A priori workshop: John Skorupski

John gave a paper entitled 'Aprioricity and Normativity'. In it he talked about a certain form of a priori knowledge we have about the relations between reasons. A thinker's epistemic reasons are relative to what John called her 'epistemic field'. This is a set of facts at a specific time that are ascertainable by the thinker, but not necessarily ascertained. If there is outright sufficient reason to believe p then that belief has a priori support in the relevant epistemic field. John then talked of a narrowed epistemic field which he called an 'epistemic state'. A fact p is part of an epistemic state if the obtaining of p at a particular time gives a monotonically sufficient reason for the thinker in this state to believe that p. An example of such a fact might be that if I'm thinking and I have the thought that I'm thinking, I can know a priori that the latter thought is true (no further adduced evidence can falsify the thought).

John then went on to describe 'a priori warrant' as a phenomenological attitude towards a thinker's belief that she has sufficient reason to believe a fact p. If she bases that sufficient reason on her being in an epistemic state which gives outright sufficient reason to believe p, then she has a priori warrant. He then gave what he called the 'critical argument' where he argued that a thinker could not generate the relevant attitude to undewrite a priori warrant with regard to any a posteriori fact. Given his argument for a priori warrant, the conclusion was what John called the cognitive irrealism of the 'normative view' - that the apparently factual a priori propositions we know about reasons are in fact non-factual offshoots of synthetic a priori knowledge of reasons. What such knowledge has as its object is something like what Kant called the pure principles of the understanding - presumably principles of epistemic reasoning as such.

Reading Group: Akeel Bilgrami, 'Intentionality & Norms'

Bilgrami's paper is rich, and I want neither to summarise it nor comment on everything he has to say. I'm going to focus on sections I-IV, putting aside the very interesting comments on the nature of commitments (section V) and the discussion of Davidson (section VI). This is partly justified, I seems to me, by the fact that most of the anti-naturalistic argumentation happens in these early sections.

The main claim is that intentional states, being normative states, cannot be reduced to dispositions. This, Bilgrami suggests, is a serious obstacle to the naturalisation of the mind. There are two main arguments which, as Bilgrami puts it, effect a 'pincer' movement on the naturalistic reduction of intentional states to dispositions. The first is a variation on Moore's Open Question Argument (OQA). The OQA works by pointing out that, according to the naturalistic proposal, the question "I have the disposition to f, but ought I to f?" should be a closed question. That is, the answer should trivially be yes. The problem is that it looks like an open question. So the naturalistic proposal must be false. Consider the belief that it is raining outside. Suppose that a part of the proposed dispositional account is that I am disposed to believe that it is wet outside. We can fill in the above schema, "I am disposed to believe that it is wet outside, but ought I believe that it is wet outside?".

The reason that a second argument is needed is, for reasons familiar from discussions of Moore, this argument only works if the reduction was supposed to maintain sameness of sense. If the naturalistic view was that the belief and the disposition have different senses but the same referent, then the OQA is ineffective against it. So the second, Fregean, argument asks of the senses of the intentional states (the one's to be reduced), 'what are these senses expressing?' (131). The naturalist is then faced with a dilemma: if they express naturalistically acceptable properties, then the OQA comes back into play, if they express naturalistically unacceptable properties then the reduction has failed.

Although I think that this is a really powerful strategy, I have two criticisms of Bilgrami's treatment. The first is that he appears to assume that senses are descriptive. That is, he assumes that 'senses express properties', such that there is a question to be asked concerning whether the properties so expressed are natural or normative. But, as is very familiar, there is a significant position that is being ignored here (represented by Evans and McDowell), according to which senses are ways of thinking of objects that cannot be identified with independently identifiable definite descriptions. As, I seem to recall, McDowell puts it, what the sense of an expression is can be shown but not said. Admittedly, that view may have more appeal as an account of the sense of proper names than of terms referring to intentional states. But, so it seems to me, the very existence of such a position means that, without arguing against it, Bilgrami's non-naturalistic argument is inconclusive.

