“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Innate Ideas

Okay, so I haven’t posted anything exactly philosophy-related in several weeks. So in order not to disappoint and stay true to the bio of the guy who set up this blog, I thought it would be fun to revisit some John Locke! He is most known for, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his treatment of innate ideas. This concept of innate ideas was especially important to those who took up the position that there are foundational truths in our network of knowledge, which are essentially given to us at birth, which we use to further reason out and understand all of the things which we perceive in the world. It doesn’t take any sort of previous experience with the associated concepts or phenomena to come to a knowledge of these truths. Locke wants to reject these kinds of claims outright for many different reasons, but I will take a closer look at one of his more interesting objections in what follows.

To be as clear possible, it’s always a good idea to start with definitions. Here is Locke’s for innate ideas: “some primary notions, koinai ennoiai, characters, as it were stamped upon the mind of man; which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it.” As one of the central figures in empiricism – or the idea that sensory experience is to be the main source of human knowledge – Locke is concerned with how we can explain the acquisition of knowledge in terms of impressions or imprints which we receive from perceiving objects in the world. Innate ideas are one of the first challenges which Locke seeks to overcome in developing his philosophy in the Essay. They are problematic in that it would seem that the foundational truths which we are given are outside of our capacity to know through perception, in virtue of us already being given them.

 

Locke finds cause for concern in all of this talk and goes on the defensive in arguing against innate ideas. He puts an emphasis on the faculty of reason, saying that it is this which is first required in order to recognize and assent to any truth that one can conceive of. His examples are a couple of the logical absolutes: an object, a, is what it is (a=a) and the same object cannot be both what it is and not what it is (a =/= b & ~b). He argues that there is no denying, upon discovery via reasoning, the truth of both of these two claims. But this is exactly the point – that it requires one to first reflect, and in so doing it is posing a threat to the notion of innate ideas. Locke more or less argues that something which is innately imprinted on the understanding need not be discovered, because it should be a truth which the subject is already actively conscious of, if it is to be considered innate. It needs to meet this condition if the truth is considered to be an impression naturally (innately) made on the understanding. Otherwise, the impression is without any substance and cannot be said to have made any real imprint. Locke draws a further distinction, stating that if we are restricting our focus to just the capacity for having knowledge – as it is fleshed out through the application/discovery of reasoning – this would still be insufficient for an innate idea, because, then, “all the truths a man ever comes to know will, by this account, be every one of them innate.” He thinks the actual innate ideas, if they exist, are the ones which deserve proper philosophical inquiry and this former line of reasoning only amounts to an “improper way of speaking.” It distracts us from the main question at hand.

 

He justifies all of this further by making counterexamples, which are a child and an idiot. Both of these subjects have rationality, to some degree, even in its developmental or affected stages, and so each can use one’s mind to make inferences, deduce further pieces of information from a set of given facts. But there will always be a subset in any given population, he argues, that will not be conscious and/or assent to the truth of either of the two claims above. There are two points here: One, of there not being universal assent, and two, a reliance upon others to help them along in learning the relevant pieces of information (names, concepts) in order for them to understand the truths for themselves. As far as the former point, Locke believes that an innate idea must be universally imprinted on man’s understanding for it to be truly innate. But, as I’ve said before, there are always outliers, people who simply don’t readily know or understand what seem to everyone else to be elementary truths. Hence, the child or the idiot just doesn’t have ‘it’ in them, in this case, to know that a red light means stop when they cruise on by; that being, the innate idea. But also, there is a stumbling block lodged up within someone when they just can’t be taught something. It’s hard to think about, but we can intuitively agree in saying that some things will just never get through to someone, despite our best efforts and careful presentation of the facts. Locke would suggest that if it were really innately imprinted on their soul, then one wouldn’t need assistance to discover the truth for him/herself. All of these points are ones which he thinks stand as evidence against the claim that innate ideas exist.

 

My take on Locke’s argument is that it is cleverly constructed, and that there are several good points made, but unable to dismiss the position completely. The thought here is that there are certain dispositions which we all have which often subconsciously get expressed in our actions. To be sure, these are altogether separate from the capacities which Locke argued against, in that a disposition would be defined as a product of a thought which, while not necessarily deliberate, is drawn out from preexisting ideas and their associated desires. Even the newborn child, whose brain had not developed enough to qualify as rational, still somehow primitively knows that s/he desires the love and affection of his/her mother, despite not having a concrete thought in mind which reflects this. It somehow is “wired” to react in a favorable way when it experiences the love of its mother. So I think that although it might not necessarily be termed, in the strict sense which Locke offers us, an innate idea (as something derived purely through reason), I believe that there remains a comparable concept which we can use to describe our observable behavior. There is a psychological component to the question which is clearly pertinent, and it is always a learning experience if a question such as this is analyzed through the perspectives of various schools of thought.

