates why coherence requirements and evidential reasons must be separated and theorized separately.     

Wide and narrow scope

In this paper I present an original and relatively conciliatory solution to one of the central contemporary debates in the theory of rationality, the debate about the proper formulation of rational requirements. I begin by offering my own version of the “symmetry problem” for wide scope rational requirements, and I show how this problem necessitates the introduction of a normative concept other than the traditional notions of reason and requirement. I then sketch a theory of rational commitment, showing how this notion solves the symmetry problem as I’ve presented it. I also show that the concept of rational commitment is one we already appeal to in common sense discourse, and that it is necessary for vindicating comparative judgments of rationality.     

What is at Stake in Debates among Normative Realists?

One class of central debates between normative realists appears to concern whether we should be naturalists or reductionists about the normative. However, metaethical discussion of naturalism and reduction is often inconsistent, murky, or uninformative. This can make it hard to see why commitments relative to these metaphysical categories should matter to normative realists. This paper aims to clarify the nature of these categories, and their significance in debates between normative realists. I develop and defend what I call the joint‐carving taxonomy, which builds on David Lewis’ notion of elite properties. I argue that this taxonomy is clear and metaphysically interesting, and answers to distinctive taxonomic interests of normative realists. I also suggest that it has important implications for the project of adjudicating debates among normative realists.     

Deliberative coherence

Choosing the right plan is often choosing the more coherent plan: but what is coherence? We argue that coherence-directed practical inference ought to be represented computationally. To that end, we advance a theory of deliberative coherence, and describe its implementation in a program modelled on Thagard's ECHO. We explain how the theory can be tested and extended, and consider its bearing on instrumentalist accounts of practical rationality.     

Coherence as an ideal of rationality

Probabilistic coherence is not an absolute requirement of rationality; nevertheless, it is an ideal of rationality with substantive normative import. An idealized rational agent who avoided making implicit logical errors in forming his preferences would be coherent. In response to the challenge, recently made by epistemologists such as Foley and Plantinga, that appeals to ideal rationality render probabilism either irrelevant or implausible, I argue that idealized requirements can be normatively relevant even when the ideals are unattainable, so long as they define a structure that links imperfect and perfect rationality in a way that enables us to make sense of the notion of better approximations to the ideal. I then analyze the notion of approximation to the ideal of coherence by developing a generalized theory of belief functions that allows for incoherence, and showing how such belief functions can be ordered with regard to greater or lesser coherence.Many people influenced the present version of this essay. Ban van Frassen, Richard Jeffrey, David Lewis, Mike Thau, and Alan Hájek provided extensive and invaluable written comments on the entire essay. Mark van Roojen provided helpful comments on Sections 3 and 4. Mike Than and John Barker provided essential aid when I was formulating the proofs in section 6. Finally, I am grateful for valuable discussion of the essay with Ned Hall, Fiona Cowie, Jim Woodward, David Hilbert, and Frank Arntzenius.     

Philosophy for Children and the Reconstruction of Philosophy

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now – as that rationality undergoes its crisis – makes of them, like women and other “natives,” privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative.     

SOCIOLOGISM IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE*

In a nutshell, the present essay claims this: First, the classical problem of knowledge has recently shifted from, How do I know? to, How do we know?–from psychology to sociology. As a phenomenological matter this is a great improvement, as a solution to the problem of rationality it is erroneous and immoral. The problem, (Why) should I act, believe, etc., this or that? is answered: You should do so on the authority of your reason. But change the problem of rationality in accord with the change in the problem of knowledge, and ask, (Why) should we–rather than I–act or believe as we do? and the answer is clear: We should act and believe as we do, because our society is as it is, and should be as it is. This is clearly the same as, we should because we should. Not very enlightening. Sociologism appears as the authoritarian solution to the problem of rationality in works of Polanyi and Kuhn; a variant of it appears as a liberal theory in the studies of Popper and his former students who, however, do not offer any positive theory of what to believe or do; rather, they offer a negative theory of what to reject. They view this as a better solution to the problem of rationality, if not even a better formulation of it (not what and why should I/we etc., but what and why should I/we not etc.).     

Is Personal Identity Evaluative?

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum subscribes to the view that our identity is an evaluative question determined by our common, deeply held beliefs about what is worthwhile in human life. In so doing, she asserts that for an account of ethics to have “philosophical power” it needs to be grounded in an account of human nature that is both evaluative and internal.

I focus on Nussbaum’s claim that personal identity has to include the necessary features of practical rationality and sociability. Although Nussbaum puts forward self-validating arguments to prove that we cannot - on pain of pragmatic inconsistency - dispute that practical rationality and sociability are necessary features of human life, it is my claim that her account is flawed. The nature of the relationship between ethics and human nature is the broader context to such debates. This paper raises questions regarding on the one hand, whether it is possible to found ethics in human nature and, on the other, what we are to make of accounts that turn on the assumption that identity is ethical, not metaphysical.     

Lakatosian Rational Reconstruction Updated

I argue in this article that an aspect of Imre Lakatos’s philosophy has been largely ignored in previous literature. The key feature of Lakatos’s philosophy of the historiography of science is its non-representationalism, which enables comparisons of alternative ‘historiographic research programmes’ without implying that the interpretations of history re-present or mirror the past. I discuss some problems of this interpretation and show specifically that Lakatos’s philosophy does not distort the history of science despite its normative ambitions. The last section is devoted to updating Lakatos’s programme to answer the needs of contemporary history and philosophy of science. The standard of rationality used in comparative assessments should be understood as a tool for measuring the coherence of an account of history with regard to the ‘actual history’. This standard takes two forms: framework-dependent and framework-independent rationality. The latter is decisive in comparative assessments.     