My second criticism is of a move that Bilgrami makes in response to one potential reply to the pincer strategy. This response, if I understood it correctly, was to allow that the senses in question expressed non-natural properties, but that these properties are also non-actual. That is, insofar as the relevant senses attribute non-natural properties to the world, they never attribute really existing properties. Now Bilgrami asks, what could justify this claim? His answer is, nothing other than a question begging scientistic prejudice, according to which only natural properties exist. What I take issue with is the suggestion that this answer would be question begging. Here is Bilgrami:

"The naturalist was supposed to give an argument for the reduction of value to natural properties and facts...Against that argument a Frege-Moore counterargument had been presented. If it turns out that in one's response to this counterargument one is assuming a criterion for property existence that takes for granted the truth of naturalism, the naturalist has begged the question" (136)

But surely this gets the dialectic entirely backwards. In the present context there is no argument for naturalism to which Bilgrami is offering a counterargument. Rather, he is giving an argument against naturalism, to which the naturalist is envisaged to be responding. Since this is the case, the naturalist is entitled to draw on elements of his own view in order to defend himself against Bilgrami's argument. The burden is no Bilgrami to show that the senses must express properties that really exist, rather than on the naturalist to show that they do not. If that's right, then this type of response is left open for the naturalist to make.

Naturalism Reading Group: McDowell's 'Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind'

The dialectical structure of McDowell's paper is the following (missing out a few side points against Rorty and some linking of the argument to the history of philosophy).

(1) Lay out the distinction between the logical space of reasons within which knowing and thinking operate and the logical space of law within which the natural sciences explain the phenomena that constitute 'nature'. Accept this distinction as a genuine intellectual achievement, but refuse to identify 'nature' with the realm of law.

(2) Give motivation for this 'liberal naturalism': '[T]hinking and knowing are aspects of our lives' (p94) as rational animals, and so need to be included within the domain of nature.

(3) Point out that liberal naturalism accepts the 'sui generis' nature of activities that occupy the logical space of reasons, against 'restrictive naturalism' which does not, wanting instead to characterise such activities in terms of the realm of law.

(4) Explain the aim of isolating the realm of law, according to liberal naturalism: to understand its 'mode of intelligibility' so that it can be distinguished logically from the space of reasons. But also, to see how easy it is to conflate the realm of law and the realm of nature and thus to understand the root cause of our modern anxiety over the place of mind in nature.

(5) Diagnose the roots of this anxiety in the Cartesian philosophy of mind that attempts to include the special normative features of thinking within the realm of law: that is, such philosophy misunderstands the sui generis nature of the logical space of reasons, thinking of it as a demarcated region of the realm of law with special characteristics. Conversely, liberal naturalism properly understands the sui generis character of thought, and crafts a conception of nature that goes beyond the realm of law and is thus able to accommodate it.

(6) Show that modern 'restrictive' naturalistic philosophy of mind and language, such as that of Ruth Millikan, simply repeats the basic mistakes of the Cartesianism it purports to reject. Moreover, because of this it cannot explain the phenomenon of thought as it patterns our lives, so is to be rejected (such patterning is equated with Frege's conception of intentionality). Note, this last point is not that restrictive naturalism endangers some aspect of our folk psychology to which we are particularly wedded. Rather, it apparently endangers the very idea of thought.

I will do my best here to assess McDowell's case for (6). I will then say something about why 'restrictive' naturalists might not find his case against Millikan completely convincing, and why this hangs on what one's fundamental philosophical motivations happen to be.

McDowell takes up Millikan's rejection of what she calls Frege's 'meaning rationalism'. This is the idea that 'sameness and differences in elements of thought-content are transparently available to a rational subject.' (p100) Millikan finds fault with (amongst other things) Frege's assumption that intentionality is 'semantic rationality', which is (amongst other things) the thesis that grasping a sense is being intentionally directed towards an object (towards a Bedeutung). Thus grasping a sense is semantically rational in that 'it is a matter of what, for instance, can and cannot be true together.' (p101) Millikan takes this assumption to be 'substantive and indefensible' (ibid.). That she thinks it substantive is because - according to McDowell - she conceives of rationality as inhering in an 'intact mind' that is in good mechanical order. And this means that Frege (on this conception of the mind) is committed to the internal machinery of the mind being in such mechanical order that it could track the requirements of semantic rationality. But, Millikan points out, certain forms of semantic rationality presuppose directedness at determinate objects. 'And there are modes of directedness at determinate objects - for instance, those expressible by perceptually-based demonstratives - that we cannot get into our picture without appealing to environmental circumstances - circumstances external to the intra-organismic machinery that Millikan thinks would have to be meant by the 'intact mind'.' (ibid.) So Frege's conception of intentionality fails for Millikan because it conceives of rationality in semantic terms that are too strong to be accounted for by any properly (mechanically) functioning 'intact mind'.