 

I’m in agreement with Locke’s claim that we don’t always universally assent to intuitively true maxims. The problem here in not assenting, which would make us doubt the notion of an idea’s innateness, is appropriate to the question. What I mean is that we need to necessarily assent, or positively affirm, some idea – so as to make it our belief – for it to be actually present in our understanding, because part of what it means for such an idea to be understood, is that it needs to be a part of us; it needs to be positively taken up within our mind anytime it is recalled in our memory. In short, the idea must be believed. And beliefs, by traditional standards, necessarily are more than passive tendencies to agree or disagree with a claim if asked about it. They need to be unfettered in all of our daily dealings, being sparks of our own initiative. So with Locke’s suggestion, I can’t see any way around the point that innate ideas must be assented to, in order for them to be innate. The issue interestingly transitions into being one of personal identity more than anything, and I think that this is the foundation for the epistemology which Locke depends upon. It is an important question in any case, but here we cannot go any further in assessing the concept of innate ideas from Locke’s perspective, as a mind which takes in phenomena through impressions and sensations, because of the pattern by which our personal beliefs are formulated. I must say, his argument is surely sound in this regard.

 

So after all of this, I think that we’ve brought the subject of Locke’s Essay into the fray, thrown him into the crosshairs of the debate on innate ideas. I would argue in the end that while he may have certain dispositions based on our human nature, we should side with Locke insofar as to say that these are not innate to us until we have done some of the work and reasoned out the impressions which we receive to fashion a set of beliefs for ourselves. This is a bit of a tangent to the question of whether humans, from the outset, are imprinted with certain innate ideas. General speaking on the latter point, I believe that Locke was incorrect, and that we do have, in a very abstract sense, some very broad ideas about love, justice, beauty, etc. – because this is what it means to be human. Whether or not these principles are innate in us, or if it is societally/culturally inherited is what we may disagree on, but even so, there is value in having the discussion. I personally find it gratifying, and I hope to someday chip away at that tabula rasa enough to see the core of my beliefs etched in the model of truth as it really is, as it actually exists.

Defending Anti-Intellectualism in Ryle’s Regress

 

In “Knowing How and Knowing That,” Gilbert Ryle takes a stance against one of the prevailing ideologies of his time: Intellectualism. In this paper, I will work to explain Ryle’s regress argument and show why it initially seems to be a plausible attack against intellectualism. I will then focus on a strong counterargument in defense of the intellectualist position, given by Stanley and Williamson, reasoning that Ryle makes the mistake of equivocating between two distinct senses of action. Finally, I will object to this counterargument and defend Ryle (and anti-intellectualism) by pointing out how his regress model is mistakenly accused of this fallacy of equivocation and that the meaning of intentional action is actually fixed between the argument’s premises.

Let me first more clearly define the intellectualism which Ryle is concerned about before moving on to his regress argument. Intellectualism is a theory which states how practical knowledge, or knowledge-how, really just fits under the framework of knowledge-that – where this knowledge-that is nothing more than knowledge of propositional truths. This theory, in addressing knowledge-how, also answers the following question: “How does one act intelligently?” Here, we can think of acting intelligently as the expression of the sorts of propositions that constitute one’s knowledge-how in either a clever, skillful, humorous, etc. way. Furthermore, for the intellectualist, knowing-that these propositions necessarily and sufficiently satisfies the issue of F-ing intelligently, because they contain all of the information which would answer the implicit question of how to F intelligently. For example, a good marathon runner knows-how to pace herself to clock the best possible time in a race. She is aware ahead of time of the race’s milestones and a successful strategy to follow – to keep a certain distance from the pack to conserve energy and to speed past them at a later time. These are among some of the mere facts that the runner knows-that in terms of running a race, and properly knowing-that all of these propositions are true leads to a runner knowing-how to intelligently run a marathon.

Ryle, however, believes that the intellectualist faces a serious obstacle, because it would seem that acting on knowledge-that intelligently is something that requires one to employ more and more intelligence the more one thinks about how to act. In other words, Ryle thinks there is an infinite series of more and more complex propositions of knowing-that, all of which would need careful consideration to qualify an act as intelligent. I will put this regression into the form of the following argument:

(1)   If intellectualism is true, then in order to act intelligently, one must first have considered and applied the relevant knowledge-that; in the form of maxims (reasons for acting) or propositions.

(2)   However, any such consideration or application is itself an act, which can be performed more or less intelligently or stupidly.

(3)   Therefore, if intellectualism is true, then one acts intelligently iff one’s maxim or proposition for acting is also intelligently decided (acted on).

(4)   But if one’s maxim or proposition for acting is to be acted upon intelligently, then one must perform the act of considering and applying an even higher-order proposition, which itself must be acted upon intelligently, and from there, another which is intelligently acted upon, ad infinitum.

(5)   Therefore, if intellectualism is true, then one must have considered and applied an infinite number of high-order propositions to ensure that an action is intelligently executed.

(6)   The consequent of (5) cannot be logically carried out, so, by modus tollens, intellectualism is not true.

Ryle makes a strong argument for a number of reasons. First, it is consistent with the intellectualist view, since the steps are broken down in terms of propositional knowledge-that. Also, Ryle makes a good point by suggesting that any active selection for a particular maxim to motivate one’s action must itself also be motivated by a more complex maxim. This is because if first-order maxims were to act as the sole arbiters of intelligence, then there would be something left unconsidered; namely, an intelligently thought out maxim that goes into deciding this first-order maxim. If the intellectualist is to make a feasible objection against Ryle’s regress, he is thus precluded from arguing that a maxim can be both spontaneously and intelligently acted on. Intellectualism would demand a regulatory proposition to be behind any given maxim if it is to be considered intelligent.

Now I would like to consider Stanley and Williamson’s intellectualist response to Ryle. The issue that they present is that Ryle’s regress argument is equivocating between two distinct meanings of the word “action” integral to two of his premises. Let me briefly reconstruct their version of Ryle’s argument:

(1)   If one F’s, one employs knowledge-how to F.

