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Michael Dickson – “Musical Notation”

In this post, Michael Dickson discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Michael’s article can be found here.

a painting of three musicians by pablo picasso
Three Musicians (1921) Pablo Picasso

While scholars have often discussed the artifacts created from musical notation (scores), philosophical exploration of the nature of notation is relatively sparse. My essay “Musical Notation” takes a step back to address foundational questions about notation: What is it? What and how does it express? And what are the implications of this expression?

In my essay, I do not offer an exhaustive philosophy of notation, but I develop a framework that accommodates the complexity and context-dependence inherent in musical notation. The essay focuses on notation in the Western tradition, itself quite diverse, and does not pursue a comprehensive treatment of other traditions.

My approach differs from Nelson Goodman’s work on this topic in two ways: firstly, it avoids his nominalist commitments and, secondly, it acknowledges that musical notation is not a formal language and resists being treated as such.  

To ground the discussion, I introduce four desiderata for any theory of musical notation:

  1. Diverse Uses: The theory must explain the various roles notation plays – e.g., prescriptive (as in scores), mnemonic, transcriptional, pedagogical, and analytic.
  2. Diverse Systems: The theory must accommodate the multitude of notational systems and their integration with specific musical practices.
  3. Extra-notational Interaction: The theory should account for how notation interacts with contextual information, such as titles, composer names, and stylistic indications.
  4. Entanglement with Practice: The theory must recognize that notation is deeply interwoven with the practices it supports, reflecting the cultural, historical, and practical contexts of its use.

I distinguish various types of symbol: for example, sonic symbols, such as quarter-notes, which relate directly to the production of a sound, and supporting symbols, such as staves and clefs, which provide context for establishing the meaning of sonic symbols.

I then turn to disentangling the components of musical notation.

  • Symbol-forms are the abstract shapes or other configurations (such as the shape of a notehead or a rest) that carry musical meaning.
  • Symbol-engravings are the physical manifestations of these forms, found in scores and other notational media.
  • Symbols themselves are abstract entities, created through the association of symbol-forms with meanings, intended for use within a notational system.

This model allows for a nuanced understanding of how notation functions. For instance, the same symbol-form (e.g., a dot) can have different meanings depending on context, as seen in late medieval mensural notation where dots signify various rhythmic values. Similarly, the variability of symbol-engravings, especially in historical manuscripts, underscores the flexibility of notation. A quarter-note engraved as an odd squiggle by Janáček might differ morphologically from the standard engraving, but it remains a quarter-note because of its role within the system.

Symbols are not reducible to their forms or engravings. They are abstract artifacts with meanings and relationships that evolve over time. A clear illustration of this can be found in the historical development of rhythmic notation in the 13th-century treatise De mensurabili musica, where symbols (like the semibrevis) were created by associating specific forms with new rhythmic meanings.

A key contention of my essay concerns the meaning of musical symbols. I call it

Instructional Meaning: the thesis that musical notation denotes imperative meaning.  

Musical instructions are open-ended and flexible.  A whole note, for instance, instructs the performer to sustain a pitch for a duration but leaves details like dynamics, timbre, and phrasing to the performer’s discretion. This abstraction aligns with the nature of performance, where expertise and context fill in the gaps.

I also explore how instructions are expressed. Musical notation employs symbolic, iconic, and sometimes ostensive modes of expression. A crescendo marking might iconically represent a gradual increase in volume, while a symbolic convention determines its precise interpretation. This interplay of modes underscores the richness of notation as a medium for conveying meaning.

One notable feature of musical instructions is their self-directedness. Unlike instructions for baking bread, where the aim is an external product, musical instructions aim at their own enactment. Performing a push-up or playing a scale exemplifies this self-directedness; the goal is the performance of the action itself, irrespective of downstream objectives like fitness or musical presentation.

I contrast Instructional Meaning with

Sonicism: the thesis that notation denotes fixed sonic structures.

Sonicism struggles to account for the variability of performance and interpretation. If scores were tied univocally to specific sonic outcomes, much of the nuance and adaptability of musical practice would be lost.

Instructional Meaning, by contrast, reflects the fact that performers interpret scores as flexible guides, not rigid blueprints. For example, debates about whether a modern piano performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations constitutes a ‘genuine performance’ illustrate the interpretative richness of musical instructions. These debates arise because the instructions encoded in notation (like all instructions) are always mediated by the norms and practices of interpretation.

Instructional Meaning also makes good sense of unperformable scores – notations that describe impossible actions, such as each performer playing louder than the others. Such scores reinforce Instructional Meaning because their interest lies not in any hypothetical sonic outcome but in the instructions themselves and the conceptual engagement they provoke.

Another strength of Instructional Meaning is its ability to account for extra-notational elements. Titles, composer names, stylistic annotations, and other markings often influence how performers interpret scores. For instance, the tempo marking “Maestoso” in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 shapes the performer’s approach, even though it is not part of the core sonic symbols. These interactions demonstrate how musical instructions (like all instructions) are embedded within broader interpretative contexts.

My essay emphasizes that musical notation is inextricably linked to the practices it supports. Understanding a notational system requires familiarity with the cultural and historical context in which it operates. For example, the rhythmic notation of the Notre Dame school of polyphony relies on an implicit knowledge of rhythmic modes specific to that practice. Similarly, contemporary chord symbols like “Fm7” depend on the tonal conventions of modern music.  This entanglement underscores the limitations of treating musical notation as a formal language. Instead, musical notation must be understood as part of a dynamic, context-sensitive practice.

In the conclusion, I speculate on the ontological implications of Instructional Meaning. If musical scores represent musical pieces, and if scores express instructions, then perhaps musical pieces themselves are instructions. This view aligns with the observation that musical pieces are created, instantiated, and contextualized within specific practices. By conceiving musical works as instructions, we gain a fresh perspective on their nature and the role of notation in their realization.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5706/.

About the author

Michael Dickson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.  For many years he worked in philosophy of science, especially physics.  More recently his work has focused on the philosophy of music and psychiatry.

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Martin Glazier and Stephan Krämer – “The Logic of Contingent Actuality”

In this post, Martin Glazier and Stephan Krämer discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

porcelain bust of a woman, with a large baguette and bronze statue precariously set on her head
Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) on view at the MoMA © 2025 Gala-Salvador Dalí
Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York

The word “actually” can be used in many ways. One prominent use is to compare the way things actually are with the way they could have been or must be. For example, we may say that the weather could have been nicer than it actually is or that the chemical formula of any substance must be what it actually is. The orthodox view of this notion of actuality accepts the thesis of

actuality necessitism: for all p, if actually p, then it is necessary that actually p.

For example, since it is actually the case that Trump is president, the necessitist will take it to be necessary that he is actually president.

Although this view is widespread, there are reasons to reject it (Glazier forthcoming). One argument against it, which draws on Dorr and Goodman (2020), appeals to the idea that actuality – the collection of propositions that are actually true –  changes over time. Since actuality has been otherwise, it must be possible for it to be otherwise. So actuality necessitism is false.

In our paper “The Logic of Contingent Actuality”, we explore the logic that results if the assumption of necessitism is dropped. What principles govern necessity, possibility, and actuality, once we allow what is actually true to be contingent?