But surely, McDowell argues, this is bad, for if sense and reference don't hang together in propositional attitudes as Frege takes them to, we lose partial grip on the rationality of thinking - we lose the ability to explain why a thinker is not irrational if she holds two conflicting propositional attitudes (say, belief and disbelief) toward the same object. Moreover, why not contrapose and reject Millikan's concepton of the 'intact mind' as properly functioning internal machinery, precisely because it can't account for semantic rationality? McDowell states 'to have an intact mind just is to be semantically rational.' (p102) The point being, only semantic rationality can account for the kind of normativity that structures the space of reasons. Millikan's mistake is to construe Frege's notion of sense as characterising 'the internal mechanics of having one's mind on objects.' (ibid.) But this is to treat the notion as characterising a special portion of the realm of law, and this is what her repetition of the Carteisan mistake consists in. Moreover, Millikan's allergic reaction to the idea of semantic rationality is that it would commit her to the 'spooky' idea that 'meanings move the mind directly' (p103). But this is only because she conceives of the mind as falling in the logical space of law. If it is seen as falling within the logical space of reasons, then the idea of meanings moving the mind becomes unproblematic: it becomes the idea that grasping senses describes 'patterns in our lives'. (ibid.) The basic mistake is trying to conceive of such 'grasping' in terms of mechanical understanding rather than the semantic rationality operative in the space of reasons.

With regard to Millikan's 'externalist' argument against Fregean intentionality, McDowell accepts that the environment plays a role in determining thought contents, but denies that we need displace thoughts from the rational animals that have them, as Millikan does, when she conceives of rationality as 'a norm effected in an integrated head-world system under biologically ideal conditions.' (ibid.) The problem with this form of externalism is that the thing that thinks is no longer identified with the rational animal that does the thinking.

Ultimately then, McDowell complains that Millikan fails to see his liberal-naturalist alternative because of her implicit Cartesianism (her conceiving of the mind as a special part of the domain of law). This is disastrous, because we end up losing our grip on thinking as something we do, which presumably was what the restrictive naturalist originally wanted to explain.

Now, I certainly think that if Millikan presents Frege's conception of thought in the psychologistic terms of properly functioning 'internal machinery', then she is wrong to do this (I have to say, I doubt that someone as smart as she is would do this). And it certainly seems a counterintuitive result to relocate thought outside the rational animal that thinks. But I have two worries about McDowell's argument here. First, does Millikan really conceive of the mind in terms of the realm of law? For she thinks of it in terms of 'proper biological function under ideal conditions', and that seems like a teleological and thus normative notion to me. Granted, this notion does not exhibit the same normativity that's operative in the 'space of reasons', but neither does it exhibit the non-normativity of the realm of law. Second, and more important, McDowell's motivation for refusing the assimilation of nature to the realm of law is to avoid the anxieties we experience in trying to account for thought without supernaturalism. Fair enough. But what if one is motivated by the idea that naturalism is driven by the aim of a unified scientific account of the world? Accepting the sui generis phenomenon of thought into the realm of nature is going to look ad hoc to someone so motivated, representing a failure of naturalism rather than a success. To that person the anxiety McDowell can't countenance is just an acceptable by-product of working towards such an account of the world, hopefully to be overcome in some future version. Don't we just reach a stand-off of competing philosophical motivations here? Perhaps McDowell can win the stand-off by demonstrating that restrictve naturalism leaves us with the 'grotesque' (as he puts it) result that thoughts are not wholly possessed by thinkers, or that restrictive naturalism can't account for the normativity of thought? But presumably, Millikan's conception of 'proper biological function under ideal conditions' is precisely supposed to handle the normativity of thought. Given her commitment to a unified scientific account of nature, perhaps partially extricating thoughts from thinkers heads is a price worth paying to achieve this goal? How do we mediate here? Can we appeal to the common sense of McDowell's neo-Aristotelianism? One thing is sure, simply slinging mud won't help, as McDowell does at the end of the paper by calling restrictive naturalists 'scientistic'.

