Propositions about Reasons John Skorupski
1. Cognitivism and Realism In the last few decades controversy in epistemology and meta-ethics about the status of normative claims has taken a distinctive shape. On the one side have been realists, naturalistic and non-naturalistic, on the other have been noncognitivists. Coming in from the side have been error theorists, whose very presence suggests that the issue is of first-order importance, since—if they are right—whole classes of normative claims could not in principle be warranted. Some think this whole debate is misconceived. In this paper I want to lend support to that view.1 I shall restrict myself however to considering the semantics and epistemology of claims about reasons (about what there is reason for someone to believe, to feel, or to do). If all normative claims can be analysed as claims about reasons then my conclusions can be extended to all normative claims. But though I believe that is so I shall not attempt to establish it here. Suppose we accept that claims about reasons express truth-apt propositions that are proper objects of belief and assertion. Then we will hold that semantic theory should treat declarative sentences about reasons as a straightforward branch of semantics for declarative sentences in general—uniformly providing a truth condition of its favoured form for each such sentence. Our view will be straightforwardly cognitivist, or declarativist. But is it necessarily ‘realist’? Realists often infer from semantics to metaphysics: from truth conditions to ‘truth-makers’. Non-cognitivists contrapose: arguing that since claims about reasons have no truth-makers they have no truth conditions. Either way, the inference appeals to a correspondence or picture model of propositions. Noncognitivists accept this model as much as realists do, but they hold that it cannot be fitted to claims about reasons. So they conclude that these claims are not genuine assertions, there being no genuine propositions to be asserted in this domain. We talk as though there were, but that is a surface feature of our discourse that calls for explanation. For a discourse can be genuinely declarative only if it’s genuinely depictive. In contrast, I want to argue that propositions about reasons are unmysteriously non-depictive. To make this clear we need to distinguish a nominal notion of fact from substantial notions. The nominal notion identifies facts with true propositions or abstract items conventionally assigned one-one to true propositions. Then, trivially, there is a fact for every true proposition. A substantial notion of fact, however, takes facts to be distinct from propositions. The correspondence or picture model of propositions requires a substantial notion of European Journal of Philosophy 14:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 26–48 r 2006 The Author. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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fact: the proposition depicts a possible fact, which, if it obtains, makes the proposition true. I argue in section 3 that there is no inference from semantics to the existence of such facts. Truth-conditional semantics requires the notion of truth; it does not require the correspondence theory of truth, which I reject. It does not follow, however, that there are no substantial facts. I agree—against philosophers who think that the only tenable notion of a fact is the nominal one— that we have a non-nominal or substantial, robust, notion of fact. This substantial notion is inherent in common-sense ontology, and it is this notion that gives us our notion of a factual proposition. A factual assertion says that some substantial fact obtains. But in precisely this sense of fact we do not think that propositions about reasons are factual. That we have this contrast between factual and normative in our thinking is, I think, insufficiently recognised by ‘quietist’ or ‘painless’ realists about the normative, who stand pat on the fact that normative language is assertoric and then argue that no distinction can be made between assertions that describe reality and those that do not.2 That conflates the two notions of fact; I argue in section 4 that if they are, in contrast, kept distinct then the view of propositions about reasons that results is appropriately deemed ‘irrealist’. In section 5 I attempt to show that nothing in the epistemology of propositions about reasons invokes the ontologically substantial notion of a fact, drawing for this purpose on the Kantian contrast between receptivity and spontaneity. I conclude that epistemology does not require us to treat propositions about reasons as though they were propositions about substantial facts, any more than semantics does. And if neither semantics nor epistemology forces on us the realist picture of reasons, then, I suggest, nothing does. But first in section 2 I sketch some points about reasons. This is a sketch only, without supporting argument; its purpose is to locate in broad terms the basic concept whose ontology and epistemology is to be discussed.
2. The Concept of a Reason—Some Terminology and Distinctions Hurrying to the airport I think to myself that the high cost of a taxi is a reason to take a coach, but the unreliability of the coach is a reason to take a taxi. A scientific report argues that the evidence, taken as a whole, gives us some reason, maybe even sufficient reason, to believe that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. A friend succeeds in finding a publisher for her first novel: she has good reason to be happy and proud. One can distinguish these reasons respectively as practical, epistemic, and evaluative. Beliefs, affective states (feeling such-and-such about so-and-so), and actions in the ordinary narrow sense of performances or doings all have an intelligible intentional content, and can all be assessed for their reasonableness. It is useful to have a broad philosophical term to cover them all. For convenience I will call them all ‘acts’. Let ‘c’ range over acts in this sense, and let ‘c(c)’ range over acts directed to a content c. r
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Reasons are facts, or as we can represent it, sets of facts,3 which stand in a certain relation to an agent and an act-type—also a degree of strength of the reason and a time. Thus we have: R(pi, x, c, d, t) The set of facts pi gives x reason of degree d at time t to c.4 So conceived, reasons are reasons of degree—they can come in various degrees of strength. One might have various specific reasons of degree, of greater or lesser strength, to c. To have a thought about reasons of degree is to have a thought about the reason relation, R. However we also come to conclusions about whether or not there is sufficient reason to c. Thus we have beliefs about the sufficientreason relation, S, in which there is no argument-place ranging over degrees of strength, and which can be written thus: S(pi, x, c, t) The set of facts pi gives x sufficient reason at time t to c. Can S be defined in terms of R? In the case of practical reasons, it may seem plausible that it can—one has sufficient reason to do any action that one has most reason to do, counting inaction and further deliberation as actions. But in the case of epistemic and evaluative reasons it’s not so obvious. Inaction can be regarded as a kind of action, but not believing and not feeling aren’t kinds of belief or feeling. Suppose that the police are investigating a crime. At present A is the prime suspect—there is more reason to believe that A committed the crime than that any other suspect did. So A is the person there is most reason to believe committed the crime. It does not follow there is currently sufficient reason for the police to believe that. At this stage it might be a very unsafe conclusion on their part. The same applies to feelings, or affective states. Perhaps irritation, as against gratitude, is what there’s most reason for you to feel about Jim and his would-be good turn—but still, taking all the facts into account, maybe the reasons for feeling irritated aren’t sufficient. Without pursuing the matter further here, let us accept that there may be two primitive terms expressing reason relations, S and R. Plausibly, in fact there is a third, call it Ro. For as well as specific reasons to c, there is the overall degree of reason to c, taking all specific reasons into account. If that is right then inferences from R to Ro, and Ro to S, are substantive not definitional. But the semantics and epistemology I set out here will apply to all three. Two other basic points in the logic of reasons must be noted. 1. The logic of epistemic reasons is distinctive in an important respect. Namely, the facts which give an agent reason to believe something do so relative to what may be called the agent’s epistemic fields. x’s epistemic fields at t consist of the sets of facts that x can at t jointly discover, come to know, become directly or indirectly aware of; one might also say, the sets of facts that are jointly accessible to x. They are the fields of evidence available to x at t, whether or not x has inquired into r
