This has been a great symposium. Thanks
to everyone for participating! And of course special thanks go to
Michael Ridge for writing such a rich and thought-provoking book, as
well as for being so attentive and responsive to his critics.
To everyone: Apologies that this post is relatively long. Please feel free to ignore any points you find confused or think
miss the mark! In what follows I'll first present an overview of the
chapter. Early on I'll confront an interpretive question which will
give me reason to address aspects of Sections 1 and 2 together, but
after that I will proceed linearly. I then conclude with some more
critical points. Editorial comments appear in square brackets “[]”.
The main conclusions of the chapter
seem to be the following: (1) Talk of rationality is talk of internal
coherence among one's attitudes
and actions. There are no intrinsically irrational ends apart from
logically contradictory ones. (2) Internal coherence is not a
normative notion, so judgments of rationality are not normative
judgments. However, in discussion among rational agents assertions of
rationality and irrationality will tend to exert a kind of
motivational pressure. Thus these judgments admit of Ecumenical
Cognitivist treatment. (3) What I'll call the LINK thesis, since it
links rationality as a success notion to rationality as a capacity
(what I will call “rational agency”). It works to explain why
rationality should be thought of as a matter of internal coherence:
“To say that someone is rational in the success sense just is to
say that he successfully adheres to those norms to which anyone who
counts as rational in the capacity sense must, for the most part,
adhere” (226).
Let's begin with
this last thesis. Ridge follows it immediately with a list of ten
capacities which, he offers, it is platitudinous that rational agents
possess. They can be roughly grouped into three categories. Items 1-4
deal with the agent's capability to genuinely set genuine ends for
itself, in the sense of committing itself to an end (or a principle,
if that is distinct?); 5 and 10 with the ability to act enkratically
in a broad sense, on the basis of its normative judgments or its
commitments to ends; 6-9 with the capacity to revise ends when they
conflict or need to be specified, and to take the means to their ends
because they believe them to be the means to their ends.
It does seem to me
that the items on the list are platitudes, at least in the sense that
every view of agency ought to find some way of vindicating them, and
every sensible view I can think of does. (However, I make no claims
that my summary of them preserves this property!) And in reading them
one might get the impression that LINK merely asserts that these
capacities suffice for the agent to be scored by the norms which form
the success standards of rationality. That is, one might read the
second occurrence of “adhere” as elliptical for “successfully
adhere”, the “must” as normative or epistemic, and the hedge
“for the most part” as indicating that we clearly do not think
the standards of rationality are necessarily overriding or always
meet with conformity. On this reading, calling an agent “rational”
is not genuinely normative in the way that calling a toaster “a
good one” is not: it is to assert that something ranks highly by a
(conventionally?) associated standard without endorsing that standard
at all. Or at least, without giving it much endorsement: the
normative reading of “must” would indeed give assertions of
rationality something of a normative presupposition, but they needn't
have any immediate implications for settling the thing to do
because of the hedge. On the epistemic reading LINK would presuppose
only that rational agents are mostly pretty rational.
However, when we
get to Section 2 (specifically 234-5) it becomes clear this is not
the way to interpret LINK. The “must” is epistemic, “adhere”
isn't elliptical, and “for the most part” modifies the way in
which rational agents follow the norms of rationality. The
idea is that in order for us to attribute those capacities to a
rational agent we need to be able to interpret her as being committed
to the norms. In other words, this is a thesis which attributes
constitutive norms on a rather large scale. By way of
illustration: What's the difference between belief that P and
faith that P? It's not how responsive you are to
evidence, for some people are not very good at updating on their
evidence. Instead, one might think, it's whether or not you are
following the rules of evidence at all. Ridge's thought is that what
it is to be a rational agent is to follow (most of) the norms of
rationality.
What sorts of norms
are constitutive of agency, in Ridge's view? He gives nothing like a
list, but he name wide-scope means-end coherence (236) and coherence
of different ends with each other (237). He points out that this
preserves a unity with the theoretical case, for which the paradigm
instance of irrationality is inconsistency in belief.
At this point let's
return to where we left off in Section 1. Ridge points out that his
view can explain why a clause about normative normative judgments
appears on the list of platitudes about rational agency: to judge
that one ought to X is to have (Ridge says “occupy” on p.