In Mind and World, McDowell takes the line that he is just providing an alternative account of naturalism and intentionality, one where we don't have to stay on the seesaw of Myth of the Given/Coherentism (he uses the language of showing up a blindspot, an unseen possibility). So there he admits that the 'therapy' he offers is available to those who want it, but he doesn't claim that it is mandatory for all. Here, he seems to take a tone where rather than simply providing us with an alternative possibility, he's actually closing off the possibility of restrictive naturalism. But the arguments don't seem to warrant this stronger line to me.

Reading Group: Hilary Putnam, 'The Content and Appeal of Naturalism'

Putnam has two criticisms of (scientific) naturalism:

(I) Naturalism cannot give stable accounts of semantic content so that central naturalistic claims about language imply views that are not consistent with an overall naturalistic perspective (anti-realism or even supernaturalism).

(II) Naturalism has anti-supernaturalistic appeal, but goes too far in its reductionist fervour -- Putnam attributes this to fear of the normative.

The essay starts with a survey of naturalistic attitudes towards semantic issues. As is well known, naturalism privileges the formalised languages of science, in particular physics, over language as we know and use it. Language, meaning and reference in the ordinary sense may or may not be part of the naturalistic picture of language. At any rate, there is a distinctive hierarchy between first-rate conceptual systems with contents that pertain to the absolute conception of the world sought by physics. Only statements of this (fairly rarefied) kind are bona fide statements. If less formal statements are considered at all, naturalism strives to reduce their contents to those of first-order statements. Putnam stresses, of course, that some areas of discourse resist this reduction to what pertains to an absolute conception of the world -- talk of desire, belief, meaning or reference. Naturalism may even accept this. But it is bound to take the irreducibility of certain areas of discourse as a symptom for their groundlessness. This should raise suspicions about this reductionist approach, or so Putnam argues.

This survey leads to Putnam’s summary critique of Quine’s view that reference is indeterminate and inscrutable. Quine is opposed to ordinary ideas about word-world correspondence on the grounds that there is no ostentative distinction between an object, undetached object parts or object stages. Therefore it cannot be determined whether ordinary sentences refer to the objects and relations between objects we take them to speak about literally or whether they refer to parts or stages of objects. On a different presentation of ontological relativity, it cannot be determined whether our ordinary statements refer to what we take them to speak about literally or to complement events. Maybe it should be added at this point that from a naturalistic point of view only highly formalised languages are equipped to deal with ontological relativity. This is in part because they cover a limited and very specific range of objects, in part because there are appropriate (scientific) tools for individuating what the statements of these languages refer to. In their case, reference is in fact reduced to an aspect of scientific method.

Putnam’s main point seems to be this: If word-world correspondence is abandoned along with a sui generis concept of reference, it is not clear what language does. But it would be highly counterintuitive to deny that language makes a determinate contribution to our accounts of the world. Naturalists may reply that language is still connected to objects on their view, albeit causally and not in terms of reference. But in Putnam’s view this amendment only conceals the problem that the naturalistic position on language is ant-realist. He believes that this endangers the overall realism of (scientific) naturalism. What is left of realism if utterances have no semantic relation to an appropriate part of reality, he suggests, is too thin to support naturalism. If propositions do not refer to reality in a determinate sense, preference for the (scientific) naturalistic view that they transmit or organise neural stimulation over, say, the notion that language helps creatures like us to cope with the world (Rorty) is a matter of predilection. Putnam seems to believe that this ambiguity seals the fate of scientific naturalism as an overall realist position.

Turning to (II), like Stroud and Dupré, Putnam wants to engage with the acclaim that naturalism appears to enjoy today. He does this from his own perspective: ‘”Naturalism”, I believe, is often driven by the fear that accepting conceptual pluralism will let in the “occult”, the “supernatural”.’ (66) To keep the occult at bay, naturalism adheres to two broad rules:

(1) All things are mereological sums of physical objects.
(2) The only admissible explanations are complete explanations in physical terms.

Failure to respect (1) means that outer-worldly entities can be included in one’s ontology. Failure to respect (2) means allowing events to be accounted for by miracles. However, according to Putnam, these rules create more problems than they solve.

In the case of (1), claiming that X is a mereological sum of its physical parts is unproblematic as long as I just mean that X is never disconnected from its parts. If I assume that this means the logical identity between X and the mereological sum of its physical parts, however, I could, for instance, create mereological sums of my parts which predate me by several centuries. Evidently, these sums wouldn’t be me.

