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JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume 33, Issue 3 2019

Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientiﬁc Progress: Find- ing Middle Ground Between the Epistemic and the Noetic Accounts 1

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Editors-in-Chief: Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla, Alexander Gebharter Editorial Board: Albert J. J. Anglberger, Laurenz Hudetz, Christine Schurz, Christian Wallmann E-Mail: [email protected] Web: http://www.kriterion-journal-of-philosophy.org Indexing: KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy is indexed and abstracted by The Philosopher’s Index and EBSCOhost Humanities Source. Infor- mation about the journal’s ranking is available at SJR. The journal was also approved of satisfying the ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities) criteria: ERIH PLUS. Copyright: The copyright remains with the authors. ISSN: 1019-8288 A Hybrid Account of Scientiﬁc Progress: Finding Middle Ground Between the Epistemic and the Noetic Accounts

Clara Goebel

Abstract Whereas the progressive nature of science is widely recognised, specifying the standards of scientific progress has been subject to philosophical debate since the enlightenment. Recently, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Alexander Bird, and Finnur Dellsénhave revived this debate by setting forward a semantic, epistemic and noetic account of scientific progress respectively. I argue that none of these accounts is satisfactory. The semantic and epistemic accounts might advance necessary conditions for scientific progress, namely an accumulation of true, justified, and non-Gettiered beliefs, but fail to specify sufficient conditions. The noetic account, in contrast, advances sufficient conditions for scientific progress, namely an increase of genuine understanding, but fails to specify the necessary conditions. To remedy these deficits, I advance a hybrid account of scientific progress between the epistemic and noetic accounts, according to which the accumulation of explanatorily or predictively powerful knowledge constitutes scientific progress. In contrast to the epistemic account, my account ensures that only scientifically relevant knowledge constitutes scientific progress, thereby evading the threat of underdemandingness. In contrast to the noetic account, my account does not impose a psychological requirement of grasping the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development, thereby evading the threat of overdemandingness. A further advantage of my account is that it can preserve plausible features of the noetic account.

Keywords: scientiﬁc progress, knowledge, understanding, explanatory power, predictive power, the aim of science

Intuitively, one of the features which distinguishes the sciences from non-empirical disciplines, such as philosophy or art, is their progressive nature: We take it that, in the sciences, there exist objective standards which determine when and why certain scientiﬁc developments

Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16. http://www.kriterion-journal-of-philosophy.org c 2019 The author 2 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16 constitute an improvement on what came before. The specification of these standards has been subject to philosophical debate since the 1600s. Whereas enlightenment philosophers widely accepted a realist epistemic account of cognitive scientific progress, their account came under attack by antirealists, such as Thomas Kuhn, during the 1960s. This has given rise to the contemporary debate, which largely revolves around realist accounts of scientific progress, namely the semantic, epistemic, and noetic account. The semantic account (most notably, see [17] and [19]) seems to provide an obvious solution to the question of scientific progress: Scientific progress occurs when we accumulate true beliefs or, at least, verisimilar beliefs. On inspection, however, we might think that an accumulation of mere true beliefs does not suffice for scientific progress. Rather, scientific progress requires an accumulation of knowledge, i.e. non-Gettiered justified true beliefs. This is the view of the epistemic account (most notably, see [1]). If we further examine this account, however, we might again think that our scientific interests do not consist in accumulating knowledge, but rather in correctly explaining observables and reliably predicting phenomena. This leads to the noetic account (most notably, see [4]), according to which scientific progress occurs when a scientific development features an increase in understanding, i.e. the scientist’s capacity to grasp the explanatory and predictive consequences of a scientific development. In this paper, I argue that none of these accounts is satisfactory. The semantic and epistemic accounts are underdemanding with regard to scientific progress, i.e. they count certain developments as progressive, which intuitively do not constitute scientific progress. The noetic account, in contrast, is overdemanding with regard to scientific progress, i.e. it fails to count certain developments as progressive, which intuitively do constitute scientific progress. To remedy the deficits of the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts, I attempt to set forth a realist hybrid account of cognitive scientific progress which occupies middle ground between the epistemic and the noetic accounts. According to my hybrid account, the accumulation of explanatorily or predictively powerful scientific knowledge constitutes scientific progress. In section1), I specify more closely the conditions of scientific progress as postulated by my hybrid account, namely i) the accumulation of scientific knowledge and ii) the explanatory or predictive power of such knowledge. Given this characterisation of my hybrid account, I will make some brief remarks regarding what promotes scientific progress versus what constitutes scientific progress. I will also make some brief Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientific Progress 3 remarks regarding the rate of scientific progress. In the subsequent sections, I attempt to defend my hybrid account: in section2), I discuss the criterion ii) of explanatory or predictive power and demonstrate in what way it renders my hybrid account more plausible than the noetic and the epistemic accounts. In section3), I discuss the criterion i) of the accumulation of scientific knowledge and demonstrate in what way it renders my hybrid account more plausible than the semantic account. Finally, in section4), I demonstrate how the criterion of explanatorily or predictively powerful knowledge enables us to preserve plausible features and implications of the noetic account.