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them. We need to speak in the plural, at least in principle, because if x actually undertakes to discover the facts, the very activity of searching out some precludes him from discovering others. These facts and those do not belong to the same set of jointly discoverable facts—they belong to different sets in a tree structure of possible inquiries at t, each of them consisting in a maximal set of facts which x could have discovered jointly had x pursued an appropriate programme of inquiry at t.5 Whether a subset of facts in a given epistemic field constitutes a reason for belief must be assessed by reference to the whole field. Thus the fact that the lawn is wet may in a given epistemic field be a reason for me to believe that it has rained recently, even if I’m not aware of it. I’m not aware of it, because I haven’t looked out of the window; but I could easily become aware of it by looking out. However the same fact can be in an epistemic field without being a reason to believe that it’s been raining. Suppose that another fact in my epistemic field is that I recently watered the lawn. I could easily remember that if I thought about it. In that case my epistemic field contains both those facts, in a jointly accessible set—and so in this field the fact that the lawn is wet is not a reason for me to believe that it has rained recently.6 Epistemic reasons, like evaluative and practical reasons, are relations to sets of facts—but they hold relative to an agent’s epistemic field.7 In this respect they differ, I believe, from evaluative and practical reasons, which are not so relativised. For example, the fact that a relative of yours has done you a great favour is a reason for you to feel grateful, whether or not you could come to know it. Likewise the fact that this stuff is poison, not water, is a reason for you not to drink it, whether or not you could come to know it. An observer could truly say that there’s reason for you to feel grateful, or not to drink this stuff, whether or not you know or could know there is. 2. At this point, however, it becomes necessary to make a distinction for which it’s not easy to find good terminology. It is often referred to as the difference between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reasons. This is liable to mislead, so let’s talk instead about reasons tout court and ‘warrantable’ reasons. The distinctive feature of warrantable reasons is that they are open to self-audit: you have them if and only if you can tell that you have them, just by reflecting. (I put aside the question how far we should idealise your reflective powers, though it becomes important in other contexts. So the force of ‘can’ in ‘can tell’ is to this extent open to further discussion.) In the examples just given: there’s reason but not warrantable reason for you to feel grateful, reason but not warrantable reason for you not to drink this stuff. Perhaps you have warrantable reason to drink the stuff because you have warrantable reason to believe it’s water and you’re thirsty. Likewise, there can be reason—in your epistemic field—for you to believe something but you may not have warrantable reason, because you have not discovered the fact that constitutes that reason (even though it’s in your epistemic field, there to be discovered—you can discover it’s not water by drinking it, for example).
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R, Ro and S are the primitive concepts. Warrantable reasons do not have to be characterized by a distinct primitive concept; they can be defined in terms of these. But since their feature is that you can tell that you have them by thinking carefully enough about it, we need for this definition a notion narrower than that of an epistemic field—let’s say, an epistemic state. x’s epistemic state at t is the set of facts that could be jointly accessed by x at t simply by appropriate attention on x’s part, without any further action. This smaller circle of facts is contained within all x’s epistemic fields, so that any fact found in the epistemic state can also be found in all the epistemic fields. One can circumscribe the smaller circle thus: the fact that p is in x’s epistemic state at t if and only if, (i) (ii)
x could come to believe that p obtains at t, simply by attention to the fact that p without any further action, and in any epistemic field containing the fact that p that very fact is a sufficient reason for x to believe that p, whatever other facts obtain in that field.
For example, the fact that I seem to remember watering the lawn can be in some of my current epistemic states, according to this definition. For it can be true that I can come to believe that I seem to remember that just by attending to whether I seem to remember, and the fact that I seem to remember is a sufficient reason for me to believe that I seem to remember, in any epistemic field. In contrast, the fact that I remember cannot be in any epistemic state of mine, though it can be in my epistemic fields. Armed with the concept of an epistemic state we define warrantable reasons in terms of the R, Ro and S relations as follows: In epistemic state sx,t x has warrantable (specific, overall or sufficient) reason to c if and only if in sx,t there is sufficient8 reason for x to believe that there is (specific, overall or sufficient) reason for x to c. So, for example, in sx,t x has warrantable reason to feel grateful just if there is in sx,t sufficient reason for x to believe that there is reason for x to feel grateful. Observe that x may not have noticed that, so he can have warrantable reason to feel grateful without realising that he has. In general one can have warrantable reasons without realising that one does—what warrantable reasons you have does not equate to what reasons you believe yourself to have. Observe also that x may have warrantable reason to feel grateful, even though there is no reason for x to feel grateful. That is because an epistemic state (just like an epistemic field) can give you reason to believe that p even if it’s not the case that p. So an epistemic state can give you reason to believe that there is reason to c even when there isn’t. In general, you can have warrantable reason to c even though there is no reason for you to c.9 The warrantable reasons one has to c are not a subset of the reasons there are for one to c. r
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Suppose, to put it in neutral terms, that the S relation holds between your epistemic state and the belief that (9pi)R(pi, you, feel grateful to Smith); but in truth it’s not the case that (9pi)R(pi, you, feel grateful to Smith). Knowing that, would we say that you have reason to feel grateful to Smith? Well, yes and no. In a way you have a reason, but in a way you don’t. Would we say there is reason for you to feel grateful? Here there’s a greater tendency to say no. For in this case we might want to say that though you are warranted in thinking there is a reason, you are wrong. This is the difference of response I’m appealing to in my choice of terminology. To say you had a warrantable reason leaves open the question whether there really was a reason. A last point to note is that the mere fact that x has this or that warrantable reason need play no explanatory role in explaining x’s acts. What causes you to act (to believe, feel, do) is not, directly, the reasons there are for you to act, nor even the warrantable reasons you have to act, but some subset of the reasons you take yourself to have.10 My conclusion from this brief round-up is that the only relations whose ontology and epistemology we have to consider are R, Ro, and S. To this we now return; and our first task is to pin down clearly what it is to be a realist about reasons. 3. Facts, Propositions and Truth Reasons are (sets of) facts. It is worth emphasising at the outset that this is not itself, already, realism about reasons. The realism about reasons that I want to deny does not consist in the claim that reasons are facts—it is, rather, the claim that there are substantial facts in virtue of which propositions about reasons are true when true. The difference can be made clearer with an example. Consider: (i)
The fact that skiing gives Joan pleasure is a reason for her to ski.
This says that the reason relation R holds between the fact that skiing gives Joan pleasure, Joan, and the act of skiing: (i)’
R(the fact that skiing gives Joan pleasure, Joan, to ski).
