Posted on by

Corey Dethier – “Interpreting the Probabilistic Language in IPCC Reports”

A young sibyl (sacred interpreter of the word of god in pagan religions) argues with an old prophet (sacred interpreter of the word of god in monotheistic religions). It looks as if the discussion will go on for a long while.
Detail of “A sibyl and a prophet” (ca. 1495) Andrea Mantegna

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

Every few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases reports on the current status of climate science. These reports are massive reviews of the existing literature by the most qualified experts in the field. As such, IPCC reports are widely taken to represent our best understanding of what the science currently tells us. For this reason, the IPCC’s findings are important, as is their method of presentation.

The IPCC typically qualifies its findings using different scales. In its 2013 report, for example, the IPCC says that the sensitivity of global temperatures to increases in CO2 concentration is “likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence) and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)” (IPCC 2013, 81).

You might wonder what exactly these qualifications mean. On what grounds does the IPCC say that something is “likely” as opposed to “very likely”? And why does it assign “high confidence” to some claims and “medium confidence” to others? If you do wonder about this, you are not alone. Even many of the scientists involved in writing the IPCC reports find these qualifications confusing (Janzwood 2020; Mach et al. 2017). My recent paper – “Interpreting the Probabilistic Language in IPCC Reports” – aims to clarify this issue, with particular focus on the IPCC’s appeal to the likelihood scale.

Traditionally, probabilistic language such as “likely” has been interpreted in two ways. On a frequentist interpretation, something is “likely” when it happens with relatively high frequency in similar situations, while it is “very likely” when it happens with a much greater frequency. On a personalist interpretation, something is “likely” when you are more confident that it will happen than not, while something is “very likely” when you are much more confident.

Which of these interpretations better fits the IPCC’s practice? I argue that neither of them does. My main reason is that both interpretations are closely tied to specific methodologies in statistics. The frequentist interpretation is appropriate for “classical” statistical testing, whereas the personalist interpretation is appropriate when “Bayesian” methods are used. The details about the differences between these methods do not matter for our present purposes. My main point is that climate scientists use both kinds of statistics in their research, and since the IPCC’s report reviews all of the relevant literature, the same language is used to summarize results derived from both methods.

If neither of the traditional interpretations works, what should we use instead? My suggestion is the following: we should understand the IPCC’s use of probabilistic terms more like a letter grade (an A or a B or a C, etc.) than as strict probabilistic claims implying a certain probabilistic methodology.

An A in geometry or English suggests that a student is well-versed in the subject according to the standards of the class. If the standards are sufficiently rigorous, we can conclude that the student will probably do well when faced with new problems in the same subject area. But an A in geometry does not mean that the student will correctly solve geometry problems with a given frequency, nor does it specify an appropriate amount of confidence that you should have that they’ll solve a new geometry problem. 

The IPCC’s use of terms such as “likely” is similar. When the IPCC says that a claim is likely, that’s like saying that it got a C in a very hard test. When the IPCC says that sensitivity is “extremely unlikely less than 1°C”, that’s like saying that this claim fails the test entirely. In this analogy, the IPCC’s judgments of confidence reflect the experts’ evaluation of the quality of the class or test: “high confidence” means that the experts think that the test was very good. But even when a claim passes the test with full marks, and the test is judged to be very good, this only gives us a qualitative evaluation. Just as you shouldn’t conclude that an A student will get 90% of problems right in the future, you also shouldn’t conclude that something that the IPCC categorizes as “very likely” will happen at least 90% of the time. The judgment has an important qualitative component, which a purely numerical interpretation would miss.

It would be nice – for economists, for insurance companies, and for philosophers obsessed with precision – if the IPCC could make purely quantitative probabilistic claims. At the end of my paper, I discuss whether the IPCC should strive to do so. I’m on the fence: there are both costs and benefits. Crucially, however, my analysis suggests that this would require the IPCC to go beyond its current remit: in order to present results that allow for a precise quantitative interpretation of its probability claims, the IPCC would have to do more than simply summarize the current state of the research. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4637/.

References

  • IPCC (2013). Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thomas F. Stocker, Dahe Qin at al. (Eds.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Janzwood, Scott (2020). “Confident, Likely, or Both? The Implementation of the Uncertainty Language Framework in IPCC Special Reports”. Climatic Change 162, 1655–75.
  • Mach, Katharine J., Michael D. Mastrandrea, at al. (2017). “Unleashing Expert Judgment in Assessment”. Global Environmental Change 44, 1–14.

About the author

Corey Dethier is a postdoctoral fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. He has published on a variety of topics relating to epistemology, rationality, and scientific method, but his main research focus is on epistemological and methodological issues in climate science, particularly those raised by the use of idealized statistical models to answer questions about climate change.

Posted on by

Christine Bratu – “How (Not) To Wrong Others with Our Thoughts”

image of two cherubs thinking
Detail of the San Sisto Madonna (c. 1513-1514) Raphael

In this post, Christine Bratu discusses her article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Christine’s article can be found here.

Imagine Jim attends a fancy reception and, seeing a person of color standing around in a tuxedo, concludes that they are a waiter (when, in fact, they, too, are a guest). Alternatively, picture Anna who, during a prestigious conference, sees a young woman setting up a laptop at the lectern and concludes that she is part of the organizing team (when, in fact, this woman is the renowned professor who will give the keynote lecture). In many of us, cases like these elicit the fundamental intuition that there is something morally problematic going on.

Some philosophers have used this intuition to argue for the possibility of doxastic wronging (Basu 2018, 2019a, 2019b; Basu and Schroeder 2019; Keller 2018). Cases like these, they argue, show that we have the moral duty not to have bigoted beliefs about each other. On their interpretation, the situations above are morally troublesome because, by believing classic racist and sexist stereotypes, Jim and Anna violate a duty they have towards their fellow party guest and keynote speaker, respectively. According to proponents of doxastic wronging, positing this morally grounded epistemic duty is the best way to explain our intuition, since in the situations depicted neither protagonist acts in a reprehensible way (in fact, neither of them acts at all!) – it’s their racist and sexist beliefs as such that are the problem.

I think this proposal is intriguing. Group-based discrimination is a serious moral and political problem, and the moral duty not to have bigoted beliefs seems perfectly tailored to strike at its root. Nevertheless, in my article I argue that we should reject the existence of such a duty: there is no such thing as doxastic wronging. I argue for this by presenting what I call the liberal challenge.

I start from the assumption that positing any new, morally grounded epistemic duties comes at a price, because it constitutes a curtailment of our freedom of thought. We should only accept such curtailment if we can thereby gain something comparably important. I then point out three strategies that advocates of doxastic wronging could adopt to convince us that we are gaining something comparably important, and I explain why I think that all three of them fail.

First, the advocates of doxastic wronging could claim that positing a duty not to have bigoted beliefs helps us avoid bigoted actions. This strategy fails, I argue, because we are already under the moral obligation not to act in bigoted ways. If the reason for limiting our freedom of thought is merely to decrease the risk of bigoted actions, then placing us under this new obligation is superfluous.