1 A Hybrid Account of Scientiﬁc Progress

According to my realist hybrid account, two conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for cognitive scientific progress, namely i) the accumulation of scientific knowledge and ii) the factual explanatory or predictive power of such knowledge. i) constitutes an epistemic desideratum for scientific progress: scientific progress must involve an accumulation of scientific knowledge, i.e. an accumulation of non-Gettiered justified true beliefs. Such knowledge need not be positive (p), it may well be approximate knowledge (approximately, p), negative knowledge (¬p), hypothetical knowledge (p → q), and so forth. Furthermore, the KK principle need not obtain. According to the KK principle, for any proposition p, if one knows that p, then one knows that one knows it. However, in the case of scientific progress, for any proposition p, if the scientist knows that p, then the scientist need not know that she knows it. ii) constitutes a pragmatic desideratum for scientific progress: the accumulated scientific knowledge must possess explanatory or predictive power. The reason for this is that only knowledge with explanatory or predictive power can be scientifically relevant in a broad sense: Only knowledge which enables or provides (even simple) explanations or predictions satisfies our curiosity about the world, the institutional embodiment of which is science. The explanatory power of a proposition or theory amounts to its ability to adequately explain real phenomena. These explanations can range from quite simple to very sophisticated explanations. In a straightforward case, the existence of a previously unknown planet explains our observing an uncharted orb1. In a more complex case, collision theory explains the course of chemical reactions. Ideally, the theory in question allows for effective explanations. That is, 4 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16 it is either simpler when compared to preceding theories (see [7]) or it explains a larger set of observables and, thus, offers greater unification power (see [10]). The predictive power of a theory amounts to its ability to enable or provide accurate predictions of real phenomena. Ideally, the theory in question allows not only for accurate predictions, but for striking predictions (see [15]). The ability of a proposition or theory to adequately explain observables and provide accurate predictions implies its well-integratedness within a larger well-established scientific context or structure. On the one hand, well-integratedness concerns the content of the proposition or theory and how neatly it fits with other well-established findings of the scientific discipline. On the other hand, well-integratedness concerns the method and principles of scientific inquiry employed in the development of a proposition or theory and whether these are sufficiently accredited within the network of sciences (see [23]). As with the epistemic desideratum, the scientist need not be aware of the explanatory and predictive power of the accumulated knowledge or able to substantiate its explanatory and predictive consequences. In other words, my hybrid account (as opposed to the noetic account) does not impose a psychological requirement of grasping the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development. It merely requires that a scientific development does, in fact, possess explanatory or predictive power. The reason for this shall be attended to in section 2), where I discuss the advantages of my hybrid account over the noetic account. Given that there is neither an awareness requirement on the epistemic desideratum i) nor on the pragmatic desideratum ii), in some cases, scientific progress may only be recognisable in hindsight. At this point, one might ask wherein the difference lies between the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development, which I appoint as the marker for scientific relevance, and the problem-solving power of a scientific development, which Kuhn and Laudan appoint as the marker for scientific progress (see [12] and [16]). Functionalist- internalist accounts, such as Kuhn’s or Laudan’s account, make two claims which I do not intend to make: firstly, they require that the scientist is in the epistemic position to judge whether a relevant function has been fulfilled by a scientific development. On my account, however, the scientist need not be able to judge this. Secondly, functionalist- internalist accounts are antirealist stances. Antirealists about scientific progress reject an accuracy standard of any kind as a criterion for scientific progress: Whether or not a scientific development constitutes Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientific Progress 5 progress cannot (as realists would claim) be determined by appeal to external, mind-independent standards, such as its truth and, relatedly, its justification, explanatory power, or predictive power. Rather, whether or not a scientific development constitutes progress is determined by comparison to the existing paradigm, independently of its accuracy. My account, in contrast to functionalist-internalist accounts, is a realist stance. However, if we jettison the psychological requirement of being able to grasp the problem-solving power of a scientific development and, moreover, if we interpret problem solving within a realist framework, the phenomenon of problem solving seems to largely converge with the phenomenon of explaining observables and providing accurate predictions (see [5]). Given this characterisation of my hybrid account, what might we say about the phenomenon of promoting scientific progress versus constituting scientific progress? Presumably, certain occurrences, such as technological advancements or increased funding for research, promote scientific progress although they do not constitute cognitive scientific progress (see [4]). Equally, certain instances of scientific knowledge sans explanatory or predictive power, such as collections of data regarding familiar entities, may promote scientific progress but by themselves do not constitute scientific progress. Such data does not constitute scientific progress because, taken on its own, it is scientifically irrelevant. How- ever, the collection of data regarding familiar entities may well promote scientific progress because typically we engage in the accumulation and systematisation of data in the anticipation that we may prospectively derive explanatorily or predictively powerful theories from the data in question. Similarly, accidentally true beliefs with explanatory or predictive power may promote scientific progress but do not constitute scientific progress. Such beliefs promote scientific progress by prompting the scientific community to undertake further investigations in order to properly justify the beliefs in question (see [2]). It is, then, successful investigations of this kind which constitute scientific progress. Furthermore, based on my hybrid account, what might we say about the rate of scientific progress? Broadly speaking, it seems that the degree of scientific progress hinges upon the degree of explanatory or predictive power rather than the amount of accumulated knowledge: the accumulation of a great volume of knowledge with little explanatory or predictive power seems to constitute less scientific progress than the accumulation of a modest volume of knowledge with exceptionally great explanatory or predictive power. We might say that positive knowledge (p) will 6 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16 typically possess greater explanatory or predictive power than approximate (approximately, p) negative knowledge, (¬p), and hypothetical knowledge (p → q)2. Thus, positive knowledge will typically constitute greater scientific progress than approximate, negative, or hypothetical knowledge. Moreover, we might say that increases in our ability to de- tect and substantiate the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development, i.e. increases in the depth of our understanding, translate into greater scientific progress than mere increases in factual explanatory or predictive power (see [1]). Given the latter intuition, it seems my hybrid account cannot account for the rate of scientific progress on its own. Thus, an additional account of the rate of scientific progress may be needed.