(2)   If one employs knowledge-that p, one contemplates the proposition that p.

These premises mirror the implication of the regress, because the act of contemplating propositions is something which needs to be continually repeated intelligently in order to employ knowledge-how; since, for intellectualism, knowing-how is just knowing-that. The objection here, however, is that when we dig deeper into what it means to employ knowledge-how in premise one, Stanley and Williamson say that we must restrict our focus to intentional acts. Their example of digestion supports this claim, in that one’s body can digest food, but one doesn’t know-how to digest food – there is no active thought process of considering propositions. So in order to save this notion and for premise one to be true, Stanley and Williamson argue that one can only act intelligently if one intentionally acts; the latter is a necessary condition for knowing-how on this premise.

Stanley and Williamson then show that, with premise two, one cannot be so quick to just ascribe intentionality to the act of contemplating propositions, because there are cases where one does not reflect on a proposition and yet still knows-that it is true in regards to an action. For example, when a factory worker repeatedly operates on a machine, he may begin to no longer contemplate what he should be doing after a period of time. Nonetheless, he still has the knowledge-that that what he’s doing is a true way to operate the machine. Stanley and Williamson are trying to demonstrate here that premise two of Ryle’s argument is false if it is understood on the same reading of intentional actions which made premise one seem plausible. They believe his argument now simultaneously holds two very different senses of acting between premise one and two: necessarily intentional on the first, but not necessarily intentional on the second. They cannot converge into either one of these because a uniform substitution instance of unintentional action would render premise one false, while substituting in intentional action for both would make premise two false in some cases. For these reasons, Stanley and Williamson think that Ryle’s regress argument is unsound and they remain unconvinced of its force against intellectualism.

Here is where I would like to offer my own argument for why I believe Stanley and Williamson to be giving intellectualism a weak defense against Ryle’s regress. In showing this, I will provide an original argument as to why Stanley and Williamson were incorrect in part of their equivocation objection. I will note from the beginning that I will be using the words “deliberate” and “contemplate” and all of their grammatical tenses synonymously.

Stanley and Williamson had claimed that premise two of their version of Ryle’s argument could be false if the act of contemplating the proposition was interpreted as intentional. But I would argue that it is not false, but rather always (necessarily) true that employing knowledge-that entails intentionally contemplating a proposition. Let me draw this out by giving the following argument:

(1)   If knowledge-that is employed, then the proposition in question is being deliberately acted on.

(2)   If a proposition is deliberately acted on, then this proposition must also be intentionally contemplated.

(3)   Therefore, by hypothetical syllogism, if knowledge-that is employed, then the proposition is also intentionally contemplated.

This is a valid argument which is written under the intellectualist view. Recall that they had claimed that one could be employing knowledge-that while, at the same time, not intentionally deliberating on the relevant proposition. My conclusion, however, has employing knowledge-that entailing intentionally contemplating a proposition. The consequence of all of this is that, if my argument is sound, Stanley and Williamson’s objection fails, and Ryle’s argument can no longer be charged with equivocating between senses of intentional action in premises one and two. This is because, leaving premise one of Stanley and Williamson’s argument to be read as they had originally presented it, premise two now can be read on the same meaning of intentionally contemplating a proposition as premise one.

In order to support premise one, let’s return to my example of the factory worker. Earlier I said that the factory worker’s actions may stop being deliberately executed but that he still has the relevant knowledge-that; that is, he still has access to it and could reiterate to himself the proposition of how to operate the machine if he so desired. However, the premise reads that “if one employs knowledge-that…” This notion of employing knowledge-that plausibly demands more than simply having access to a proposition, since there is the idea at work here with the instantiation of the subject’s propositional knowledge-that into his acting. The factory worker, however, surely isn’t employing his knowledge-that, because his habitual response is the kind of act which doesn’t engage, in any clear sense, with his propositional knowledge-that. And it would be incorrect to judge, as Stanley and Williamson might, the worker to be employing his knowledge-that through the manifestation of operating the machine because this would give no explanation of the origin of the worker’s intelligence; which is the key issue of Ryle’s regress argument. Rather, it presupposes it within this manifestation.

So in order, on the intellectualist view, to further explain how one can intelligently employ knowledge-that, I take it is a necessary condition to at least deliberate on one’s relevant proposition in acting. Here, at least I am doing more philosophical work by offering a mechanism of intelligently employing propositional knowledge rather than evading the regress by presupposing it. More will be said about this soon. At any rate, the worker doesn’t deliberate – he simply goes through the motions, and in so doing he is not actively aware of his knowledge-that. Furthermore, he does act, but his act is not intelligent. In short, what it means for the factory worker to actually employ his knowledge-that is just this – to deliberately choose to act based on his knowledge-that x is a true way to F.

I don’t think Stanley and Williamson would have an easy time objecting to my second premise, because it seems that the act of deliberating a proposition always involves some sort of intention which is integral in this very act of deliberation. In other words, any time that one sorts through her options on how to act, she implicitly also is thinking about what it is she would like to do (her intention). It doesn’t seem plausible that someone can knowingly be motivated to act based on something that one would have no interest in doing; that is, unless we were speaking about cases of compulsion. But this compulsion doesn’t fit in with what we have been focusing on, since it cannot be understood in terms of acting intelligently. This is because considering and applying propositions becomes irrelevant here – one will inevitably just be moved by her basic desires, no matter which maxim she would intend to act on.