It does not identify the reason relation itself with any of the facts, or sets of facts, which satisfy it—that would make no sense, facts being one sort of item and relations another. To say that a fact is a reason is simply to characterise it by its possession of the reason relation. For example, if I say ‘The reason we should leave is that the building is collapsing’ I make an identity statement in which a fact is characterised by its relational property of being a reason: the x such that x is the reason we should leave 5 the fact that the building is collapsing. r
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But—crucially—do we want to say that (i) itself, if true, ‘corresponds’ to a fact? There are many contested issues about how we are to individuate ‘truthmaking’ facts. They need not detain us.11 Only one point is important for present purposes: namely, that the idea of depiction is ineliminable from our conception of what it is to be a factual proposition. A factual proposition depicts a possible fact or facts. The world comprises the totality of facts. It is not in question that we have this dyadic idea of depiction for the case of factual propositions. The question is about its role: does it simply explain what makes a proposition a factual proposition? Or does it have a wider role to play as a general account of truth, or of what it is to be a proposition?12 In particular, can we apply this ‘picture’ picture to propositions about reasons? We must focus here on propositions which are purely about reason relations. (i) is not purely about R, since it entails that skiing will give Joan pleasure, and that is a factual proposition. So consider the following pair: (P) (F)
(f)(x)(if f-ing gives x pleasure then the fact that f-ing gives x pleasure is a reason for x to f) The fact that (f)(x)( if f-ing gives x pleasure then the fact that f-ing gives x pleasure is a reason for x to f).
(P) is purely about R. Should we apply the ‘picture’ picture to it? Should we countenance such substantial facts as F and say that they are truth-makers for propositions like P? I think not. Certainly P has a truth condition. Understanding the sentence requires grasping that truth condition as the truth condition. But does any semantic requirement lead us from the idea of assigning a truth condition to a sentence to the idea of a truth-making fact? One must distinguish the tasks and requirements of logical and semantic theory on the one hand and those of metaphysics on the other. Semantics aims to provide a uniform account of the way in which the truth value of a sentence is determined by the semantic values of its constituent expressions. To this end we need to attach semantic values to singular terms, predicates and operators, and describe how the truth values of sentences are functions of these. What items are postulated as semantic values depends on your semantics. Let us take Fregean semantics as our model.13 Here predicates and relational expressions are taken to refer to concepts and relations in the Fregean sense. Consider the sentence ‘This fire is hot’. According to Frege, that sentence is true if and only if the Fregean concept denoted by the predicate ‘x is hot’ maps the object denoted by ‘this fire’ into the True. The same goes for a sentence about reasons—say ‘The fact that I’m late is a reason to hurry’. Here the truth condition is that the Fregean relation denoted by the relational expression ‘x is a reason for n to w’ maps the sequence hthe fact that I’m late, me, the act-type of hurryingi into the True. To understand these sentences is to grasp their truth conditions in the appropriate way, that is, in accordance with that mode of their presentation which constitutes their sense. This involves grasping the senses of the predicates, relational expressions, and r
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singular terms—i.e. their modes of presentation of a semantic value. So the Fregean semantic theorist needs to posit semantic values and senses—but not facts (in the substantial sense distinguished above). But if we are talking about truth conditions don’t we need to explain what truth is? The question merits scrutiny. As far as semantics goes, what we have to do is to explain the meaning of ‘true’, in a way that makes it a useable term for semantics. It is enough for this purpose to say that the meaning of ‘true’ is grasped not through an explicit definition but by grasping (i) the connection between truth and the aim of assertion, (ii) the truth of some semantic principles in which the concept of truth appears, (iii) the point that such principles are stated using the word ‘true’. ‘True’ is not explicitly definable, and also ineliminable without loss of expressive power. This was Frege’s view—‘The meaning of the word ‘‘true’’ is spelt out in the laws of truth’.14 It is then a question in metaphysics, not semantics, whether one goes on to give a correspondence theory, an assertibilist theory, a coherence theory etc. of truth. Semantics as such does not legislate on this issue. However, although semantics does not itself legislate on the issue it is possible to hold—as Frege held—that the account of ‘true’ that’s required for semantic purposes is not merely enough for semantic purposes but also all there is to be said about truth. This is, so to speak, the anti-metaphysical or ‘no theory’ theory, and in my view it is the one that’s correct. It is sometimes said that the correspondence conception of truth, in some sense of correspondence, can be regarded as a platitude to be accepted by all sides. At best this is misleading. Consider the schema ‘It’s true that p if and only it’s a fact that p’. If, with Frege, one takes the fact that p just to be the true proposition that p, then the schema is platitudinous, but expresses no binary correspondence notion. But if ‘fact’ is taken in some other, ‘truth-making’ way, which introduces a binary correspondence notion, then the schema is not platitudinous. How might a correspondence theorist of truth reply? Perhaps the question is, what explains why ‘This fire is hot’ is true, when it is true? But what sort of explanation is being looked for here? There is a trivial explanation: ‘This fire is hot’ is true (in English) because this fire is hot and that is what the English sentence ‘This fire is hot’ means. Here the explanation consists in specifying what proposition is expressed by the sentence and asserting it. Another explanation is that ‘This fire is hot’ is true because the coal is combusting and giving off highenergy gases. In this case the appeal is to a scientific explanation of what it is that makes the fire hot. A correspondence theorist needs to show that there is something else to be said. Here is a third kind of explanation: the Fregean concept assigned to ‘w is hot’ maps this fire into the true because this fire has the property of being hot. I agree that that is an explanation, inasmuch as the property of heat, in the sense of ‘property’ intended, is identical neither with the Fregean concept which is the semantic value of the predicate, nor with the predicate’s sense. The latter items are abstracta posited by the Fregean semanticist, whereas the property of heat, in the sense intended in this explanation, is a concrete attribute of things that has a r
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nature, essence, or constitution which physicists investigate. In doing so, they are not investigating the nature of functions or sets. The same point could be made within other semantic frameworks. If our semantics says that the predicate ‘w is hot’ signifies a set of extensions in possible worlds, then fire is in the extension indexed to the actual world because it has a certain property—that of being hot. But this third kind of explanation can be given precisely because we are dealing with a factual proposition. ‘Fact’ in this context has its substantial sense: a fact consists of the possession of properties and relations by objects and (if time is real) changes in these. These properties and relations are not identifiable with semantic values, be they Fregean functions or Lewisian extensions across possible worlds. Just as we have distinguished nominal and substantial facts, so we can distinguish nominal and substantial properties. Since facts in the nominal sense are identified with true propositions, properties in the nominal sense must be identified not with Fregean concepts but with senses of predicates.15 And thus the third explanation of why ‘This fire is hot’ expresses a true proposition appeals to this fire’s possession of the substantial, not the nominal, property of heat: in short, to the substantial fact that this fire is hot. Unsurprisingly, since a factual proposition says that a (substantial) fact obtains, we can explain why a factual proposition is true by pointing out that the (substantial) fact it says obtains does obtain. Equally unsurprisingly, however, if there are non-factual propositions the same thing cannot be done for them. Someone who insists that it can be done for every proposition is simply insisting that all propositions are substantially factual. Nothing in the semantic theory we have considered entails that. A last claim could be made for the correspondence theory of truth. We could see it as a relatively shallow thesis about the meaning of the word ‘true’: it would simply say that ‘It is true that’ is properly attached to a sentence only if the sentence expresses a factual proposition. Cognitive irrealists could accept that, as a proposal about how to use ‘true’: they could then hold that whereas factual propositions can be said to be true or false, propositions about reasons can only said to be ‘correct’, or ‘valid’, but not true or false.16 This way of talking has some attractions, as far as making things perspicuous is concerned, but it’s laborious. Semantics would still need a broad term, such as ‘correctness condition’, to characterise the condition it attaches to any declarative sentence. On the whole it seems preferable to use ‘true’ in such a way that one’s warranted in thinking that p if and only if one’s warranted in thinking that p is true—in which case the right word for the condition semantics attaches to sentences will be ‘truth condition’.