2 The Hybrid Account versus the Noetic and Epistemic Ac- counts

In this section, I attempt to demonstrate in what way the previously delineated condition ii) that a piece of scientific knowledge must be explanatorily or predictively powerful in order to constitute scientific progress renders my hybrid account more plausible than the noetic account and the epistemic account. I shall begin by discussing why my hybrid account, in contrast to the noetic account, does not impose a psychological requirement of grasping the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development, but merely imposes the requirement that a scientific development does, in fact, possess explanatory or predictive power. According to the noetic account, scientific progress involves increases in scientific understanding. There is substantial disagreement over the concept of understanding. On one account, understanding is factive, i.e. a species of knowledge (see [1])3. According to this account, having understanding of a subject matter involves that our beliefs concerning the subject matter are true, justified, and non-Gettiered. At the very least, our beliefs regarding the core of the subject matter must be true and justified, whereas peripheral beliefs may be untrue or unjustified (see [13]). On another account, understanding is merely quasi-factive (see [4])4. According to this account, understanding does not require knowledge or justified true belief. Arguably, understanding must not even involve a belief that some proposition p is true. Rather, we may merely assume or accept p to be true. On both the factive and quasi-factive account, however, understanding involves the capacity to adequately place some proposition p Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientific Progress 7 into a larger context or structure (see [9], [13], and [24]). We might do so, for example, by identifying the relationship of p to other (adjacent) propositions, specifying its function in the structure of the whole, identifying the preceding and subsequent causal chains, and so forth. Such conceived, understanding some proposition p allows us to harness p for explaining observables and making accurate predictions (see [4]).

Regardless of whether the factive or quasi-factive account of understanding obtains, I argue that the noetic account is overdemanding with regard to scientific progress. According to the noetic account, a scientific development constitutes scientific progress iff i) we accumulate knowledge (or we accumulate true beliefs, or assume the truth of some proposition) and ii) we are able to adequately place the piece of knowledge (or the belief, or the proposition) into a larger scientific context or structure. The condition ii) amounts to a psychological requirement of being aware of and able to substantiate the well-integratedness of a piece of knowledge, its explanatory power, and its predictive power. Such a psychological requirement of grasping, however, renders the noetic account overdemanding: the noetic account cannot accommodate cases in which we accumulate knowledge with factual explanatory or predictive power, but are not (yet) aware of or able to substantiate its explanatory and predictive consequences. As an example, consider John Newland’s proposal for a periodic table in 1864. Newland accurately observed that, when chemical elements are listed in order of increasing atomic weight, similar physical and chemical properties recur at periodic intervals of eight. He, thus, proposed the so-called Law of Octaves. Despite New- land’s knowledge concerning the periodicity of properties in chemical elements, he did not recognise that the gaps and trends of his periodic table could be employed to predict the existence and properties of hitherto undiscovered chemical elements. Only Dmitri Mendeleev recognised the predictive power of the periodic table a few years later. Intuitively, cases such as Newland’s discovery of the periodicity of properties in chemical elements seem to constitute scientific progress. It seems counterintuitive to say that the periodic table which Newland proposed in 1864, despite its truth content and sufficient justification, made for scientific progress only a few years later, when Mendeleev additionally grasped its predictive power. According to the noetic account, however, cases such as Newland’s discovery of the periodicity of properties in chemical elements cannot constitute scientific progress because the scientist does not (yet) grasp the explanatory and predictive power of the scientific development in question. In order to avoid this counterintuitive implication, 8 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16 when we attempt to identify scientific progress, we must jettison the psychological requirement of the noetic account. My hybrid account avoids the counterintuitive implication of the noetic account because, instead of imposing a psychological requirement of grasping the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development, it merely requires that a scientific development does, in fact, possess explanatory or predictive power. Given that Newland’s periodic table did, in fact, possess predictive power, his knowledge concerning the periodicity of properties in chemical elements constitutes scientific progress according to my hybrid account. I shall now discuss why my hybrid account, in contrast to the epistemic account, requires that scientific progress involves the accumulation of scientific knowledge with explanatory or predictive power. According to the epistemic account, scientific progress involves the accumulation of scientific knowledge (see [1]). In contrast to the noetic account, this account demands too little with regard to scientific progress. Accord- ing to the epistemic account, cases in which we accumulate scientific knowledge without explanatory or predictive power, i.e. scientifically irrelevant knowledge, constitute scientific progress. Scientifically irrelevant knowledge might, for example, include collections of data regarding regarding familiar entities, random experimental outcomes, hypothetical knowledge which relies on absurd or highly doubtful premises, or statistical correlations sans causation. For example, it is scientifically established that there is a correlation between the age of Miss America and the number of murders by steam, hot vapors, and hot objects. Intu- itively, however, such instances of knowledge do not seem to constitute scientific progress because they do not enable or provide even simple explanations or predictions. They do not seem to satisfy our curiosity about the world, but rather seem quite pointless. Hence, when we attempt to identify scientific progress, the epistemic account tout court cannot convince. We must adopt a criterion which precludes scientifically irrelevant knowledge from constituting scientific progress. The criterion that a piece of knowledge must possess explanatory or predictive power fulfils this desideratum. Therefore, when we attempt to identify scientific progress, we might plausibly adopt the criterion of explanatory or predictive power, as does my hybrid account. At this point, one might interject why I do not appoint scientific relevance as a criterion of a proposition’s being scientific. Granting this criterion would render my hybrid account redundant because the claim of the epistemic account that scientific progress involves the accumula- Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientific Progress 9 tion of scientific knowledge would already entail that the knowledge in question must be scientifically relevant. However, we have good reason to resist appointing scientific relevance as a criterion of a proposition’s being scientific: if we grant this criterion, certain propositions fall into neither the category of scientific propositions nor into the category of non-scientific propositions. Again, consider statistical correlations sans causation. Assuming that scientific relevance is a criterion of a proposition’s being scientific, such correlations are not scientific propositions because they are scientifically irrelevant. However, given that such correlations were established by accredited scientific methods, they cannot plausibly be classified as non-scientific propositions either. This is non- classifiability is unsatisfying. Therefore, it seems that we should resist appointing scientific relevance as a criterion of a proposition’s being scientific. This, in turn, renders the pragmatic desideratum ii) of my hybrid account a necessary condition of scientific progress.