Second, these philosophers could claim that positing a duty not to have bigoted beliefs helps us avoid practical vices that bigoted beliefs manifest such as, for instance, arrogance. This strategy fails, I argue, because – while we might be morally better, i.e. more virtuous, if we avoided vices like arrogance – we are under no moral obligation to do so.

Thirdly, they could claim that positing a duty not to have bigoted beliefs is necessary to avoid the intrinsic harm of being the object of bigoted beliefs. This third strategy starts off more promisingly as it is based on a correct observation. Most of us desire not to be the objects of bigoted beliefs. People who think about us in bigoted ways frustrate this legitimate desire, and so it seems that they thereby harm us. Yet even if we grant that bigoted beliefs harm their targets, we cannot conclude that the resulting harm is important enough to justify restricting our freedom of thought. People frustrate each other’s legitimate desires all the time. We frustrate our parents’ legitimate desire to see us flourish when we let our talents go to waste, and we frustrate our partners’ legitimate desire to continue the relationship when we break up with them. Cases like these show that frustrating someone’s legitimate desire is not sufficient for our behavior to count as morally impermissible. To make this strategy work, proponents of doxastic wronging must, in addition, argue that the desire not to be the objects of bigoted beliefs is so important that its frustration is morally impermissible. However, I contend that they can only do so by appealing to the impermissibility of either bigoted actions or vices that bigoted beliefs manifest. In other words, they can only do by falling back on one of the former two strategies. And since I’ve already shown that such strategies fail, so does this one.

If we reject the duty not to have bigoted beliefs – as I argue we should – what about our initial intuition? What is wrong with Jim’s assumption that a person of color is most likely a waiter rather than a guest , or with Anna’s assumption that a young woman at the conference podium is most likely an organizer rather than the keynote?

It seems to me that the best way to make sense of these cases is to explain them not in terms of doxastic wronging, but rather in terms of doxastic harming. People like Jim and Anna do not violate any obligations they have toward their targets when they think about them in racist or sexist ways. However, they do frustrate their desire not to be the objects of bigoted beliefs, and they thereby harm them. When we reproach people like Jim and Anna for their hurtful thoughts, we are accusing them not of having done something they were morally not allowed to do, but rather of having done something it would have been better not to do (even though they were morally allowed to do it).

The change in perspective I propose does not make light of the morally problematic nature of bigoted beliefs. On the contrary, it ensures that the criticism we level against people who entertain such beliefs hits its mark properly by avoiding moralistic overreach and by making morally grounded demands on what other people believe.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/3595/.

References

  • Basu, Rima (2018). “Can Beliefs Wrong?” Philosophical Topics 46 (1): 1–17.
  • Basu, Rima (2019a). “The Wrongs of Racist Beliefs”. Philosophical Studies 176 (9): 2497–515.
  • Basu, Rima (2019b). “What We Epistemically Owe to Each Other”. Philosophical Studies 176 (4): 915–31.
  • Basu, Rima and Mark Schroeder (2019). “Doxastic Wronging”. In Brian Kim and Matthew McGrath (Eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, 181–205.
  • Keller, Simon (2018). “Belief for Someone Else’s Sake”. Philosophical Topics 46 (1): 19–35.

About the author

Christine Bratu is a professor of philosophy at the University of Göttingen in Germany. She received her PhD in philosophy from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests are in feminist philosophy, moral and political philosophy (especially issues of disrespect and discrimination) and topics at the intersection between ethics and epistemology. 

Posted on by

Quill Kukla and Mark Lance – “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions”

picture of gendered bathrooms where the gendered icons are replaced by a shark and a T-Rex.

In this post, Quill Kukla and Mark Lance discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of the article can be found here.

Debates over the validity or appropriateness of gender ascriptions, whether imposed on someone else (“You may pretend you’re a woman, but you’re actually a man!”) or self-proclaimed (“I am a man!”; “I don’t have a gender!”), typically turn to what gender “really is” and who “really” has which gender. We argue that such metaphysical turns are usually irrelevant distractions and redirections. We claim that gender ascriptions like “You are a man” or “I am not a woman” are not, first and foremost, functioning to make truth claims about substantive features of the world.

This may be a surprising claim. After all, a sentence like “You are a man” is grammatically a declarative. Declaratives are what we use to make claims about the world – Paris is the capital of France; metals conduct electricity; there is a deer in the meadow. The grammatical form of a sentence is generally an indicator of the pragmatic force of uttering that sentence, so sentences with declarative grammar normally function to make truth claims, which are appropriate if they match the world and not if they don’t. But this connection is not universal. If I say to my roommate “It’s really hot in here!” this can function as a request to open the window or turn down the heat. “The meeting is adjourned” might describe a social status of the meeting, but more typically, it functions to bring about or constitute the adjournment.

Imagine that one person says to another, “You and I are friends!” and the second person responds, “No, we are not.” It seems unlikely that they are disagreeing about a substantive issue of fact. They are likely not disagreeing over the empirical criteria for friendship, whatever those might be, or the evidence concerning whether they meet those criteria. Rather, the utterance “You and I are friends!” is a kind of social proposal. In calling you my friend, I am proposing that we relate to one another in specific ways and take ourselves as having various commitments to one another; I am making a claim on a certain normative relationship to you. The utterance functions more like “I bet you ten dollars” or “I take you as my spouse” than as a factual claim. To say “We are friends” to someone is to try to position us in social space with respect to one another. And to reject the friendship claim is to reject this proposed positioning.

Similarly, we want to claim that the primary function of gender ascriptions is to establish a normative positioning in social space. First-person gender ascriptions (“I am a woman!”) are attempts to claim a specific position in gendered social space, while second-person and third-person gender ascriptions (“You are no man!”; “He is a man!”) are attempts to impose a position in gendered social space. Most gender ascriptions mostly sustain a position that someone already has rather than constituting one from scratch, but they still work to incrementally solidify such a position.

Our position in gendered social space, or the gender we are taken as having (or lacking), inflects nearly every aspect of how we are expected and demanded to negotiate the social and material world. It shapes how we are supposed to hold our body and modulate our voice; what clothes we are supposed to wear; how we are supposed to manifest sexual attraction and attractiveness; where and how we pee; what hobbies and jobs we are supposed to have; who we compete against in sports events and which sports we take up in the first place; what our relationship is to our children; and so forth. Even fetuses, once recognized as ‘boys’ or ‘girls’, are expected to become babies for whom certain nursery and clothing colors and emotions and behaviors are appropriate. Such norms are modulated by race, age, ability, class, body shape, and more; there is not a single, consistent set of norms for each gender, but rather a complex and often contradictory web of norms in which we are all differently positioned. But these structures of social significance are inescapable. To occupy a position in gendered social space is to be situated with respect to this complex network of norms. One can transgress or resist any subset of these norms, of course, but they are still the norms that carve out expectations and evaluations and social uptake for almost every dimension of our social and material existence.