228, and I am not sure whether this makes a difference) a normative
perspective which is in part constituted by an intention (which Ridge
also glosses as “commitment of the will”) to do whatever certain
standards would require, as well as to believe that any such standard
would require X-ing. “To fail to [X] would be to fail
to take a constitutive means to one's end, and hence to be
instrumentally irrational” (ibid.). Ridge later asserts that
because the commitment expressed by a normative judgment is a
“high-level planning state” as opposed to an immediate intention,
this also suffices for an explanation of the possibility and
irrationality of akrasia. When we judge we ought to X and
consciously give voice to this high-level commitment, it usually
generates a present-directed intention. But it doesn't always, and
when this happens we exhibit the same kind of means-end incoherence.
There seem to be
two other important lines of thought in this section. One is an
argument for instrumentalist conceptions of rationality over more
substantive, Kant-inspired ones from the possibility of rational
amoralists. The twist is that Ridge argues ordinary speakers would
without qualification attribute rational agency to such amoralists,
so that given LINK Kantians would need to either (i) attribute
persistent failure in abiding by the norms they are actually
following, which seems implausible in part because we have good
evidence that we shouldn't even interpret them as following
those norms, or (ii) deny that these amoralists are rational in the
capacity sense, biting the bullet on folk intuitions. [Here I've
presented the options slightly differently than the way Ridge does.
I'm a little worried that the presentation in the text relies on the
premise that the amoralist is successfully exercising the capacities
outlined in the ten given platitudes and therefore is rational
in the capacity sense. But a Kantian may demur and look for
additional platitudes.] The other emphasizes that because
judgments of rationality are not normative, calling someone
“rational” is compatible with the sort of substantive normative
commitments which the latter seem most concerned to derive. Just as
well, on Ridge's view it is perfectly compatible to be a nihilist
[about the normative, presumably – someone who does not rule out
any norms for acting or deliberating] while still making judgments of
rationality and irrationality.
(Jumping to Section
2, p. 237...) Ridge does seem a little more moved by intuition that
fully-coherent anorexics might be irrational, and to this he has two
responses: (i) Insofar as it's robust it might be “an acceptable
casualty of systematic theorizing”, and (ii) there is an
alternative sense of “rational” on which it is genuinely
prescriptive, meaning something like “self-destructive without good
reason”. Ridge explains that coherence-rationality can explain why
we would be driven to attribute prescription-rationality: we quite
generally attribute motivations to people in virtue of which
unreasonable actions like starving themselves to death would
be coherence-irrational. Ridge goes on to give some reasons to think
that coherence-rationality is unified and useful for making sense of
agents in a way that gives it a kind of priority over
prescription-rationality, and that judgments of coherence-rationality
can in a sense settle the immediate thing to do in spite of not being
normative.
[It might be good
at this point to do some theoretical score-keeping. In brief, so far
Kantians are biting the bullet on the rational knave intuition and
Ridge is biting the bullet on the irrational anorexic intuition. The
norms of instrumental rationality do indeed display a kind of unity
that would be broken by adding in more substantive norms. But does
this really support the contention that our pre-theoretic notion of
rationality on balance favors the instrumental conception? Kantians
might agree that the ten platitudes hang together but insist that
they, as well as LINK, only say something about internally
coherent agency, not rational agency. According to them rational
agency is a matter of being minimally responsive to reasons or the
like. After all, they might say, there do seem to be strong
conceptual connections between “reason” and “rationality”,
and it used to be orthodoxy that if anything was a normative
notion, “rationality” was. These intuitions they can explain
while Ridge can only explain them away. They'd also presumably say
the same thing about theoretical rationality: Wilberforce the
dinosaur-denier may be fully internally coherent, but he's hardly
rational. So I'm worried that we're heading towards a
stalemate – perhaps even of the sort that is characteristic of
verbal disputes.]