3 The Hybrid Account versus the Semantic Account

In the previous section, I demonstrated how my hybrid account bypasses the objection of overdemandingness against the noetic account as well as the objection of ‘underdemandingness’ against the epistemic account. It remains unclear, however, why we are to combine explanatory or predictive power with knowledge, instead of mere true belief. Hence, in this section, I attempt to show in what way the previously delineated condition i) that scientific progress involves the accumulation of scientific knowledge renders my hybrid account more plausible than the semantic account, which merely requires true belief. According to the semantic account, cognitive scientific progress involves the accumulation of truth or verisimilitude (see [17], [19], and [20]). Such theories of scientific progress, however, have several dis- advantages. The na¨ıve account, according to which scientific progress involves the accumulation of truth, must refute the deeply ingrained scepticism as to whether truth is attainable (see [1] and [18]). The verisimilitude account, on the other hand, bears ontological and epistemological burdens: it must give an adequate account of the concept of verisimilitude by determining its logical properties and it must demonstrate how we can epistemically access verisimilitude (see [1]). These are very difficult tasks. Lastly, the semantic account demands too little with regard to scientific progress. According to the semantic account, cases in which we accumulate entirely accidentally true beliefs constitute 10 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16 scientific progress. For example, in the 4th century B.C., Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model of the universe. Aristarchus’ model, albeit an accurate representation of the world, relied on faulty measurements, was at odds with the sensualistic evidence available at his time, and could not be confirmed through the observation of a stellar parallax until 1838 A.D. It was a true, yet unjustified belief. In this light, it seems doubtful that the acceptance of Aristarchus’ heliocentric model at this time would have constituted scientific progress. According to the semantic account, however, such cases must constitute scientific progress because they involve an accumulation of truth or verisimilitude. In order to avoid this counterintuitive implication of the semantic account, when we attempt to identify scientific progress, we must adopt a criterion which precludes accidentally true beliefs from constituting scientific progress. The requirement that scientific progress involves the accumulation of knowledge fulfils this desideratum given that knowledge entails justification5. Therefore, when we attempt to identify scientific progress, we might plausibly adopt the criterion of the accumulation of knowledge, as does my hybrid account.

4 Preserving Plausible Implications and Features of the Noetic Account

Finally, I shall discuss how the criterion of explanatorily or predictively powerful knowledge enables us to preserve plausible features and implications of the noetic account, namely that all instances of genuine scientific understanding constitute scientific progress, that we have good reason to favour idealised, elegant, and simple theories, and that, perhaps, understanding is epistemically more valuable than knowledge. Due to the criterion of knowledge, my hybrid account (and the epistemic account) can account for all instances of scientific understanding as contributions to scientific progress, even such cases in which our understanding does not rely on a (justified) true belief, but rather on the assumed truth of some proposition or some set of axioms from which we can derive explanatorily or predictively powerful theories. According to my hybrid account (and the epistemic account), such cases are framed as hypothetical knowledge: ‘If some proposition p is true, then p explains some set of observables O’. Or, similarly: ‘If some proposition p is true, then p predicts some set of events E’. As an example, consider Albert Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion in terms of the kinetic theory of heat (see [4]). Einstein did not have the epistemic justification Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientific Progress 11 in order to know that Brownian motion and the kinetic theory of heat did, in fact, obtain. Hence, the explanandum and explanans were not objects of his knowledge. Nonetheless, Einstein succeeded in demon- strating how Brownian motion is explained through the kinetic theory of heat. Intuitively, this achievement constitutes scientific progress. My hybrid account (and the epistemic account) can account for our intuition: Einstein assumed the accuracy of Brownian motion and the kinetic theory of heat and, based on this supposition, demonstrated how Brownian motion is explained in terms of the kinetic theory of heat. He, thus, possessed hypothetical knowledge.

In other instances of hypothetical knowledge, however, only my hybrid account retains plausibility, whereas the epistemic account does not. Consider Nicole d’Oresme’s belief that hot goat’s blood splits diamonds (see [1], [4]). Suppose Oresme had developed a theory which, if true, explains why hot goat’s blood splits diamonds. Like Einstein, Oresme did not have the epistemic justification in order to know whether his theory does, in fact, obtain. Nonetheless, based on the supposition that his theory does obtain, Oreseme would have succeeded in explaining why hot goat’s blood splits diamonds. Intuitively, this achievement does not constitute scientific progress. According to the epistemic account, however, if we are willing to grant Einstein scientific progress in his explanation of Brownian motion, Oresme’s theory must equally constitute scientific progress because both of these cases are instances of hypothetical knowledge. In contrast to the epistemic account, my hybrid account can account for our intuition that Oresme’s achievement does not constitute scientific progress: Oresme’s theory was neither explanatorily nor predictively powerful. In order for a theory to possess explanatory power with regard to certain phenomena, these phenomena must be real. There cannot be explanatory power with regard to merely imaginary phenomena because, then, there is nothing to actually explain (even if we might hypothetically explain the imaginary phenomena). Similarly, in order for a theory to possess predictive power, it must enable predictions regarding the occurrence of some real event, whereby these predictions hold true in actuality (as opposed to enabling predictions regarding the occurrence of some imaginary event, whereby these predictions hold true merely hypothetically). Given that we have made no observations that hot goat’s blood does, in fact, split diamonds and that we have no reason to expect it will do so prospectively, Oresme’s theory is not explanatorily or predictively powerful and, thus, fails to fulfil the pragmatic desideratum ii) of my hybrid account. Therefore, according to my hybrid account, 12 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16