When people disagree over whether a gender attribution is appropriate, it is rarely primarily an empirical disagreement. There is no single, widely accepted empirical definition of gender. It is varyingly defined in terms of anatomy, gametes, genetics, psychology, social role, self-identification, and phenotype. But we argue that what is at stake in most disagreements over gender attributions is not which empirical features someone has, but rather whether it is appropriate to take someone as positioned in a specific way within gendered social space. When a trans woman claims, “I am a woman,” and someone responds, “No, you are a man,” they are not generally arguing about empirical matters, but rather, as in the friendship case, about how a claim on a social position will or won’t be ratified.

If the function of gendered language is not (primarily) to describe the world, but to establish, ratify, reinforce, or oppose the taking up of social roles, then the appropriateness of such linguistic performances is not a matter of truth and falsity. Rather, we should evaluate what we ought to say and how we ought to respond to one other’s gender ascriptions in terms of how we ought to organize social space, and how much respect individuals should be given for determining their own gender ascription.

We argue that core norms of self-determination and autonomy demand wide respect for and deference to first-person attributions (or rejections) of gender (“I am a man,” etc.). What gender is, or whether it is anything at all, is simply irrelevant to these core norms. Saying “Yes, you are a man” is endorsing a person’s right to choose the social role they wish to inhabit, similar to recognizing a person’s choice of career, spouse, or hobby. Indeed, people generally think of rules that force social positions on people, such as Jim Crow laws and caste systems, as paradigmatic antidemocratic violations of self-determination. Since gender norms govern many of the most intimate dimensions of our bodily lives, forcing gendered social positions seems especially unjustified. The only ethical reason to contravene someone’s first-person claim upon a social position is if their doing so harms others, and we find the idea that this is true in the case of gender completely without merit or serious evidence. (This is not always the case. If I declare, “I am your sovereign master!”, I am claiming a social position, but obviously one you have every right to reject, because it harms you and your own self-determination directly. We find the idea that one person’s gender claim has a significant chance of harming someone else absurd, although we recognize that transphobes do try to assert this.)

Thus, we claim that first-personal gender attributions are virtually always justified, not because people are infallible about their own gender, but because of the ethical function of these attributions. Likewise, second- and third-personal gender attributions that contradict or foreclose first-personal attributions are almost always unjustified. Debates over the metaphysics of gender may be of philosophical curiosity to some, but they are distractions when it comes to everyday questions about when and how to respect people’s claimed gender, or lack thereof.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2911/.

About the authors

Quill Kukla is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Disability Studies at Georgetown University. From 2021 to 2023, they also held a Humboldt Stiftung Research Award at the Institut für Philosophie at Leibniz Universität Hannover. They received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in Geography from the City University of New York, and completed a Greenwall Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Their most recent book is City Living: How Urban Dwellers and Urban Spaces Make One Another (Oxford University Press 2021) and their forthcoming book is entitled Sex Beyond ‘Yes!’ (W. W. Norton & Co. 2024)

Mark Lance, PhD University of Pittsburgh, is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. He has published in areas ranging from relevance logic, to philosophy of language, to metaethics and contributed to public education projects through The Institute for Social Ecology, the Institute of Anarchist Studies, the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He is an activist who has been arrested 13 times in civil disobedience actions protesting US government crimes. His most recent book is Toward a Revolution as Nonviolent as Possible (with Matt Meyer). Outside activism and philosophy, he is a rowing coach, chess player, and former orchestral trumpet player.

Posted on by

Naftali Weinberger – “Signal Manipulation and the Causal Analysis of Racial Discrimination”

picture of fragmented parts of a Caucasian woman's face rearranged and surrounded by pearls.
“Sheherazade” (1950) René Magritte

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

After the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the consensus was that Clinton came out ahead, but that Trump exceeded expectations. Some sensed sexism, claiming: had Trump been a woman and Clinton a man, there’s no way observers would have thought the debate was even close, given the difference between the candidates’ policy backgrounds.

How could we test this hypothesis? Some professors at NYU staged a play with the candidates’ genders swapped. A female actor played Trump and imitated his words and gestures, and a male actor played Clinton. Afterwards, participants were given a questionnaire. Surprisingly, audience members disliked male Clinton more than observers of the initial debate disliked the original. “Why is he smiling so much?”, some asked. And: “isn’t he a bit effeminate?”

Does this show there was no sexism? Here we need to be careful. Smiling is not gender-neutral, since norms for how much people are expected to smile are themselves gendered. So perhaps we need to rerun the experiment, and change not just the actors’ genders, but also modify the gestures in gender-conforming ways such that male Clinton smiles less. The worry is that the list of required modifications might be open-ended. The public persona Clinton has developed over the last half century is not independent of her gender. If we start changing every feature that gets interpreted through a gendered lens, we may end up changing all of them. 

This example illustrates how tricky it can be to test claims about the effects of demographic variables such as gender and race. I wrote “Signal Manipulation and the Causal Analysis of Racial Discrimination”, because I believe it is crucial to be able to empirically test at least some claims about discrimination, and that causal methods are necessary for doing so.

Studying racial discrimination requires one to bring together research from disparate academic areas. Whether race can be treated as a causal variable falls within causal inference. What race is, is a question for sociologists. Why we care specifically about discrimination against protected categories such as race is a matter for legal theorists and political philosophers.

Let’s start with whether race can be causal. Causal claims are typically tested by varying one factor while keeping others fixed. For instance, in a clinical trial one randomly assigns members to receive either the drug or the placebo. But does it make sense to vary just someone’s race or gender, while keeping everything else about them fixed?

This concern is often framed in terms of whether it is possible to experimentally manipulate race, and some claim that all causal variables must be potentially manipulable. I argue that manipulability is not the primary issue at stake in modeling discrimination. Rather, certain failures of manipulability point to a deeper problem in understanding race causally. Specifically, causal reasoning involves disentangling causal and merely evidential relevance: Does taking the drug promote recovery, or is it just that learning someone took the drug is evidence they were likely to recover (due to being healthier initially)? If one really could not change someone’s race without changing everything about them, the distinction between causal and evidential relevance would collapse.

We now turn to what race is. A key debate concerns whether it is biologically essential or socially constructed. Some think that race is non-manipulable only if it is understood biologically. Maya Sen and Omar Wasow argue that race is a socially constructed composite, and that even though one cannot intervene on the whole, one can manipulate components (e.g. dialect). Sen and Wasow do not theorize about the relationship between race and its components, and I believe this is by design. The underlying presupposition is that if race is constructed, it is nothing over and above the components through which it is socially mediated.

Yet race’s being socially constructed does not entail that it reduces to its social manifestations. To give Ron Mallon’s example: a dollar’s value is socially constructed, but this does not entail that there is nothing more to being a dollar than being perceived as one. Within our socially constructed value system, a molecule-for-molecule perfect counterfeit is still a counterfeit. The upshot of this is that even if race is a composite such that we can only manipulate particular components, it does not follow that race just is its components. The relationship between social construction and manipulability is more nuanced than has been presupposed.

Finally, how does the causal status of race connect to legal theories of discrimination? Discrimination law only makes sense given a distinction between discrimination on the basis of protected categories and mere arbitrary treatment. An employer who does not hire someone because the applicant simply annoys them might be irrational, but is not violating discrimination law. I argue that in order to distinguish between racial discrimination and arbitrary treatment, we need to be able to talk about whether race itself made a difference. This involves varying it independently of other factors and thus modeling it causally.