Putnam argues against (2) that naturalism is in fact selective with regard to what it takes to be a pernicious and a benign incomplete explanation. The basic vocabulary of geology, for instance, does not map onto that of physics. Naturalists don’t believe this to be obscure. What they do not tolerate, however, are normative terms like true, justified, adequate, referring. According to Putnam, naturalism appears to imply that if these normative terms cannot be reduced to non-normative ones, it is unavoidable for us that we posit a supernatural realm of values. Contrary to the parsimonious understanding of language in naturalism, Putnam’s conceptual pluralism states that a wide variety of indicative sentences, including normative ones, are bona fide statements. These normative statements are not descriptions of reality. So there is no question of them relating to that occult realm. The naturalist fear is unfounded.

One of the things I don’t understand is how Putnam gets from instability of content (I) to horror of the normative (II). More specifically, I don’t see why Putnam’s conceptual pluralism is the most compelling solution to the semantic instability of naturalism. There seem to be other solutions to the semantic instability of naturalism. One of these is naturalistic in the sense attacked: to seek a different first-order conceptual system so that reference is not unstable (Millikan). Another solution is mentioned by Putnam: if we follow Rorty, language does not consist of bona fide statements to start with. So there is no particular issue with the inclusion of normative statements. But there is no special weight to them either that would suggest that those singling out specific bona fide statements commit another mistake (anti-normativism) in addition to the mistake of ascribing special status to certain statements.

Then, I wonder whether Putnam’s blanket accusation of normative horror might have profited from some reference to emotivism, expressivism or prescriptivism. Though his accusation is more concerned with normative terms like truth, justification rather than those of ethics, emotivism et al are broadly naturalistic attempts to say something about normativity without making it disappear. They talk about normative claims that are not descriptions of reality. The main difference to Putnam’s position is that emotivism et al do not treat normative claims as bona fide statements. In particular, Putnam might have explained vis-à-vis emotivism etc why his internal realism gives us a better idea than emotivism et al about claims that are not descriptions of reality. This might have prompted him to restate his blanket accusation of normative horror as a critique of non-cognitivism about norms. And this in turn might have incited him to reveal more about the systematic architecture in the background of his critique.

Robert Stern at the Transcendental Arguments Workshop

Bob gave a paper entitled The Value of Humanity: Reflections on Korsgaard's Transcendental Argument. In it he argued that a particular reading of 'phase two' of Korsgaard's transcendental argument for the value of humanity formulation of the categorical imperative is successful (Bob stressed that he was not defending the success of phases one and three, nor another version of phase two based on a 'regress of identities argument').

The argument Bob defended had the following first three premises, which were what discussion focussed on.

1. To rationally choose to do X, you must take it that you have some reason to do X
2. You cannot think that X is the rational thing to do in itself, but only given your practical identity
3. You cannot regard your practical identity as making X the rational thing to do unless you can see some value in that practical identity

It seems premise 1 is unproblematic. Given anti-realism about the normative source of reasons, premise 2 is fairly unproblematic also - for if actiona are not in themselves possessed of normative properties, then a particular rational action will only make sense if the agent conceives of it as the instantiation of what she finds worthwhile, i.e. as an instantiation of a practical identity.

Bob suggested Korsgaard's transcendental argument be read as a modest one - that is, not as 'world directed', attempting to establish the truth of the value of humanity, but rather operating under the auspices of an anti-realism about value which means the argument is only attempting to establish what an agent must believe from within her perspective on the world.

Most discussion was of the move from premise 2 to 3. One objection was that we can have anti-realism about values without going through a self-reflexive stance where the agent values her practical identity - think of Humean projectivism. Bob replied that it is hard to understand an agent valuing what she projects without valuing the practical identity that frames the projection, unless we see the object of a rational action as itself normative (precisely what we can't do given anti-realism about norms). Another objection was that acting under a practical identity just is to find certain reasons compelling - that is, it is to operate according to the practical identity rather than to explicitly endorse that identity in an evaluative step. Bob replied that the evaluative step is necessary to answer our how possible question about rational action given anti-realism. A third objection was that reasons are usually identified with roles in reasoning, which yields a sort of anti-realism in that occupying the role makes things so (that I conceive myself as a holder of office makes it so that fulfilling that role is a reason to act, nothing more is needed to make the reason compelling). But if this is right, the move from premise 2 to 3 is invalid, for finding certain reasons compelling is constitutive of having a practical identity, which means one can see X as the rational thing to do without valuing the practical identity that frames it. Bob responded that we need the evaluative step to get reasons into the picture in the first place in an anti-realist setting.

