Belief and Rational Cognition in Aristotle by Ian C

Belief and Rational Cognition in Aristotle by Ian C. McCready-Flora A dissertation submitted in partial ful!llment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophy) in the University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Victor Caston, Chair Emeritus Professor Edwin Curley Professor Bruce Frier Professor Kendall Walton Assistant Professor Matthew Evans, New York University © Ian C. McCready-Flora _____________________________________________ 2011 For my mother, who got me going For Rachel, who keeps me going ii Acknowledgements I would like, !rst and foremost, to thank my wife, Rachel McCready-Flora, for her love and support. My academic advisor, Victor Caston, has been an ideal mentor from the very start: supportive, intellectually demanding, and extremely generous with his time. He has my thanks. My thanks also to the rest of my dissertation committee, whose feedback continues to shape this material as it ambles toward publication. Were it not for the diligence of the Philosophy department staff, my life would have been in!nitely more difficult. My thanks to Linda Shultes, Judith Beck, Kelly Coveleski and Maureen Lopez for always knowing where to go and what to sign. anks also to Molly Mahony, librarian at Tanner Philosophical Library. However confused my recollection of a title or author, she could always put the book in my hand. I had the good fortune to reside at the Gamma Alpha graduate student co-op from August 2006 to May 2009. I met some of my best friends there, and that fun, supportive, socially-conscious and diverse community is something I will remember fondly. May it stand forever, and make life affordable on grad student wages. My thanks to the UM Graduate Employees Organization (AFT Local 3550). It was an honor to serve as vice-president. “Oh you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union!” Much of the material in this book has bene!ted from public presentation and the attention and engagement of commentators. I would like to thank Travis Butler, Matthew Evans, Eduardo Garcia-Ramirez, Maria Jayasekera, Emily Katz, Jeremy Kirby, Greg Salmieri, and Christopher Shields for their comments and criticism. My fellow graduate students at the University of Michigan are some of the sharpest people I ever hope to meet. I cannot record or recall every lunchtime conversation or iii casual encounter that led, serendipitously, to an improvement in the !nal product, so I hope they all accept my sincere thanks for these six edifying years. ey have my undying admiration and respect. Substantial portions of this work were completed under the auspices of fellowship funding, made possible by the University of Michigan Philosophy department and the Horace Rackham School of Graduate Studies. I can only hope that my labor does justice to their generosity. iv Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………iii Abstract……………………………………………………………………..vii Introduction…………..……………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1 Credence and Belief…….………………………………………13 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………13 2. e Argument…………………………………………………………….16 3. Pistis as Credence: A Mental State that Varies by Degree……………….18 4. Interlude: Credence and Truth…………………………………………...30 5. How Belief Depends On Credence………………………………………34 6. Conclusion………………………………………………………………..46 7. Appendix: Other Uses of Pistis…………………………………………..48 Chapter 2 Evidence and Rationality…….…………………………………50 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………...50 2. Persuasion and Distortion……………………………………………….55 3. Evidence and Epistemic Evaluation……………………………………..62 4. A Radical Alternative?…………………………………………………...69 Chapter 3 e Normativity of Belief………………………………………80 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………...80 2. e Argument, and Two Crucial Assumptions…………………………81 3. Dismantling the Second Assumption: Truth-Apt…………………….…82 4. Replacing the Second Assumption: Truth Matters……………………...91 5. Dismantling the First Assumption: Causal Control…………………...100 6. Replacing the Second Assumption: As You Please…………………….109 7. Concluding Remarks: How Belief is Normative……………………….116 8. Appendix: Text and Translation of 427b16-21…..……………………..123 v Chapter 4 Response and Restraint……………………………………….128 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………128 2. Fitting Affections and Causal Connections…………………………...129 3. Imagining Scary ings………………………………………………..142 4. e Difference: What “Immediately” Amounts To……………………148 5. Reason and Restraint…………………………………………………..157 Conclusion………….