However, Stanley and Williamson may perhaps object to my claim that it is necessary to deliberate on one’s propositional knowledge-that when employing it. They could point out, for example, a case of a professional artist who knows-that the best way to give his painting texture is to start by painting with faint colors and gradually build to more vibrant colors. While he is painting, however, he is in a sort of “zone,” wherein he no longer is conscious of this true proposition. Here, Stanley and Williamson could argue that the artist employs his knowledge-that reflexively. But I would respond that this is not a potential solution to the problem since it does not add any extra insight into the relevant question to the regress – acting intelligently. Employing a proposition of knowledge-that unintelligently would not properly object to the challenge posed by Ryle’s argument. But Stanley and Williamson seem to be making exactly this mistake by making the suggestion that one can employ knowledge-that while bypassing conscious awareness of a proposition by mere reflex, because this is insufficient in intelligently employing an action, since the act of considering and applying a certain proposition is altogether lacking. Again, intellectualism is committed to the view that one acts intelligently iff one has considered and applied a relevant proposition of knowledge-that. As I mentioned earlier, though, reflex would need to have an additional proposition backing it saying that “Acting on reflex is an intelligent means to painting.” So this objection is simply getting away from the question which is at stake; namely, how intellectualism can account for acting intelligently without the consequence of the regress. Deliberation can theoretically account for employing knowledge-that – though not in a way that necessarily gets around the regress – since, in deliberating, a proposition is continually being considered and/or applied. However, reflex, under intellectualism, cannot account for this. In short, my necessary condition of deliberating should be salvaged while the objection should be dismissed.

In conclusion, I have given a defense of Ryle’s anti-intellectualist position by supplying an original argument and raising a number of objections to Stanley and Williamson’s intellectualist counterargument to Ryle’s regress argument. I have shown that their objection does not do what they claim that it does; namely, there is no fallacy of equivocation. Furthermore my evaluation gives us further reason to believe that Ryle has successfully undermined the intellectualist position with his regress argument and given us all the more evidence that knowledge-how is not something that can be absolutely understood in terms of knowledge-that.

Judging by What You Know

Plato raises an important philosophical question of how we should define knowledge. He makes use of interesting analogies, told through the voice of Socrates, to argue that making a true judgment about something is insufficient for knowledge in certain cases.  In this paper, I will first point out the reasons why Plato thought that this distinction necessarily should be made between knowledge and true judgment and how he uses Socrates to capture this idea through analogies. I will argue with and against Plato, evaluating aspects of his two analogies. At the same time, I will sketch my own idea of justification and argue that it is this which accounts for rendering true judgment into knowledge.

Plato offers a potential epistemic view in the Theaetetus, through his writing of the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus. At this point, the definition which Socrates wants to critically analyze is the following: x knows y iff x reaches a true judgment about y. He draws a distinction between the two by making an analogy to a lawyer who is able to rightly persuade a jury of a perpetrator’s guilt in committing a crime. Socrates emphasizes that, in persuading the jury, the lawyer doesn’t teach the jury anything, but rather causes them to make a true judgment for themselves (Theaetetus 201b). However, Socrates wants to argue that the jury doesn’t know that the perpetrator is guilty because they reached this verdict merely by hearsay (i.e. testimony of an eye-witness), and that the jury intuitively must have actually seen the crime being committed for themselves to know their verdict to be true (Theaetetus 201c). Thus, Socrates analogy acts as a counterexample to the definition in that knowledge and true judgment come apart when personal experience is posited as a necessary condition to knowledge. Namely, this is so since true judgment is not reached by personal experience while knowledge is – thus, violating the double entailment in the biconditional above.

My objection to Socrates’ analogy is that it becomes less convincing when adding in the premise of personal experience as a necessary condition. We are interested in what knowledge actually is and how one acquires it, and adding in certain conditions to test it is a useful practice. But I would argue that Socrates is simply mistaken that each individual jury member has to see the crime being committed in order to make their true judgment an instance of knowledge because the testimonies of several independent witnesses, the perpetrator’s criminal history, his/her alibi, his/her possible relationship with the victim and motivation for being guilty can act as sufficient secondary source evidence to persuade a jury to make the right judgment over the perpetrator’s guilt, and this judgment still has knowledge along with it to a high degree. I will elaborate on this point soon.

In short, I’m suggesting here that Socrates is right that there is a distinction between knowledge and true judgment, but his jury analogy surely doesn’t specifically target what is missing. It only goes as far as making us realize that there is something else which is necessary to add to true judgment for it to become knowledge. This may include personal experience, but it is not limited to just that – as I have shown above. In what follows, I will supply my own argument for what I believe to be a component of knowledge which Socrates overlooked.

My idea is that justification needs to be exercised in order to support our true judgments. By justification, I mean that there are individual reasons or pieces of evidence which interact with one another to form a methodology which explains to one how or why one’s true judgment is true. By methodology (or method), I am referring to a notion of patterned organization of reasons or explanatory information. The point is not what type of methodology is implemented in one’s justification, but rather that it is there and shown to be reliable.