4. Why ‘Irrealism’? Before turning to the epistemology of propositions about reasons in the final section, I want to ask whether it’s illuminating to call the cognitivism about reasons so far developed irrealist. r
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The case for doing so rests on the contrast I have made between propositions about reasons and factual propositions. To understand what it is for a proposition to be a factual proposition, I have said, the notion of a fact in the substantial sense is needed; but this is not to endorse the correspondence conception as an account of propositionhood, or truth, as such. At this point two opposing responses are possible. One insists that the correspondence picture applies to all propositions, the other says that we don’t need a substantial notion of fact at all. The argument in this paper is mainly directed against the first. But what, briefly, about the second? Certainly irrealist cognitivists must reject the correspondence theory as an account of propositions, that is, as an account of what it is to declare that something is the case, of the declarative speech act. In that respect they follow an important modern tradition in semantics. But this tradition has tended to widen into an assault on the very notion of a fact, in the substantial sense of fact. Thus Frege, for example, denies that there are any facts of the kind envisaged by the correspondence theorist of truth, the kind required to play the role of truthmaker. He simply identifies facts with true propositions.17 The second response follows this line. It rejects the very idea of facts and properties in the substantial sense. And obviously if we reject that very idea then the question of realism about reasons, as I intend it, could not arise. On this approach one could say that one is as much a realist about reasons as one is a realist about everything else—or, alternatively, one could say that one is an irrealist about all propositions and not just propositions about reasons. However, this rejection of the very notion of a fact, in the substantial sense, should be resisted. It is one thing to deny the correspondence theory of truth, and consequently the need for the notion of a ‘truth maker’ as a theoretical concept of semantic theory; it is another thing to deny the existence of substantial facts altogether. Substantial facts and properties don’t have to be posited by semantic theory as items designed to play theoretical roles in semantics. From that point of view they are quite redundant. As far as I can see, that it is the only argument offered for denying that they exist.18 But this particular argument is fallacious. Tables and fairies, flowers and phlogiston aren’t posits required by the activity of semantic theory as such—but that does not settle whether or not they exist. The question of their existence is settled by branches of inquiry other than semantics, though of course if they do exist we had better have ways of referring to them. In thought about the world (everyday discourse, science, religion) we deploy substantial notions of object, property, relation, fact. Such facts have causal powers: ‘It was the fact that poor-quality steel had been used that caused the collapse of the grandstand’. Furthermore, that they have causal powers plays an essential role in the way we conceive ourselves as thinkers and agents in the world (the total causal fabric of facts). It carries consequences for the epistemology of factual propositions—since their epistemology has to dovetail into the idea that knowledge in their case consists in a substantial relation to a substantial fact. In contrast, the epistemology of propositions about reasons does not, and does not have to, fit that idea, as we shall see in the next section. Spelling r
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out these differences will help to undermine both the response which loses substantial facts, and the one which insists on bringing them in as truth-makers for every kind of proposition. I suggest that the notion of a substantial fact is indispensable to what realism about reasons, or about normativity in general, is standardly understood to hold. If that is right, then irrealism is the appropriate term for the position advanced here. The realist is naturally taken to hold that there are substantial facts about reasons, or in general, substantial normative facts. For this is the sense in which ‘fact’ and ‘property’ are naturally understood. The notion of a ‘(substantial) normative fact’ can then strike one as a contradiction in terms; or it can seem to have a bold and forceful air. Either way there’s the sense of something provocative and ‘queer’ going on, which is the characteristic indicator that a philosophical sleight of hand is taking place. It is realism in this sense that leads to the idea that ‘naturalism’ must be in danger unless we find a naturalistic truth maker for propositions about reasons. And through the implausible epistemology that this realism seems to require, plus the open-question arguments which go on lurking around it, it leads to an error-theoretic or non-cognitivist recoil. My claim is that the recoil can only seem appropriate if one shares the realist’s faulty account of truth or propositionhood.19 One other point remains to be mentioned. Return for the moment to (P) and (F). The irrealist says that we do not ‘explain’ the truth of (P) by saying that (F) obtains and makes it true. Still, (F) looks like a perfectly good singular term; so what is its semantic value? Irrealists cannot say that it is a substantial fact. They could try saying that its semantic value is a true proposition. In that case, given that we have accepted the existence of substantial facts, ‘the fact that p’ turns out to be referentially ambiguous. Also, against the Fregean identification of ‘fact’ with ‘true proposition’, there is the point that in ordinary language facts and objects are possible objects of awareness, not possible objects of belief, whereas propositions are possible objects of belief. If one talks of being aware of a proposition what one means is being aware of it as an object, of its existence not of its truth. However one can also talk of being aware of the truth of a proposition. So we could introduce a regimentation in which ‘the fact that p’ refers to the substantial fact where there is one, whereas ‘the truth (of the proposition) that p’ refers to the proposition that p when that proposition is true (or to a distinct abstract item which exists just if the proposition is true). In any case, although ‘the truth of the proposition that p’ has the syntax of a singular term, it looks as though it should be possible to eliminate it. For example, ‘X is aware of the truth of the proposition that p’ just reduces to ‘X is aware that the proposition that p is true’. The relational construction with ‘aware of the truth that p’ is possible because ‘aware that p’ is factive. The important distinction for us to consider is between two senses in which we talk of being aware of a fact. In the first sense to be aware of a fact is to be (cognitively) aware of the truth of a proposition—which reduces to being aware that the proposition is true—while in the second sense it is to be r
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receptively20 aware of the occurrence or obtaining of an event or state of affairs. Talk of facts in the first sense is formal—we can artificially identify such nominal facts with true propositions, or we can eliminate the apparent reference to facts altogether. The latter approach would be more elegant in that it would remove the distinction between substantial and nominal facts as a piece of temporary scaffolding, and return us to a single notion of fact. Nonetheless, allowing oneself to talk of facts, properties and relations in the nominal way is very convenient. In particular, we can talk in a nominal way about reason relations. Understood in this way, relations and properties are objects of thought like propositions. In a Fregean framework they are identifiable with the senses of relational expressions and predicates, just as propositions (‘thoughts’) are identifiable with the sense of sentences, and so in indirect contexts they also serve as indirect referents. Thus when we refer to a reason relation we are talking about the sense, or mode of presentation, associated with that reason predicate.21
