Scientific Explanation and Moral Explanation*

Moral philosophers are, among other things, in the business of constructing moral theories. And moral theories are, among other things, supposed to explain moral phenomena. Consequently, one's views about the nature of moral explanation will influence the kinds of moral theories one is willing to countenance. Many moral philosophers are (explicitly or implicitly) committed to a deductive model of explanation. As I see it, this commitment lies at the heart of the current debate between moral particularists and moral generalists. In this paper I argue that we have good reasons to give up this commitment. In fact, I show that an examination of the literature on scientific explanation reveals that we are used to, and comfortable with, non‐deductive explanations in almost all areas of inquiry. As a result, I argue that we have reason to believe that moral explanations need not be grounded in exceptionless moral principles.     

Meaning and Truth in Habermas's Pragmatics

The article examines Habermas's formal-pragmatic theory of meaning from the point of view of his attempt to defend a postmetaphysical yet context-transcendent conception of validity. It considers his attempt to develop a pragmatic account of understanding utterances that emphasises the mediation of knowledge through socio-cultural practices while simultaneously stressing that understanding has a cognitive dimension that is inherently context-transcendent. It focuses on his recent "Janus-faced" conception of truth, looking more briefly at his purely epistemic conception of moral validity. It raises three objections: the first to his attempt to maintain a notion of "unconditionality" that has no otherworldly origins but is purely immanent to this world, the second to the alleged non-arbitrary status of his conception of truth, and the third to his rejection of metaphysical thinking. It concludes that the objections, if valid, have profound implications for Habermas's postmetaphysical enterprise and for his programme of formal pragmatics.     

Pragmatics in Analogical Mapping

Theories of analogical reasoning differ in the roles they ascribe to pragmatic factors as a source of constraints on analogical mappings. The multiconstraint theory as instantiated in the ACME model (Holyoak & Thagard, 1989a) claims that pragmatic constraints interact with structural and semantic constraints within the mapping stage itself, in addition to influencing pre-mapping and post-mapping stages. Participants in three experiments were asked to generate mappings between non-isomorphic analogs for which mappings for some elements were ambiguous on structural grounds. In all experiments, manipulations of participants’ processing goals influenced their preferred mappings. At the same time, goal-irrelevant information contributed to many-to-one mappings (Experiments 1 and 2) and to the resolution of mappings that were ambiguous on the basis of goal-relevant information alone (Experiment 3). The qualitative pattern of results was successfully simulated using the ACME model, implementing the impact of processing goals as an inhibitory process of selective attention.     

The Pragmatics of Slurs

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term (and its associations). Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile.     

Cerebral asymmetry: motoring on

I argue that the phylogenetic and neurobiological bases for cerebral asymmetry in humans are likely to be found in motor systems rather than in perceptual systems. Current genetic models of human laterality suggest that a `dextral' allele might be responsible for right-handedness and left-cerebral dominance for speech in the majority of humans. The linking of handedness with language lateralization might reflect the early evolution of language as predominantly a system of manual gestures, perhaps switching to a mainly vocal system only with the emergence of Homo sapiens. So-called `mirror neurons' in the prefrontal cortex of the monkey, which fire both when the animal makes a grasping response and when it sees the same response performed by others, might be part of a circuit that is the precursor to language circuits in the brain. This circuit appears to be bilateral in monkeys, but left-hemispheric in humans.     