Where does this leave us with Clinton and Trump? I’d suggest that if we really can’t change Clinton’s perceived gender without changing everything about her, we cannot disentangle causal from evidential relevance, and causal reasoning does not apply. Fortunately, not all cases are like this. In audit studies, one can change a racially relevant cue (such as the name on a resume) to plausibly change only the racial information the employer receives. And this does not entail that race is only the name. Instead of asking whether race is a cause, we should ask when it is fruitful to model race causally, with a spectrum from cases like audit studies (in which it is) to cases like Clinton’s (in which it isn’t).  And even in audit studies, treating race as separable is an idealization, since one does not model it in all of its sociological complexity. If what I argue in the article is correct, however, this modeling exercise is indispensable for legally analyzing discrimination and designing interventions to mitigate it.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2915/.

About the author

Naftali Weinberger is a scientific researcher at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. His work concerns the use of causal methodology to address foundational questions arising in the philosophy of science as well as questions arising in particular sciences, including: biology, psychometrics, neuroscience, and cognitive science. He has two primary research projects – one on causation in complex dynamical systems and another on the use of causal methods for the analysis of racial discrimination. He is currently trying to convince philosophers that causal representations are implicitly relative to a particular time-scale and that it is therefore crucial to pay attention to temporal dynamics when designing and evaluating policy interventions.

Posted on by

Markus Pantsar – “On Radical Enactivist Accounts of Arithmetical Cognition”

Two children selling fruit from a basket count the coins they just received.
Detail of “The Little Fruit Seller” (c. 1670-1675) Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

In this post, Markus Pantsar discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of his article can be found here.

Traditionally, cognitive science has held the view that the human mind works through, or is at least best explained by, mental repre­sentations and computations (e.g., Chomsky 1965/2015; Fodor 1975; Marr 1982; Newell 1980). Radical enactivist accounts of cognition challenge this paradigm. According to them, the most basic forms of cognition do not to involve mental representations or mental content; representations (and content) exist only in minds that have access to linguistic and sociocultural truth-telling practices (Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017).

As presented by Hutto and Myin, radical enactivism is a general approach to the philosophy of cognition. It is partly from this generality that it gets much of its force and appeal. However, a general theory of cognition ultimately needs to be tested on particular cognitive phenomena. In my paper, I set out to do just that with regard to arithmetical cognition. I am not a radical enactivist, but neither am I antagonistic to the approach. My aim is to provide a dispassionate analysis based on the progress that has been made in the empirical study and philosophy of numerical cognition.

Arithmetical cognition is especially suited to test radical enactivism (Zahidi 2021). This is not because arithmetic itself suggests the existence of non-linguistic representations. In fact, since Dedekind and Peano presented an axiomatization for arithmetic, it became clear that the entire arithmetic of natural numbers can be presented in a very simple language with only a handful of rules (i.e., the axioms) (Dedekind 1888; Peano 1889).

It is not arithmetic as a mathematical theory that presents challenges for radical enactivism; it is rather the development of arithmetic. This development happens on two levels. First, at the level of individuals, we have the ontogenetic development of arithmetical cognition. Second, at the level of populations and cultures, we have the phylogenetic and cultural-historical development of arithmetic. In my paper I focus on the ontogenetic level, because it is at that level that radical enactivism faces its most serious challenge.

It is commonly accepted that, in learning arithmetical knowledge and skills, children apply their innate, evolutionarily-acquired proto-arithmetical abilities (Pantsar 2014, 2019). These abilities – sometimes also called “quantical” (Núñez 2017) – are already present in human infants, and we share them with many non-human animals.

According to the most common view, there are two main proto-arithmetical abilities (Knops 2020). The first is subitizing: the ability to determine the amount of objects in our field of vision without counting. Subitizing enables detecting exact quantities, but it stops working after three or four objects. For larger collections, there is an estimating ability. This ability is not limited to small quantities, but it gets increasingly inaccurate as the size of the observed collection increases.

For the present topic, the literature on subitizing and estimating presents interesting questions. Following the work of Elizabeth Spelke (2000) and Susan Carey (2009), it is commonplace to associate each ability with a special core cognitive system (Hyde 2011). Subitizing is associated with the object tracking system (OTS), which allows for the parallel observation of objects in the subitizing range, up to three or four. Estimating is associated with the approximate number system (ANS), which is thought to be a numerosity-specific system.

The problem for the radical enactivist is that, under most interpretations, both the OTS and ANS are based on non-linguistic representations. The OTS is based on the observed objects occupying mental object files, one file for one object (Beck 2017; Carey 2009). For example, when I see three apples, three object files are occupied, and we can understand this as a representation of the number of the apples.

The ANS, on the other hand, is usually interpreted as representing quantities on a mental number line (Dehaene 2011). This line is likely to be logarithmic, given that the estimating ability becomes less accurate as the quantities become larger. Studies on anumerical cultures in the Amazon provide further evidence of this; members of those cultures tend to place quantities on a (physical) number line in a logarithmic manner (Dehaene et al. 2008; but see Núñez 2011).

Therefore, we have good empirical evidence in support of the idea that proto-arithmetical abilities are to be interpreted in terms of non-linguistic representations. Now the question is: can radical enactivism provide an alternative explanation for proto-arithmetical abilities without evoking representations?

This proves to be difficult, because it requires answering what is perhaps the most fundamental question in the field: namely, what exactly is a mental representation? Should visual memories, for example, be considered representations? For the radical enactivist they should not, but little evidence or argumentation has been provided to support this denial. In the present context, we must ask: could the OTS and the ANS work without using representations? Radical enactivism says so, but there is little solid evidence in support of this view.

Nonetheless, it should also be noted that the object files and the mental number line as explanations of the functioning of the OTS and the ANS, respectively, are currently nothing more than theoretical postulations : neither object files nor a mental number line have been located in the brain at the neuronal level, although fMRI studies give us good clues on where to look (Nieder 2016).

To be sure, some monkey studies have detected the existence of number neurons: i.e., specific groups of neurons whose firing is connected to observing a particular (small) quantity of objects (Nieder 2016), and one could infer that such number neurons count as representations of quantities in the brain. But this inference is exactly the kind of inference that radical enactivists have warned us against. Radical enactivists agree that there is non-linguistic processing of information in the brain, but they deny that in such cases there is content, i.e., representations. In the words of Hutto and Myin, brains process non-linguistic information-as-covariance, but not information-as-content (Hutto and Myin 2013:67).

In conclusion, where do we stand? Is there a way forward in the debate on representations? I believe there is, but it would be spurious to claim that philosophers can find it on their own. Instead, we will need a better empirical understanding of the neuronal activity associated with the functioning of the OTS and the ANS. At the same time, it would also be misguided to expect empirical data alone to resolve the issue. We will not find groups of neurons that are unassailably non-linguistic representations, and philosophers will need to continue working with empirical researchers in an effort to gain more knowledge about the proto-arithmetical abilities.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/3120/.