We do not think that under contingentism just anything goes with respect to actuality. Not every proposition – nor even, perhaps, every possible proposition – could have been actually true. The contingency of actuality has limits, some of which are imposed by the very nature or essence of the notion of actuality. With an eye to these limits, we develop a number of axiomatic systems of modal logic with contingent actuality.

What sort of semantics characterizes these systems? Necessitist logics are typically characterized by a possible worlds semantics with a designated actual world. The statement “actually p” is taken to be true at a possible world just in case p is true at the designated world.

However, a semantics like this will not do for contingentist logics. Instead, our semantics appeals to an actuality function: a function which maps each possible world w to another possible world which serves as w’s actual world. (This world may, but need not be, w itself.) Different possible worlds may therefore have different actual worlds. The statement ‘actually p’ is taken to be true at a world w just in case p is true at w’s actual world, the world to which the actuality function maps w. We establish soundness and completeness results for our contingentist systems.

References

  • Dorr, C. and J. Goodman. (2020). “Diamonds are forever”. Noûs 54(3): 632-65.
  • Glazier, M. (forthcoming). “The contingency of actuality”. Ergo

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Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5713/.

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Michael Walschots – “The Rationality of Love: Benevolence and Complacence in Kant and Hutcheson”

In this post, Michael Walschots discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Michael’s article can be found here.

A couple kissing, flowers in her hands, and a cake on the breakfast table.
“Birthday” (1915) Marc Chagall

Not so long ago, saying that Immanuel Kant had something interesting to say about love would have struck most people as odd. As a prototypical rationalist who looks down upon the sensible side of human existence, it was assumed that love plays an insignificant role in Kant’s thought. Thankfully, this stereotype is fading due to very important research on Kant’s understanding of love published in the past few years.

In Love’s Enlightenment, for instance, Ryan Patrick Hanley argues that Kant is one of the truly preeminent modern theorists of love because of the radical alternative Kant proposes to what Hanley calls the ‘sentimentalist’ and ‘theological’ conceptions that preceded him (Hanley 2017, 135).

In his 2018 book Kant on Love, Pärttyli Rinne carries out the most comprehensive study of Kant’s understanding of love published to date. In it, he illustrates both that Kant has quite a lot to say about love and that his account is relatively detailed, systematic, and consistent throughout all of his major writings (Rinne 2018, 1).

In Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory, Helga Varden argues that, although Kant himself had mistaken views about sex and gender minorities, Kant’s philosophy nonetheless contains the philosophical resources we need to better understand sex, love, and gender in ways that can improve the experience and lives of those most affected by the misunderstanding of these concepts (Varden 2020, 7-8).

Collectively, this recent research illustrates that Kant’s understanding of love might not be as objectionable as one might have expected from a philosopher with such old-fashioned (to put it mildly) views about women, sex, and marriage.

At the same time, a consensus has emerged in the literature, according to which Kant understands love to be a purely pathological phenomenon. Kant himself suggests this reading in various places: in the Metaphysics of Morals, for instance, he claims that

“[l]ove is a matter of feeling [Empfindung], not of willing” (6:401).

He also states that what he calls “practical love”– namely benevolent action from duty – should not be considered love properly speaking because it is “conduct” rather than a feeling (6:399). 

However, Kant also makes an additional claim about love that complicates conceiving of it as a mere feeling. He claims, namely, that

“love in general […] can be divided into that of benevolence and that of complacence (benevolentiae et complacentiae), and both (as is self-evident) must be rational” (6:45n, translation modified)

This “general division” of love, as Rinne has called it (Rinne 2018: 1), is central to Kant’s thinking and raises some important questions about his understanding of love more generally. Perhaps most importantly: Does Kant really think that “love in general”, i.e., all love, can be classified as either benevolence or complacence and thus that all love is rational?

We can only answer this question once we know how Kant understands both benevolence and complacence in the first place. And although Kant and his commentators have lots to say about benevolence, unfortunately not much attention has been given to complacence.

My aims in this paper are twofold:

  1. I offer an interpretation of Kant’s notion of complacence by situating it next to what is likely the historical inspiration for it, namely Francis Hutcheson’s own very similar notion, with which Kant was familiar and with whose terminology Kant remains consistent. 
  2. I seek to identify the sense in which both benevolence and complacence are rational, for Kant, in light of my previous analysis. 

The paper has five sections. 

In section one (1), I introduce Kant’s distinction between benevolence and complacence and its place in his thought.

In section two (2), I outline Hutcheson’s understanding of benevolence and complacence. For Hutcheson, these two types of love correspond to the two central topics of moral philosophy, namely the approval of morally good action, affection, and character by the moral sense (love of complacence) and the motive of morally praiseworthy action (love of benevolence). Hutcheson conceives of these two types of love as rational in the sense that they can only have rational beings as both their subject and object.

In section three (3), I offer an interpretation of Kant’s conception of love of complacence that is informed by certain features of Hutcheson’s understanding of the term. More specifically, I argue that Kant understands complacence as approval and that he distinguishes between two kinds of approval, namely sensible and intellectual, depending on whether the object we approve of is a maxim that promotes happiness or one that is consistent with morality, respectively.

In section four (4), I argue that both complacence and benevolence are rational, for Kant, in the sense that they presuppose that human beings possess certain higher cognitive capacities, namely the capacity to use concepts and the ability to make inferences. I also explain how it is perfectly compatible with, and perhaps even required by, Kant’s empirical psychology for both kinds of love to be rational in this way and yet nonetheless remain a feeling.

I conclude in section five (5) by discussing some broader implications of my previous conclusions. For instance, I give reason to believe that Kant does indeed conceive of all love, properly speaking, as rational in the sense I have described. I also argue that this means that “love as attraction” (6:470), i.e. affectionate love, and sexual love do not count as love properly speaking, for Kant, because they do not involve reason.

As a whole, it is my hope that the paper places us in a position to better understand the nuances of Kant’s conception of love more generally.

References

  • Hanley, R. P. (2017). Love’s Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press.
  • Kant, I. (1900–). Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe). Vol. 1–22 Ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 23 Ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Vol. 24ff. Ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.
  • Rinne, P. (2018). Kant on Love. De Gruyter.
  • Varden, H. (2020). Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory. Oxford University Press.

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Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4670/.

About the author

Michael Walschots is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, where he is part of a project entitled: ‘Rethinking Enlightenment: The Reception of John Locke in Germany’. He is the editor and translator of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: Background Source Materials (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and the co-editor of Christian Wolff’s German Ethics: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2024).

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Brandon Smith – “Healthy and Happy Natural Being: Spinoza and Epicurus Contra the Stoics”

In this post, Brandon Smith discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Brandon’s article can be found here.

etching showing death coming in from the window while a doctor chases it away with a syringe
“The Doctor dismissing Death” (1785) Peter Simon, Francis Jukes, and Thomas Rowlandson

Like many of his fellow philosophers in the seventeenth-century, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) was heavily engaged with the views of ancient thinkers. In particular, Spinoza’s philosophy shares many affinities with Stoicism (James 1993; Miller 2015; Pereboom 1994). Both, for example:

  1. think that God is the universe itself (pantheism) and everything that occurs happens necessarily (determinism);
  2. conceive of happiness as being rational and virtuous;
  3. critique passions as flawed judgments about good and bad; 
  4. promote a therapeutic approach to combatting harmful passions through the practice of modifying our value judgments; and
  5. distinguish between passions and rational emotions.