Let me make this clearer by giving an example: A simple farmer and a botanist both have a true judgment on how to grow corn. They take very different approaches, however: the former plants the corn in the field using proper machinery and insecticides while the latter cares for the plant cells in a laboratory. But regardless of their differences, the farmer has knowledge of growing corn just as the scientist does because they are both justified by their methods. The farmer knows what to do to grow corn well because he has been persuaded over time working on the family farm that it traditionally harvests well in the right soil, climate and field conditions, whereas the botanist knows this because she is convinced from her study of biology and repeatable experiments that it will grow when given the right amount of sunlight, air pressure, temperature, etc. The conclusion here is that the reasons at play in each of their respective tested methods give sufficient justification for the farmer and botanist’s true judgments, making them – while not cases of certainty – cases of knowledge, nevertheless.

Also, there is a difference in value which separates knowledge from true judgment. Plato addresses this point in the Meno, when he writes of Socrates’ dialogue with Meno and his analogy of the statues of Daedalus. He insists to Meno that true judgment is like one of Daedalus’ beautiful statues, which is good in every way until it escapes (Meno 97d). The comparison here that Socrates is making is that true judgment is also good, but this doesn’t last very long since it is soon forgotten – escaping from a man’s mind (Meno 97e). Knowledge, however, is more secure. It is like the same statue, but now tied down to ensure that it lasts for all to enjoy its beauty and goodness. For Socrates, this quality in knowledge is attributed to recollection, and serves to make knowledge superior in value to true judgment (Meno 98a). Recollection works to tie knowledge down within the subject, since it is actually innate within the soul. When one recollects, one demonstrates that one has subconsciously known something all along as the knowledge is summoned out of one’s soul. It will not be my purpose here to get into a long discussion over Plato’s theory of recollection, but to make a connection now with how this notion of tying down in knowledge relates to my argument for justification.

Being justified has a comparable function as with recollection, since justification helps one to confidently arrive at the conclusion that one’s true judgment is in fact true. In other words, justification is essentially good in making one firm in one’s knowledge. This is accomplished through tracing the reasons in one’s methodology to the point where one can understand why something is the way that it is. Justification, furthermore, is an adhering mechanism which fastens one’s judgment to the truth. One’s true judgment, in being justified, latches itself on to knowledge in just the same way as how recollection securely ties down the statue of Daedalus. Or in the case of the jury analogy, the jurors’ tracing of all of the reasons or pieces of evidence provided by the witnesses makes them resolute in their judgment that the perpetrator is guilty – they know from this why their verdict must be true. It would be very difficult to make them budge in their determination once they have been justifiably persuaded.

In conclusion, I have considered different analogies of Plato to help me form my own argument for how justification resolves the distinction between knowledge and true judgment. Admittedly, our methodologies may vary, but even Socrates wouldn’t deny that justification is a universally applied truth in how humans commonly construe knowledge.

Can we act for reasons we don’t have?

In recent developments in action theory, there have been two major philosophers who have disagreed over the specific questions of the nature of reasons that one has to act, and whether these reasons are traceable to an individual’s motives. On the one hand, Bernard Williams suggests that all reasons one has for acting are reasons given that they derive themselves from elements from the individual’s inner motivations – or subjective motivational set (S) (which includes her: desires, wants, values, commitments, etc.) This is the internalist approach to reasons. On the other hand, John McDowell argues against Williams with the opposite interpretation. He believes that there are reasons that are untraceable, or outside of, one’s existing motivations, which yet and still act as reasons for the agent’s action. This is the externalist position. These views are clearly mutually exclusive because of the fact that an individual is relying on his S to produce reasons in one case and not in the other. While this may be so, I will show that McDowell’s contention with Williams over the possibility of external reasons is a good one, and furthermore makes the notion of an external reason more plausible. I will also increase the conceivability of one’s having an external reason by demonstrating how that these allow for one to perform certain kinds of actions that wouldn’t be otherwise possible under an internalist approach – thus giving a more holistic picture of action.

The contention alluded to above between Williams and McDowell is based, in large part, on the idea of how an individual can be moved to form the belief that she has an external reason. Williams holds that any reason one has for potentially being motivated to act in a certain way must arise through rational means, which he calls deliberation. As Williams point out in his paper entitled Internal and External Reasons, deliberation is of the “rational processes, [that] can give rise to new motivations,” (Williams, 108). What he means here is that, by reflecting on one’s S in a way that advances some of its aspects while at the same time pushes back others, the agent redefines her motives by producing new beliefs as to what is a proper reason for her to be guided by in action, in light of this deliberation.

Applying this notion of deliberation to external reasoning, then, Williams would go on to say that if an individual was to be moved to form a belief regarding an external reason, deliberation would have to be the necessary pathway for the belief to be thought of as rational. But the trouble presents itself when one attempts to conduct this deliberation since, at the time of deliberation, the individual cannot consult her current S in acquiring such a belief. Again, this is because an external reason is brought about independently of any reference to an agent’s S, and therefore precludes any deliberative route to forming the belief.

McDowell enters the argument by writing a written response piece to Williams called Might There Be External Reasons? McDowell, essentially charged with irrationality for favoring an externalist position, responds to Williams by suggesting that deliberation need not be the sole means by which one can have an external reason for acting. McDowell emphasizes that it is the end result of having the belief in an external reason that matters; not necessarily the pathway or means to getting to this conclusion. Using William’s terminology, McDowell would argue that the matter can still be “considered aright” (Williams, 109) regardless of how the belief concerning an external reason is formed, since the conclusion that was arrived at (the belief) was a true conclusion (McDowell, 72-73). In other words, an individual who has “considered the matter aright” is one who has established reasons-beliefs from which one is motivated to always act in the right way; similarly to if she had rationally deliberated. These reasons are in line with serving a motivation that, by its expression through action, fulfills their goal in any given situation.