5. The Epistemology of Reasons When misunderstandings involving the correspondence picture have been cleared away, only epistemological questions remain. How can we know the truth of propositions about reasons? What justification do we have for thinking that there is anything truth-apt to be said about reasons at all? If no satisfactory epistemological account of how one has ‘truth-maker-free’ knowledge of propositions about reasons can be given, then the very notion of there being such propositions—of the ‘objectivity’ of this area of discourse—becomes precarious. By the same token, if we can give such an account we show that realism about reasons is redundant. It will have turned out that neither semantics nor epistemology requires us to postulate that there is, in the world, a substantial relation of being a reason. Let’s say that a person has a warrant for the belief or judgement that p if and only if they have sufficient warrantable reason to believe that p.22 What we need, then, is an accurate description of the circumstances in which a person is regarded as having a warrant for a pure judgement about reasons. How do having a warrant for a factual or partly factual judgement on the one hand, and for a pure judgement about reasons on the other, differ? Here we come to the roles played by receptivity and spontaneity in the formation of judgements. These are Kant’s terms, and in discussing this epistemological difference between factual and normative judgement I mean to build on what he said. But before we do so two points of divergence must be noted. First, Kant discusses the spontaneity of judgements and volitions but does not apply the notion of spontaneity to the emotions, whereas other philosophical thinkers, who have been more interested in the development and education of character and emotion, have had much to say about spontaneity of feeling.23 I believe that spontaneity plays a uniform role in the epistemology of all three r
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kinds of reasons, evaluative as well as practical and epistemic; although in ethics and aesthetics affective and conative spontaneity are important in various differing ways, while cognitive spontaneity has less importance.24 Second, Kant treats spontaneity and receptivity within the framework of his doctrine of transcendental idealism—a doctrine whose import is disputed, but which, as far as I can see, goes beyond what irrealist cognitivism about the domain of reasons requires.25 Nonetheless we can build on three fundamental Kantian insights. First, pure judgements about reasons (e.g. judgements like P in section 3) involve no receptivity. Second, where the epistemology of a judgement involves spontaneity only, and no receptivity, one must take an irrealist view of its objects.26 Third, a judgement about reasons is universal in content. Take the first point, that pure judgements about reasons involve no receptivity. Suppose, for example, that I receive an aural representation as of a higher note followed by a lower note. Such a representation, Kant thinks, has already received considerable processing in ‘sensibility’; but our concern is with the step in which I proceed to judge, on the basis of this representation, that I have indeed heard a certain objective sequence of sounds. At this point the ‘understanding’ applies concepts to the materials provided by my sensible intuition. In doing so it exhibits a general capacity to pick out epistemic states which give one reason to form judgements that deploy these concepts—x is a higher note than y, y is later than x. To have the concepts is, among other things, to grasp of various possible sensible intuitions that they constitute reasons to make judgements deploying those concepts. This capacity of concept-application or reasonrecognition is spontaneous, in that it involves no further form of receptivity. A given epistemic state is the product of various forms of receptivity, such as hearing; but recognising that it provides reason to make this or that judgement does not involve another form of receptivity, to some further domain of substantial facts.27 So this Kantian account rejects an intuitionist epistemology of reasons according to which reason-recognition does involve a form of receptivity that is sui generis to the understanding. For this reason I follow Kant in talking of the spontaneity of normative dispositions, responses etc., rather than of ‘self-evident intuitions’. It is true that not everyone who uses the latter phrase is committed to the intuitionist epistemology just mentioned,28 yet—through illicit association with that epistemology—talk of intuitions tends to relieve one of an important task: namely, finding a sober description of what actually goes on in the epistemology of normative claims. On the one hand, pure reason-recognition is not a matter of receptivity, on the other hand, we want to say, that point does not force us to conventionalism or voluntarism about reasons either. Our account of spontaneity must help us to see how this can be so. Following the Kantian insights mentioned above, I will in outline argue as follows. Pure judgements about reasons involve no receptivity, so their epistemology differs accordingly from that of factual judgements. They are default-warranted by their spontaneity alone. But they are also universal in r
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content, so in making them we take on a convergence commitment as to what other reasoners should rationally endorse. It follows that there are two important ways in which a pure judgement about reasons can lose its warrant. One can undermine it by showing that its spontaneity was only apparent, and one can defeat it by showing that the convergence to which it commits one does not obtain. Spontaneity and universality are the fundamental epistemological bases of the objectivity of pure judgements about reasons. We shall discuss these two notions in turn. Spontaneity can be a quality of any intentional act in our broad sense—that is, a belief, an action or decision, or a feeling. In the sense intended here it does not mean ‘acting without thinking’. Rather, a spontaneous act is an act that comes in the right way from me. Such an act can issue from profound reflection. The critical point is its source; it must be the product of a disposition to that very act which is ‘really mine’. A spontaneous act is a self-originating, not a purely receptive, act. Connectedly, ‘spontaneous’ contrasts with ‘factitious’: a factitious as against a truly spontaneous response or disposition is one that is accepted uncritically into one’s thinking from others, or one that results merely from a wish to please or to annoy . . . and so on. The difference between education in reasons and indoctrination in reasons depends on this contrast. (Another pair of terms for the same contrast is ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’: as in J. S. Mill’s remark that ‘moral associations which are wholly of artificial creation, when intellectual culture goes on, yield by degrees to the dissolving force of analysis’.)29 Finally, ‘spontaneous’ also contrasts with ‘conventional’. For example my disposition to drive on the left in Britain is not spontaneous; it registers my awareness of a convention. However following a convention itself always involves the exercise of spontaneity—there is spontaneity in the judgement that a conventional rule applies in such-and-such a way to a particular case (as highlighted by Wittgenstein’s discussion of following a rule).30 Obviously more needs to be said about what it is for a disposition to be ‘really mine’. Indeed so much has been said that an extended historical-cumphilosophical study would be useful. An important starting point, I suggest, is that spontaneity in one’s cognitive, affective or practical dispositions is marked by a certain experienced or felt normative harmony. A disposition to c has this feature of normative harmony when it combines or unites with a disposition to take oneself (more or less explicitly) to have reason to c. Call this latter disposition, taken on its own (i.e. with or without the actual disposition to c) a normative disposition to c. It’s essential to this notion that a normative disposition is ‘intuitively experienced’ for oneself—from the inside, in a first-person way. It is an experience or impression of understanding a reason to c as a reason (though it may not be reflectively articulated). A normative disposition to c is not the same as an actual belief that one has reason to c. You can believe that you have reason to c without having a normative disposition to c, in the present sense—for example you can believe it on the basis of testimony or in some other indirect way that does not involve the first-person experience of seeming to understand the reason for oneself. Thus I may warrantedly believe that there is reason to r