However, Spinoza also (from his perspective) improves on certain Stoic doctrines by denying that God acts purposefully, acknowledging the goodness of passions in certain contexts, and conceiving of virtue and happiness as both physical and intellectual in nature (DeBrabander 2007; Long 2003; Miller 2015).

Curiously, Spinoza also shares noteworthy affinities with Epicureanism, an important ancient opponent to Stoicism (Bove 1994; Guyau 2020; Lagrée 1994; Vardoulakis 2020). For instance, Spinoza and Epicurus are both committed to:

  1. a rejection of providence, creation, supernatural phenomena, and the immortality of the soul;
  2. materialistic (rather than supernatural) explanations of natural phenomena; and
  3. a pleasure-oriented conception of happiness. 

My focus in this paper is on (iii) because I think that pleasure plays a foundational role in both their philosophies and that previous scholarship does not capture the richness and nuance of the agreements and disagreements between them on this subject. Moreover, Spinoza’s agreements with Epicurus on pleasure make it clear that he is neither a dogmatic disciple of nor a mere innovator on Stoicism, despite his common ground with them in many respects. Ultimately, I argue that Spinoza and Epicurus are committed to three central claims which the Stoics reject:

  1. pleasure holds a necessary connection to being healthy;
  2. pleasure manifests healthy being through positive changes in state and states of healthy being in themselves;
  3. pleasure is by nature good.

Epicurus distinguishes between two kinds of pleasures: kinetic and katastematic (DL X.136; OM I.37). Kinetic pleasure represents a change in one’s state of being through the process of satisfying a desire. Necessary kinetic pleasures, like eating, drinking, sleeping, and learning, directly promote our natural functioning or health by removing either pain in the body or disturbance in the mind. Unnecessary kinetic pleasures conversely diversify the expression of healthy being through desires related to preferences (e.g., satisfying my basic need for food through steak or chocolate in particular), activities (e.g., reading or running), or external things (e.g., wealth, marriage, or social approval). Katastematic pleasure is the enjoyment of being healthy in itself through the absence of desire, for example, being satiated, well-rested, and tranquil. Happiness as the highest good consists specifically in katastematic pleasure. According to Epicurus, all pleasures essentially promote healthy being and happiness, and are thus intrinsically good, because they either lead to, constitute, or diversely express, the unimpeded natural functioning of the body or mind. A pleasure can only be bad then insofar as it is pursued in a manner that leads to its destruction by causing pain or disturbance (i.e., impediments to natural functioning), namely through excess or misunderstanding of the hierarchy of value amongst pleasures (LM 128–132; PD VIII, XXIX–XXX). 

Spinoza makes a similar distinction between transitional and non-transitional pleasures (E3da2; E5p36s; E5p42). All individuals possess an essential power to express and preserve themselves through bodily and mental activities (E3p6; E4p38–9; E4p26). Transitional pleasures, like eating, drinking, and learning, increase our self-affirmative power. Non-transitional pleasures express our degree of self-affirmative power in itself through bodily activities like sculpting or running and mental activities like scientific understanding of God, nature, and ourselves as human beings and individuals. Blessedness, as the highest happiness and good, consists specifically in the non-transitional pleasure of being as physically and intellectually active as possible. Both kinds of pleasure for Spinoza are however by nature good insofar as they are tied to promoting bodily and mental health in the form of physical and intellectual self-empowerment. Any badness that arises from a pleasure is due to that pleasure being enjoyed in an excessive manner that undermines its self-empowering nature. Insofar as we knowingly pursue pleasure in line with its nature then it can only lead to flourishing (E4p41–4s; E5p10s).

In summary, both Epicurus and Spinoza draw necessary connections between pleasure, health, goodness, and happiness.

Health manifests itself as unimpeded bodily/mental functioning for Epicurus and self-affirmative bodily/mental power for Spinoza. Because health is the shared metric of goodness here and happiness is the ultimate good, both philosophers place a happy life in the joy of healthy being (i.e. natural functioning or self-affirmative power) itself.  From this foundation, they distinguish between pleasures as positive health-oriented changes in one’s state of being (kinetic pleasure and transitional pleasure) and pleasures as expressions of healthy being in itself (katastematic pleasure and non-transitional pleasure). It is pleasure’s essential role in promoting bodily and mental health that leads Epicurus and Spinoza to argue that all forms of pleasure are by nature good, and that pleasures can only be bad if enjoyed in a manner that undermines their health-promoting nature as pleasures.

Epicurus and Spinoza, in their own distinctive ways, help us to see the true nature and value of pleasure in our pursuit of flourishing and fulfillment. Epicurus offers us an account of happiness which carries the advantage of being fairly easy to achieve and maintain as the simple enjoyment of physical and mental health, while Spinoza offers us an account which carries the advantage of strongly emphasizing the active connotations of being and living well, in order to encourage us to joyfully express ourselves as fully as possible both physically and intellectually. The ultimate lesson for us is that any harm that comes to us by way of pleasure is the result of our own misunderstanding and misuse of nature’s greatest good and not at all the fault of pleasure (in any of its forms) or our essential desire for it.

References

  • Bove, Laurent (1994). “Épicurisme Et Spinozisme: L’éthique.”  Archives de Philosophie 57(3): 471–484.
  • Cicero, Marcus Tullius (2004). On Moral Ends. Julia Annas (Ed.) and Raphael Woolf (Trans.). Cambridge University Press. [OM]
  • Epicurus (1994). “Letter to Menoeceus”. In Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Eds. and Trans.), The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (28–31). Hackett. [LM]
  • Epicurus (1994). “Principal Doctrines”. In Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Eds. and Trans.), The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (32–36). Hackett. [PD]
  • Guyau, Jean-Marie (2020). Spinoza: A Synthesis of Epicureanism and Stoicism. Frederico Testa (Trans.). Parrhesia, 32, 33–44.
  • James, Susan (1993). “Spinoza the Stoic”. In Tom Sorrell (Ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tensions between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz (289–316). Oxford University Press.
  • Lagrée, Jacqueline (1994). “Spinoza “Athée & Épicurien””. Archives de Philosophie 57(3): 541–558.
  • Long, A. A. (2003). “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition”. In Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Eds.), Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy (7–29). Cambridge University Press. 
  • Miller, Jon (2015). Spinoza and the Stoics. Cambridge University Press. 
  • Pereboom, Derk (1994). Stoic Psychotherapy in Descartes and Spinoza. Faith and Philosophy, 11(4), 592–625. 
  • Spinoza, Benedict de (2002). Ethics. In Michael L. Morgan (Ed.) and Samuel Shirley (Trans.), Spinoza: Complete Works (213–282). Hackett. [E]  [da = definitions of the affects/emotions; p = proposition; s = scholium]
  • Vardoulakis, Dmitris (2020). Spinoza, The Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism. Edinburgh University Press. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6156/.