References

  • Beck, J. (2017). “Can Bootstrapping Explain Concept Learning?” Cognition 158:110–21.
  • Carey, S. (2009). The Origin of Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Chomsky, Noam (2015). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (50th anniversary ed.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1965)
  • Dedekind, Richard. (1888). Richard Dedekind: was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?: Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen. 1. Auflage. edited by S. Müller-Stach. Berlin [Heidelberg]: Springer Spektrum.
  • Dehaene, S., V. Izard, E. Spelke, and P. Pica. (2008). “Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures.” Science 320:1217–20.
  • Dehaene, Stanislas. (2011). The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Revised and Updated Edition. Revised, Updated ed. edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Harvard University Press.
  • Hutto, D. D., and E. Myin. (2013). Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hutto, D. D., and E. Myin. (2017). Evolving enactivism. Basic minds meet content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hyde, D. C. (2011). “Two Systems of Non-Symbolic Numerical Cognition.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:150.
  • Knops, A. (2020). Numerical Cognition. The Basics. New York: Routledge.
  • Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company.
  • Newell, A. (1980). “Physical symbol systems.” Cognitive Science 4(2):135–83.
  • Nieder, A. (2016). “The Neuronal Code for Number.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17(6):366.
  • Núñez, Rafael E. (2011). “No Innate Number Line in the Human Brain.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42(4):651–68.
  • Núñez, Rafael E. (2017). “Is There Really an Evolved Capacity for Number?” Trends in Cognitive Science 21:409–24.
  • Pantsar, Markus. (2014). “An Empirically Feasible Approach to the Epistemology of Arithmetic.” Synthese 191(17):4201–29. doi: 10.1007/s11229-014-0526-y.
  • Pantsar, Markus. (2019). “The Enculturated Move from Proto-Arithmetic to Arithmetic.” Frontiers in Psychology 10:1454.
  • Peano, G. (1889). “The Principles of Arithmetic, Presented by a New Method.” Pp. 101–34 in Selected Works of Giuseppe Peano, edited by H. Kennedy. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
  • Spelke, Elizabeth S. (2000). “Core Knowledge.” American Psychologist 55(11):1233–43. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.11.1233.
  • Zahidi, K. (2021). “Radicalizing numerical cognition.” Synthese 198(Suppl 1):529–45.

About the author

Markus Pantsar is a guest professor at the RWTH University in Aachen. He has the title of docent at University of Helsinki. Pantsar’s main research fields are philosophy of mathematics and artificial intelligence. His upcoming book “Numerical Cognition and the Epistemology of Arithmetic” (Cambridge University Press) will present a detailed, empirically-informed philosophical account of arithmetical knowledge.

Posted on by

Kevin Richardson – “Exclusion and Erasure: Two Types of Ontological Oppression”

Painting in which one half of the view is obstructed by a person looking out (but you can see some of the sky around her), and the other half is obstructed by a curtain (but you can see some of the sky from a cut-out)
“Decalcomania” (1966) René Magritte © Magritte Gallery 2021

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

Between July 2021 and December 2022, there were 4,000 cases of books being banned in US public schools. The most frequently banned books in the 2022-2023 school year was Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe. Kobabe’s graphic novel is a coming of age story in which the author questions the gender binary. The gender binary is the set of social norms that tells us that there are only two genders (man and woman), that these genders are biologically defined, and that everyone has exactly one of them. In the book, Kobabe comes out as a gender non-binary, identifying with neither of the two standard gender categories.

Gender Queer and other books that are directly or indirectly critical of the gender binary have been under attack. Not only is there legislation that bans books about trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people; there is also legislation that aspires to ban the people themselves. As of this writing, translegislation.com reports that 83 anti-trans bills have been passed out of the 574 proposed in the US this year. The bills are anti-trans because they target trans people by restricting their access to gender-affirming care, reclassifying drag shows as “adult entertainment,” codifying the right of teachers to not respect students’ preferred pronouns, and so on.

At a rapidly accelerating pace, we see more attempts to make the lives of trans people impossible. In Normal Life, Dean Spade, legal theorist and activist, writes: 

"Trans people are told by the law, state agencies, private discriminators, and our families that we are impossible people who cannot exist, cannot be seen, cannot be classified, and cannot fit anywhere."

Republicans and conservatives everywhere are on a mission to eliminate the legal possibility of trans people and LGBTQ people more generally.

How should we understand this notion of “making impossible”? In my paper, “Exclusion and Erasure: Two Types of Ontological Oppression”, I describe two ways in which trans people are made impossible: exclusion and erasure.

Ontological exclusion is what happens when an institution wrongfully refuses to let you participate in it because of your social identity. For example, trans woman Calliope Wong was rejected from Smith College, a  women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts, on the grounds that she was not properly eligible to be a student at the college. In 2013, Smith College defined being a woman in terms of being female, a biological property they took Wong not to have.

We also see ontological exclusion in the current movement for so-called gender critical feminism. According to these feminists, feminism should be a movement based on a person’s sex, not their gender. This means that women’s sports, and access to women’s restrooms, are to be legally restricted to cisgender (as opposed to transgender) women.

I contrast ontological exclusion with ontological erasure. A case of ontological erasure happens when an institution fails to determinately recognize your social identity. In my paper, I discuss the case of Bryn Mawr college, another women’s college. While Smith College outright rejected trans applicants, Bryn Mawr momentarily held an ambiguous position toward trans women. They did not determinately rule out trans applicants, but they also did not determinately acknowledge the legitimacy of trans applicants. Instead, they claimed that they would consider the legitimacy of trans applicants on a case-by-case basis.

This is a case of ontological erasure because the social institution erases the existence of the category of trans people itself. It does this by failing to have a determinate judgment about whether trans people can apply. Trans, genderqueer, and non-binary people defy the gender binary. As such, trans identities are often perceived as indeterminate. One is neither a man nor a woman, neither a woman nor a non-woman.

In my paper, I write about how erasure can also be oppressive to people who inhabit marginalized identities. I focus on the case of trans people, but erasure is possible whenever you have people who sit in the gaps between the dominant social categories: multiracial people, bisexual people, and so on. Being erased, I argue, is a case of what Robin Dembroff and Cat Saint-Croix call “agential identity discrimination”. You are discriminated against, not simply in virtue of your identity, but in virtue of your attempt to get others to recognize your identity.

There is much more detail in the paper, but in this blog post, I want to highlight a few things that are important in light of recent events. The political climate for LGBTQ people has changed drastically over the course of my writing and publishing this paper. While my paper focuses on erasure as a static, largely hidden phenomenon, I  want to emphasize that erasure is much more dynamic and public than it may appear in my article.

Today, there is an increased effort to enforce gender boundaries. This means there is an increased effort to engage in ontological exclusion. More institutions are removing the indeterminacy from their definitions of gender, ruling out the ability of many trans people to participate or feel safe within them. There is currently a “gender panic”, as sociologists Kristen Chilt and Laurel Westbrook call it. Gender panics occur when there is a perceived threat the the gender binary. In defense of the binary, there is an intense affirmation of the boundaries of gender.

