Normativity and Intentionality

Intentional states are states of mind that are about entities in the world, whether those entities be objects, properties, kinds, etc.  Related to the fact that these states are about entities, is the fact that intentional states (at least typically) have contents with truth conditions.  These contents are true or false depending on the features of the entities that the intentional states are about.  The paradigm of intentional states is, perhaps, belief.  However, intentional states include perceptual experiences, desires, hopes, memories, etc.

One thesis about intentional states that is of interest to philosophers of mind is the thesis (T) that, qua intentional states, they have normative essential natures.  This thesis could be clarified in a number of ways, but one way of thinking about it is that part of what it is to qualify as an intentional state is to be subject to certain kinds of norms.  One might think, for instance, that what makes something a belief with a particular content is the rational role that this something has.  The rational role is a matter of what other intentional states it would (as a kind of premise) rationally support as well as what other intentional states would rationally support it (as a kind of conclusion).  You might think that states qualify as intentional partly by taking on a particular rational role.

(T) is more controversial than it might first appear.  Many people would be sympathetic to the idea that, for instance, a belief is subject to epistemic norms (of rationality) even in any possible circumstance.  However, part of what is at issue is whether these norms apply to a belief because it is a belief, or whether a belief is a belief because the norms apply to it.  This kind of question is not settled even by conceding that there are epistemic norms applicable to beliefs that are even necessarily applicable.

However, I think one thing that might be relevant to whether (T) is true is the fact that, not only do we tend to think that norms apply to intentional states, we often think that intentional states are acquired, sustained, and revised because of applicable norms.  Common sense tells us that the norms have to get into the action in an explanatory sort of way.  Do they do so because the state is intentional?  If so, then it seems like we should think that intentionality is prior to the applicability of norms.  If not, then it would be more natural to think that the state is intentional because of the way the norms get into the action.  In the latter case, (T) definitely appears to be true. 

Modern Philosophy and the Space of Reasons

One thing that is generally agreed upon by scholars is that the Cartesian turn in philosophy was not an act of creatio ex nihilio, but had its roots in various tendencies in logic, metaphysics, and epistemology located in the late scholastic tradition that preceded it. One such tendency was that of nominalism, which was a characteristic feature of late scholasticism made popular by William of Ockham and his followers, notably John Buridan. Nominalism as a feature of late scholasticism is the view that universals are not real but signify certain dispositions in the subject to think or speak in a certain way. Contrast this with realism that holds that universals are really existing either universally in both the mind and extra-mental reality (Platonism) or universally only in the mind and individually in reality (Aristotelianism, Thomism, Scotism).

Now if we focus on nominalism, it holds that universals are not real but signify only dispositions of the subject. On that account then, our knowledge of kinds and the ontological make-up of reality is nothing more than certain dispositions of the subject; for an Ockhamist, these would be dispositions to think in a certain way. It follows then that for such nominalists, engagement with characteristically philosophical problems occurs within a mental space wherein universals abound. Late scholastic nominalists then moved the philosophical discussion away from extra-mental reality and sought out explanations for philosophical problems from within the mental. This is juxtaposed to realists like Aquinas or Scotus who held that to engage with philosophical problems one must engage with extra-mental reality.

What scholastic nominalism bequeathed to philosophy was a tendency to do philosophy ‘in the head’ as it were; and it is no surprise that some of the most interesting contributions to the logic of this period were made by nominalists. Now if we consider this tendency to do philosophy within the head, we can notice the roots of a philosophical problem begin to emerge. What goes on in the head has a certain character to it; it doesn’t seem to be conformable to law, rather spontaneity seems to reign such that we can think what we like and oftentimes people entertain the most wildly contradictory of thoughts. By contrast, extra-mental reality seems to be governed by law, it is determined, regular and quite different from the spontaneity of mentality. If we connect this juxtaposition of the spontaneity of thought and the determinateness of the world with the nominalistic tendency to see philosophical problems as being addressed ‘within the head’, then we see a problem. Given that ‘in the head’ we are free to think of things as we like whereas in the world things go by a regular order that is subject to law like generalisation, the immediate problem arises as to whether or not what is going on in the head is in any way comparable to what is going on in reality, that is, whether or not our patterns of thought about the world actually match up to what is going on in the world. Late scholastic nominalism then envisaged a fissure between mind and world such that the manoeuvres in the mental space for the solving of philosophical problems may not exactly connect up with the world in any way. The problem then of the mind/world relation became an urgent one, and it was out of this philosophical matrix that a Descartes was to emerge and attempt to establish knowledge of the world on the basis of a sure and certain foundation.