About the author

Brandon Smith is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. His research interests include Spinoza, 17th century philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of happiness. He is in in the process of turning his dissertation into a book, The Search for Mind-Body Flourishing in Spinoza’s Eudaimonism, which explores Spinoza’s engagement with Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics on the roles of pleasure, virtue, mind, and body in living a happy, flourishing life.

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Ella Whiteley – “Order-Based Salience Patterns in Language: What They Are and Why They Matter”

In this post, Ella Whiteley discusses their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Ella’s article can be found here.

Portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino (ca. 1473-1475) by Piero Della Francesca
Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (ca. 1474) Piero Della Francesca

Imagine you’re talking with someone, and suddenly they shout their last sentence while making emphatic hand gestures. “I do enjoy Jeff Goldblum’s outfits in shows; his luxe dressing gown in Kaos is pretty excellent BUT OH MY GOSH THE UNBUTTONED SHIRT IN JURASSIC PARK!” Outside of finding this mildly disconcerting or amusing, you’d likely find that last part of the communication the most attention-grabbing. The volume, the phrase ‘oh my gosh’, the banging-of-fists on the table – these are explicit cues to focus on those latter words. The part about the unbuttoned shirt stands out, which invites you to treat it as more important and memorable. (The result of course is that the image of Goldblum on that metal doctor’s table is what insists upon your mind’s eye. If it doesn’t, we have identified a horrifying gap in your cultural knowledge that you should now rectify.)

We make certain elements of what we’re saying more salient to our audience in a range of ways – tone of voice, repetition, and so on. Philosophers have pointed out how just mentioning something makes it salient. Maxime LePoutre (2024), for instance, has shown how mentioning a conspiracy theory in service of debunking it can raise the salience of that conspiracy theory. This can have counterproductive consequences: its heightened salience makes the theory feel more familiar and, ultimately, true.  

I want to focus on a different salience mechanism: the order in which we communicate information. Since we cannot say, hear, or read everything at once, ordering is unavoidable. This makes it a particularly important phenomenon to analyse.

Sometimes, the significance of ordering is not subtle or elusive. It’s intuitive that the first page of the newspaper is more salient than page 10. It’s intuitive that what comes up at the top of one’s social media feed is likely to grab one’s attention the most. But I don’t think we’re used to recognising the importance of order in other aspects of communication. Most of us talk about ‘men and women’, ‘kings and queens’, ‘he or she’, without noticing this persistent pattern of positioning men first. Many of us gloss over the pattern whereby we standardly position the ‘for’ first, when we ask if one is ‘for or against’ a given proposal. 

What are the implications of these orderings for audience interpretation? One place to look for answers is psychological research into ‘order effects’ (Haugtvedt & Wegener,1994). A general picture emerges from this research. Firstly, the content positioned first, call it content 1, is generally processed as more salient – more attention-grabbing. Other factors, like volume and tone of voice, inevitably complicate this general rule. But once we control for other factors, we find that, systematically, the first-mentioned content is treated as more salient. Heightened salience is then processed as indicating heightened relevance – content 1 is considered more important for understanding. Audiences then unconsciously draw on various accessible beliefs and associations that help to make sense of this signalled relevance.

This picture explains various psychological findings. For instance, talking about men before women tends to activate gender stereotypes in audiences’ minds, including men being more agential, powerful, assertive, decisive, and so on (Kesebir, 2017). These stereotypes are cognitively accessible and socially licensed ways of interpreting why, through being discussed first, men have been signalled as more salient and relevant. Troublingly, stereotypes that are activated in this covert way generally resist being blocked, and thus audiences are liable effectively to endorse those stereotypes in their subsequent inferences. Order-based salience patterns have unexpected normative significance, then, in virtue of triggering ethically and/or epistemically problematic biases.

I am keen that this insight avoids being appreciated only in certain circumscribed contexts, such as the ordering of binomials. So, let’s think about another example. One trend I have noticed in sex/gender science papers is the tendency to mention sex or gender differences first. In recent decades it has become more standard explicitly to acknowledge gender similarities—something that historically was rarely mentioned or recognised. But routinely such similarities do not make the first page. There’s reason to consider this a problem. A great deal of research has documented a particularly accessible, easy-to-trigger bias of gender essentialism, which treats gender differences as extreme and immutable, a belief routinely justifying a range of harmful social practices (Gelman & Taylor, 2000). By discussing gender differences before similarities, researchers are making them more salient. Order effect research gives us reason to think that audiences will likely process this salience as indicating relevance, which audiences then try to understand by drawing on accessible and licensed beliefs and associations that fit with this gender difference being made more relevant. Gender essentialism, easy-to-activate as it is, risks being triggered in this process. 

There are other risks to consider. Rather than activating specific problematic beliefs or associations, discussing differences before similarities may help more broadly to shape audiences’ overall cognitive map of sex/gender, which has significant effects for what they then notice in the world, the inquiries they conduct, and so on. Or, rather than focus on the downstream effects of these salience patterns, we might reflect on whether the patterns themselves constitute subtle forms of prejudicial speech. Speech act theory, for instance, recognises that we do things with words; saying ‘Run, there’s a fire!’ does not just cause people to flee, it constitutes an act of warning (Langton, 1993). Mentioning men before women might constitute an androcentric act of placing men at the centre of things. Routinely discussing sex/gender differences before similarities might count as a particularly subtle act of essentialising gender.

Imagine an account of a phenomenon, whether that be a historical event, a person, a scientific topic. Imagine that account contained no falsehoods – only truths. Imagine further that it contained every significant and relevant truth –nothing important is left out. I suggest that there may still be ways in which that account can be normatively criticisable. By ordering those truths in a particular way, this account might make salient the ‘wrong’ truths. Perhaps the ordering elicits biases of ours, which trigger false beliefs. Perhaps it simply counts as a subtle form of prejudice. 

References

  • Gelman, S., and M. Taylor (2000). “Gender Essentialism in Cognitive Development”. In P. H. Miller and E. Scholnick (Eds.), Towards a Feminist Developmental Psychology (169–90). Routledge.
  • Haugtvedt, C. O. and D. T. Wegener (1994). “Message Order Effects in Persuasion: An Attitude Strength Perspective”. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1): 205–18.
  • Kesebir, S. (2017). “Word Order Denotes Relevance Differences: The Case of Conjoined Phrases with Lexical Gender”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2): 262–279.
  • Langton, R. (1993). “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts”. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22(4): 293–330.
  • Lepoutre, M. (2024). “Narrative Counterspeech”. Political Studies, 72(2): 570-589.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6166/.

About the author

Ella Whiteley is a Lecturer in PPE at the University of Sheffield. Their research interests are primarily in ethics, social epistemology, and political philosophy. Their key specialism is the normative dimensions of salience and attention; Ella is interested in how mere patterns of salience can cause or constitute discrimination, a harm, or an epistemic flaw. Since their role at the ‘Invisible Labour Project’ at the University of Cambridge, Ella also works on the philosophy of labour. 

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Neil Levy – “Believing in Shmeliefs”

In this post, Neil Levy discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Neil’s article can be found here.