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prefer X to Y, because reliable critics have told me so, without knowing what the reason is. Equally, you can have the normative disposition to c, without the belief that you have reason to c. Your disposition to believe that you have reason to c is checked or outweighed in some way. You have the normative disposition to think that every condition determines a set, for example, but you know enough about set theory to be aware of the problems. Yet still it feels as though there’s reason to believe that: you can ‘understand’ why it must be so. In normal cases, being disposed to c goes with being normatively disposed to c. There is an unquestioned normative harmony in one’s dispositions. But it can break down. It may seem to me (in the intuitively experienced way) that I have reason to c and yet I find I’m not at all disposed to c. Or I may have the disposition without the normative disposition. In these cases of internal dissonance I start to question my dispositions. And thus whether I really do have reason to c comes into question too. Suppose for example that I experience a normative disposition to admire a particular performance and yet have no inclination to admire it. It seems to me that the performance is admirable; I just don’t actually feel any admiration. Given this normative disharmony, I can happily move to a verdict about whether the performance is admirable only if I can credibly ‘explain away’ one or other of these dispositions. The normative disposition may be explained as resulting from misleading hype or peer-group pressure for example. Or the failure to admire may be explained away by tiredness, jadedness or distraction, dislike or envy of the artist, and so on. In the first case, the normative disposition has been subverted; it confers no warrant to believe. In the second case it confers a warrant even though the disposition to admire is absent. In the first case the spontaneity of the normative disposition has been cast in doubt, while in the second case the absence of a spontaneous disposition to admire has been explained away. Or we could reverse the case: I admire but have no normative disposition to admire. Again normative disharmony may be overcome in a variety of ways. One possibility is that my admiration persists and eventually carries my normative dispositions with it. I come to acknowledge, ‘be at home with’, new reasons to admire new things. Educating spontaneity is in large part concerned with presenting and resolving such normative disharmonies by free reflection on cases and consequences. That applies as much to set theory as to aesthetics. In this search for normative harmony in one’s dispositions, what exactly is the role being played by explanations that subvert or explain away this or that dissonant response? One could say that they work by showing that the response isn’t ‘properly tuned’ to its object in some way. That isn’t wrong, but is liable to mislead, in so far as the notion of proper tuning sounds as though it’s causal (good reception of a signal)—but in this case it is purely normative. The disposition to c or to judge there’s sufficient reason to c is properly tuned just if it’s appropriately correlated to there being sufficient reason to c. And correlation in this case is not causation. My disposition to c or to judge there’s sufficient reason to c is not caused by there being sufficient reason r
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to c. The subversive explanations don’t work by showing that a required cause fails to be in place. They work by showing that some ‘wrong’ causes are in place. The dissonant response is the factitious product of extraneous factors. The same applies in cases where dissonance consists in the lack of a response. Explaining away this lack will consist in showing that extraneous factors are masking or stunting the disposition that would otherwise be expected. To what are these interfering factors extraneous? Again to the spontaneity of the response—to the way in which I would respond if interfering factors were absent and my responses were working in an active and unimpeded way.31 If there is normative disharmony in my reactions, I’m not warranted in making a pure judgement about reasons just on their basis. I need to sort out the problem, either by achieving harmony or finding a convincing way of explaining the disharmony away. Where there is disharmony I’m not warranted in trusting to the spontaneity of my responses unless I can do one of these things. It does not follow, of course, that normative harmony in one’s dispositions is a sufficient condition of their spontaneity. Even if my dispositions are not internally in conflict in this way, I may have other evidence that my response, though harmonious, isn’t spontaneous. A subversive explanation of both sides of the harmony—the disposition and the normative disposition to c—may be available. If that can be shown then my warrant for judging that there’s reason to c is undermined. Judging whether one’s dispositions are spontaneous can be hard. It may require difficult self-examination. (Am I genuinely inclined to see reason to c—is that what I really think—or do I just want to respond as other people want me to? Or to annoy them? Is there something I don’t want to acknowledge here?) And since the appearance of spontaneity can be subverted by various sorts of debunking explanation of how it came about, self-examination alone may not be sufficient—a third-person view on oneself may be needed. Nevertheless, in many cases of normative harmony one is warranted—as ever defeasibly—in taking one’s normative disposition to be spontaneous. In the light of this discussion I propose the following principle of spontaneity for pure judgements about reasons: When one is warranted in taking oneself to have a spontaneous normative disposition to judge that a set of facts pi would give one reason to c then, in the absence of defeaters, that warrants the judgement that the set of facts pi would give one reason to c. What can defeat a genuinely spontaneous disposition? There is, notably, the question of how well one’s normative dispositions cohere overall. Where there is overall conflict, a pure judgement about reasons may be defeated even though spontaneous. This aspect of the epistemology of normative claims is generally recognised, under the heading of reflective equilibrium, so although there are r
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interesting questions about how it works I simply note its importance here. Let us consider instead the possibility of defeat by discussion with others. Disagreement can defeat a warrant based on a spontaneous normative disposition. It does so when one has no sufficient reason to believe that the judgements concerning reasons made by those who disagree are faulty. This source of defeat depends on a principle which I have elsewhere32 called the convergence thesis: When I judge that p, I enter a commitment that inquirers who scrutinised any relevant evidence and argument available to them would agree that p unless I could fault their pure judgements about reasons or their evidence. The convergence thesis applies to all judgements, and thus in particular to pure judgements about reasons—in whose case, however, the possibility of faulting other inquirers’ evidence falls out as irrelevant. Only the question of their capacity to judge of reasons remains. Thus if other inquirers disagree with me in my spontaneous judgements about reasons, I have to ask myself how credible it is that their judgements, as against mine, are faulty. How does this principle arise? Epistemic reasons, like all reasons, are universal: If there is (sufficient) reason for someone in an epistemic field e to judge that p then there is (sufficient) reason for anyone in e to judge that p.33 To this we can add that: It is irrational to judge that: p but there is not sufficient reason for me to judge that p. Suppose I judge that the set of facts pi would give me reason to c Call this the judgement that q. It would be irrational for me to judge that q if I did not think there was sufficient reason to judge it. So by the universality of epistemic reasons I’m rationally committed to holding that anyone who shares my epistemic field but does not agree (on reflection) that q is faulty in their judgement about reasons. What then if I find that others do disagree with my pure judgement about reasons, and I conclude, in one way or another, that I have no reason to doubt the quality of their judgement? In that case I am forced to doubt the quality of my own. I might start to wonder whether my disposition is indeed spontaneous, or whether after all it’s in some way factitious, distorted by a special interest for example. Alternatively, I might conclude that my disposition was genuinely spontaneous but also wrong. In which case I may seek to educate my spontaneity. However this might fail to work. I might then conclude, in a merely external way, without insight, that my spontaneous responses in this domain are somehow r