Generally then, the scepticism about Bob's reading of the argument, such as there was, centred on the idea that acting under a practical identity implies valuing that identity. It wasn't clear to me whether the valuating step is just built in to rational action as such, or whether an agent has to actually engage in self-reflexive evaluation (which seems false), or whether the latter is more a requirement of philosophical theory that wants to explain the possibility of rational action in an anti-realist setting.

Paul Boghossian at the Normativity Workshop

Paul gave a paper entitled 'Rules and Norms'. He began by reminding us of how central rule-following is to our understanding of what it is to be in the business of rational belief. He then went on to detail some differences between what he called rules in the guise of imperatival contents ('If C, do A') and normative propositions such as those that grant permission to do something on occasion of some state of affairs obtaining. He argued we have no clear understanding of which of these logical forms governs the rule-following constitutive of rational belief.

But whatever we decide about that, we accept that rule-following involves essentially the following four factors:

1) (Acceptance) If S is following rule R, then S has somehow accepted R.
2) (Correctness) If S is following rule R by doing A, then S's acceptance of R determines whether S's doing A is correct relative to his acceptance of R.
3) (Explanation) If S is following rule R by doing A, then, S's acceptance of R explains S's doing A.
4) (Rationalisation) If S is following R by doing A, then, S's acceptance of R rationalises S's doing A.

A popluar and natural way to incorporate these factors into a response to the rule-following sceptic is to take the 'Intention View' - the view that when we accept a rule we form an intention to correctly apply it over a potentially infinite amount of cases and that such acceptance both explains (sets causal conditions for right responses) and rationalises our rule-following behaviour.

Paul raised problems for the Intention View and by extension any view that invokes intentional content in its response to rule-following scepticism. He pointed out that problems remain even if we reject Kripke's 'meaning assumption' (the assumption that the contents of thoughts are understood on account of following rules so that if we respond to the sceptic who doubts our grasp of the meaning of 'plus' in terms of words like 'count', she can just bring into doubt our grasp of such words, and so on to infinity). Rather, the central problem for the Intention View remains even if we allow that there can be meaningful mental content that is not understood in terms of rule-following. That problem is that grasping any rule at the personal level relies on grasping a general conditional content governed by a deductive inference rule such as Modus Ponens. But then, how are we to explain grasp of that rule? Thus an infinite regress is generated in the manner of Lewis Carroll's famous argument in 'What the Tortoise said to Achilles'. Except the regress applies not only to the justification of applying a rule, but to rationalising such application as well: in other words, the regress rears up even in cases of unjustified rule-following, such as where we apply a bad rule.

This regress leaves us with the unpalatable rejection of the idea that accepting a rule consists in an intentional state with a conditional content. Paul argued this in fact was Wittgenstein's view: that if rule-following is to be possible at all then some of it must be blind. This puts in danger our intuitive generalist understanding of Rational Belief as governed by epistemic rules.

Paul finished by arguing that a dispositionalist response will not work here because something cannot rationalise or explain itself, so that a disposition must be explained and rationalised by the following of a rule. This leaves us with the idea that not only must we take mental content to be primitive (as we did when we rejected the meaning assumption), but also 'a general conditional content that acts as a reason to believe something'. Paul confessed, although he didn't say why, to not understanding how there could be such a primitive contentful state.

Objections and questions were many during a very stimulating discussion period, but I shall mention the few that my meagre memory cells can adequately recall.

Several people wondered whether an imperatival account of rules and norms wasn't perhaps still a live option.

In response to the infinite regress Paul generated it was suggested that we take the classic line of response to the Lewis Carroll dilemma: we argue that a subject S is operating in accordance with a rule of inference such as Modus Ponens without explicitly accepting it via propositional understanding. To this Paul resonded that Modus Ponens is a general rule that is defined over infinite applications and so one cannot be in accord with it on account of some kind of particularistic grasp of its application.

It was suggested that perhaps the minimal case of following a rule (which involves for PB the four factors outlined above) was too rich. Perhaps some less thick notion of rule-following might suffice that obviated the appeal to a rule of inference that governs a general conditional content? But, it was responded, it is hard to see how something can be a rule without at least (1) and (2) (see above) being satisfied.