Screenshot from the X-Files episode “Bad Blood” showing Mulder's famous "I Want to Believe" poster
Screenshot from the X-Files episode “Bad Blood” (1998)

Much of my work has been devoted to arguing that bad believers – anti-vaxxers and climate change sceptics, say – are epistemically rational. That is, they respond to their evidence appropriately. They simply trust different sources of testimony to those of us who accept the official stories. This account has met with a variety of objections, but there’s one in particular that I concede my account can’t handle: the objection from the incredulous stare. There are bad beliefs that people just can’t accept on a rational basis; not in this century, with access to the information we all have available and in the face of easily assessed evidence.

Think of those people who purport to believe that reptilian shape-shifters occupy central positions of power in the world, including among their ranks US presidents, British and Canadian prime ministers, and the House of Windsor. This theory has many thousands of adherents and David Icke, its principal proponent, speaks to crowds numbering in their thousands. How can anyone seriously believe that?

While there may be some few people who are true believers, I suspect that they are a small proportion of the people who say they believe that King Charles is a reptilian, or those who say they believe the Earth is flat. In addition to the true believers, there are many trolls and shmelievers.

True believers are people genuinely trying to proportion their belief that the Earth is flat to their evidence who end up believing that the Earth is flat. They probably exist, but they are unusual. Trolls are people who don’t believe that the Earth is flat but enjoy the reaction they get when they say that they believe that the Earth is flat. Shmelievers are people who don’t believe that the Earth is flat but take themselves to believe it.

There’s good evidence that a significant proportion of respondents to polls and participants in research are trolls. Consider the claim that a significant number of people drank bleach to combat COVID-19. The CDC’s research found that 4% of respondents were drinking bleach (allegedly following Trump’s advice). Leib Litman and colleagues replicated the CDC study with a larger sample. But once the people who reported accidentally drinking a cleaning product or accidentally answering ‘yes’ to the question were eliminated, 100% of those who reported drinking or gargling with bleach or another household cleaner were ‘problematic respondents’. They also reported incredible demographics, or that they had never used the internet in their lives (the study was online), or that they had previously suffered a fatal heart attack. They’re trolls, reporting beliefs they don’t hold for the lulz.

Expressive responders also count as trolls on this taxonomy, though their motivation seems to be to express or to signal support for their side by insincere report. For example, the 15% of Trump supporters who reported believing that a photo of his inauguration showed more people than did a photo of the Obama inauguration count as trolls; it’s not plausible that they really thought the photo showed more people.

While there is direct evidence for the existence of trolls, the existence of shmelievers must be inferred. We have grounds for thinking that some people who report believing incredible claims, like the flat Earth theory, are sincere. Sometimes they come to reject the belief but report they were sincere at the time. Yet they don’t seem to be believers either. They don’t act consistently with the theory, for instance. Hugo Mercier points to the many people who claimed to believe that Jewish shopkeepers were kidnapping gentile girls in the town of Orleans in the late ‘60s. At the height of the rumor, some people stopped and stared at the supposedly offending shops – hardly the response called for by true belief. 

Shmeliefs can also be distinguished from genuine beliefs by the kind of evidence that shmelievers cite for them. True believers are discerning in what evidence they accept; shmelievers are not. Recall the kinds of evidence cited during the pandemic for the claim that the whole thing was a nefarious plot: the fact that ‘delta omicron’ is an anagram of ‘media control’ or claims that movies like I Am Legend show the dangers of the vaccine. When people cite evidence like that, they demonstrate that they aren’t really concerned with the truth of their claims.

How can someone take themselves to believe something they don’t believe? Citing anagrams and movie stills as evidence is a playful approach to offering support, and I think shmelievers are engaged in a sort of imaginative game. Being a believer is akin to becoming absorbed in a fiction. Conspiracy theories are, after all, fun; it’s easy to get absorbed in the conspiratorial or paranormal enchanted worlds they offer us. The main difference between me watching the X-Files and the conspiracy theorist who takes themselves to believe that the US is really concealing the bodies of aliens from a UFO that crashed at Roswell is that I know it’s a fiction.

How do shmelievers lose track of the fact that they’re playing ‘conspiracy theory’? At least part of the explanation is that shmeliefs often receive social support: the shmeliever identifies with people who share the fantasy, while people that push back against it are neither trusted by the shmeliever nor apt to engage them in a way that encourages dialogue. Moreover, the world doesn’t push back against the shmelief; the shmelief predicts the evidence that might be cited against it. This is known as the ‘self-sealing quality’ of conspiracy theories: any attempt to dispel the theory can be interpreted as further proof of the conspiracy.

If bizarre claims are believed less often than we might think and have few consequences for behavior, what harm do they do? I suspect that shmeliefs are often supported by and help to sustain genuine beliefs (that the government doesn’t care about people like me, for example). However, shmeliefs prevent these genuine beliefs from coming clearly into view, either for the shmeliever or for those around them. To that extent, they undermine dialogue and side track debates down unproductive alleys. These effects might be sought: those who want to stymie debate have an interest in the promotion of shmeliefs. 

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Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6158/.

About the author

Neil Levy is professor of philosophy at Macquarie University (Sydney) and a senior research fellow at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford. He has published widely in philosophy on a variety of topics, with an emphasis recently on the rationality of belief.

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Paul L. Franco – “Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication”

In this post, Paul L. Franco discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Paul’s article can be found here.

portrait of Susan Stebbing, 1939
Lizzie Susan Stebbing
photographed by Howard Coster (1939) © National Portrait Gallery, London

In anthologies aimed at giving readers an overview of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century, we are used to seeing listed works by G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But upon reading these anthologies it is not immediately obvious what, say, Moore’s common-sense philosophy shares with Carnap’s scientific philosophy. Moore waves his hands to prove an external world; Carnap uses formal languages to logically construct it. Yet, both belong to a tradition now-called analytic philosophy. Following Alan Richardson, I think an interesting question in history of analytic philosophy concerns how this happened. 

One common story centers A.J. Ayer’s visit around 1933 to the Vienna Circle to study with Moritz Schlick, Carnap’s colleague and leading representative of the logical positivist movement. Ayer distilled the lessons from his visit in his book Language, Truth and Logic (1936). In a readable style – more accessible than the technical work of some Vienna Circle members – Ayer brought the good word of verificationism to an Anglophone audience, resulting in vigorous debate.

Like Siobhan Chapman, Michael Beaney, and others, I think that this story – although not entirely wrong – neglects Susan Stebbing’s role in shaping early analytic philosophy. She contributed through her involvement with the journal Analysis, which published papers on logical positivism before 1936. She was also a central institutional figure in other ways, inviting Schlick and Carnap to lecture in London. In contrast with Ayer, who admitted that the extent of his scientific background was listening to a Geiger counter once in a lab, Stebbing, like the logical positivists, paid close attention to science. 

Stebbing’s sustained engagement with logical positivists in articles and reviews in the thirties is central to their reception in the British context. This work is also a core part of Stebbing’s rich output on philosophical analysis. For these reasons, her work illuminates early analytic philosophy’s development.