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flawed. (My taste in this kind of art, for example, is incorrigibly bad.) Or I might conclude, given enough self-confidence and scepticism, that what the divergence of judgements in this case shows is that there simply are no genuine reasons in this domain—no genuine reason, for example, to admire this rather than that. Clearly in the case of pure judgements about reasons the convergence thesis depends only on the universality of reasons. There is, in contrast, a model of convergence which one might call the ‘camera model’. It says that reliable knowers will, given the same input to their receptive faculties, produce the same judgment of fact, just as reliable cameras will, given the same input, produce the same photograph. The idea is that reliable receptivity produces the same results from the same inputs. But in the case of pure judgements about reasons we have no need to appeal to this idea—for them we have derived the argument to convergence from the universality of reasons alone. Following Kant, then, we have shown that the epistemology of reasons depends only on spontaneity and the universality of reasons. In contrast, the epistemology of factual judgements requires receptivity as well. To be warranted in believing that it’s raining, for example, I must be warranted in believing that I’m receiving some appropriate information: that I can see that it is, that I’m receptively aware of testimony from someone who’s aware that it is, and so forth. Here, then, is the crucial lack of parallelism between the epistemology of factual judgements and the epistemology of reasons. The epistemology of factual judgements rests on a conception of thinking beings as receptively connected, or linked, to states of affairs which are distinct from the receptive faculties by which the connections are made. This conception has no role to play in the case of pure judgements about reasons. If the reason relation is treated as a property in the substantial sense it becomes knowable only by some form of receptive awareness; but in fact our knowledge of reason relations can be accounted for entirely in terms of the spontaneity of belief, will and the feelings. In this case as elsewhere, knowledge is true belief reliably responsive to its subject-matter. However, being reliably responsive to the way in which reason relations obtain in a given subjectarea consists simply in having the developed spontaneous capacity for judging the applicability of R, Ro and S in that area. One’s reliability can be put in doubt, and one’s judgement corrected, by showing that one’s responses are not spontaneous or that they conflict with those of judges whose responses are not thereby impugned. Unless convergence radically breaks down, that is enough for knowledge of reasons. The conclusion is this. We do not have to ask whether the reason relation is identifiable with some natural relation, nor, failing to find any such natural relation, do we have to postulate that there are metaphysically substantial nonnatural relations, so that naturalism is false. Nor do we have to give up on the idea that discourse about reason is genuinely declarative or propositional. The question of naturalism is simply not at stake. There is no ‘location’ problem about ‘fitting reasons into a scientific world picture’, or showing where in the world r
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they are to be found. Pure propositions about reasons are not pictures of the world, not because they are pictures, impossibly, of something else, but because they are not pictures.34 John Skorupski Department of Moral Philosophy University of St Andrews St Andrews KY16 9AJ UK
[email protected] NOTES 1
Several writers on meta-ethics have seemed to express scepticism about the debate, in various ways, among them Thomas Nagel (1986: 138–49), Hilary Putnam (2004: 52–70), T. M. Scanlon (1998: 55–64) and Crispin Wright (1996). I don’t attribute to any of them the specific views on fact and truth, or spontaneity and receptivity, put forward here: in some cases I know that they would disagree with them. (Thomas Nagel describes himself as a ‘realist’; I give my reasons for preferring the term ‘irrealist’ in section 4 below—however this may be only a terminological disagreement. Conversely, the important work in meta-ethics of Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, summarised in their 2000, comes to a similar-sounding conclusion to mine but from very different semantic foundations: it seems to me that it remains essentially expressivist in spirit.) Also, this account is not restricted to meta-ethics; it is meta-normative in that it is intended to apply to the concept of a reason in all its occurrences, epistemic as well as practical and evaluative (see section 2). I have previously argued for it in Skorupski 1985/6, 1999a and 2002. The aim of the present paper is to develop rather more detailed answers to some crucial questions about its semantics and epistemology. 2 See for example Lovibond 1983. 3 Given the distinction made in the previous section, are they facts in the purely nominal or the substantial sense? It may in various ways be more convenient for the logic of reasons to regard them purely nominally; but it may also be that a theory of reasons which takes all reasons to consist in substantial facts could in principle be worked out, so long as we allowed ourselves to distinguish between modes of presentation of one and the same fact. We do not need to decide this here. 4 ‘c’ may itself contain a temporal reference—e.g. ‘to fly to Paris on June 1’. 5 Nonetheless, we often think in the singular about an inquirer’s epistemic field (as when we ask whether there was enough evidence around for the police to have made a case against a suspect). Without context it’s unclear what we mean: we might mean what reasons to believe are available in one or other of the inquirer’s epistemic fields at that time, or we might mean what reasons to believe are available in all those fields, or something more complicated and/or vaguer (what facts the inquirer could have been expected to discover in the time available, for example). 6 The points just made are a version of Carnap’s requirement of total evidence in Carnap 1950: 211–213. 7 So in the case of epistemic reasons, we could represent R like this: Rðej; x; t ; pi ; x; bðpÞ; d; tÞ
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In x’s j-th epistemic field at t the set of facts pi gives x reason of degree d to believe that p at time t. Similarly for S. The tree structure of epistemic fields poses problems. What conditions must hold for it to be true that there’s reason for x (sufficient or otherwise) to believe that p at t? In particular, what if there’s reason in one ej,x,t but not in another? In the rest of this section I will pretend that we have an answer to this question. 8 I have simplified: the question whether the reason to believe has to be sufficient or can also be specific or overall obviously requires consideration. 9 Note also that in the case of practical reasons, adopting a strategy for deciding under inadequate information is often one of your available options. Thus if you have no idea whether the enemy will attack on the left or the right, tossing a coin to decide whether to defend on the left or the right may be what you have sufficient warrantable reason to do. But what there is most reason to do is to defend the flank the enemy will in fact attack. 10 A similar three-way distinction is made by Allan Gibbard 1990: in his terminology the reasons there are for you are your ‘potential reasons’, your warrantable reasons are your ‘available reasons’, and the reasons you take yourself to have are your ‘putative reasons’. But the term ‘potential’ seems to me misleading: ‘potential reasons’ actually are reasons. Another question to note: for a fact to be a reason for x, must x have the potential ability to recognise the reason-giving character of that fact? Can a fact be a reason for x to act if x is completely impervious to the idea that a fact of that kind has reason-giving force— simply could not take the obtaining of such a fact as a reason? This will not be pursued here. 11 The ‘slingshot argument’ can be set aside (see e.g. Read 1996). Still, how to extend the substantial notion of fact from the case of simple predications is notoriously contested—what of negative facts, conditional facts, existential facts? These issues may or may not be important in themselves. But for our purposes the only question will be whether there are substantial facts about reason relations: a question that can be answered independently of any particular way of individuating facts in the substantial sense. 12 I am going to assume here, in accordance with the Fregean framework I shall be using, that a proposition is a Fregean ‘thought’; i.e. the ‘sense’ of a sentence. This choice is not essential to the argument: all that is essential is the distinction between propositions and facts (in the substantial sense). 13 It is not the only possible model, of course. Different semantic theories will have different abstract ontologies. But the points I make using Fregean semantics as an example apply generally. 14 See ‘Thoughts’, in Frege 1977: 2. 15 Strictly speaking, I would urge, the concept of a property just is the concept of a property ‘in the substantial sense’. Theoretical concepts of semantics such as the semantic value of a predicate, or the sense of a predicate aren’t really the concept of a property, in the sense in which one speaks of the properties (attributes) of a thing. Similarly for the concept of a fact. But I shall continue to distinguish explicitly betweeen properties and facts in the ‘substantial’ and the ‘nominal’ sense. 16 Note the opposite position, which rejects this shallow thesis without rejecting the deeper thesis that propositions are essentially depictive. For example, Simon Blackburn calls himself an agnostic about truth as ‘an identifiable ‘‘robust’’ property’, and favours a ‘deflationary’ view of truth. Thus he is willing to attach ‘It is true that’ to those grammatically declarative sentences which in his view do not express genuine propositions. See Blackburn 1998, e.g. 318–9. At the same time, his non-cognitivist argument turns on the correspondence or depictive model of propositions. 17 ’A fact is a thought that is true’, Frege 1977: 25.
