2013 UNC-KCL Workshop in Philosophy:

Finding a Place for the Normative in a Natural World

May 3rd and 4th at UNC Chapel Hill

May 3rd

4:30pm – 6pm “Why Ought We Care About Epistemic Standards"

Kate Nolfi, UNC Chapel Hill

6pm – 7pm Dinner

7pm – 8:30pm “Naturalizing Direction of Fit”

Patrick Butlin, King’s College - London

May 4th

10:30am – 12pm “Reasons and Resentment”

Vida Yao, UNC Chapel Hill

12pm – 1:30pm Lunch

1:30pm – 3pm “Normativity & naturalism in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: the importance of learning to perceive virtuously”

Michael Coxhead, King’s College - London

3pm – 3:15pm Break

3:15pm – 4:45pm “Hume’s Naturalism Epistemologized”

James Arnold, King’s College - London

4:45pm – 5pm Break

5pm – 6:30pm Keynote Address: “Agency and Belief”

Maria Alvarez, King’s College - London

7pm – ? Dinner

All Workshop Sessions, Dinner on May 3th and Lunch on May 4th to be in Caldwell Hall, room 213; Dinner on May 4th will be at the home of Vida Yao (10 Mt Bolus Rd, Chapel Hill)


Abstracts

“Why Ought We Care About Epistemic Standards?"

Kate Nolfi, UNC Chapel Hill

Epistemic evaluations get a normative grip on us independently of what particular things we happen to value and what particular ends we happen to have. And in this regard, evaluation with respect to the epistemic norms that govern believers and their beliefs is quite different from evaluation with respect to the constitutive norms that govern certain other kinds of activities or roles. Regardless of what else we happen to care about, we ought to care about whether we live up to epistemic standards; whether we believe in ways that conform with epistemic norms. In this paper, I set out to explain why epistemic evaluations have this kind of non-hypothetical normative force. I argue that one sort of explanatory strategy that is most familiar from contemporary metaethics—the constitutivist strategy—holds promise in explaining why epistemic evaluations have the kind of force that they have and I explain how a seemingly potent a line of reasoning on offer in the current literature that purports to undermine the constitutivist strategy is question-begging. Putting the lessons learned from this failed line of objection to work, I go on to argue that a constitutivist explanation grounded on an account of the nature of belief according to which beliefs are subject to a constitutive and explanatorily fundamental truth-norm is unable to supply a satisfying explanation of the non-hypothetical force of epistemic norms. Finally, I develop and defend an alternative constitutivist explanation.

“Naturalizing Direction of Fit”

Patrick Butlin, King’s College - London

Mental states and other representations can have either the indicative direction of fit, meaning that their purpose is to say how the world is, or the imperative direction of fit, meaning that their purpose is to say what should be done or specify a result to be aimed for. It is also possible, in principle, that they could have both of these directions of fit, or some other purpose entirely. One way to analyse the directions of fit is normative (e.g. Zangwill 1998). Such an analysis might claim that indicatives are subject to norms concerning their production and revision, while imperatives generate norms concerning the behaviour of their consumers. But the connection between direction of fit and the normative can be taken the other way: if a naturalistic account of direction of fit is possible, this will be a significant contribution to naturalizing various normative domains. If belief is subject to epistemic norms, the direction of fit of belief is presumably part of the explanation for this. Similarly, the direction of fit of desire may partially explain why we are subject to norms of prudential rationality. This paper considers the prospects of one possible approach to naturalizing direction of fit.

Many existing accounts of direction of fit employ a sharp distinction between content and attitude. They assume that we can neutrally represent propositional contents, and then take a variety of attitudes to them – put the representations in belief or desire boxes, to use the common analogy. On this approach, accounts of direction of fit are separate from theories of representation. However, teleosemantic theories of representation (e.g. Millikan 1984) take a different approach. They take the most fundamental forms of representation to involve both content and attitude – suggesting that asserting p, for example, is more fundamental than neutrally representing the propositional content p. This idea is very closely tied to the basic teleosemantic claim, which is that both an entity’s status as a representation, and its representational content, are determined by its function or purpose. If this is right, and directions of fit are purposes that representations can have, then directions of fit are ways in which entities can represent.

Millikan’s theory of representation is therefore made up of two parts: one giving the conditions for indicative representation, and another giving the conditions for imperative representation. Roughly, indicatives have the function of mapping normal conditions for the function of their consumers, while imperatives have the function of mapping conditions that their consumers have the function of producing.[1] Many representations, Millikan urges, have both indicative and imperative content; for example, a beaver’s tail-splash indicates the presence of danger, which is a condition required for escape-behaviours to be adaptive, and there are systems in fellow beavers that have the function of producing escape behaviours when tail-splashes are detected, so they also have imperative content. But her theory also suggests criteria for pure indicative or imperative representations. Pure indicatives lack imperative content, so their consumers may respond in various ways, or not at all, when they consume these representations. Pure imperatives lack indicative content, so they may be produced under a variety of conditions, any of which will allow the consumers of these representations to fulfill their functions. As Lewis puts it, indicatives are used at the discretion of the consumer, and imperatives are generated at the discretion of the producer (Lewis 1969; also compare Sterelny 2003).

One key challenge for this account is to overcome the indeterminacy problem for teleosemantics. Teleosemanticists typically employ etiological theories of function, meaning that they take the functions of devices to be the ways that devices of the same kind behaved in the past, which explain their persisting in the present.[2] This introduces indeterminacy, because there is generally more than one way of describing such behaviours which is capable of fitting into a teleological explanation. We can explain why we have hearts either by saying that they pump the blood, or by saying that they making squeezing movements, depending on what background information we take for granted. This is a problem for naturalizing direction of fit, because the directions of fit we attribute to given states will be highly sensitive to how we identify the functions of their consumers. For example, if we take desires to be consumed by a system that assesses which desire is strongest, then produces the desired action, desires turn out to be pure indicatives, since their consumers should respond differently to them, depending on what other desires are occurrent at the time.[3] But if we take desires to be consumed by a system that produces the action that satisfies the strongest occurrent desire at the time, then they do have imperative content.