My paper reconstructs and interprets Stebbing’s criticisms of the logical positivist conception of analysis. The centerpiece is “Logical Positivism and Analysis” in which she contrasts her understanding of the logical positivist approach with the sort of analysis Moore practices. Stebbing argues that Moore insists on a threefold distinction between:

  1. knowing that a proposition is true;
  2. understanding its meaning;
  3. giving an analysis of it.

Accordingly, philosophical analysis doesn’t give the meaning of statements or justify them. Instead, it clarifies relationships between statements which are already known and understood.

Although she is not an acolyte of Moore, Stebbing agrees with the fundamentals of his account and contrasts it with the picture offered by logical positivism. On her view, the logical positivist conception of analysis – represented by Wittgenstein, Schlick, and Carnap – begins with the principle of verification. This principle says the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. To know a statement’s meaning is to know what verifies it, and philosophical analysis clarifies a statement’s meaning by revealing its verification conditions. Carnap was also committed to what he called methodological solipsism. This is the view that the verification of statements about physical objects and other minds is provided by that which is immediately given in phenomenal experience. Adopting this methodological commitment means that verification conditions reduce to first-personal statements about experience.

Stebbing asks how the principle of verification can ground communication in light of methodological solipsism. For her, the logical positivists should be able to answer. This is because they are interested in meaning and knowledge, and communication is necessary for intersubjective knowledge. Here, we come to the crux of her criticisms. She says that the identification of meaning with verification conditions collapses Moore’s threefold distinction. Then, she argues that in collapsing the distinction, and given Carnap’s methodological solipsism, the principle of verification gives counterintuitive conclusions about the meaning of statements about other minds and the past.

For example, on Stebbing’s account of logical positivism, the meaning of your statement “I have a toothache” is, for me, given in first-personal statements about my experience of your bodily behavior, your utterances, and so on. Similarly, the meaning of historical statements like “Queen Anne died in 1714” is given by first-personal statements about my experience when consulting the relevant records. After all, the verification theory of meaning identifies the meaning of statements with their verification conditions and methodological solipsism says those are found in statements about what is given in phenomenal experience. But Stebbing thinks this misidentifies knowing that a statement is true with understanding its meaning. For her, it is clear that you don’t intend to communicate about my experience in talking about your toothache. It is also clear that when you speak about Queen Anne’s death, you do not intend to communicate about the way I would verify it. Instead, in talking about your toothache, you intend to communicate about your experience; in talking about Queen Anne’s death, you intend to communicate about the world. Stebbing thinks that I understand the meaning of both statements because they are about the “same sort” (Stebbing 1934, 170) of things I could experience, even though I’m not currently experiencing them. For Stebbing, it is this “same-sortness” of experience which grounds our understanding of the meaning of statements about other minds and history, not our knowledge of their verification conditions. 

These are just the basics; my paper has other details of Stebbing’s criticisms – and related ones by Margaret MacDonald –that I’m tempted to mention but won’t. Instead, I’ll close by explaining how paying close attention to Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism can be helpful. As I see it, there are three main upshots.  

First, we can better understand Stebbing’s novel contributions to the analytic turn in philosophy, especially her attention to the nuances of different types of philosophical analysis. 

Second, we realize that the well-worn, presumed-to-be-devastating objection that the principle of verification fails to meet its own criteria for meaningfulness doesn’t appear in Stebbing’s work. Rather, she is concerned about whether logical positivism provides an account of meaning that explains successful communication. Whatever problems verificationism was thought to have, they were more interesting than whether the principle of verification is verifiable.

Third, by paying close attention to Stebbing’s focus on communication, we can better understand how her appeal to the common-sense conviction that we understand what we are talking about when we talk in clear and unambiguous ways is echoed in criticisms of logical positivism in ensuing decades – in particular, in the criticisms developed by ordinary language philosophers like J.L. Austin and P.F. Strawson. 

Stebbing shaped the understanding of logical positivism in a way that made their brand of philosophical analysis recognizably similar to that of philosophers who didn’t share their scientific concerns. In doing so, she helped create the big tent that is early analytic philosophy. 

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Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5185/.

About the author

Paul L. Franco is Associate Teaching Professor in Philosophy at the University of Washington-Seattle. His research is in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of philosophy of science, values in science, and intersections between the three areas. He currently serves as the treasurer for HOPOS. 

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Justin Capes – “The W-Defense Defended”

In this post, Justin Capes discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Justin’s article can be found here.

street sign indicating that expectations and reality go in opposite directions

A person deserves blame for what she did only if she could have avoided doing it. This principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), as it has come to be known, sounds plausible. But why think it’s true?

David Widerker (2000, 2003) suggests an answer that I find attractive. Widerker’s argument, which is known as the W-defense, goes something like this:

Premise 1: A person deserves blame for what she did only if it would have been reasonable to expect her not to do it.

Premise 2: It would have been reasonable to expect a person not to do what she did only if she could have avoided doing it.

Conclusion: A person deserves blame for what she did only if she could have avoided doing it.

This argument is significant, as it promises to advance a debate many believe has reached an impasse. But does it deliver? Does it yield a convincing argument for PAP? 

Some think not. In a past philosophical life, I complained that Premise 1 is unmotivated (Capes 2010). Others have complained that it requires us to reject intuitively plausible judgments about particular cases (Frankfurt 2003; McKenna 2005, 2008). And still others have complained that Premise 2 depends on the controversial ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ maxim (Fischer 2006).

None of these complaints, though, is legitimate. I respond to each of them in turn.

Start with complaint (lodged by my past philosophical self) that Premise 1 is unmotivated. This isn’t so. Premise 1 is supported by many of our ordinary and uncontroversial moral practices. Consider, for example, what we do when we want to persuade others that we don’t deserve blame for what we did. One of the most obvious strategies is to argue that expecting us to behave any differently would have been unreasonable – in behaving as we did, we didn’t fail to live up to any reasonable expectations. If we can establish this, either by showing that we didn’t fail to live up to others’ expectations or by showing that, if we have, the expectations in question were unreasonable, that will suffice, it seems, to demonstrate that we aren’t blameworthy for our behavior. Premise 1 thus looks pretty plausible.

Often, though, ideas that sound plausible have counterexamples. Consider the following case (modeled on a famous example from Frankfurt 1969):

Shooter: Jones shoots Smith without hesitation. But if Jones had hesitated, a nefarious neuroscientist would have taken control of Jones’s brain and forced him to shoot Smith, and there is nothing Jones could have done to stop this from happening.

Because Jones shot Smith on his own, without being caused to do so by the neuroscientist, many judge that Jones deserves some blame for shooting Smith, even though he couldn’t have avoided shooting Smith (since the neuroscientist would have forced him to shoot Smith if he hadn’t done so on his own). Thus, many philosophers think cases like Shooter are counterexamples to PAP. 

Many of those same philosophers also think cases like Shooter are counterexamples to Premise 1 of the W-defense. They grant, for the sake of argument, that it wouldn’t have been reasonable to expect Jones to avoid shooting Smith, given that he couldn’t have avoided doing so. However, they claim that Jones deserves some blame for shooting Smith, nonetheless.