Oresme’s achievement does not constitute scientific progress. I hope to have shown that, whereas the epistemic account fails to give an accurate verdict in the latter example, my hybrid account gives an accurate verdict in both examples. My hybrid account enables us to account for all instances of genuine scientific understanding as contributions to scientific progress by means of the epistemic desideratum i), whilst ruling out instances of hypothetical knowledge without explanatory or predictive power by means of the pragmatic desideratum ii). Another plausible feature of the noetic account is its ability to account for considerations regarding idealisations which facilitate scientific explanation and prediction, pragmatic virtues, such as the elegance or simplicity of a theory, and the value of understanding as opposed to the value of knowledge. It seems to me that, in virtue of the pragmatic desideratum ii), my hybrid account can make sense of the appeal of idealised, elegant, and simple theories: Idealised, elegant, and simple theories facilitate it for us to grasp their explanatory and predictive power. Moreover, if we adopt an account of the rate of scientific progress according to which the degree of scientific progress hinges upon the degree of explanatory or predictive power, this would parallel the recently pop- ular stance that understanding may have greater epistemic value than knowledge6.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have set forth a hybrid account of scientific progress, according to which the accumulation of explanatorily or predictively powerful scientific knowledge constitutes scientific progress. My account is motivated by the deficits of the semantic, epistemic, and noetic account. I have not, however, compared my account to any antirealist functionalist-internalist accounts. Furthermore, some open questions remain. For example, given my hybrid account, how precisely can we account for the rate of scientific progress and how might we quantify the degree of explanatory power, predictive power, and understanding? What constitutes scientific stagnation and scientific regress? How does my hybrid account translate into an account of the aim of science? Such enterprises and questions must be tackled in another paper. Clara Goebel: A Hybrid Account of Scientific Progress 13

Acknowledgements

This article beneﬁtted considerably from discussion with Alexander Bird and the postgraduate students of the Philosophy of Science seminar at King’s College London. Moreover, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Kriterion for their helpful suggestions and careful reading.

Notes

1 It is important to note that, whereas the discovery of novel entities has explanatory power and satisfies our curiosity about the world, the observation of familiar entities does not: When we observe an uncharted entity, this seems to demand an explanation and evokes our curiosity. The explanation for our observation is typically provided by accepting the existence of a novel entity. In contrast, when we observe a familiar entity, this does not seem to demand an explanation or to evoke our curiosity. Accepting the existence of a familiar entity at a certain time and location does not explain or even go beyond our observation, but is precisely what our observation consists in. As an example, whereas the observation of the previously unknown dermophis donaldtrumpi in Panama in 2018 constitutes scientific progress, the observation of a brown-throated sloth in Panama in 2018 does not. 2 Here, it is important to note that there is a distinction between approximate and idealised knowledge. Whereas approximate knowledge mathematically approx- imates reality, idealised knowledge distorts reality by abstracting from certain unpertinent aspects of reality in order to make it more tractable. Whereas mathematically accurate knowledge is typically preferable to mathematically approximate knowledge, it is not clear that the same holds of idealised and non-idealised knowledge. We might be tempted to say that because idealised knowledge reveals important explanatory factors, whereas non-idealised knowledge potentially ob- scures these factors, idealised knowledge displays greater explanatory power than non-idealised knowledge. This view, however, is not convincing. Whereas it is certainly true that idealised knowledge facilitates our psychological grasping of the explanatory factors, this does not mean that idealised knowledge provides greater explanatory power than non-idealised knowledge. 3 Beyond that, see [3], [8], [9], [11], and [26] for a factive account of understanding. 4 Beyond that, see [6], [13], [14], [21], [22], [24], [25], [27], and [28] for a quasi-factive account of understanding. 5 It is important to note that, whilst justification is necessary for scientific progress, it is not sufficient according to both my hybrid account and the epistemic account. The reason for this lies in the fact that justification is not epistemically valuable in the way that knowledge is: whereas knowledge secures a valuable epistemic outcome, i.e. truth, justification cannot reliably do so (see [2]). 6 For example, see [6], [9], [13], [14], [21], and [22]. 14 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3):1–16

Clara Goebel King’s College London Philosophy Department Strand London WC2R 2LS, UK

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[24] Riggs, Wayne. “Understanding, Virtue, and the Virtue of Under- standing”. In: Intellectual Virtue : Persepectives From Ethics and Epistemology. Ed. by Michael DePaul & Linda Zagzebski. 2003, pp. 203-227. [25] Riggs, Wayne. “Understanding, Knowledge, and the Meno Re- quirement”. In: Epistemic Value. Ed. by Adrian Haddock & Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard. 2009, pp. 331-338. [26] Sliwa, Paulina. “IV – Understanding and Knowing”. In: Proceed- ings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2015), pp. 57-74.