At the same time as there is an effort to draw the boundaries around who is, and is not, a woman, there is also an effort to make this very boundary-drawing effort invisible. For example, the book Gender Queer is being taken off of shelves because it is likely to lead young people to question the gender binary. The goal is not simply to exclude genderqueer people from public spaces (and society more generally), but to eradicate the very possibility of the category genderqueer. Erasure exists alongside exclusion; erasure and exclusion complement and reinforce each other.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2279/.

About the author

Kevin Richardson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He mainly researches social ontology, with an emphasis on the ontology of gender, sexual orientation, and race.

Posted on by

Jonas Werner – “Extended Dispositionalism and Determinism”

Picture of a tall glass tumbler, meant to represent the glass disposition to break.
“Nr. 1598” (2001) Peter Dreher © Courtesy of the Peter Dreher Foundation

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

You should handle glasses with care because they are fragile and could break. Dispositions, like fragility or inflammability, go hand in hand with possibilities, like the possibility that the glass breaks or the paper ignites.

Modal dispositionalists take this observation as the starting point for their theory of metaphysical modality. Every possibility, so they claim, is underwritten by a disposition. Some of these dispositions are possessed to a very small degree, some are iterated (dispositions to acquire certain dispositions), and some were lost and are only a thing of the past.

At the heart of the modal dispositionalist’s position  lies the following biconditional:

It is metaphysically possible that p just in case something has, had, or will have an (iterated or non-iterated) disposition to be such that p.

I call the proponent of this biconditional the “classic dispositionalist”.

I argue that, for some p, it is possible that p although nothing has, had, or will have a disposition to be such that p. Some possibilities are only indirectly underwritten by dispositions. 

Why should one be unhappy with classic dispositionalism? Because, when combined with certain plausible assumptions, it quickly leads to a disaster.

The first assumption is that dispositions are always future-directed: nothing can be disposed to change the past.  For the classic dispositionalist, this immediately leads to the result that the first moment in time (if there is one) could not have been different.

The second assumption is that there are immutable truths about the dispositional roles of fundamental physical objects. Plausibly, nothing has the power to change these dispositional roles. For example, nothing can stop electrons from repelling protons. As a result, truths about the fundamental dispositional roles of fundamental objects turn out to be necessary for the classic dispositionalist.

The problem with both assumptions is that they generate too many necessities. To see the force of this worry, assume (something close to) determinism:

A complete description of the state of the universe at the first moment in time, in conjunction with immutable truths about the dispositional roles of physical objects, entails a complete description of every later state of the universe.

Now, the first assumption gave us that the state of the universe at the first moment in time is necessarily the way it is, while the second assumption gave us that fundamental dispositional roles are necessarily the way they are. Whatever is entailed by necessities is itself a necessity. Hence, we get the result that every state of the world obtains by necessity.

According to this result, for a match that never ignites – because I accidentally dropped in a pond, for example – it is impossible that it ignites. If we were to still subscribe to classic dispositionalism, we would even have to say that it was never flammable. This seems absurd!

Of course, there is some room for manoeuvre for the classic dispositionalist, which I discuss in some detail in the paper. For now, I just wish to mention that the case based on determinism is just an extreme version of the general worry that the classic dispositionalist might be forced to accept necessities that are incompatible with the manifestation of some dispositions.

In the second part of my paper, I propose a variant of dispositionalism that is immune to this problem, which I dub “extended dispositionalism”.

Clearly, the right-to-left part of the biconditional has to be saved. Something having a disposition to be such that p needs to be sufficient for the possibility that p, otherwise the central idea of modal dispositionalism is lost. But the dispositionalist need not say that something having a disposition to be such that p is necessary for it being possible that p.

Extended dispositionalism allows that possibilities are indirectly underwritten by dispositions; it allows that the left-to-right direction of our biconditional fails. This blocks the problem described above, because from the fact that nothing is disposed to be such that p we need not conclude that it is not possible that p.

How can possibilities be indirectly underwritten by dispositions?

In a nutshell, we can take a collection of true propositions to be a candidate for a collection of metaphysical necessities just in case every disposition is such that its manifestation is logically consistent with the conjunction of all propositions in this set.

There will be many such collections. However, some of them might be more plausible candidates for a basis of all metaphysical necessities than others. Maybe there is a maximal collection; maybe a collection is the largest one that avoids arguably objectionable cases of arbitrariness; or maybe it turns out that what’s necessary is indeterminate.

In any case, the method of looking for a collection of necessities that is compatible with the right-to-left direction of our biconditional has it that dispositions keep their role as the source of modality.

Still, we might have possibilities that are not the manifestation of any dispositions. We could, for example, hold that the first state of the universe is not necessary, although nothing ever has, had, or will have a disposition for it to be different.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2280/

About the author

Jonas Werner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on metaphysics and the philosophy of language. 

Posted on by

Joshua Shepherd and J. Adam Carter – “Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Intentional Action”

picture of a catch in baseball
“Safe!” (ca. 1937) Jared French © National Baseball Hall of Fame Library

In this post, Joshua Shepherd and J. Adam Carter discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

A popular family of views, often inspired by Anscombe, maintain that knowledge of what I am doing (under some description) is necessary for that doing to qualify as an intentional action. We argue that these views are wrong, that intentional action does not require knowledge of this sort, and that the reason is that intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding modally close failures.

Our argument revolves around a type of case that is similar in some (but not all) ways to Davidson’s famous carbon copier case. Here is one version of the type:

The greatest hitter of all time (call him Pujols) approaches the plate and forms an intention to hit a home run – that is, to hit the ball some 340 feet or more in the air, such that it flies out of the field of play. Pujols believes he will hit a home run, and he has the practical belief, as he is swinging, that he is hitting a home run. As it happens, Pujols’s behavior, from setting his stance and eyeing the pitcher, to locating the pitch, to swinging the bat and making contact with the ball, is an exquisite exercise of control. Pujols hits a home run, and so his belief that he is doing just that is true.

Given the skill and control Pujols has with respect to hitting baseballs, Pujols intentionally hits a home run. (If one thinks hitting a home run is too unlikely, we consider more likely events, like Pujols getting a base hit. If one doesn’t like baseball, we consider other examples.)

But Pujols does not know that he is doing so. For in many very similar circumstances, Pujols does not succeed in hitting a home run. Pujols’s belief that he is hitting a home run is unsafe.

When intentional action is at issue, it is commonly the case that explanations that advert to control sit comfortably alongside the admission that in nearby cases, the agent fails. Fallibility is a hallmark of human agency, and our attributions of intentional action reflect our tacit sense that some amount of risk, luck, and the cooperation of circumstance is often required to some degree – even for simple actions.

The same thing is not true of knowledge. When it comes to attributing knowledge, we simply have much less tolerance for luck and for failure in similar circumstances.

One interesting objection to our argument appeals to an Anscombe-inspired take on the kind of knowledge involved in intentional action.

Anscombe famously distinguished between contemplative and non-contemplative forms of knowledge. A central case of non-contemplative knowledge, for Anscombe, is the case of practical knowledge – a special kind of self-knowledge of what the agent is doing that does not simply mirror what the agent is doing, but is somehow involved in its unfolding. The important objection to our argument is that the argument makes most sense if applied to contemplative knowledge, but fails to take seriously the unique nature of non-contemplative, practical knowledge.