So, here’s the situation. Premise 1 is plausible, but it also seems to conflict with our intuitive sense that Jones deserves some blame for what he did. What’s a W-defender to do? 

As I see it, we should have our cake and eat it too. Here’s the recipe. Note that, in the example, Jones shoots Smith on his own (i.e., without being forced to do so), and, although Jones couldn’t have avoided shooting Smith, he could have avoided shooting Smith on his own. For example, he could have thought twice about shooting Smith, hesitating enough to prompt the neuroscientist to intervene and force him to shoot Smith. Moreover, we could reasonably have expected Jones to do just that. We can therefore justly blame Jones for shooting Smith on his own (or for shooting Smith without hesitation), since we could reasonably have expected Jones to avoid doing that. What we can’t justly blame Jones for, though, is shooting Smith, as we couldn’t have reasonably expected him to avoid doing that.

So, Jones does deserve some blame for something in this case, but what he deserves blame for is something he could have avoided and that we could reasonably have expected him to avoid. In this way, we can retain PAP and Premise 1 of the W-defense without having to deny that there is indeed something in Shooter for which Jones deserves some blame.

What about Premise 2? Well, it arguably entails the controversial deontic maxim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (the Maxim, for short), and some see this as reason to reject it (Fischer 2006: 210). However, I argue that the case for Premise 2 is stronger than the case against the Maxim. So, if Premise 2 entails the Maxim, we should accept both claims.

To illustrate this, imagine the following:

Sandy walks by a lake with twenty children in it, all of whom are clearly drowning. She can’t rescue all twenty children; there’s not enough time and no one else around to help.

What would it be reasonable to expect Sandy to do in this situation? The obvious answer is: to save as many of the drowning children as she can. But why isn’t it reasonable to expect her to save all twenty? Here, too, the answer is obvious; it’s because she can’t save all twenty. 

I think we will be hard pressed to account for these judgments without appealing to the general idea (of which Premise 2 is an instance) that expecting something of someone is reasonable only if the person can comply with the expectation. Since the judgements in question are correct, I think we should accept the general idea (and thus Premise 2).

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5717/.

References

  • Capes, Justin. (2010). “The W-Defense.” Philosophical Studies 150: 61-77.
  • Fischer, John Martin. (2006). My Way. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Frankfurt, Harry. (1969). “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66: 829-39.
  • Frankfurt, Harry. (2003). “Some Thoughts Concerning PAP.” In Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna, 339-348. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press.
  • McKenna, Michael. (2005). “Where Frankfurt and Strawson Meet.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29: 163-180.
  • McKenna, Michael. (2008). “Frankfurt’s Argument Against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Looking Beyond the Examples.” Nous 42: 770-793.
  • Widerker, David. (2000). “Frankfurt’s Attack on Alternative Possibilities: A Further Look,” Philosophical Perspectives 14: 181-201.
  • Widerker, David. (2003). “Blameworthiness, and Frankfurt’s Argument Against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna, 53-74. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press.

About the author

Justin Capes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flagler College. He writes on issues in ethics and the philosophy of action, especially those that concern proper responses to wrongdoing.

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Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer – “Tightlacing and Abusive Normative Address”

In this post, Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

“Standing woman viewed from the front, clasping her corset” (ca. 1883) Edgar Degas

When we interact with each other, we draw on assumptions about what the other is like. When I talk to someone, I assume they can understand me; when I ask them for help, I assume they are capable of helping; when I offer help, I assume it is in their interest. These assumptions are often neither explicit nor conscious, but they guide our interactions.

Likewise, when we act, we are influenced by assumptions about what we ourselves are like. I only get into the pool because I assume that I can swim; I go to bed early because I assume that I need a certain amount of sleep; I hesitate to run for a public office because I am unsure I can handle its pressures.

Our agency is thus deeply influenced by our conception of ourselves. This also holds for our moral agency. We may feel under a duty to help others because we assume not only that they need help but also that we are able to offer the help they need at no great cost to ourselves. Conversely, we think that others should help when we assume they are able to and it is not too demanding. Whether we think we have a certain duty, then, depends in part on what kind of people we understand ourselves to be, including what we understand our capacities to be and what we think will count as unduly burdensome for us. 

This makes us vulnerable to having our self-conceptions wrongfully distorted by others in ways that control how we think we should act. We call this kind of wrong “tightlacing”.

Tightlacing occurs when someone is subjected to influences that foreseeably distort their self-conception in a way that makes them have overburdening demands on themselves. This may come about in various ways, but moral address, and the assumptions it makes about its target, are a particularly useful vehicle for it. Consider two examples:

  • Some parents want their children to suppress their emotions, especially where they are negative, and this can lead to emotional abuse. If normal episodes of, say, a child’s anger regularly elicit responses like “Keep your ridiculous anger to yourself”, “Why are you annoying us with this?”, or “Your mother/father is having such a hard time already, and now you’re being so unhelpful”, a moral demand is made that conveys an assumption about what the child is like. They are expected to be able to suppress their anger in order not to annoy their parents, and this conveys that their anger is something they should be in control of, and that managing it away has no cost to them.
  • Survivors of political atrocities like the Holocaust are sometimes expected to overcome feelings of resentment to enable a society to move forward. Where they refuse to do so, they may find themselves accused of vengefulness and egoism. Their resentment is not treated as a proper emotional reaction to the horror they experienced, but as something they, in the interest of society, should be able to get rid of. This expectation, too, conveys a view of their emotional nature.

In these examples, people are addressed with moral demands based on the assumption that they can regulate their emotions away in order to benefit others without significant cost to themselves. Given the perceived authority of moral demands and the fact that these problematic assumptions are left implicit, this risks manipulating the moral addressees into accepting the view conveyed. If successful, this strategy induces in them a distorted view of themselves: for example, that they are beings with no significant affective nature, or at least with an affective nature that can be easily disposed of. As a consequence, they will tend not to view their emotions as a natural and integral part of themselves, and they will not recognise that emotion regulation can be a difficult and costly task. In short, their view of themselves might become distorted.

This tightlaces them: if someone is made to think their affective nature carries no weight and is easily managed away, they will make moral demands on themselves that are based on this assumption. Once manipulated into thinking that one’s anger has no significance, or that emotion regulation has no costs, these agents are likely to expect themselves to regulate their anger away even when doing so is in fact inappropriate. They will apply norms to themselves that appear to be justified but, given their actual nature, are in fact decidedly overburdening. Victims of tightlacing thus find themselves wearing a normative corset which does not fit what they are like.

We are not saying that tightlacing is the only form of wrongdoing occurring in these examples. Nor do we think that tightlacing only occurs in relation to managing feelings; it occurs whenever someone’s view of themselves is changed such that they apply overburdening demands to themselves. 

Tightlacing wrongs people in many ways: it is manipulative, it makes unreasonable demands, and it is likely harmful to its victims. But, in addition to this, there are two especially significant ways in which it is wrongful. First, by pressuring the victims into applying unreasonable demands to themselves, it denies their rights, and it makes them complicit in this denial. Second, it erases who they are and, again, makes them complicit in this erasure of who they are.