[27] Strevens, Michael. “No Understanding Without Explanation”. In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (2013), pp. 510-515. [28] Zagzebski, Linda. “Recovering Understanding”. In: Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justiﬁcation, Responsibil- ity, and Virtue. Ed by Matthias Steup. 2001, pp. 235-252. Letting the Truth Out: Children, Na¨ıve Truth, and Deﬂationism

Brian Lightbody

Abstract In their recent paper, “Epistemology for Beginners: Two to Five-Year-Old Children’s Representation of Falsity,” Olivier Mascaro and Olivier Morin study the ontogeny of a na¨ıve understanding of truth in humans. Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis holds that children seem to have an innate capacity to represent a state of affairs truthfully. In the following paper, I investigate the problems this research poses for deflationist theories of truth. Richard Rorty and Huw Price hold that the best way to understand truth or “the truth” is to understand the necessary conditions required for assertoric practice. Both philosophers present unique and very different deflationary theories when it comes to construing truth. I argue that neither philosopher’s approach is successful because they focus on truth and fail to recognize truthfulness as a norm of assertoric practice. I show that truthfulness is the elusive third norm of claim-based discourse and is consistent with Mascaro and Morin’s findings.

Keywords: Pragmatism, Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis, Deﬂationism, Rorty, Price, Kant

Introduction

In their recent paper, “Epistemology for Beginners: Two-to Five-Year- Old Children’s Representation of Falsity,” Olivier Morin and Olivier Mascaro study the ontogeny of a na¨ıve understanding of truth in humans.1 Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimist Epistemology Hypothesis (hereafter OEH) holds

Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42. http://www.kriterion-journal-of-philosophy.org c 2019 The author 18 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 that young children have the conceptual understanding to treat, correctly, assertions that make false representations of a state of affairs as false. What’s more, when toddlers are unable to identify false claims as untrue, the authors hypothesize that this is because young children reconstruct the testimony of some speakers, but especially primary caregivers, “in a way that makes them true.”2 One could, of course, attempt to debunk the findings of Mascaro and Morin by claiming that the study used a relatively small number of children (about 50) and therefore constitutes a small sample size making any claims made either for or against OEH inscrutable. One might also argue that the methodology employed to test the responses of toddlers is open to several and competing interpretations. I, however, will forego these criticisms. Instead, I shall concentrate on their twofold hypothesis, namely, 1) that truth as propositional adequatio, (defined as a statement that truly reflects a state of affairs), is programmed into our species being (their Optimist Epistemology Hypothesis) and develops very early on in childhood and 2) that children attempt to re-interpret false statements made by primary caregivers because there is a survival advantage in doing so.3 The hypothesis, if correct, has far-reaching consequences within epistemology as a whole. To take but one entailment, fashionable pragmatic theories of truth which attempt to deflate truth and inflate justification or other normative features of assertoric discourse as promulgated by the likes of Richard Rorty and Huw Price, seem to be in jeopardy if OEH is true. Their respective positions offer pragmatic disquotational views of truth: for Rorty when someone states “that is true” or some other version thereof, what she really means is that the statement is highly justified. Price, in contrast, resists the temptation to provide an Ursprung explanation of truth (for reasons that will become clear later) and instead argues that truth is the necessary and only goal of all claim- based discourse.4 Thus when someone states “That is true.”, they are coronating the particular sentence as it were and, in effect, removing the proposition from further reproach. In the following paper, I wish to explore three things. Firstly, I examine the respective arguments Rorty and Price employ to deflate truth. There are, of course, many different kinds of deflationism, but the standard pragmatic methods of deflating truth, as assiduously employed by Rorty and Price, stand out from other, semantic deflationary approaches (e.g., Minimalism) because they focus on the illocutionary effects of using ‘true’ and its cognates.5 Next, I demonstrate that Price is correct in Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 19 stating that a key aspect of assertive practice is the goal-like aspect of truth: interlocutors, ideally, pursue truth together. Thirdly, I show how Mascaro and Morin’s thesis undermines Price’s “global expressivist” position. I argue that Price conflates the normativity of truthfulness with the end goal of investigative inquiry, namely, truth itself. Truthfulness and not truth is the elusive third norm of avowal practice. Finally, I demonstrate how an implication of the second claim of OEH namely, that, “vigilance towards misinformation could be an adaptive response to a child’s increased social autonomy” is consistent with the further development of the ontogeny of truth in children as they mature into adults despite the tendency for some adults to be duped by ideology.6 I conclude by supplementing Price’s 3-D holographic metaphor (which is intended to demonstrate the necessity of conjoining subject and object aspects of naturalism in order to form a holistic whole) with a fourth dimension, time. To be a naturalist is to possess, act and practice an ethos and this ethos is defined by a subject’s ongoing commitment to truth and truthfulness.

Section I: Richard Rorty on Truth

Rorty in “Science as Solidarity” writes, “There is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours—uses in one or another area of inquiry.”7 Rorty’s epistemic position is such that truth, the truth or Truth (whatever nominalization of truths one wishes to use) are not necessary to make statements. As a pragmatist, Rorty up- holds the methodological rule of “no difference without a practical difference.”8 As Rorty himself explains this principle: “Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference to practice, it should make no difference to philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of the distinction between justification and truth, for that distinction makes no difference to my decisions about what to do.”9 For Rorty, the best way to understand epistemic concepts such as truth, warrant, evidence and so forth is to examine the linguistic vehicles utilized to transit these notions. The primary transport of such epistemic terms is assertions. Thus, by analyzing the conditions that make assertions and statements possible, one can determine the essential components of sentences that purport of truth. Assertoric discourse, of which scientific and other forms of inquiry are a species, is defined by the acceptance, challenging and denying of claims. 20 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42