Pragmatics of measuring recognition memory: applications to dementia and amnesia

This article has two purposes. The first is to describe four theoretical models of yes-no recognition memory and present their associated measures of discrimination and response bias. These models are then applied to a set of data from normal subjects to determine which pairs of discrimination and bias indices show independence between discrimination and bias. The following models demonstrated independence: a two-high-threshold model, a signal detection model with normal distributions using d' and C (rather than beta), and a signal detection model with logistic distributions and a bias measure analogous to C. C is defined as the distance of criterion from the intersection of the two underlying distributions. The second purpose is to use the indices from the acceptable models to characterize recognition memory deficits in dementia and amnesia. Young normal subjects, Alzheimer's disease patients, and parkinsonian dementia patients were tested with picture recognition tasks with repeated study-test trials. Huntington's disease patients, mixed etiology amnesics, and age-matched normals were tested by Butters, Wolfe, Martone, Granholm, and Cermak (1985) using the same paradigm with word stimuli. Demented and amnesic patients produced distinctly different patterns of abnormal memory performance. Both groups of demented patients showed poor discrimination and abnormally liberal response bias for words (Huntington's disease) and pictures (Alzheimer's disease and parkinsonian dementia), whereas the amnesic patients showed the worst discrimination but normal response bias for words. Although both signal detection theory and two-high-threshold discrimination parameters showed identical results, the bias measure from the two-high-threshold model was more sensitive to change than the bias measure (C) from signal detection theory. Three major points are emphasized. First, any index of recognition memory performance assumes an underlying model. Second, even acceptable models can lead to different conclusions about patterns of learning and forgetting. Third, efforts to characterize and ameliorate abnormal memory should address both discrimination and bias deficits.     

Appresentation and Simultaneity: Alfred Schutz on Communication between Phenomenology and Pragmatics

In his theory of communication Schutz exhibits a significant tension between two fundamental perspectives, phenomenology and pragmatism, and in the long run he fails to reconcile the contradictory implications these perspectives have with regard to his model of interaction.The main problem seems to be the notion of sense-constitution. Schutz develops two distinguishable accounts of constitution: an egological one and a model based on the phenomenon of direct interaction of empirical subjects. Two key concepts are related to these different modes of constitution: the model of appresentation with regard to language, symbols and signs, and the model of synchronisation as triangulation of streams of consciousness and outward action sequences. They are analyzed as significant for two different methods and two different theories of communication. I propose some reasons for Schutz's insistence on a phenomenological account of the ego and the constitution of sense, and offer a brief sketch of an alternative strategy that is implicit in Schutz's theory.     

Integrated Learning: Controlling Explanation

Similarity-based learning, which involves largely structural comparisons of instances, and explanation-based learning, a knowledge-intensive method for analyzing instances to build generalized schemata, are two major inductive learning techniques in use in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we propose a combination of the two methods—applying explanation-based techniques during the course of similiarity-based learning. For domains lacking detailed explanatory rules, this combination can achieve the power of explanation-based learning without some of the computational problems that can otherwise arise. We show how the ideas of predictability and interest can be particularly valuable in this context. We include an example of the computer program UNIMEM applying explanation to a generalization formed using similarity-based methods.     

Developmental Pragmatics in Normal and Abnormal Children

We propose a critical review of current theories of developmental pragmatics. The underlying assumption is that such a theory ought to account for both normal and abnormal development. From a clinical point of view, we are concerned with the effects of brain damage on the emergence of pragmatic competence. In particular, the paper deals with direct speech acts, indirect speech acts, irony, and deceit in children with head injury, closed head injury, hydrocephalus, focal brain damage, and autism. Since no single theory covers systematically the emergence of pragmatic capacity in normal children, it is not surprising that we have not found a systematic account of deficits in the communicative performance of brain injured children. In our view, the challenge for a pragmatic theory is the determination of the normal developmental pattern within which different pragmatic phenomena may find a precise role. Such a framework of normal behavior would then permit the systematic study of abnormal pragmatic development.     

Brain asymmetry and autonomic conditioning: Sensitization control

In the present experiment we report effects of cerebral asymmetry, or laterality, during classical conditioning to facial emotional stimuli. Twenty-five female subjects were presented with slides of a happy face in one visual half-field (VHF), and simultaneously a slide of an angry face in the other VHF, followed by shock as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS). To control for effects of sensitization, a new stimulus, never associated with the UCS, was introduced in the extinction phase. Dependent measures were phasic heart rate responses (HR) and skin conductance responses (SCR). The HR results showed a significant right hemisphere effect for the CS-UCS association, that was not attributable to UCS sensitization. No significant effects were found for the SCRs. The basic HR finding was a right hemisphere superiority for learning of a conditioned association.