Finally, it was suggested that the infinite regress PB had highlighted was not Wittgenstein's problem. The latter, it was suggested, consists in finding an answer to the question 'How do I know what I mean?' rather than the problem of how a rule like Modus Ponens can be a premise in an explanation of how I understand some further rule.

I for one would like to know more about why it is mysterious that 'a general conditional content that acts as a reason to believe something' could be taken as generated by a primitive cognitive-semantic capacity. Perhaps the difficulty here is in thinking there can be such a primitive mental content without there also being a subject who thinks. If I am to be able to think the content Fa then presumably I can think the inferential relations between Fa and Ga, between say, 'being red' and 'being coloured' - that, after all, is what it is to 'think' (it is essential to the content Fa that it be inferentially related to the content Ga - without such relations, there is no such content). But this is just a case of operating with the logical form of the conditional that a grasp of Modus Ponens presupposes; 'if a is red, then a is coloured.' So if we are going to take mental content as primitive I don't see what is so strange about taking 'a general conditional content that acts as a reason to believe something' as primitive, once we accept that content is always for a thinking subject. This brings us close to something like endorsing a 'transcendental' subject without which rule-following would not be possible.

Hannah Ginsborg at the Normativity Workshop

In her paper Hannah argued for a solution to Kripke-inspired scepticism about rule-following by appealing to what she called 'primitive normativity'. She located her approach in terms of dispositionalist and anti-reductionist responses to the problem. The most fundamental problem for the former approaches is that they cannot account properly for the normative aspect of rule-following, and the most fundamental for the latter is their inability to account for the 'disoposition-like' nature of rule following. Hannah's approach operates below the level of facts about meaning yet above the level of mere behavioural responses.

Her approach rejects Kripke's way of setting up the shape a possible solution to the problem might take. He notes that there are two points at which the sceptic will apply pressure: what you meant by past uses of a rule, and what funds your present confidence in applying it? And he insists that a justification of the latter confidence can only be funded by a justification of what you meant in the cases of past usage. Hannah challenged this way of framing the problem. She claimed that one can justify one's present confidence in applying a rule without appeal to facts about past meaning. Invoking examples like children applying a mathematical rule such as 'add 2' without properly understanding the meaning of '+', yet still with enough confidence and reliability in relation to past patterns of application to distinguish such activity from blind responses, she claimed one can be justified in one's present confidence by appeal to such 'primitive normativity' - i.e. normativity that flows from a rulish compulsion to 'go on in the right way' that doesn't explicitly or even implicitly rely on the internalisation or acceptacnce of the meaning of the rule. Once we have answered this half of the sceptical challenge we can help ourselves to a suitably formulated version of dispositionalism to answer the other half: one meant the intended rule because one possessed a disposition to apply it, interfering factors notwithstanding.

Here are some objections that came up in discussion. A general point which recurred was that examples of primitive normativity are not central to the rule-following considerations and it is not clear that appeal to them can work for all applications of rules. Or, to put the point another way, to talk of such primitive normativity is to fall below the bar of rule-following proper and thus to perhaps change the subject rather than answer the problem at hand.

Another objection was that perhaps rules about meaning were being sneaked in the backdoor - isn't 'conforming to past patterns of application' to conform to an understanding of what you meant to do in the past, namely, apply a certain pattern?

It was further pointed out that the patterns of application were such small snatches of finite behaviour that it was not clear one could cite them as cases of rule-following at all.

It was also pointed out that appealing to Kant's conception of aesthetic judgement to understand primitive normativity would not do. For such judgement is involuntarily wrung from one in a way that does not involve a surveying of past usage and so is fundamentally disanalogous to the case of a primitive rulish compulsion to conform to past patterns of application.

I myself do not feel the force of rejecting anti-reductionist responses on account of their not accounting for rule-following being 'like' other dispositional responsive mechanisms. Perhaps it is only 'like' such mechansims!

Although I will not detail them here, Hannah presented robust responses to all these objections and convinced me that something could be made of this original response to the problem.

Normativity Workshop: Papineau

In his paper, "The Normativity of Judgement" (background reading for which is here) David Papineau argued that the normativity of judgement can be reduced to the normativity of morality and prudence and so pose no extra problem for naturalists. His main line of attack is to point out that in those cases where truth is morally or prudentially valued, it will be true that, "X ought to judge that P only if P". But a non-naturalist may want to say more than this. Specifically, they may want to say that it is constitutive of belief that it be governed by certain sui generis norms. Papineau broke this down into two questions: Is the attitude of belief constitutively normative? Are the contents of belief constitutively normative?