We discuss a few different ways of understanding practical knowledge, due to Michael Thompson, Kim Frost, and Will Small. The notion of practical knowledge is fascinating, and there are important insights in these authors. But we think it is not too difficult to apply our argument to a claim that practical knowledge is necessary for intentional action.

Human agents sometimes know exactly how to behave, they make no specific mistake, and yet they fail. Sometimes they behave in indistinguishable ways, and they succeed. Most of the time, human agents behave imperfectly, but there is room for error, and they succeed. The chance involved in intentional action is incompatible with both contemplative and non-contemplative knowledge.

We also discuss a probabilistic notion of knowledge due to Sara Moss (and an extension of it to action by Carlotta Pavese), and whether it might be of assistance. It won’t.

Consider Ticha, the pessimistic basketball player. 

Ticha significantly underrates herself and her chances, even though she is quite a good shooter. She systematically forms beliefs about her chances that are false, believing that success is unlikely when it is likely. When Ticha lines up a shot that has, say, a 50% chance of success, she believes that the chances are closer to 25%. Ticha makes the shot.

Was Ticha intentionally making the shot, and did she intentionally make it? Plausibly, yes.

Did Ticha have probabilistic knowledge along the way? Plausibly, no, since her probabilistic belief was false.

The moral of our paper, then, has implications for how we understand the essence of intentional action. We contrast two perspectives on this.

The first is an angelic perspective that sees knowledge of what one is doing as of the essence of what one is intentionally doing, that limns agency by emphasizing powers of rationality and the importance of self-consciousness, and that views the typical case of intentional action as one in which the agent’s success is very close to guaranteed, resulting from the perfect exercise of agentive capacities.

The second is an animal perspective that emphasizes the limits of our powers of execution, planning, and perception, and thus emphasizes the need for agency to involve special kinds of mental structure, as well as a range of tricks, techniques, plans, and back-up plans.

We think the natural world provides more insight into the nature of agency, and of intentional action, than the sources that motivate the angelic perspective. We also think there is room within the animal perspective for a proper philosophical treatment of knowledge-in-action. But that’s a separate conversation.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2277/.

About the authors

Joshua Shepherd is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, and PI of Rethinking Conscious Agency, funded by the European Research Council. He works on issues in the philosophy of action, psychology, and neuroethics. His last book, The Shape of Agency, is available open access from Oxford University Press.

J. Adam Carter is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His research is mainly in epistemology, with special focus on virtue epistemology, know-how, cognitive ability, intentional action, relativism, social epistemology, epistemic luck, epistemic value, group knowledge, understanding, and epistemic defeat.

Posted on by

Eyal Tal and Hannah Tierney – “Cruel Intentions and Evil Deeds”

Pop-art depiction of a man and woman riding away in a car with evil intentions
“In the Car” (1963) © Roy Lichtenstein

In this post, Hannah Tierney and Eyal Tal discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Doing the right thing can be difficult. Doing the morally worthy thing can be even harder.

Accounts of moral worth aim to determine the kinds of motivations that elevate merely right actions—actions that happen to conform to the correct normative theory—to morally worthy actions—actions that merit praise or credit.

Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right (Herman 1981; Jeske 1998; Sliwa 2016; Johnson King 2020). Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right (Arpaly 2003; Arpaly & Schroeder 2014; Markovits 2010).

What sets these views apart is the kind of motivation each takes to be essential for an action’s moral worth.

When an agent is motivated to do the right thing because of the action’s moral rightness, she has a higher-order motivation to perform this action. When an agent is motivated to do the right thing because of a particular right-making feature of the action, she has a first-order motivation to perform this action. Higher-order theorists (Sliwa 2016; Johnson King 2020) argue that higher-order motivations are necessary and sufficient for moral worth, while first-order motivations are largely irrelevant. In contrast, first-order theorists (Arpaly 2003; Markovits 2010) argue that first-order motivations are necessary and sufficient for moral worth, while higher-order motivations are irrelevant.

In an important sense, higher-order and first-order views of moral worth are diametrically opposed. The motivations that one camp argues are necessary and sufficient for moral worth are the very motivations that the other camp argues are irrelevant.

Nevertheless, proponents of these opposing views share something important. With the exception of Arpaly (2003) and Arpaly & Schroeder (2014), they theorize about the nature of moral worth by focusing mainly on the moral worth of, and praiseworthiness or creditworthiness for, right actions.

Yet each of these properties has a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions. Just as agents can deserve praise or credit for doing the right thing, they can deserve blame or discredit for doing the wrong thing. While the former actions have moral worth, the latter actions have what we will call moral counterworth.

In our paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions. 

Compare the following cases: 

Selfish Gossip: Cecile learns of a good friend’s embarrassing secret. She knows that it would be wrong to reveal it, and she does not wish to do wrong. While at a party, an opportunity to be the centre of attention arises. Wanting to be popular, Cecile succumbs to temptation and reveals her friend’s secret. 
Cruel Gossip: Sebastian learns of a good friend’s embarrassing secret. He knows that it would be wrong to reveal it, and he does not wish to do wrong. While at a party, an opportunity arises to humiliate his friend by revealing the secret. Wanting to embarrass his friend, Sebastian succumbs to temptation and reveals his friend’s secret.

Though both Cecile and Sebastian are blameworthy for revealing their friend’s secret, they are not equally blameworthy. Sebastian is (much) more blameworthy than Cecile and his action possesses more counterworth than Cecile’s action.

What could explain this difference? The only difference between Cecile and Sebastian lies in their first-order motivations. Cecile’s motivation to reveal her friend’s secret is selfish—she cares more about being popular than her friend’s privacy. But Sebastian’s motivation to tell the secret is cruel—he desires to harm his friend by embarrassing them.

Sebastian’s cruel first-order motivation renders him more blameworthy than Cecile. If this is right, then first-order motivations are not irrelevant to moral counterworth—they can directly contribute to the degree to which an agent is blameworthy. 

Reflecting on cases of wrong actions indicates that higher-order motivations can impact moral counterworth as well.

Compare the case of Selfish Gossip, in which Cecile reveals a friend’s secret in order to be the centre of attention despite having the higher-order motivation not to perform wrong actions, to the following case:

Evil Gossip: Isabelle learns of a good friend’s embarrassing secret. She knows that it would be wrong to reveal it, and she wishes to do wrong. While at a party, an opportunity to be the centre of attention arises. Wanting to both be popular and do wrong, Isabelle reveals her friend’s secret.

While both Cecile and Isabelle are blameworthy for their actions, Isabelle is (much) more blameworthy. The relevant difference between Cecile and Isabelle lies in their higher-order motivations.

Cecile possesses a higher-order motivation not to reveal her friend’s secret—she knows that doing so is wrong and does not want to do the wrong thing. In contrast, Isabelle possesses a higher-order motivation to reveal the secret—she wants to reveal the secret because doing so is wrong. 

We submit that Isabelle’s motivation to do wrong renders her more blameworthy than Cecile. And if we are right that Isabelle’s motivation to do wrong enhances the degree to which she is blameworthy for doing wrong, then higher-order motivations are not irrelevant to moral counterworth. 

