Chapter 8: Rationality

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.

Chapter 7: Truth

In Chapter 7, Ridge takes on the challenge of accommodating the notion of normative truth within the overall programme of Ecumenical Expressivism (EE). His main aim in doing so is to provide a workable alternative to what could currently be seen as the standard expressivist approach to truth. Popularised primarily by Blackburn, this standard approach is deflationary, taking truth-aptness as a mere matter of declarative form and the truth-predicate as a mere device for disquotation. Ridge, however, is concerned that a commitment to deflationism would leave too many hostages to fortune, considering the numerous objections to which this theory of truth has been subjected more broadly within the philosophy of language. For this reason, he devises a conceptual machinery meant to enable the ecumenical expressivist to take on board any other plausible theory of truth (his focus in the chapter is on correspondence) and to modify it in a principled way so that it fits snuggly within EE. There are lots of interesting ideas and insights in this chapter, all worthy of much more attention than I can give them here. In the interest of brevity I’ll focus on what I take to be the main thread of Ridge’s argument, leaving aside some of his subsidiary moves. I’ll raise a number of critical issues and questions along the way, though I confess that on the whole I find myself more often agreeing than disagreeing with Ridge.

Expressivism, Truth-Aptness, Deflationism

For a few decades now, expressivists have taken a deflationary approach to truth. Deflationism works on two levels. First, there’s deflationism about truth-aptness, according to which truth-aptness is simply a matter of grammar: if statements in a certain domain of discourse have the declarative form, then they’re truth-apt. Normative statements are obviously declarative, so they qualify. Then, there’s deflationism about the truth-predicate. On this view, ‘is true’ is merely a device for disquotation, whose meaning is given by instances of the famous schema:

     (T) ‘p’ is true if and only if p.

In other words, the truth-predicate adds nothing to the semantic content of the proposition to which it is ascribed. When I say that it is true that charity is good, I say nothing more than that charity is good. So whenever I’m entitled to make the latter claim I am also entitled to make the former. Deflationism thus gives us truth “on the cheap”.

Ridge rejects both these kinds of deflationism. With respect to truth-aptness, he subscribes instead to minimalism, which adds the idea of discipline to the deflationist’s insistence on declarative form. And since the work completed in previous chapters of the book amounts to a cumulative argument to the effect that normative discourse is subject to the appropriate kind of discipline, Ridge takes himself, rightly in my view, to have already established that normative discourse is truth-apt. 

With respect to deflationism about the truth-predicate, Ridge is equally critical. Although he doesn’t formulate a decisive objection to it, in §2 he lists a number of problems that this type of deflationism faces more widely within the philosophy of language: its incompatibility with the idea of truth-value gaps, the formal problems arising out of the incompleteness results, and, more importantly, the difficulty of accounting for the normativity of meaning and truth. According to Ridge, these problems are enough to show that deflationism is on philosophically shaky ground - shaky enough, that is, for the expressivist not to want to pin all her hopes on it, but instead to be looking elsewhere for a sort of “insurance policy”.

Ridge’s Account of Truth in EE     

Ridge couches his alternative proposal in terms of the correspondence theory, which he chooses because of its friendliness to representationalism. Here’s my reconstruction of the main building blocks of Ridge’s account:

1. As the objects of propositional attitudes like belief and desire, propositions are the primary truth-bearers. (p. 204) 
2. A normative proposition does not fix a single representational content - rather, it expresses a hybrid state (a relation between a normative perspective and a representational belief) and is thus multiply realisable: the representational belief that partly constitutes it can take any of an indefinite range of contents. (p. 205) 
3. From (A) and (B) it follows that the business of representing the world is done not by propositions, but by their representational contents. Token normative propositions represent only indirectly, via the contents that are assigned to them by the normative perspectives that partly constitute them (ibid.).
4. From (C) it follows that the same kind of indirectness must be replicated in our theory of truth for propositions. Specifically, the truth of a proposition must be interpreted in terms of the truth of its associated representational contents.
5. Hence, we get the following indirect account: using ‘p’ to denote an arbitrary proposition, a claim of the form ‘p is true’ means that on any acceptable construal, the representational content of p corresponds to reality. (p. 208)
6. Since the clause on the right-hand side of the meaning equivalence in (E) deploys a normative concept (‘acceptable construal’), it follows that ascriptions of truth are essentially normative judgments.
7. Given EE’s account of normative judgments, it follows from (F) that an ascription of truth of the form ‘p is true’ expresses a hybrid state made up of: (i) a normative state; (ii) the belief that on any of the admissible specifications of the representational content of p, that content corresponds to reality (p. 209).   