Instead of resorting to an agent’s deliberative route for forming the foundation of the beliefs for an external reason, McDowell proposes a few alternatives that he thinks serve just as well in bringing about this belief. A couple notable examples he uses are: a religious conversion and/or inspiration from rhetoric. Albeit that all of these examples are irrational (McDowell, 74), they still, in his view, make it so that an individual can arrive at the belief pertaining to the external reason. Specifically, the individual, through any one of these kinds of experiences, transitions from a state of not being motivated by an external reason to being motivated by it (McDowell, 74), because each of these provide a means for her to gloss over her existing S in the process of forming the belief relevant to the external reason. In the wake of undergoing such a radically self-altering experience, the individual becomes enamored by a new belief that would ordinarily not be said to have belonged to her prior to her conversion. This belief, again, isn’t rationally explicable, yet it works in her favor if it leads her to see, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the “matter aright” and furthermore enables her to become motivated by the external reason.

My take on McDowell’s objection to Williams is that it succeeds in distinguishing between what one has reason to do, in virtue of whom one is, and what one has reason to do, in virtue of what is ultimately reasonable. By reasonable, I am entertaining the idea that there are reasons that are simply right reasons for acting, despite one’s desire to be motivated by them or not. For example, if an anti-patriotic, cowardly man was faced with the choice of either staying with his family during wartime by means of performing illegal activities or enlist in the draft that mandates him to serve, the man would plausibly have no inherent motivations that would be satisfied by his act of going to war. Let’s presume here that he knows that his entering into the army will result in certain, immediate death on the front-line. Nothing in him would suggest that he cares to die for his country or wants to be instantaneously killed (hence, his anti-patriotism and cowardliness), so his S doesn’t contain any elements that would serve as precursors to his forming a reason to be motivated to go to war. Yet this is what he does because of the fact that it serves a universal purpose that is reasonable beyond himself and even his country. In other words, despite not personally having any motivations that would be furthered by his development of such a reason, the man, in a profound sense, still reasons to go to war – being motivated by a reason that could be said to be external to him.

What this example and McDowell’s interpretation of external reasons are obviously assuming to be true is a normative, objective standard concerning reasons (McDowell, 76). That is to say that the external reasons that an individual is led to believe as being her reason (through a conversion or what have you) is a reason that is prescribed to be authoritative and telling of a right or wrong reason for action. This is its normative component. An external reason is seen to be objective since it derives itself outside of an individual’s S – it takes something above and beyond the subjectivity of the individual’s psychology to form the reason. I will now briefly illustrate how these assumptions in the externalist position are vital in overcoming a few limitations that I see under the internalist description of reasons.

McDowell’s defense of external reasons is ultimately successful in rebutting William’s objection that external reasons cannot be deliberated upon – and hence, are irrationally formed – not because he defends his view from this claim (because he does not), but rather because McDowell shows that, in a more significant sense, rationality becomes incumbent on an individual only in the course of her being brought to have an external reason. Williams could argue that his theory also allows for internal reasons to contain an element of rationality in virtue of their being followed, by the consistent traceability of the reasons from aspects of the individual’s S. But what makes this story incomplete are these cases, such as the example of the drafted soldier above, where with no matter how much time the individual spends deliberating, her S still cannot encompass certain reasons for being motivated to act in selfless, universal ways that owe themselves to an external standard. This is of course supposing that the particular individual does not already have generosity, in any way, subsumed within her S. An agent, following from William’s argument, cannot come to be motivated by reasons that serve an absolute good that is beyond what she takes good to be.

It is plain to me here that, although McDowell does assume controversial standards of objectivity and normativity in his belief of what characterizes external reasons, the resulting view of external reasons does a better job of explaining the facts, since it is able to explain the reasons behind more observable kinds of action that one can take. This is opposed to the internalist interpretation which, by making reasons out to be contingent upon one’s own psychology, consequently severely reduces one’s ability to understand why an agent acts a certain way when he is observed to act out of character. Surely one has had the experience of witnessing such an instance. It would seem that, in these scenarios then, the internalist could not supply any good reason whatsoever for the agent’s being motivated as he was. His “action” may have to be rendered a mere happening or occurrence for this reason. This type of situation is a strike against the internalist, in that it demonstrates incoherence in his theory of explaining the reasons for action. In consideration of this stumbling block, plus the quantitative advantage of explaining cases of universal acts, the externalist view should be granted as more plausible.  The deciding point that I am trying to make here is that, in addition to internal reasons, external reasons portray a more comprehensive, holistic picture of action. It is in the light of having this quality that actually bolsters the plausibility of there being external reasons.

In conclusion, I have first examined the philosophical rift between McDowell and Williams over the nature of reasons in order to provide a foundation for my argument of the plausibility of the existence of external reasons. It has been seen that Williams contention of a reason’s formation being irrational if it lies outside of deliberation is irrelevant for McDowell, because the latter has responded in a way that elucidated a sense of rationality that is above which Williams could muster from within the internalist position. However it be that McDowell’s species of rationality stems from his assumption regarding the objective/normative standards inherent in external reasons, this assumption manifests a quantitative explanatory advantage that cannot be dismissed; it rationalizes the observable facts of action better than the internalist can from his account. From this argument, I have developed an account of external reasons which should push the internalist to concede to their increased conceivability.