His answer to both questions is, of course, negative. With respect to the first, he argued that a naturalist can perfectly easily explain why it is that belief aims at the truth, belief has a distinctive direction of fit, and belief is non-voluntary without having to postulate sui generis norms. But since these are the most likely reasons for believing in such norms we should not be convinced that the attitude of belief are so governed. With respect to the second, he argued that the only views that would genuinely support the idea that content is irreducibly normative are those of, say, the classical verificationists, Dummett and, perhaps, Davidson who place norms within the content itself. But, says Papineau, these views face difficulties in accounting, for example, for the intuitive view that babies and animals have contentful beliefs. Thus there is nothing uncontroversial here to show that the naturalists position is untenable.

One objection to this that was suggested that that the naturalist will have difficulty in accounting for the normativity that arrives not with the notion of belief per se but with the notion of a belief that is warranted. But, of course, this just pushes the question back to whether the naturalist has an acceptable account of warrant.

Another objection was that we have the intuition that if someone continues claim to believe P in the face of overwhelming evidence that not-P, then that person is no longer 'playing the belief game'. This intuition can be explained if we take belief to be constitutively sensitive to evidence, and so take the norm "X ought to judge that P only if P" to be an exceptionless rule rather than, as Papineau treats it, something that is true in a great many cases. This thought hits Papineau's specific proposal in particular if we consider a case where all moral and prudential factors suggest that one should believe P - yet we still think that the person ought to believe not-P.

Might there not be a middle ground that the naturalist could occupy, by maintaining that "X ought to judge that P only if P" is in fact exceptionless because there is always some prudential reason for believing the truth? This could be maintained if we allow that the norm does not represent an all-things-considered ought. Thus, there is always some sense in which one ought to believe the truth (it will always help you in some way), but this norm can be overridden the cases of the above type.

Normativity Workshop: Millar

In his paper, "The Explanatory Role of Normative Considerations", Millar argued for the existence of normative commitments that are incurred simply by engaging in practices, holding beliefs or having intentions. Generally speaking, and ignoring various of the details, these commitments take the disjunctive form of requirements to either believe the consequences of one's belief/take the necessary means to one's end/carry out the practice-based duties of one's role or revise one's belief/drop one's intention/opt out of the practice, respectively. These commitments, he claimed, are independent from personal evaluative stances. This means that, in order to explain why someone acts as they do, we can simply refer to their commitments - we do not need to be in possession of further knowledge concerning their evaluative sensibilities. The result it that there is nothing odd about thinking that a person's reason for believing that they have incurred one of these commitments is simply that they have done so. This, arguably, contrasts with the moral case in which it appears to be necessary, in predicting and explaining another's action, to take account of their particular moral stance. Insofar as the proposal concerning the explanatory role of commitments within the realm of practices, beliefs and intentions is concerned, this is not a naturalistic view as it accords an essential role for normative considerations.

A couple of nice examples came up in discussion that help to put pressure on this picture. First, for the case of belief, (apparently influenced by Niko Kolodny) consider someone who believes that all redheads are untrustworthy, but who also believes that their neighbor, who is a redhead, is trustworthy. Now, the picture above has it that they must give up on one or the other of these beliefs. But now suppose the first cannot be given up for some psychological reason, then it follows that the latter should be given up. But, given that the latter is true, wouldn't this person be better of continuing to believe it even at the expense of his or her own rationality?

Second, for the case of practices, consider someone engaged in fox-hunting. It does not appear that one can predict and explain their behaviour solely on the basis of their practice-based commitments, i.e. independently of their personal evaluative stance. For, some apparent fox-hunters are saboteurs. So, to predict what they will do one does need to rely on some assumption about what their moral stance is.

A second point with respect of the claim concerning practices is that so long as one is engaged in a practice, there is generally be the standing desire to continue taking part. But if this is acknowledged, then is it open for the naturalist to maintain that practice-based commitments are simply a species of the commitments involved in means-end reasoning, which might then be explained on other grounds. For, one is committed to carry out one's practice-based duties only in order to get what one desires (one's continuation within the practice).