To sum up, our actions and interactions depend on our conception of what we and others are like. This makes us vulnerable not only to other people’s conception of us, but also to what they may do to alter our conception of ourselves. Not abiding by a distorted conception of ourselves, and not being tightlaced into unfitting norms, matters greatly to our lives and our freedom. To break free of unfitting normative corsets, we need to let go of such distorted conceptions. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4644/.

About the authors

Alexander Edlich is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where he completed his PhD in 2023. He works on moral responsibility (specifically blame, protest, and apology), the philosophy of emotions, and feminist and LGBTQ ethics.

Alfred Archer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. He is interested in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of sport and moral psychology. He is the co-author of Honouring and Admiring the Immoral: An Ethical Guide (Routledge 2021), Why It’s Ok to be a Sports Fan (Routledge 2024) and Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies (Oxford University Press 2024).

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Sebastian Bender – “Spinoza on the Essences of Singular Things”

In this post, Sebastian Bender discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Sebastian’s article can be found here.

Picture of a red drop at the center of an intricate double spiral pattern painted on a rugged cloth
“At the core” (1935) Paul Klee

Essences play a key role in Spinoza’s philosophy, but it is surprisingly difficult to figure out what he takes them to be. Are essences concepts, as some commentators suggest? (Wolfson 1934; Newlands 2018.) Or are they something in things? And what is their theoretical role in Spinoza’s system?

The surprising finding of the paper is that Spinoza’s account of essence is much further removed from traditional Aristotelian accounts than one might expect.

The notion of essence has had a central role in the history of Western philosophy at least since Aristotle, and Spinoza’s account can only be understood against this background. For Aristotle and his scholastic successors, the essence of a thing tells us what that thing is. A well-known example is the Aristotelian definition of a human being as a rational animal. This definition expresses the essence of a human. It states that being rational and being an animal are essential to being human.

Three aspects of traditional Aristotelian essences are noteworthy. First, they are universal. Tina and Tom both belong to the species ‘human’ because they share the same essence. Thus, Aristotelians hold that essences explain why individuals belong to a certain kind or species. Second, the essential features of a thing are its core features, and they are explanatorily prior to any non-essential features. The ability to laugh, for example, is something humans cannot lack, but it is not an essential quality because it depends on rationality, which is explanatorily prior. Finally, according to Aristotelians essential features are intrinsic. This last point is often not mentioned, presumably because it is taken for granted (it is made explicit, though, by Cohen & Reeve 2021).

In the early modern period, many aspects of the Aristotelian metaphysical framework are overthrown. This includes, for instance, the notions of substantial form and prime matter, which many early modern philosophers deem useless or confused. Other Aristotelian concepts and tools, however, continue to be used; among them is the notion of essence. Despite their strongly anti-Aristotelian rhetoric, philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Cavendish more or less adhere to an Aristotelian conception of essence (Schechtman 2024).

What about Spinoza? As recent scholarship has shown, there is at least one clear point of divergence between Spinoza and the Aristotelian tradition: Spinozistic essences are most likely individual essences (Martin 2008; Della Rocca 2008). For Spinoza, humans do not all share the same essence; instead each human being has a highly specific individual essence. In fact, Spinoza tends to view general kind concepts, such as ‘human’ or ‘horse,’ as epistemically problematic. Such concepts may mislead us because they tempt us to ignore real and meaningful differences between distinct things in the world. Like many other philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century (including, e.g., Leibniz), Spinoza severs the connection between essences and kinds (Schechtman 2024).

Setting this issue aside, however, many commentators have argued that Spinoza by and large adopts an Aristotelian framework of essence. Here is Thomas Ward’s succinct summary of this reading:

Although [Spinoza] rejects part of the Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which it is in virtue of its essence that a thing is a member of a kind, he nevertheless retains a different part of an Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which an essence is some structural feature of a thing which causally explains other, non-essential features. (Ward 2011, p. 44)

Thus, it seems that according to Spinoza essences are intrinsic features of things, and they are explanatorily prior in that they account for the less fundamental features of such things. It thus seems that, except for the fact that his essences are individual while Aristotelian essences are universal, Spinoza accepts much of the Aristotelian framework.

In contrast, I argue that Spinoza’s account of essence is much less Aristotelian than this commonly held view might suggest. The main issue is that Spinoza questions an idea which Aristotelians, and many other philosophers, simply take for granted: that the essence of a thing tells us what that thing is. On Spinoza’s view, essences – at least the essences of singular things – can do so only in part. 

To see why this is so, it is important to note (i) how singular things relate to God for Spinoza, and (ii) how singular things relate to their own causal history.

As for the first point, Spinoza is a substance monist, who holds that God is the only substance. Everything else—be it tables, apples, or planets—is ‘in’ God and can only be ‘conceived through’ God (E1def5). Thus, in order to (fully) understand what a certain singular thing is, one needs to understand God.

As for the second point, Spinoza holds that “[t]he cognition of an effect depends on, and involves, the cognition of its cause” (E1ax4, translation modified). Thus, in order to (fully) understand what a singular thing is, one must grasp the entire causal history of the thing.

It may seem, then, that essences are really packed, or ‘overloaded,’ for Spinoza (Della Rocca 2008; Lin 2012). But this is not his view. In fact, Spinoza tries to explicitly avoid the ‘overloading’ of essences. At an important passage, he writes that “singular things can neither be nor be conceived without God, and nevertheless, God does not pertain to their essence” (E2p10s2). Similarly, Spinoza does not include the causal history of singular things in their essences.

The result is that, unlike Aristotelians, Spinoza believes that the essences of singular things do not render these things fully conceivable. Both God and the causal history of a thing are needed to fully grasp what a thing is. But since Spinoza excludes information about God and causal history from the essences of singular things, grasping these essences does not enable us to (fully) understand what the things they are essences of truly are. From this we can conclude that Spinoza’s view of essences and their theoretical role is quite different from the traditional Aristotelian account.

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References

  • Cohen, S. Marc and C. D. C. Reeve (2021). “Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). Ed by Edward N. Zalta. URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/>.
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  • Lin, Martin (2012). “Rationalism and Necessitarianism.” Noûs 46(3): 418–48.
  • Martin, Christopher (2008). “The Framework of Essences in Spinoza’s Ethics.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16(3): 489–509.
  • Newlands, Samuel (2018). Reconceiving Spinoza. Oxford University Press.
  • Schechtman, Anat (2024). “Modern.” In: The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. Ed. by Kathrin Koslicki and Michael Raven. Routledge, 41-52.
  • Spinoza, Baruch de (1985). The Collected Works of Spinoza (2 vols.). Ed. and trans. by E. Curley. Princeton University Press. [References to the Ethics (E) are cited by using the following abbreviations: ax = axiom, d = demonstration, def = definition, p = part, s = scholium.]
  • Ward, Thomas (2011). “Spinoza on the Essences of Modes. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (1): 19–46.
  • Wolfson, Harry (1934). The Philosophy of Spinoza. Harvard University Press.

About the author

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Sebastian Bender is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on early modern philosophy, especially on the metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy of this era. He writes on figures such as Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Anne Conway, John Locke, Margaret Cavendish, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.