Reason(?) in the Absurd

Albert Camus is a philosopher and literary author whose works are notably known for their treatment of the concept of the Absurd. He spends a lot of time in The Myth of Sisyphus, defining this conflict of our searching for meaning in an indifferent universe, but also he extends this theme into some of his other works such as The Stranger. Camus will ultimately argue for man to free himself from being bothered by the question of finding any sort of meaning in life.

Albert Camus introduces to his readers the Absurd – the central issue of much of his writings – in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus exemplifies the issue by recounting the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a king who was eternally punished by Zeus to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill because it would always roll back down on him. Sisyphus is the absurd hero for Camus because he is engaging in a very physically demanding task which one would expect to receive pleasure or satisfaction upon completion; though Sisyphus’ work is never over. His labor serves no real purpose in that he is forced to repeat the same process of rolling the boulder back up the hill each time without any sort of reward or release from his anguish. As Camus puts it, his “whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing,” (E, 197). So with this example of Sisyphus, Camus wants his readers to recognize that while man likes to hope and wish for some intrinsic value or meaning to the projects he engages with out in the world, in reality, there is no such meaning. The universe is totally “silent,” as it were, when the rational man submits his inquiries and demands answers from it. All of these points denote the main problem that Camus believes characterizes human existence: The Absurd. Upon coming to a conscious awareness over the Absurd is, furthermore, something which fills man with a sense of disillusionment. At first glance, then, man is like an alien in his world, not having a single reason to justify his existence or belonging to such a strange world which he feels unwelcome living in (E, 189).

The other question which is at stake here is how man can be free if his existence is, in a way, defined by the Absurd. But in order to understand our freedom, we first need to consider the limitation on it. So Camus offers a notion of this when he says that the Absurd limits him in that he cannot pursue a qualitative means of living (since this implies value-judgments), but rather that he can only pursue quantitative living (E, 195). Man, in becoming conscious of the Absurd, is essentially putting his existence in relation to his eventual death; since Camus would argue that the Absurd depends on death (E, 196). That is to say that death is the finality of man’s existence, and the fact that everyone will go through living for no reason just to die is essentially what gives the Absurd its force in opposing the will of the man in revolt. But despite this limitation, freedom can be had by passionately living out a number and variety of experiences, all of which are part of man’s own conscious experience of living in the world. Camus is suggesting here that, furthermore, a scale of values is unnecessary when it comes to “evaluating” freedom, because merely having conscious experiences while revolting against the Absurd in the background is enough to give life for the person living it its value and freedom (E, 194). The fact that man is involved in such a brave project is great, but also man is free in that he does not need to expect anything more or less from life knowing that the Absurd and his involvement through revolt is all that there is.

I have to object here on a number of different levels, because, for one, this conception of freedom seems to be a very weak one. The idea that one can freely live out his life when the Absurd is its central theme just doesn’t make much sense, since the Absurd wouldn’t be just putting up a relative limit on action, but an absolute limit. In other words, the biggest question that must be asked is “Why should I do anything at all if nothing that I choose to do has any value or significance?” I believe here that, theoretically, any action that one performs is based off of a desire which one hopes to satisfy, which is then shaped into a reason which gets motivated in one’s action. But if one follows Camus’ view and comes to consciousness of the fact that we are living in a benign universe which offers us no objective justification, then one who operates on this “view from eternity” could not derive any reason whatsoever for acting. Also, since Camus would urge us to refrain from inventing such reasons to fill this void – though this is something which we intuitively would strive to do anyway – there is no coherent concept of reason left to draw on to understand human agency. Furthermore, one couldn’t even form any concrete desires, because this would entail that something can be implicitly valuable and worthy of being desired. In short, the prima facie consequence of Camus’ discussion of the Absurd leaves humans as entirely passionless beings, despite his emphasis on revolting with passion. The worry here is that ultimately Camus has given us a vacuous, rather than substantial notion of freedom, since, in a universe devoid of meaning or value, there is nothing positive which our supposed freedom can work toward achieving.

But there is also a significant inconsistency in Camus’ argument as well. Specifically when he states that the value of life is wrapped up in the revolt against the Absurd, this seems to be implying that everything is without value, save for a particular exception which needs to be made in order for real human action to even be possible. The exception isn’t justified, because in making the exception, Camus is placing a normative demand on us stating that the revolt is the proper reaction to have when becoming aware of the Absurd. But assuming that this is true, it seems to follow that Camus must also be deriving a reason ex nihilo for us to act in this particular way. The problem, moreover, is that he can’t make this derivation while holding on to his theory of the Absurd, because the consequence would then be that a reason can be found in something entirely unreasonable. This conjunction of “Be conscious of the Absurd and take up a reactionary effort to revolt from it” cannot be logically carried out, since, again, there is no means to becoming motivated to take such an action; given that there are no reasons which can be had to justify any possible action. Camus is asking us to do something that we may initially and intuitively agree is appropriate in such a situation, but upon further analysis it proves itself to be an act of “philosophical suicide.”