Ridge packs a lot in here - much of which, I think, is on the right track. In what follows, I want to express (excuse the pun!) two cheers and two associated fears about his proposal.

Here’s my first cheer. The view spelled out in claims (F) and (G) above, namely that truth-ascriptions are normative, has a lot going for it. I am independently persuaded that truth is an essentially normative concept, mainly due to an argument put forward by Huw Price in his 2003 paper, “Truth as Convenient Fiction”. Moreover, it is a virtue of Ridge’s account that he doesn’t restrict his approach only to ascriptions of truth taking normative judgments as their objects - rather, he states that the approach “generalises to arbitrarily complex claims and thoughts in which ‘true’ figures” (p. 211). This, for instance, enables him to say that both ‘It is true that charity is good’ and ‘It is true that grass is green’ are normative judgments, whereas the deflationist could only say that about the former. To my mind, this gives Ridge an advantage over deflationism, though it’s not an advantage that he explicitly claims for himself. On the other hand, one advantage that Ridge does claim for his view is that it can fend off a counterexample to Hume’s Law (the injunction against deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’). The counterexample is due to Mark Nelson:

     (1) The Pope believes that charity is good.
     (2) All the Pope’s beliefs about charity are true.

     Therefore, (3) Charity is good.

On a standard understanding of truth-ascriptions, (2) is descriptive. Since (1) is also descriptive but (3) is normative, the inference is supposed to have derived an ‘ought’ purely from a set of ‘is’ premises. However, Ridge rightly points out that on his view, (2) counts instead as a normative judgment, and therefore the inference from (1) & (2) to (3) already contains an ‘ought’ hidden in the premises.

But here comes my related worry. Ridge explicitly commits himself on p. 210 and elsewhere to the “transparency” of truth, namely to the claim that the following two entailments are valid: ‘p, therefore it is true that p’, and ‘it is true that p, therefore p’. Now take the first of these entailments. If that’s valid, then the following instance of it is valid, too: 

     (4) Grass is green.
     Therefore, (5) It is true that grass is green. 

Now, (4) is a descriptive claim, whereas (5) is a normative one, at least if Ridge is right about truth-ascriptions. Thus, we have an ‘is’ that directly entails an ‘ought’ - a fine counterexample to Hume’s Law! However, Ridge states that he finds Hume’s Law independently plausible (p. 218). So something has to give here. For my part, I would be inclined to give up on Hume’s Law, given that I have a stronger commitment to the normativity of truth. But I would also be curious to hear what Ridge thinks about this, and whether or not his own inclination is the same as mine.

Be that as it may, here is my second cheer. As Ridge himself notes (p. 207), his proposal that propositional truth be interpreted as the truth of associated representational contents on all acceptable construals (as per claim (E) above) is structurally similar to the supervaluationist account, on which a sentence is true just in case it is super-true, i.e. true on all admissible precisifications. Supervaluationism is a theory of truth designed to account for propositions containing vague predicates, and in this connection Ridge suggests at one point (particularly in footnote 15 on p. 207) that normative predicates are maximally vague - having determinate non-instances but no determinate instances. As someone who has been thinking long and hard about the vagueness of moral predicates, all of this is music to my ears! 

But I also have a related worry. When glossing the notion of maximal vagueness, Ridge says that normative predicates are maximally vague in the sense that there are no cases to which they apply as a matter of sheer semantic and conceptual competence. But this, he adds, doesn’t entail that there are therefore no determinate normative truths. Instead, according to him “there are many determinately true and non-trivial normative propositions. The point is that which ones are determinately true is something which competent speakers as such can disagree about even if they agree on all the relevant non-normative facts” (p. 207, n. 15). It seems to me that this is one of the strongest claims Ridge makes about truth in this chapter. Effectively, he’s saying that knowledge of normative truths is entailed neither by factual knowledge of non-normative truths, nor by knowledge of semantics. And of course, as a quasi-realist committed to mimicking realist talk about the normative domain, this is exactly what he should be saying. For it is indeed a staple of realism that normative truths are epistemically unconstrained in the ways specified above, as well as in other ways. However, my question is this: how is Ridge going to interpret such claims of epistemic unconstrainedness with respect to normative truth in a quasi-realist fashion, without taking on the full-blown commitments of robust realists? The old deflationist has a ready-made solution to this - she can simply adopt a deflationary view of such claims of epistemic unconstrainedness as:

     (7) If you thought kicking dogs was permissible, you’d be wrong.