From here, we defend the following argument: 

(1)	First-order and higher-order motivations can each affect moral counterworth.
(2)	Moral counterworth and moral worth are relevantly similar, such that the kinds of motivations that affect the former can also affect the latter.
(3)	First-order motivations and higher-order motivations can each affect the moral worth of an agent’s action.

In our paper, we defend each premise from potential objections and conclude by explaining how reflection on moral counterworth serves to support recently developed accounts of moral worth that make room for the relevance of both higher-order and first-order motivations. (Isserow 2019, 2020; Portmore 2022; Singh 2020)

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2621/

References

  • Arpaly, N. (2003). Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency. Oxford University Press. 
  • Arpaly, N. & Schroeder, T. (2014). In Praise of Desire. Oxford University Press. 
  • Herman, B. (1981). “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty.” Philosophical Review 66: 359–382.
  • Isserow, J. (2019). “Moral Worth and Doing the Right Thing by Accident.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97: 251–264.
  • Isserow, J. (2020). “Moral Worth: Having it Both Ways.” The Journal of Philosophy 117(10): 529–556. 
  • Jeske, D. (1998). “A Defense of Acting from Duty.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 32(1): 61–74.
  • Johnson King, Z. (2020). “Accidentally Doing the Right Thing.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1: 186–206.
  • Markovits, J. (2010). “Acting for the Right Reasons.” The Philosophical Review 119 (2): 201–242. 
  • Portmore, D. (2022) “Moral Worth and our Ultimate Moral Concerns.” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, volume 12. 
  • Singh, K. (2020). “Moral Worth, Credit, and Non-Accidentality.”  Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, volume 10. 
  • Sliwa, P. (2016). “Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93(2): 393–418. 

About the authors

Eyal Tal received his PhD in philosophy from University of Arizona. He is interested in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, philosophy of psychiatry, and philosophy of science.

Hannah Tierney is Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in ethics and metaphysics, and she writes mainly on issues of free will, moral responsibility, and personal identity.

Posted on by

Charles Goldhaber – “The Humors in Hume’s Skepticism”

An enigmatic winged female figure is surrounded by the symbols of mathematics, alchemy, and the crafts. She looks gloomy and melancholic, but also in the grip of inspired and creative contemplation. She is thought to be a symbol of scientific and artistic creativity.
“Melencolia I” (1514) Albrecht Dürer

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

Something very surprising occurs in the “Conclusion” to Book I of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: he pauses to survey some of the skeptical strands within the “science of man”, and doing so causes his generally dispassionate tone to explode into a turbulent personal narrative.

He describes himself as plunging into an extremely gloomy mood. Sunken, he fancies himself

“some strange uncouth monster…inviron’d with the deepest darkness” (T 1.4.7.2).

When this “philosophical melancholy and delirium” reaches a fever pitch, Hume reports: 

“The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another” (T 1.4.7.8–9).

Hume’s drastic shift in literary style and severe mental state are striking, but perhaps even more surprising is the fact that, within just a few pages, he seems to have recovered entirely. He says:

“I feel an ambition to arise in me of contributing to the instruction of mankind, and of acquiring a name by my inventions and discoveries” (T 1.4.7.12).

He then launches headfirst into his account of the passions in Book II, seemingly untroubled by the skeptical implications of his own findings.

What happened here? How did Hume break out of his melancholy and resume his philosophical pursuits? Why did he even bother to write about his mental state—and in such a curiously stylish way at that?

I think the style of his writing is our best clue to answering all these questions. Or rather, the clue is Hume’s use of a swath of words and images deriving from ancient and medieval medicine.

On the humoral theory, health consists in a balance of four humors, or essential bodily liquids: black bile, blood, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each of them corresponds to one of four temperaments, or disposition to certain characteristic passions, actions, and ailments.

Interestingly, Hume’s recovery from “philosophical melancholy” in the “Conclusion” involves four transitional stages: Before resuming philosophy, Hume is melancholic, enjoys social pleasures, feels aggression toward philosophy, and then rests. Close attention to Hume’s description of these transitional stages reveals that he makes deliberate allusions to one of the four humors or temperaments in each.

This suggests that his recovery occurs when his cycle through the four humors produces a balance between them. For Hume, a healthy mental state is one which incorporates a moderate degree of all four temperaments.

Hume’s humoral allusions resolve a textual puzzle about the progression of his personal narrative in the “Conclusion.” Perhaps more interestingly, they also help us understand how Hume conceived of skepticism and its role in human life.

By associating excessive skepticism with melancholy, heated brains, and lycanthropic delusions, Hume invites his readers to conceive of it along the lines of classical diseases resulting from the excess of black bile. Such diseases were thought to have been especially common in philosophers, whose intense, often brooding reflections encouraged the production of black bile and the corresponding “melancholic” temperament. Philosophers would benefit from tempering these excesses through activities associated with the other humors or temperaments, as Hume himself does in the “Conclusion.”

Yet black bile was not taken to be inherently unhealthy. Some of it was necessary for humoral balance. Likewise, though Hume emphasizes the dangers of excessive skepticism, he finds a more moderate degree to be salutary. Hume’s invocation of the humoral theory of medicine then helps us see that skepticism can both threaten and restore a healthy mind, depending on the degree of its predominance in our thought.

You might wonder whether Hume would really invoke an antiquated medical theory in his writings. After all, Hume was highly critical of the “occult qualities” appealed to by the “antients” (T 1.4.3.8), and he wrote the Treatise during a boom in Scottish medical innovations.

You might also worry that Hume’s invocation of humoral theory saps his claims on the value and management of skepticism of any plausibility. After all, we know that health is more than a matter of balancing liquids.

Both worries are answerable. First, though by Hume’s youth humoral medicine had lost its status as the dominant theoretical orthodoxy, it continued to hold sway over medical practice. On top of this, temperament psychology remained a rich source of themes in literature well beyond Hume’s life.

Second, Hume’s point that skepticism can be both healthy and harmful depending on degree does not rely on any literal endorsement of humoral theory. Indeed, it’s unclear which medical theory Hume endorsed, if any. What is clear is that Hume found humoral theory to be a helpful analogy for thinking about how skepticism can be moderated in ways that promote healthy doxastic dispositions – and that is a point on which we can agree, even while rejecting the medical theory.

The humoral allusions in Hume’s discussion of skepticism can help us revive a promising approach to epistemology which currently has no modern equivalent. The core idea is that proper mental functioning involves a balance of tendencies to reason and believe in certain ways. Certain epistemic vices, such as skepticism and dogmatism, are extreme expressions of the very same tendencies. The vices are then more a matter of degree than of doctrine.

As a result, even skeptics and dogmatists can lead us toward proper mental functioning, when adopting some share of their dispositions helps us correct our own imbalances. We do not need to accept humoral theory to appreciate this idea, but it’s an idea that Hume’s invocations of humoral theory can lead us to see for the first time.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/1127/

About the author

Charles Goldhaber is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. His research focuses on skepticism in contemporary epistemology and the early modern era, especially in Hume and Kant.