Camus could respond to my objection of him presupposing a reason to revolt by suggesting that if we are to take a step back and reflect on our lives, the fact that we are here and living is itself presupposed; there is no convincing external explanation which can be given to answer the question of how or why we arrived on the scene. It still remains, Camus might venture to say, that we do continue to live the life that we’ve been given, despite the fact that our existence doesn’t have at its core a rational explanation. So in essence what Camus is arguing is that life doesn’t need a reason for one to live it, as evidenced by the fact that we are born into the world without reason (despite our cries!). This ties in with the revolt because the revolt is just a means of extending our lives, because without it, the only other serious recourse of action when confronted with the Absurd is suicide. In short, Camus would hold that the issue is really much simpler than what I’ve made it out to be – we should revolt, not because there is a reason to but because revolting is really what is meant by living at all. Just as there’s no inherent reason that goes into living, there’s no inherent reason that goes into revolting either; it just happens to be given to us as the nature of our continued existence.

The Paradox of Believing

I’ve been thinking a lot about completeness when it comes to our beliefs. I guess my biggest stumbling point is over the following question: Can the beliefs that govern a self’s attitudes be simultaneously informed by both faith and reason, and not have there be cause for concern over a broken self? It would seem that what faith has to say is almost always opposed to what reason would have us do. And so I’m thinking that in order to be the most complete person that one can be, it makes sense to side with one side or the other. Because if one’s fundamental attitude toward truth is derived from one’s faith, then reason need not apply; one believes the things which, to reason, are inconceivable, yet nevertheless true. Similarly, if one believes that truth is in the domain of reason, then it’s apparent that any claims that lead to contradictions must be discarded, given that the faithful person would be mistakenly ‘leap’ -ing right into falsity, rather than over the metaphoric chasm that divides the supernatural from the natural.

But now it would seem to be problematic to take the middle route. What I mean is that, from the standpoint of reason, one who admits any degree of faith into one’s beliefs is committing intellectual dishonesty by an inevitable appeal to faith to fill in the gaps of one’s ignorance. But supposing that faith is the foundation for truth and knowledge, then it would be irrelevant to worry about inexplicable contradiction in one’s choosing faith – these must be wholeheartedly embraced. This brings us to the familiar paradox of the torn and divided self, who is made this way because of a nature which he attributes to the seemingly incompatible components of reason and faith, although he is still an agent with an ability to produce unified beliefs. To be more clear, the paradox is contained in the idea of ‘beliefs,’ since these take root from opposing ‘resources’ of faith and reason, which would intuitively wish to push one in different directions; though, they allow one to have an ability to have beliefs about the world.

We have to assume, of course, that the self whose beliefs are in question is informed by both faith and reason in his search, as hopefully most of would concede is true about ourselves. Neither faith nor reason gets us anywhere alone. We discover the limitations in reason and strive to ‘understand,’ through faith, the barriers of infinity which are imposed on a finite mind. And we look to reason to ground our faith from what could be possibly disagreeable, overly superstitious consequences (i.e. the Salem Witch Trials).

But back to the problem. If we analyze the question in terms of reason, then of course we see, in faith, inconsistency. This is a notion of logic that must apply itself when faced with contradiction. For example, when Jesus is described in the Bible as a human incarnation of God, many would doubt the validity of such a description, given that ascribed to Jesus, then, are contradictory properties – mortality and immortality. But if we look at the same problem through the lens of faith, then we are plausibly left without an intelligible (reasonable) way of communicating this truth at all, and so cannot rely on anyone else to teach us this; it is only through our prayer and the following revelation that we receive that lets us believe. Reason falls short here, because no amount of explanation can do it for us, though that is exactly the work that we, or the minister, perform(s) in reading the Bible verses relevant to the issue. Our brain necessarily interprets what we read or hear. So even without this, praying about something which we have had no prior experience with would seem to be lacking something, given that we couldn’t even submit a deity a question to be answered.

If both faith and reason are necessary, then, it seems that they antagonize each other. They want to negate what the other is saying, just as an angry teenager wants to disagree with everything her mother says just for the sake of disagreeing. But how can we believe anything then, at all? If we reevaluate the assumption that faith and reason are direct opposites and suggest that they belong to different domains, and thus, cannot be compared, this wouldn’t help us along. We would just be left to shake our heads in confusion. Similarly, if we thought that what we call beliefs are really not as structurally unified as they seem to be in practice, then what use would there be in testing our kids at school? This isn’t the kind of skepticism that we should be comfortable falling back on. Aren’t we taking it for granted that our beliefs do tend to teach us something true, at least in the sense of explaining a valuable idea or concept, that most of us tend to agree leads to a point in the network of knowledge which makes up an understanding of an academic discipline?

We seem to need another, independent resource that informs belief. But how do we step outside our intrinsically human device of logic to recognize it? Or, even worse, how could we explain it, through faith, even if we’ve found the supposed answer? It seems natural enough to think that there is a definite pattern that governs human beliefs – though everyone doesn’t go around claiming to have revelations all of the time.

Are we really the broken selves that I had said at the outset? Is this why the question of human nature is so dense and perturbing? I don’t have an answer to this one yet. I’m agnostic here. But I hope not. It’s maybe the closest thing to a true paradox that I’ve been hit with. Maybe I’ll just have to accept it as that. But before giving up on it completely, I’ll be back soon to give it another thought and try to write up some kind of answer, explaining it the best I can.

If that’s even a possible task to fulfill :S.