     (8) If you knew all the facts about dog pain but somehow thought that kicking dogs was

            permissible, you’d be wrong. 

     (9) Kicking dogs is wrong even if everybody else approves of it. 

   (10) Even if we could never know what to make of it, kicking dogs would still be wrong.

    (11) Even if we all approved of it, kicking dogs would still be wrong.

According to the deflationary expressivist (e.g. Blackburn), statements like (7)-(11) all have essentially the same function: they express our first-order con-attitude towards kicking dogs, as well as various second-order attitudes about that first-order attitude. In (7), for instance, we’re expressing our first order attitude together with a second-order con-attitude to having a pro-attitude towards kicking dogs. In (11), we’re expressing our first-order attitude again, this time together with a second-order con-attitude towards changing our mind about that first-order attitude. And so on. The point is that by providing these deflationary readings, the quasi-realist appears to make good on the promise of mimicking realist talk without taking on the metaphysical baggage of realism. He does so by refusing to hear (7)-(11) as anything other than so many more normative claims, made from within our normative perspectives.

But how can Ridge hope to perform the same trick once he’s rid himself of deflationism? Read in the manner encouraged by a correspondence theory of truth, each of (7)-(11) suggests a commitment to a normative reality making some of our judgements true and others false. At this stage, it may seem as though Ridge has dropped the ‘quasi’ qualification and has opted instead for full-blown realism.

One way for Ridge to reply to this would be to point out that his eschewal of deflationism about truth does not necessarily mean that he cannot take a deflationary view of other notions. Perhaps he could cherry-pick, combining, for instance, a robust view of truth with a deflationary view of facts. This leads me on to my final worry, which I’ll outline in a separate section.

Correspondence and Deflationist Facts

Here is one way of thinking about this. Given (G) above, a truth-ascription like ‘It is true that charity is good’ expresses a hybrid state constituted by (i) a normative perspective, and (ii) the belief that on any of the admissible specifications of the representational content of ‘Charity is good’, that content corresponds to reality. But according to EE, ‘Charity is good’ expresses a hybrid state constituted by (a) a normative perspective, and (b) the belief that charity would be highly ranked as an end by any acceptable ultimate standard of practical reasoning. Featuring in the representational content of ‘Charity is good’ is a reference to admissible standards of practical reasoning. And since this representational content is supposed to correspond to reality, it must follow that reality contains facts about admissible standards of practical reasoning. These are normative facts. Therefore, normative facts exist.

Unless something’s gone wrong in my reasoning above, this seems to indicate that talk of correspondence in Ridge’s theory will ultimately force him to commit to the existence of at least some normative facts (viz., facts about admissible standards). But isn't this just the starting point of a slippery slope leading all the way to full-blown realism?

Well, one could say this depends on how we interpret talk of facts. If facts are understood realistically, then yes, this is realism. But why could Ridge not take a deflationary understanding of facts, according to which ‘It’s a fact that p’ simply means ‘p’? 

The problem here is that deflationism about facts seems to simply nullify the appeal to the correspondence theory of truth. If Ridge were to say that p is true iff p corresponds to the facts, but then add that it’s a fact that p iff p, then it would seem to me he’d be effectively backtracking. In that case, any talk of “corresponding to the facts” would become idle, and Ridge’s theory of truth would just boil down to deflationism - ‘p’ is true iff p.

Summary of critical points

Let me end this lengthy exposition by summarising my main critical points (such as they are) in the form of three brief questions, to facilitate discussion:

(Q1) Is there a tension between Ridge’s commitment to the normativity of truth, his commitment to the transparency of truth, and his commitment to Hume’s Law? (Recall that combining the first two appears to provide a counterexample to the latter.)

(Q2) How can Ridge interpret claims about the epistemic unconstrainedness of normative truth without collapsing into full-blown realism? 

(Q3) Is the correspondence theory of truth compatible with a deflationist view of normative facts?            

Chapter 6 - Disagreement

Summary

The point of Ridge’s chapter 6 is simple: to provide a plausible account of disagreement.  It has to improve on existing accounts and mesh with the account built so far in EE.  The structure of the chapter is also simple.  The first section deals with Stevenson’s account, which is found wanting.  The second section deals with Allan Gibbard’s account, which is seen as an improvement on Stevenson’s, but is also found wanting.  Ridge then develops his own account, which he calls ‘disagreement in prescription’, and shows how it meshes with what has gone before.