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Other than the problems of individuating them. But there are problems about individuating any concrete entity. 19 A question obviously remains about the ontology of abstracta: senses, semantic values, etc. I believe that irrealist cognitivism is also appropriate here. But that must be argued in its own right. It is not the issue at stake between those who endorse and those who deny the existence of normative facts. 20 This term will be further discussed below. 21 Higher-order quantification is over the semantic values of predicates (‘This fact has a property which that fact does not—it’s a reason to c’). Likewise ‘the property which this fact has but that fact does not’, if understood as higher-order. (Quantification over substantial properties is not higher-order.) 22 See section 2. 23 This comment only indicates a long story. On spontaneity of character and feeling the most obvious contribution of the time was Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which remains important in two ways. It extends the notion of education from cognition and will to the feelings, and its notion of education in all these cases is that of a development, or free culture, of spontaneity. However this work does not apply its conception of developed spontaneity to the epistemology of pure normative judgements. As for Kant, the closest he comes to discussing the epistemology of what I have called evaluative reasons is his doctrine of aesthetic judgements in the Critique of Judgement. It resembles in some striking respects the epistemology of judgements about reasons set out below. But the contrast Kant there draws between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘logical’ judgements does not map onto the division between pure judgements about reasons and factual judgements that we are considering, and indeed impedes a fully general view of it. It could be said of all the types of judgements about reasons, and not just ‘judgements of taste’, that they ‘deal with objects of sense—though not so as to determine a concept of these objects for the understanding’ (Kant 1987: 212). That is: when I judge, say, that there’s reason for me to believe this object is black I’m not judging that it is black—and in that sense not determining under what concept it falls. I’m making a judgement which is warrantable in the sense that it’s about me, but also universally legislative in the sense that it enunciates an epistemic reason for anyone in this epistemic state. Similarly for practical reasons. Discussion and critique of Kant’s notion of spontaneity may be found in McDowell 1996; the connections he sees between spontaneity and Bildung, i.e. education understood as ‘having one’s eyes opened to reasons’ (84) seem to me both historically and philosophically perceptive. See also Pippin 1997, ‘Introduction’ and ch. 2, ‘Kant on The Spontaneity of Mind’. 24 Though it has some: consider such notions as ideology, self-deception, bad faith. 25 Here too, of course, there are very large issues to consider: in particular about how far transcendental idealism can itself be interpreted as a kind of irrealist cognitivism about reason. There are clear parallelisms, but Kant’s account of space and time as appearances, his noumenal conception of the self, and his use of transcendental idealism in the ethical context seem to me to preclude such an interpretation. Furthermore, he takes it that reasoning and choice are noumenal, while feeling belongs to the experience of the subject as it empirically appears. This reinforcement of the contrast between belief and action on the one hand and feeling on the other is one of transcendental idealism’s most damaging effects, at least in Kant’s hands; it means, for example, that Kant cannot treat the emotions as spontaneous in his sense, i.e. originating in the self. 26 Or in Kant’s transcendental idealism, an empirically irrealist view. In Kant’s thinking the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity plays a further crucial role in the
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‘original synthetic unity of apperception’. Here he takes it that the knowing and acting self is not given in receptivity, in this case in inner sense, but purely apperceptively. It must follow that the ‘I think’ which (according to Kant) accompanies all my representations is an act of pure spontaneity, and this leads Kant to an empirically irrealist view of the self. Obviously the issue also arises on the view put forward here: should irrealist cognitivism be applied not only to reasons but also to the reasoning self? I hope to pursue this question elsewhere. 27 ‘Concepts are grounded on the spontaneity of thinking, as sensible intuitions on the receptivity of impressions’, and hence ‘receptivity can make cognitions possible only if combined with spontaneity’. The translation is that of Guyer and Wood, in Kant 1997: 205, 228 (A68/B93, A97). 28 Sidgwick comes to mind. Three of his criteria for ethical axioms (self-evidence, consistency, consensus) coincide fairly closely with the three factors I mention below as playing a role in the epistemology of pure propositions about reasons (spontaneity, reflective equilibrium, convergence). See Sidgwick 1981: 338–343. The fourth, ‘clarity and precision’ raises difficulties which a number of critics have noted–see for example Crisp 2002. On Sidgwick’s minimal meta-ethics see Shaver 2000. 29 Mill 1969: 230. Immediately before this passage Mill distinguishes the question whether certain moral feelings are natural from the question whether they are innate. Nevertheless, ‘natural’ has many misleading connotations; ‘spontaneous’, it seems to me, serves our purpose better. 30 So I argue in Skorupski 1997. (Like Mill, Wittgenstein uses the word ‘natural’, as in ‘natural way of going on’; but again the notion being deployed is what I’m calling spontaneity.) 31 Persistent normative disharmony tends to produce a sense of self-alienation. Suppose that I ‘can’t help’ believing everyone is hostile to me. I can see that there’s no reason to believe that, but I still can’t help thinking it. So now I may experience the disposition as alien or intrusive, not really ‘mine’. Alternatively, though I can notionally see the reasons for discounting this disposition, I can’t feel ‘at home’ with them. 32 Skorupski 1999b, pp. 34, 73. 33 As remarked in note 11, there is a question about whether a fact can be a reason for a person if that person is completely impervious to the idea that the fact in question has reason-giving force. If we answer in the negative, we must take it that ‘anyone’ and ‘everyone’ quantify only over those who are able to grasp the class of reasons in question. 34 I have benefited from comments by Jeremy Butterfield, Roger Crisp, Derek Parfit, Josh Parsons, Agustin Rayo, and Stewart Shapiro, all of whom I thank.
REFERENCES Blackburn, S. (1998), Ruling Passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carnap, R. (1950), Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Crisp, R. (2002), ‘Sidgwick and the Boundaries of Intuitionism’, in Philip Stratton-Lake (ed.), Ethical Intuitionism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 56–75. Frege, G. (1977), Logical Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibbard, A. (1990), Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horgan, T. and Timmons, M. (2000), ‘Non-descriptive Cognitivism: Framework for a New Meta-Ethic’, Philosophical Papers, 29: 121–53.
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The Author 2006. Journal compilation
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006