These worries about
genuinely normative uses in the penumbra of “rational” lead Ridge
in Section 3 to defend an Ecumenical Cognitivism about “rationality”
on which many uses of the term carry a generalized conversational
normative implicature – one for which no special stage-setting is
required but which can be cancelled. This is, of course, aided by the
fact that we may safely assume the people we talk with are
rational agents and, if LINK is right, will thereby be reliably
motivated by what's rational. That pointing out such a fact
implicates advice can by explained by Gricean injunctions to
be helpful and cooperative. [Quick note on cancellability: “Murdering
Sandeep would be rational, but I strongly advise against it” sounds
worse to me than “Murdering Sandeep would be rational from your
perspective, but I strongly advise against it.” If others share
this intuition then it does seem awfully similar to the intuition
used to argue against Ecumenical Cognitivsm about moral talk, p. 95.]
In Section 4 Ridge
considers how his own objections to cognitivism about practical
normativity apply here and finds them lacking. The normative
implications of “rational” are cancellable, and judgments of
rationality are only motivating through some independent desire to
fulfill one's various ends. [Though how is this latter the case? If
I'm rational in the capacity sense, won't I thereby have a basic
disposition to, say, drop one of my ends once I judge that I cannot
possibly fulfill all of them? And doesn't that provide the needed
motivation? Indeed, it seems that on Ridge's view such a disposition
cannot exist independently of judgments of rationality insofar as the
ability to make such judgments (perhaps) requires rational agency.]
Ridge thinks that analytic reductionism has some plausibility in this
case because in contrast to morality, which surely has substantive
implications for how to live one's life, “rationality” is a
purely formal notion. Hence formal platitudes may capture it. [Though
one hopes they're not so formal as to be analytic since, as
the “schmagency” debate shows, it is notoriously difficult to see
how analytic truths can set genuine norms!] And the Twin Earth
objections that felled synthetic reductionism about practical
normativity don't apply here: if we came across a community of people
who applied a term T to actions which manifest weakness of
will and often recommended them on account of their being T,
it seems we wouldn't translate T by “rational”.
And that's where
the chapter concludes. What follows below are some longer reflections
of my own.
CONSTITUTIVE
NORMS AND LINK. Surely everyone thinks that there are deep
connections between agential capacities and norms of internal
coherence, but there's a question as to whether LINK, or at least
Ridge's understanding of it, captures them. I see three ways to raise
problems for this view. (1) Advocate a general skepticism about
constitutive standards. This would make LINK fail on a
presupposition. (2) Accept that some mental states or attitudes have
constitutive standards, but hold that the matter is always normative:
to say that someone has the belief-capacity or is following the norms
for belief is to say that they ought
to respond to evidence in certain ways, or at least that they would
ought to if other
matters were not pressing, or some such. This makes attributions of
rational agency normative, and it appears to give attributions of
rational success a normative presupposition at the very least. It
doesn't contradict LINK, however. (3) Accept that attributing
rational capacities is not normative, but argue that possession of
the capacities does not settle whether one is following the norms of
rationality.
I'm rather friendly
to the first strategy, but it's clearly too large an issue to broach
here. In the next section I press an aspect of the second strategy.
Here I'll try to bring out the force of the third.
Most of the
capacities we unquestionably have, like my capacity to bend my right
leg, do not of themselves set standards, much less constitutive
standards which we are thereby interpreted as following. So I can
bend my leg; does that mean I ought to bend it as much as
possible? How far should it be bent, and for how long? Some
people favor teleo-functional accounts of how the selection of
capacities might set standards, but these all have problems too.
There's a ganglion cell in the frog's retina which selectively fires
for small black disks moving very rapidly in their receptive field.
Does that mean it ought to respond to flies – or instead to
black disks generally? Could it be that the receptive field ought
to be a little bit larger? The disposition itself (much less the
associated capacity) doesn't seem to settle it. (Obviously I'm taking
after Wittgenstein here.)
So there's a worry
that the ten platitudinous capacities on p. 227 admit of the same,
non-standard-setting reading, one that doesn't lead us to interpret
them as following any particular set of rules (contra p. 235).
Indeed, it was that reading which led me to misinterpret LINK. So
rational agents can set and abandon ends; does that mean they
ought to set and abandon as many ends as possible? When should I
reconsider intentions and ask, “What shall I do?” The capacities
don't seem to say. So how are we supposed to get from the capacities
to the norms?