……………………………………………………..166 Bibliography……………………………………………………………….175 vi Abstract Belief and Rational Cognition in Aristotle by Ian C. McCready-Flora Chair: Victor Caston Aristotle’s view of rational thought is understudied and little understood. Scholarly energy focuses on his deductive theory of science, knowledge and grasp of !rst principles, all of which involve certainty and necessary truth. Aristotle also, however, pays systematic attention to bounded rationality and reasoning about contingent matters. Belief, for Aristotle, is about the contingent. It ranks below scientific knowledge, but still above any cognition animals are capable of: only rational animals believe. Aristotle’s theory of belief, then, provides data for his broader theory of reasoning and human rationality. I therefore organize the dissertation around three arguments which distinguish belief from other forms of mental representation that we share with animals. (1) Belief requires credence, which depends upon the ability to represent matters as more or less likely, and therefore the ability to see facts as evidence for other facts. ese two vii abilities require reason and are partially constitutive of rational thought. Animals can be conditioned to act in certain ways given certain inputs, but this ability differs from the weighing of evidence. (2) We cannot form beliefs as we please, while we can do so with other forms of mental representation, such as imagining. Belief is out of our hands in this way because it has a normative connection to truth. It is supposed to be true, and must therefore submit to normative evaluation with respect to truth. is accountability to norms is partially constitutive of rational thought. (3) Belief causes affective response in ways that other mental states, such as imagining, do not. Imagining can cause emotional response, but does not necessitate it in the way belief does. e ability to entertain mental content without committing to it is peculiar to rational creatures, and therefore partially constitutive of rational thought. Rationality confers the ability to question, test and be open to doubt. viii Introduction In this dissertation I examine two topics in Aristotle’s epistemology and philosophy of mind: belief (doxa in Greek) and rational cognition. e former is the means to investigate the latter. is is because, for Aristotle, believing is something only rational creatures can do. However non-rational animals get around in the world (and humans, for Aristotle, are the only rational animals), whatever mental states constitute their representation of that world, they do not have anything Aristotle is willing to call belief. e sense of “rational” I have in mind is not the normative sense according to which we evaluate a certain course of action or belief as rational or irrational. Humans do not contrast with other animals because humans are rational and animals are irrational. is normative distinction presupposes a further metaphysical distinction between the rational and the non-rational (as opposed to irrational). Call the !rst phenomenon “normative rationality” and the second “constitutive rationality,” because it is meant to capture a difference in the way that creatures exist, a difference in what kinds of cognitive subjects they are. is is the distinction Aristotle means to draw when he says that belief requires “reason” (logos), so animals cannot form beliefs.1 It is not that animals are too stupid to form beliefs; they simply lack those kinds of cognitive states. Nor are they for that reason open to criticism; a subject cannot qualify as irrational in the normative sense without qualifying as rational in the constitutive sense. Rational cognition, therefore, is a special brand of cognition that only certain kinds of creatures are able to undertake. It will turn out, on Aristotle’s view, that to be a constitutively rational subject is in part to be 1. For the details of this argument, see Chapters 1 and 2. 1 bound by strictures of normative rationality.2 Being open to that sort of evaluation, however, requires being a creature of a certain type. Calling a subject “constitutively rational” says little without an account of what this special brand of cognition is supposed to look like. e contours of this account will depend in turn on which type of states are paradigms of rational cognition and which seem open even to non-rational creatures. e most striking (and largely unremarked) aspect of Aristotle’s view is that beliefs qualify as rational cognition along with higher cognitive achievements like demonstrative knowledge (epistêmê), cra knowledge (technê) and understanding (nous). I call these states “higher achievements” because Aristotle’s remarks make it clear that they are not states that humans possess and deploy by default; acquiring them takes much cognitive effort. Having demonstrative knowledge, for instance, requires that the subject grasp a demonstration of the fact, a valid syllogism that gives the explanation for the fact and thereby renders it inevitable. Understanding, to take

Load more