For this practice to occur, it is imperative that such claims be taken seriously–– assertions must be expressed by a sincere speaker/writer who gives assent to the statements with which she agrees. Second, the speaker or writer must justify her views with reasons. Sincerity and justification are clearly normative conditions and are therefore referred to as the first and second norm of claimed-based discourse. For Rorty, the above two constraints are the only normative components assertions require. The elusive third norm, truth, is not essential so holds Rorty when playing the game of stating, assenting to, and denying assertions. What then of truth, the third norm, we may ask? According to Rorty, the notion of truth plays neither a metaphysical, epistemic, semantic, nor normative role when it comes to the practice of making assertions and denials. Truth has no metaphysical role to play because truth does not exist outside of our procedures of justification and discursive practices in which we know our way around.10 Any notion where reality somehow existed beyond these procedures would be unknowable and hence of no practical purpose. Rorty proclaims that we must abandon the third dogma of empiricism which holds that there remains a division between the schemes we use to organize the sensory world and the content of the world that exists somewhere beyond these arrangements.11 The model is self-contradictory; if we cannot in principle know what the world is like then we cannot claim that our perspectives describe the world as it is independently from those very perspectives because we would have no way to perform an accurate measurement of our schemas and no way of knowing what the schemas are mapping onto. Turning now to the justificatory, truth has no epistemic role to play when examining the reasons for the holding of some assertion. When one argues that a claim is not true, one is not arguing that the speaker has not adequately viewed the real facts of the matter because one cannot “. . . separate out the world’s contribution to the judgment forming process from our own.”12 What the person is, in effect, saying, so holds Rorty, is that the speaker is not justified; the reasons given to support some assertion are inadequate, or irrelevant, are inconsistent, are insufficient or are not appropriately weighted, etc. It is the notion of justification then which bears the epistemic and normative weight of assertoric discourse. Truth is not a load bearing notion, epistemically speaking. Given that justification has an enormous load to bear in Rorty’s construal of avowal communication, it is prudent to examine Rorty’s idea of justification in more detail. Rorty makes clear, in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, that justifica- Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 21 tion, for him, is not uniform but varies from discipline to discipline and, more importantly, from audience to audience. Rorty argues that the world, as we describe it, cannot be reduced to any particular model, idea or theory. The idea of holding perspectives on a singular reality where reality stands outside of these perspectives should be outrightly rejected. All there is, Rorty evinces, are a fixed number of “language games”— academic discourses and disciplines that determine the meaning of sentences and therefore of justified belief within that particular context. Rorty explains: “Uttering a sentence without a fixed place in a language game is, as the positivists rightly have said, to utter something which is neither true nor false—something which is not, in Ian Hacking’s terms, “a truth-value candidate.”13 Philosophers should not view the different languages of academic disciplines as separate jigsaw pieces where the end-goal is to fit them together in a feeble attempt to unify both our language (and our knowledge) into one, grand, super- vocabulary. To view justification in this manner would entail that no statement is ever truly justified because all statements would be true only according to some angle or perspective on “the truth.” Holding this position would be disastrous because we would never be able to exor- cize the ghosts of Descartes, namely, of discovering a method that would ground the sciences on some perfect, epistemically secure metaphysical foundation. Thus, according to Rorty, such questions such as “What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules? Or “What is the relation of language to thought?”14 Are ill-formed questions because they presuppose that the justificatory procedures accepted in one language game hold for another. Rorty himself best summarizes the upshot of this approach by writing: “. . . since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”15