Section 1: Disagreement in Attitude

Ridge begins with a summary of Stevenson’s account.  How to define ‘disagreement in attitude’?  Although many think it is sufficient for there to be two attitudes that cannot be satisfied, Ridge notes that Stevenson does add a further, necessary condition in some passages, namely that at least one party has to have a desire to change the other’s attitude.   Ridge argues that this second condition renders the overall position absurd, and focuses in the main on the account with this condition eschewed.

Having summarized Stevenson’s account, Ridge indicates four main worries.  (i) We can have cases of different preferences – I prefer that Wolverhampton Wanderers win, and you do not – that seem to be differences of attitude but do not seem to be disagreements, at least in a sense we are trying to capture.  (ii) What about non-linguistic animals?  Fido wants to go for a walk, whilst I want to have a quiet evening in.  This fits Stevenson’s account, yet it does not seem a clear case of disagreement at all.  Even if we think it is a case of disagreement, it doesn’t seem as clear-cut as the others.  The analysis offers no sense of how that can be.  (iii) Stevenson’s account seems to fit many mental states where there can be incompatible propositional contents.  However, we do not find the ideas of ‘disagreement in fantasy’, ‘disagreement in supposition’ and ‘disagreement in perception’ natural type of disagreement as opposed, again, to being differences only.  (iv) This account has no way of accommodating agent-relative judgements, and these judgements seem to be pre-theoretically intuitively plausible.  The worry here revolves around indexicality and what one would wish others to do.  Where we have a difference between two speakers as to what a third should do,  that difference can be expressed as two different preferences as to what those individual speakers would do if they were in the shoes of the third: ‘if I were you, then I would / would not phi’.  Both preferences can seemingly be satisfied, and thus we have no disagreement where we think there should be one.

Section 2: Disagreement in Plan

For Gibbard, normative judgements are planning states.  He “analyzes what my judgement about what other people should do in a given set of circumstances in terms of my contingency plan for being in those circumstances.”

         This account gets round the fourth problem that dogs Stevenson’s account.  Gibbard illustrates his view with the example of what Brutus thinks Caesar should do.  Brutus plots to ensure that Caesar comes to the Senate, yet he can also say to himself that if he were to find himself in Caesar’s shoes, then he should not come to the Senate.  We have two all-things considered judgements that clash.  Ridge is satisfied that there is an improvement here, from Stevenson to Gibbard.

         However, there are, again, four issues that Ridge raises for this account, or rather stages of worry that he develops.  (i) I plan to do something in a circumstance, whilst you plan to do something else in the same circumstance.  What makes it the case that such differences are disagreements?  Gibbard’s response is a type of transcendental argument: we must treat at least some disagreements in plan as genuine disagreements.  Imagine what it would be like to be a single person over time, changing her plans.  It makes sense for her to treat differences between her present self and previous selves as disagreements.  If she does not, then these previous plans could still be considered as mere possibilities for her now, rather than as plans that are, in some way, defective.  Similarly, when I consult others about what to do, especially if I regard them as good planners and worth talking with, and there is a difference, it can make sense to treat this as a type of disagreement.  Again, if I don’t then these could be considered to be live possibilities for me, rather than plans that I think are flawed in some way.  This is not something we are forced to do, but if we think of someone else as a good planner, then in part it shows that we take her plan seriously, and as something worth disagreeing with.  This does suggest, as Ridge notes, that there can be occasions of ‘impasse’: I regard myself and my plan as ideal and think that you and yours are not, and vice versa.  In that case, we will have nothing left to work with and no point, perhaps, to treating our differences as ones of disagreement.  But, Gibbard hopes that such occasions will occur infrequently.   Can this transcendental argument work?....

          (ii) Ridge thinks not.  He is not convinced that we have to treat these types of difference as disagreements.  If Gibbard uses ‘disagreement’ as ‘disagreement in plan’ throughout his argument, he has established nothing.  We have a type of circularity – the differences in plan that two people have amount to a disagreement but only because we have cast ‘disagreement’ as ‘disagreement in plan’.  The real issue is whether disagreement in plan is a real type of disagreement.  Is it?  We need some independent idea of what sorts of topic can correctly be topics for agreement and disagreement.  Gibbard gives us some glimmers here, but not enough with which to work. 