Place and Displacement: Towards a Distopological Approach

Most recently, debates on decolonization, transformation, and Africanization raise, again, critical questions about the continuous dominance of the Western practice of philosophy in an African place. Such debates bear particular reference to colonization; however, they are relevant to any place where displacement is an issue and transformation demanded. Yet, the concept of displacement receives surprisingly little attention in these debates or in literature on place. I argue that place and displacement are inherently related, and explore some implications of this relation with regard to the practice of philosophy. My contention is that while displacement is an issue that raises specific challenges to the practice of Western philosophy in an African context, it is in fact a defining feature of philosophy as such in search of its place in the world. In conclusion, I propose what I call a distopological approach towards a philosophical practice that takes seriously its place and inherent relation to displacement.     

Having reasons and the factoring account

It’s natural to say that when it’s rational for me to φ, I have reasons to φ. That is, there are reasons for φ-ing, and moreover, I have some of them. Mark Schroeder calls this view The Factoring Account of the having reasons relation. He thinks The Factoring Account is false. In this paper, I defend The Factoring Account. Not only do I provide intuitive support for the view, but I also defend it against Schroeder’s criticisms. Moreover, I show that it helps us understand the requirements of substantive rationality, or what we are rationally required to do when responding to reasons.     

Deliberative epistemology: Towards an ubuntu-based epistemology that accounts for a priori knowledge and objective truth

The field of epistemology is concerned with the nature, generation and justification of knowledge as well as the rationality of belief; addressing what makes beliefs justified, what it means to say that one knows something and how one knows it. It has been characterised by many debates such as those between rationalism and empiricism or those between absolute truth and relativism. In light of the often bipolar framing of such epistemic debates, the scholarship on ubuntu contains insights that help advance the idea of a “deliberative” epistemology, which is well positioned to resolve many such tensions. With this idea, which speaks to like-minded approaches that are couched within frameworks such as conversational philosophy and complementary reflection, I add the dimension of discourse (i.e. how we think, speak and therefore do) and show that by applying an alternative discursive lens, an ubuntu-inspired epistemology need not only account for experience and subjectivity, as typically presumed, but can also embrace a priori knowledge and objective truth.     

Autonomy and Common Good: Interpreting Rousseau’s General Will

Rousseau’s project in his Social Contract was to construct a conception of human subjectivity and political institutions that would transcend what he saw to be the limits of liberal political theory of his time. I take this as a starting point to put forward an interpretation of his theory of the general will as a kind of social cognition that is able to preserve individual autonomy and freedom alongside concerns with the collective welfare of the community. But whereas many have seen Rousseau’s ideas as a prelude to communitarianism or authoritarianism, we should instead see his project as articulating an alternative model of moral-cognitivist reasoning. In order to provide a framework for this interpretation, I propose reading his conception of the general will through the theory of collective intentionality and social ontology. I end with a consideration of how this interpretation of the general will can provide a more satisfying understanding of political and practical rationality contemporary debates over republicanism and liberalism.     

The locality and globality of instrumental rationality: the normative significance of preference reversals

When we ask a decision maker to express her preferences, it is typically assumed that we are eliciting a pre-existing set of preferences. However, empirical research has suggested that our preferences are often constructed on the fly for the decision problem at hand. This paper explores the ramifications of this empirical research for our understanding of instrumental rationality. First, I argue that these results pose serious challenges for the traditional decision-theoretic view of instrumental rationality, which demands global coherence amongst all of one’s beliefs and desires. To address these challenges, I first develop a minimal notion of instrumental rationality that issues in localized, goal-relative demands of coherence. This minimal conception of instrumental rationality is then used to offer a more sophisticated account of the global aspects of instrumental rationality. The resulting view abandons all-or-nothing assessments of rationality and allows us to evaluate decision makers as being rational to varying degrees. My aim is to propose a theory that is both psychologically and normatively plausible.     

Husserl’s Conception of Experiential Justification: What It Is and Why It Matters

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first is an interpretative one as I wish to provide a detailed account of Husserl’s conception of experiential justification. Here Ideas I and Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07 will be my main resources. My second aim is to demonstrate the currency and relevance of Husserl’s conception. This means two things: Firstly, I will show that in current debates in analytic epistemology there is a movement sharing with Husserl the basic idea that certain experiences gain their justificatory force simply from their distinctive phenomenal character. Secondly, I shall reveal the benefits of Husserl’s specific version of this view. Thus, one of my aims is to show that debates in current analytic epistemology could profit from adopting certain Husserlian elements. More precisely, I will defend Husserl’s claim that perceptual experiences are justifiers due to their self-giving phenomenal character as opposed to the currently popular view that it is the phenomenology of pushiness that makes them justifiers. To put it differently, what matters is what is originally given within experience and not how you feel about what is given.     

Instrumentally Rational Myopic Planning

Abstract

I challenge the view that, in cases where time for deliberation is not an issue, instrumental rationality precludes myopic planning. I show where there is room for instrumentally rational myopic planning, and then argue that such planning is possible not only in theory, it is something human beings can and do engage in. The possibility of such planning has, however, been disregarded, and this disregard has skewed related debates concerning instrumental rationality.