A closely related challenge concerns disjunctive contents. If a particular representation has the function of causing a certain kind of response in its consumer, it has imperative content. Now imagine that it may succeed in fulfilling its function – contributing to the success of the overall system – under any of three different conditions, A, B or C. How should we decide whether this representation lacks indicative content, or indicates the disjunctive condition A or B or C?

To solve these problems, we need to tweak the teleosemantic account of function. Functions should not be seen as behaviours described in any adequate teleological explanation, but as those described in the best teleological explanation of the relevant system. Price (1998) offers several principles for determining functions that help to fill out this claim, and these can be seen as instances of general principles for forming good explanations. For instance, a candidate function for the heart is pumping clot-free blood, since the action of the heart only contributes to organisms’ survival when the blood is free of deadly clots. But this proposal seems to attribute a function to the heart that it has no way of performing, since the heart has no mechanism for preventing clots. It also creates the appearance of superfluity in the context of wider functional explanations, since there are other mechanisms in the circulatory system with the function of preventing clots.

Finally, a naturalistic account of direction of fit will be satisfactory only if it can be applied to human mental states such as beliefs, desires and intentions, and this raises a further challenge for the present account. Perhaps unlike beaver tail-splashes, these states do not have obvious producers and consumers, and we cannot apply the account unless these are identified. The challenge is perhaps most acute in the case of beliefs, many of which appear to be produced and consumed by various systems for a wide variety of purposes. However, this variation is likely to yield the result that beliefs are, as we would expect, pure indicatives. In the case of desires, a substantial body of relevant empirical work is available to draw on (Balleine & O’Doherty 2010). But one aspect of this challenge that is of particular interest is the problem of relating claims about the functions of subpersonal states and systems to the personal level. Until these connections are brought out, it will be unclear how this approach to naturalizing direction of fit can found epistemic or prudential norms that seem to apply to whole persons.

“Reasons and Resentment”

Vida Yao, UNC Chapel Hill

Internalism about reasons is often taken to be a naturalistically respectable view of practical reasons, which avoids the metaphysical and epistemological difficulties that are often pinned to externalism about reasons. On this familiar understanding of the view, however, internalism comes with certain costs: it is unable to adequately accommodate the kinds of criticisms that we feel are warranted of those that Bernard Williams calls “hard cases” – people who lack any subjective motivation that could lead, through sound deliberation, to a conclusion to act on moral or ethical reasons. While externalists insist that such people nonetheless have such reasons that they are failing to act on; internalists refuse to accommodate this intuition, while reminding us that there are worse things to be called than “irrational”. This particular line of disagreement between internalists and externslists often seems either to reach a stalemate, or will be settled by whatever our best picture of practical rationality turns out to be.

However, there is still more to be said within this particular line of the debate. Derek Parfit, in his recent rejection of internalism, has tried to capture exactly what is important about retaining the idea that somebody such as the committed, internally-coherent wife-beater has a reason to stop what he is doing. While agreeing with internalists that it is not important, in and of itself, that such a person is criticizable for his irrationality, what is important is the relationship that this kind of criticism bears to the other evaluations that we can make of him. Specifically, Parfit’s worry is that, “These other criticisms become much weaker if we must admit that, on our view, these people have no reason to act differently.” (On what Matters, 457).

This observation, I think, is exactly right. Furthermore, it provides us with a way of understanding the criticism levelled at internalism that goes beyond competing intuitions about the importance or nature of rationality, and so provides us with a promising way of addressing this dispute. Those who defend internalism ought not stop at reminding their opponents about all of the things that we can say about hard cases. While this is an important task, it should be coupled with an acknowledgment and acceptance of precisely the relationship that Parfit has pointed out, between reasons and our reactions to one another. This is because once this observation is fully fleshed out, as I will argue, internalism about reasons will yield precisely the right results about how those reactions are sensitive to, and modified in light of, an agent’s internal reasons. And in light of this argument, the central problem with externalism is not that external reasons are spooky, or mysterious, or unacceptably extravagant (though they may also be all of those things). The central problem with externalism is that external reasons do not play the role, and should not play the role, that externalists take them to play in justifying and moderating our attitudes towards one another.

“Normativity & Naturalism in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: the Importance of Learning to Perceive Virtuously”

Michael Coxhead, King’s College – London

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics contains what is commonly understood to be a virtue ethic, in which he describes not only the normative content of the virtues but also how one becomes virtuous and why one should care about doing so. On Aristotle’s view, a life of action and activity of reason in accordance with the virtues will be a truly happy (eudaimôn) life. In this paper I focus on Aristotle’s account of moral education, taken to be a process of habituation through action. In particular, Aristotle appears to subscribe to a theory of “moral perception” that is cognitively complex, value-laden, and capable of development. Perception is thus both a natural capacity that can provide complex, evaluative information about an agent’s practical circumstance, and also a capacity that can be improved or worsened in accordance with a normative description of virtue and vice. This kind of value-laden perception thus provides its agent with a kind of “second nature” which effects how they see the world in terms of normative standards. I shall first propose that this inflationary phenomenology of perception is not only cogent but also vital to explaining both how desire relates to action and how ethical reasoning can be practically efficacious. From this standpoint I ask: what difference does it make to a normative system of ethics to have perception—a natural capacity—involved in it? Conversely, by being involved in the judgment of normative ethical matters how might perception itself be rendered normative and how might this effect the grounding of that normative ethic?