(iii)  Gibbard’s transcendental move depends on a practical need.  Agents have to conceive of themselves as disagreeing with previous selves or other people in order to take themselves as being effective planners.  But what if this need could be met by us merely pretending that we disagree with previous selves as opposed to merely differing?  Gibbard could respond by saying that at least many people do feel this need to conceive of themselves in this way.  And this leads to a more fundamental issue….

(iv) Namely that the range of cases in which there is a point to treating ourselves as disagreeing does not coincide with the range of cases in which people disagree.  Consider cases of impasse: it may be coherent for us to treat ourselves as disagreeing (rather than differing) but there is no point in doing so simply because there is no way that one or the other party will change his or her mind.  This point is sharpened if we think that there are quite a few cases of impasse, I think.   

            The big worry that emerges for Ridge is Gibbard’s transcendental argument.  To what extent are we licensed to treat difference in plan as proper disagreement?

Section 3: Disagreement in Prescription

Gibbard is right to focus on normative discussion, thinks Ridge.  But, in order to move from difference to disagreement, his account depends on there being a point – a real, actual point – to the discussion, and it is this that distinguishes (mere) difference from (proper) disagreement.   Better to think about an idealized circumstance, thinks Ridge: what people would prescribe if they were in best circumstances.  We leave behind the thought that there has to be some actual, existing point to their difference. 

Ridge asks us to think about idealized circumstances in which each party advises the other about what they should do.  Each party must be fully honest and fully candid with the other.  Each must mention all considerations that are relevant to the decision, and each must mean what he or she says.

Ridge lists some advantages of his account.  (i) Sometimes there is mere difference and this does not result in disagreement, and this may simply be because I have no desire to change your mind, for I may not be advising you to do anything, even if we have different tastes or preferences.  This account can capture this phenomenon.  (ii) The account makes it easy to see why we are cautious about characterizing non-linguistic agents as entering into relations of agreement and disagreement.  We may very well hesitate about speculating as to what a non-linguistic agent would advise in ideal circumstances.  (iii) There is a nice mirror to point (i).  This account can explain how we can be taken to be disagreeing even without any actual motive to change someone else’s mind.  All that matters is that we would offer incompatible actions if we were to offer some advice.  (iv) A theme from elsewhere in the book comes in.  This account explains what is special about belief and desire.  The focus here is on advice.  Consider first desire – it would seem to be insincere to say ‘I would advise you to phi, even though I would never do that if I were in your circumstances for I have no desire to’. And in order to be offering advice in ideal circumstances, one has to be sincere.  What of belief?  That is more complicated, but essentially, one way of advising someone to believe that p is simply to assert that p.  Ridge claims that there is nothing analogous to this for fantasizing and the rest.  (v) Lastly, Ridge outlines how this account accommodates normative disagreement about agent-relative reasons.

              Ridge ends by indicating how this fits with the ecumenical expressivism he has already developed.

Commentary and Questions

(1) I think that, by and large, Ridge does a really good job in summarizing Stevenson and Gibbard, and raises some good points.   The move to think about idealization is a really nice one.  But….

(2)  …there is one point from what Ridge says that I think it is worth pausing on, if only to get more clarification.  I am going to focus on his claim that asserting that p is a way of advising someone to believe that p and, in particular, the claim that comes from this, namely that there is a great difference between belief and, say, fantasizing on this point.  (Note that establishing the difference between belief and fantasy, for example, is the main thrust of what Ridge is doing on pp. 188ff.) 

         So, first of all, is asserting a way of advising?  Well it can be.  (I am not going to deny that here.)  Ridge makes a nice point on p. 189 that relies on discussants and believers both aiming at truth, ceteris paribus.  If I say that p, then I am presenting p as being true.  If you think of me as honest and reliable, you have a reason to believe that p.  What Ridge does is play up the interesting aspects of our language that take us from a dull, narrowly characterized speech-act of asserting to show us that assertion can also be a type of advising.

          Fine.  But, the more one plays that up, the more one might see that expression of fantasy shares more with expression of belief than Ridge allows for.  He says:  “Nothing analogous to this can be said about fantasizing, perceiving, or supposing for the sake of argument.  It is not obvious that we can (in our language, anyway) directly express these states of mind at all, as opposed to expressing them by expressing our beliefs about them.  This is especially unclear when one recalls that the relevant sense of ‘express’ is one which goes via robust linguistic conventions. Insofar as we could directly express them in the relevant sense, though, it is not plausible to suppose that we would thereby be advising our interlocutor to adopt our fantasy, perception, or supposition. Nor is it clear that the idea of honesty, hypocrisy, and the like intuitively come into the frame in these other cases either.” (p. 189, his italics).