What I find fascinating about Descartes is not the content of his thought, but the framework within which it was undertaken. The mind/world relationship is now envisaged as a relationship between two sui generis things and the central philosophical problematic is how to get from the mind here to the object in the world there. Without an external constraint on thought’s spontaneity, thought would be left spinning frictionlessly in the void to use McDowell’s happy metaphor; and so the task was to find an external constraint on thought that would legitimately relate it to the world. If Descartes’s successors were not so happy to follow him in his conclusions, they were certainly happy to accept his framework, and they all seemed to accept some sort of dualism of two sui generis spaces: mind and world.

Now Kant is rightly considered to have made a major breakthrough in this problematic and I think the reason why it was so major is as follows. Whereas Descartes, Locke and Hume (Hume it should be said anticipated Kant’s breakthrough), were trying to find a constraint on thought that is itself extrinsic to thought, Kant suggested that perhaps thought itself is the constraint. That is to say, in the engagement between mind and world, we need not look for an external constraint on thought, but rather have the world become conformable to thought. Hence we have the articulation of the Copernican hypothesis and its validation in the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason.

I don’t want to explore the details of Kant’s thought, but I do want to remain with this notion that thought itself is the constraint such that the world is conformable to thought. Implicit in this position is the view that in order for there to be engagement between the subject and the world, there has to be some sort of homogeneity between the two (as opposed to a link). For Kant this entailed the a priori determination of the matter of experience, thereby bringing the world into conformity with thought. A lot of my own research has been into the thought of St Thomas Aquinas and Kant, and people often ask me how I can admire Kant so much when I fundamentally disagree with him. The point is often made that I as a Thomistic realist hold a totally juxtaposed view to Kant to the effect that the mind is conformed to the world, it is the world that determines our thought, not that our thought determines the world as Kant would have it. It is true that this is a disagreement between Aquinas and Kant, but it masks a greater and more profound agreement: for both, knowledge is not conceived of as finding some extrinsic constraint on the spontaneity of thought, rather knowledge is conceived of as finding a suitable conformity between mind and world. Both Aquinas and Kant then conceive of knowledge as standing in a certain relation to world; so for both there is a conformability between mind and world and whilst they disagree on the kind of conformity, they agree that we need conformity.

Now, Kant opted for the conformity of world to mind, because following the Cartesian juxtaposition of mind and world, itself a derivation of a nominalist mode of thinking, he took each to be heterogeneous, so that one would have to be conformable to the other. He could not see how mind could be conformable to world, but he could envisage how world could be conformable to mind by means of the a priori forms and categories. Aquinas on the other hand, not laden with nominalistic tendencies which would lead one to privatise mentality as a kind of inner space wholly juxtaposed to the world, sees both the subject and extra-mental objects as items in the realm of determinate being. The realm of determinate being is such that there is a structure to things and the determinations characteristic of the structure of things serve to locate things within a type. On this basis then St Thomas claims that things with mental capacities are able to discern individuals within their types and thereby go on to classify them, form propositions about them etc. In other words, whereas for Kant conceptual content is only located within mentality, for Aquinas conceptual content is unbounded – the realm of determinate beings is the realm of conceptual content, and within that realm there are certain beings who have the intellectual capacity to focus on the conceptual content implicit in their experience of other beings. So Thomas is then led to the conformity of mind to world.

The stand-off then between Aquinas and Kant will turn on whether or not one is happy with the metaphysical presuppositions made by both authors. But I think it should be noted that what we have here is an indication that certain issues in philosophy have not gone unnoticed by earlier generations of thinkers, and if a certain generation of thinkers does not see a philosophical problematic as particularly urgent, it may not necessarily be because that generation are amateurs, it may be that within their framework of philosophising, such questions do not have the force that they have within another framework. So it might be an idea that when one doggedly pursues research into a philosophical tradition to ever greater complexity and with ever greater precision, one should stop and think why it is only one’s own tradition that finds these problems alluring and why other traditions do not take such issues so seriously; this will serve to highlight the philosophical presuppositions that go to fuel the arguments and debates in one’s own tradition and perhaps even lead one to overhaul the whole framework within which those arguments and debates are conducted. If anything, it will leave one with a greater appreciation of the richness of other philosophical traditions and hopefully insulate one from a philosophical parochialism that can often invade the subject.

Can Science Teach Us Right From Wrong?

In November, 2010, some leading thinkers in various areas of science (e.g. neuroscience, theoretical physics), philosophy (applied ethics, metaethics) and psychology (cognitive psychology) gathered together to debate the question of whether science can 'teach us right from wrong.' Debaters included:

Simon Blackburn (metaethicist)
Peter Singer (ethicist / applied ethicist)
Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist)
Patricia Churchland (philosophy of neuroscience)
Sam Harris (neuroscientist, author)
Stephen Pinker (cognitive psychologist)

The debate, moderated by the Science Network's Roger Bingham, can be found in its entirety here.