INCOMPATIBLE
INTENTIONS. Perhaps the problem is that only a few of the capacities
are instrumental to establishing the norms which the agent is
interpreted as following. Platitude (8), which deals with revising
conflicting ends, is an excellent candidate. But – and this is a
key claim – not all agents with conflicting intentions are
irrational. I intended to be a chemist when I was 8 and now
intend to be a philosopher, but that doesn't make me irrational.
Similarly, if for reasons of cognitive capacity I couldn't come to
realize that two of my present intentions conflict, perhaps I am not
irrational. But neither is it the case that the norm only applies
when I have two incompatible present intentions which I consciously
know to be incompatible. For one thing it's not clear such a
case is possible – perhaps I'm best interpreted as not really
intending in such a case! And for another it seems we call
people irrational who persist with incompatible intentions in virtue
of having momentarily forgotten a previous one; they haven't yet “put
the two together”. (One may prefer to put the problem as when
exactly to attribute an intention to an agent in the sense relevant
for the norms, but it comes to the same thing – there's a lot of
indeterminacy here.)
What explains the
difference between irrational and rational incompatible intentions?
What is the rule that I am to be interpreted as following, and why
does it take that shape? The problem is not so much the indeterminacy
itself as that the agent's capacities (conceived in a naturalistic,
non-normative sense, at least!) do not seem to do any work here. I
have the capability to conform to lots of different norms for
intentions, but which are the ones that I'm following? Neither do my
dispositions settle which norms I'm following, as we saw
above.
Instead, one might
think, two incompatible intentions suffice for irrationality when the
agent is responsible for revising them – when the agent
merits blame on account of not revising them. That would plausibly
make judgments of rationality normative. (Ridge might very well
search for a different explanation; perhaps he can appeal to social
convention. But it looks like his current position commits him to
denying a popular solution to the rule-following problem.)
AKRASIA. On Ridge's
view the norms of rationality are wide-scope, including the one that
is supposed to explain what is irrational about akrasia – means-end
coherence. But most people think there's a difference in rational
authority between one's motivations here. It isn't always a
rational response merely to revise one's normative judgment, as this
view predicts. Also, some think there's an important difference
between a commitment and an intention, which are put in apposition on
p. 228: it's the difference between being for an action (e.g.
being for deciding according to certain standards) and going for
that action, which isn't really a normative state of mind. The
problem with akrasia is that the action you know you ought to do is
one that you've committed yourself to, but you don't plan
or intend to do it. The attitudes aren't similar enough to be
incoherent in the way that means-end incoherence is, and it requires
a different explanation. Perhaps this is a sense in which the account
makes for too much unity!
KANTIAN STRATEGY.
(p. 231) I wonder if this section gets the dialectic right,
particularly when it asserts that Kantians must show there's some
incoherence in the idea of instrumental rationality. My understanding
of the standard Kantian strategy is that it doesn't so much directly
argue straight from the concept of rationality to certain substantive
norms such that the very idea of rational action which flaunts them
is incoherent. Instead there's an argument from the concept of
rational agency (which may involve limited capacities of the sort
advocated in the book) to a metaphysical claim about the
nature of agents, and from there to a thesis about agents'
non-contingent ends. This might lead to that sort of
conceptual incoherence if there's nothing more to the nature
of agency than being something which follows the norms of
rationality, but I don't think Kantians think this. And importantly
LINK leaves open that possibility, so that Kantians would not have
any special problems accounting for it.
NIHILISTS. I assume
nihilists (231) do not rule out any criteria for deciding. But
surely they form intentions. This leaves them not ruling out not
reconsidering intentions constantly. Lacking such a safeguard they
easily could have adopted can lead to their intentions being
considerably less successful. Isn't this a kind of practical
incoherence which makes them practically irrational? So in what sense
is this view of rationality compatible with nihilism if that's
not to mean that nihilism is not necessarily irrational? Surely any
two views are compatible if all that means is that a sufficiently
irrational person could hold them! Indeed, there's a more
direct route to the conclusion given that Ridge thinks (233) that
following norms of rationality in the capacity sense is a way
of accepting certain norms. A total nihilist rational agent would
rule out no norms for acting and deciding and yet, in virtue of being
a rational agent, rule out some.