        Some comments on this key passage.  First, I don’t share Ridge’s confidence that we cannot express fantasies directly with our language.  Just think of stories one tells to all manner of people – bedtime stories to children, for example.  I think I am directly expressing a fantasy to them and not just beliefs about the fantasy (or, perhaps better to make Ridge’s point, not just beliefs about the fantasy world).  I think that when I tell my children a story I am directly expressing the fantasy, not giving them beliefs about what happens or is happening in this fantasy world.  (Of course, this may be because – thinking of Ridge’s next claim – that I have misunderstood what is meant by ‘express’ here.  But, then I need a little clarification.)  Now, a crucial point for me.  Remember, I am worried about how special belief is in this sense, and how different it is, as Ridge supposes, from fantasy and the like.  Ridge says that it is implausible to suppose that we are trying to get our interlocutor to share our fantasy.  This strikes me as wrong-headed.  When I tell my children a bedtime story this is precisely one of the things I am aiming at doing, alongside other things such as trying to amuse them and calm them down.   Insofar as my asserting of p is a type of advising others to believe p, so my expressing a fantasy p (or a fantasy that p, or a fantasy of p), is a type of getting others to share in my fantasy and to fantasize as I do.  I just don’t see the gulf here.

        (Now, here’s something that is more of a ‘blogged punt’….)  Where I do think Ridge may have something is the point about honesty, at least as narrowly construed.  Issues of honesty don’t, obviously, come into fantasies!  But recall why we are talking about honesty.  We are talking of someone, suitably idealized, advising someone to phi.  Part of that idealization involves honesty.  And now we are trying to explain why belief, amongst many contentful states, has a special status and why agreement and disagreement in belief and attitude have great similarities, and are unlike samenesses and differences in fantasy.  But, the point of introducing honesty is, really, to show that we are people who are proper discussants, and who are not just sounding off in the same general vicinity.  Our difference gets turned into a disagreement, and our sameness gets turned into an agreement, partly because there is something about our character that connects with someone else.  Now, we have just seen that we can share in the fantasy together.  Furthermore, this is not just me giving a fantasy with you latching on.  Rather, I am aiming to get you to share in the fantasy, perhaps even continue it.  This is not honesty on my part, but some similar character trait, relevant to fantasy, something such as ‘engaged, sympathetic creativity’. 

          What of difference in fantasy?  (Here I think Ridge is on stronger ground, so this paragraph just shows where I have got….)  Well, there has to be some basis of sameness to begin with.  We have to be talking of the same, general fantasy world, with quite a few of the same characters and the like.  (Just as, when it comes to belief, we have to be having beliefs about the same set of things in general, otherwise the difference will simply be a difference: you expressing a belief about cheese, whilst I express a belief about tables.)  You and I both continue the story, but in different ways.  This may turn into a disagreement, and not just a difference, because the different depictions we offer continue the characterisations in ways that clash.  But, as Ridge may point out, if you dig deep, is the best way to cache out that clash really just to put it in terms of belief: given the fantasy world we have both been engaged in constructing, I believe that Noddy will eventually turn to a life of crime as he grows up, whereas you believe that he will stick to the straight and narrow.  And, so, we may still see that the only way of moving from differences in fantasy to anything like disagreements in fantasy is to rely on beliefs.  And that may show the power of Ridge’s stance.              

(3) Also, I am going to raise a very general point, if only to encourage clarification and extension of the account.  All of this concerns action: advising people to phi.  What about judgements where there is no action?  What of cases where I am judging that something is the case where we are dealing with evaluative judgements?  In a comment on a previous chapter I mentioned aesthetic judgements, so let’s stick with one of those.  I say that a painting is jejune and sloppy, whereas you say that it is youthful, daring and unencumbered.  Is this sort of difference one of mere taste?  (I’m wary of saying that about all aesthetic cases.)  It also doesn’t seem to be a difference in prescriptions, at least not straightforwardly.  After all, what am I prescribing people to do?  Buy the painting?  In a few cases, yes, but not all.  So, is the translation to what Ridge says the simple one of ‘asserting that the painting is jejune, etc. is a way of advising others to believe that it is jejune? (Or ‘…advising others to feel that it is jejune?’.)  What is going on in cases where we may decline to say that there is an obviously straightforward prescription?   

Sorry this is longer than the norm.  (I really got into this, Mike.)

Also, apologies in advance.  After posting I may not be able to get back here to check on comments until the weekend.