In some sense, the debate constituted exactly the sort of thing we should be hoping to see more of: important questions being approached in a way that is informed by cutting edge research across disciplines. Unfortunately, this debate was in many ways a 'cringe-fest.' Let me explain.

What should have been (in principle), given the calibre of the discussants, one of the most fruitful discussions in the past five years, resulted in (by my estimation) in a discussion in which little to nothing was accomplished. Why? What went wrong?

Several things. One problem was that there were (roughly) two different 'claims of dominion' on the subject matter in question. Consider again the question Can Science Teach us Right From Wrong? Those from the 'science camp' took themselves to have the appropriate sort of expertise to answer the question because they take themselves to be experts in the subject matter of What Science Can Teach Us. The moral philosophers take themselves to be experts in the subject matter of What Can Teach us Right From Wrong. The science camp then took 'Can Science Teach us Right From Wrong?' to be an aspect of the embedded question 'What can Science Teach Us?' while the moral philosophers take Can Science Teach us Right From Wrong to be an aspect of the embedded question 'What Can Teach us Right From Wrong?'

The source of the cringe-fest runs deeper than this problem. Roughly, from my perspective as viewer, it seemed that no one in the panel had any confusion about what sort of methodology is used in science, and more broadly, what science is. The same is not true for philosophy. Setting aside Patricia Churchland for the moment, Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss seemed to view (falsely, and unfoundedly) philosophy as having 'one methodology' and the methodology they seemed to be attributing to philosophy is the sort of methodology that we (with some mistrust) attribute to the speculative metaphysics of the 17th century rationalists. Harris and Krauss, taking themselves to be answering an aspect of the embedded question, "What Can Science Teach Us?", were inclined to think along the lines of: "Someone's got to say something about human values. We've got an evolutionary story about how human values have come to be, that's enough to answer the relevant question, and all they've got is 'philosophical speculation.'" It's no surprise that the representatives of the physical sciences took themselves to have answers to questions of right and wrong, then, and be at odds with the moral philosophers on the matter.

It's also no surprise that the debate was not productive. The assumption that what philosophy has to say about questions of moral philosophy is limited to the methodology of speculative metaphysics is wildly off the mark. In this respect, while the two camps of the debate were not talking past each other when discussing the question from the side of the embedded question 'what can science teach us?' (there was commonality of content vis-a-vis 'science') they were talking past each other when discussing the question from the side of the embedded question 'what can teach us about right and wrong?'. On this side of the question, the two sides had very different pre-debate conceptions of the nature and methodology of philosophy. The debate suffered for this, and it was the scientist's uninformed assumptions about philosophy that was to blame, I'm afraid.

The debate also suffered from another crucial point on which the discussants were 'talking past each other.' Based on the speeches in the debate by Harris, Churchland and Krauss, they took the question driving the debate to be one that receives an affirmative answer so long as science can provide an explanation for human values. Let's say that science explains human values just in case science provides an illuminating explanation of how human values arose within an (appropriately) evidentially supported evolutionary story. Here, the philosophers would all reject out of hand that, if such a story could be provided, it would warrant an affirmative answer to the question of whether science can teach us right from wrong. The moral philosopher finds the matter of 'teaching right and wrong' to be something more than an evolutionary-explanatory story for how human values came into existence. Rather, we want to know (for instance) what makes first-order moral judgements true? Which moral principles (which we appeal to to adjudicate moral disputes) are the right ones, and why? From the perspective where these questions need answering to answer the embedded question 'What teaches us right from wrong?', science (under a conception of science that both sides of the dispute would agree to) obviously fails to 'teach us right from wrong' and this is because the questions do not fall in the domain within which science could in principle have anything to say about.

Because there were (vastly) different conceptions going into the debate about (i) what philosophy, and its methodology, is; and (ii) what constitutes an adequate explanation to the question of whether science can teach us right from wrong, the debate was unfruitful.

At the end of the day, I think most philosophers would agree that, in the sense that the scientists understood the question, it's obvious that science can answer the question of how the emergence of the particular values humans have could have arisen within a plausible evolutionary story. That's not the interesting question, though; it's essentially a descriptive matter, not a normative one. If we tried to control for at least some of the ambiguity by clearly distinguishing descriptive from normative questions and then re-framed the debate around the question, 'Can Science Answer Normative Questions?' (all while getting all discussants on board prior to the debate on the matter of what methods constitute the methods of philosophy and science, respectively), we might have actually learned something!

p.s. The answer is no, of course.