Following Rorty’s first step of deflating truth one might claim that there are truths in physics, truths in history and truths in geology but no Truth or the truth. Holding there is but one Truth is to view the impossible. It would entail claiming that such statements–viewed through the optics of the academic discipline in which they are couched–are necessarily limiting perspectives on the world. However, if this were the case, then what constrains them? Thinking of Truth instead of truths is to engage in the perverse practice of Platonic nominalization which entails thinking of goods in terms of the Good. However, neither nominalization, whether it is the Good, the Truth or Beauty with a capital B, is particularly helpful and thus such notions remain vacuous when they are 22 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 allowed to operate detached from the conditions that make them possible.16 “If. . . my doubts are unspecific and abstract as Descartes’–if they are such that I can do nothing to resolve them–they should be dismissed, as they were by Peirce, as ‘make-believe. Philosophy should ignore them.”17 Turning to Rorty’s second and final deflationary step, it is clear that even little t truths do not exist. So-called truths refer to ‘facts,’ but so- called facts (sentence-shaped objects Strawson declares) are much like complex, linguistic nodes functioning within, and constituted by, a network of beliefs, positions, theories and observation reports within the particular academic discipline in which they are housed. “The problem is not with funny, Platonic, ‘hyper-objectivized’ facts,” Rorty asserts “but with any sentence shaped non-sentence, any putatively (in McDowell’s words) ‘non-conceptualized configurations of things themselves.”18 The problem, demonstrated and highlighted by the likes of Kuhn and others, is that one cannot isolate facts from theories nor theories from facts and thus there is no bright line distinguishing what data input from conceptual output is. “In so far as they are not-conceptualized, they are not isolable as input. But in so far as they are conceptualized, they have been tailored to the needs of a particular output-input function, a particular convention of representation.”19 Finally and now turning to the semantic, truth does not convey additional meaning to a proposition once one adopts a deflationary alethic schema or, conversely, once justification has been inflated to take truth’s place. One way to understand propositions in the semantic sense of the term is to interpret them along Tarskian lines. Thus, using Tarski’s T schema, the proposition, ‘Snow is white’ is true just in case snow is white. However, under a Rortian deflationary picture, such sentences may be interpreted, without loss of meaning as J schemas. The same sentence ‘Snow is white’ is justified just in case the speaker of the sentence provides direct sensory evidence, corresponding reasons, and so forth to warrant his claim. Warranted assertability preserves, without loss of meaning, so holds Rorty, the assignment of truth we typically give to sentences under a more metaphysically robust reading. “If assessment of truth and assessment of justification are, when the question is about what I should believe now (rather than about what I, or someone else, acted as we did), the same activity.”20 In deflating truth along all the above three axes, Rorty’s pragmatic model attempts to expose the real essence of truth, as it were, as nothing more than a convenient fiction; there are no epistemic, semantic, or Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 23 metaphysically interesting questions to be engendered upon pondering the question “What is truth?” in a typical Socratic, What is x? manner.21 Truth, according to this view is just a property language-users use to confer a special status on some sentences and not others. However, in fact, what is meant by truth is intersubjective agreement, “justified to the hilt” as one astute commentator on Rorty’s work puts it, according to what a particular community deems to be warranted methods of inquiry and justification.22 Justification, according to an audience, however, does not entail that epistemic warrant is simply determined by a community. As Rorty points out in an earlier paper, although . . . “justification is relative to an audience and that we can never exclude the possibility that some better audience might exist, or come to exist to which a belief which is justifiable to us would not be justifiable.”23 Truth may be used in a disquotational, commending and cautionary tone, but make no mistake—in declaring a statement to be true we are not adding anything to the statement that justification cannot handle.24 Non-pragmatists have long pointed out problems with Rorty’s new construal of truth. Charles Taylor, for example, argues that Rorty is committed to scheme/content dualism and, therefore, is a representationalist after all because he advocates and defends a deflationist model of truth when dealing with input from the world as opposed to the traditional, metaphysical correspondence model. However, by defending one model as superior to some other, Rorty must hold the model defended in higher regard than the model rejected, so argues Taylor.25 But on what grounds can Rorty justify this hierarchy? The only appeal Rorty can make to justify his position is to argue that the pragmatic model he endorses is a more accurate model when it comes to describing how subjects actually deliberate when they are engaged in assessing the claims of some speaker. That is, it is false to say that one is investigating the truth of some speaker’s assertions. What one is truly doing, Rorty implies, is evaluating how the speaker justifies her claims. Perhaps Rorty’s best response to the above criticism is to hold the line against what he calls “metaphysical activism.” Metaphysical activists defend representationalism and therefore scheme/ content dualism “come what may” even though the position defended does not seem worth the trouble. Thus, Rorty concludes, raising finer, more critical analyses of realist intuitions is therefore futile because the pragmatist “. . . cannot appeal to neutral premises, nor to widely shared beliefs” between the two cultures.26 Instead Rorty advocates a more rhetorical approach in his attempt to foment socio-cultural change by asking the metaphysical re- 24 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 alist such questions as: “What good do the intuitions you painstakingly salvage do us? What practical difference do they make?”27 In Rorty’s political work, Achieving our Country, he answers the above question and illuminates the political and social problems that occur when one nominalizes truth. For in maintaining that all assertoric discourse but especially those of a political and moral bent, needs to reflect some truth that stands outside of it, one endorses a totalizing, authoritarian system that enframes all dialogue and, thereby, subjects all forms of inquiry to external control. It is the undemocratic nature of such a Platonic, nominalizing truth that Dewey, Rorty’s intellectual hero, rejected the correspondence model, so Rorty avers. “The proposition”, Rorty declares,“was that democracy is the only form of moral and social faith which does not” (for Dewey) “rest upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point to some form of external control: to some authority alleged to exist outside the processes of experience.”28 Elsewhere in Achieving Our Country, Rorty contends that a theocen- tric view of truth (the correspondence model) creates political “movements” in contradistinction to Rorty’s preferred political course of action, “campaigns.” Movements are problematic, according to Rorty, because they are destined to fail. As Howe contended, “they must always struggle but never quite triumph and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph.”29 Thus, in deflating truth, we thereby replace political movements with a series of campaigns which, unlike the former, tackle social and political issues from the ground up, encouraging input and dialogue at every step of the way. A movement, in contrast, allies itself with an adequatio theory of truth such that action in the name of the movement must match up with some pre-established extra-discursive true goal or state. However, this pre-ordained, uncontestable, end-goal Rorty contends, is a dangerous course of action indeed.

Section II: Resisting the Ur-Urge of Pragmatism: Huw Price on Truth

I now turn to Huw Price, another pragmatist who agrees with Rorty’s attempt to denominalize truth. Unlike like Rorty, Price does not suc- cumb to the Ur-urge of the pragmatist, which is to equate truth with something else, to reveal the true nature of truth as such. Instead, Price ably resists the temptation of addressing truth on a meta-level entirely and instead remains fixated on the necessary pragmatic conditions for the making and denying of claims. His criticism of Rorty, then, takes Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 25 place from within the same pragmatic culture and, therefore, is more piercing than those posed by metaphysical realists. According to his analysis, when it comes to truth’s normative role, there is no substitute: without truth, Price boldly states, “the wheels of argumentation would not engage.”30 Price’s idea of truth is that it serves as normative friction: it directs the course of discussion when claims are made. By holding to a standard that is more than just warranted assertion, speakers can and indeed must engage in dialogue with each stakeholder of a conversation regarding a course of action or position adopted. Without the search for truth as a guiding standard, contrary assertions would be inherently irresolvable because each person would use his or her personal evidence, reasons and so forth for the justification of some claim. Since, however, I can neither stand in my interlocutor’s sensory space nor logical space of reasons as Sellars would say to view her evidence from her point of view, we would effectively shout past one another when either asserting or denying claims.31 Indeed, for Price, this idea of shouting past would not take place because interlocutors would immediately see no point engaging in substantive argumentation in the absence of truth. Since there is nothing objective to argue about, because an objective truth with which to appeal, does not exist, the very notion of argumentation would be incoherent and impossible to understand. This last point is concretized by Price in his well-known fictional, inventive and ultimately impossible community of speakers called Mo’ans—speakers who do not believe in truth and thus offer merely- opinionated assertion (MOA)32 Such speakers engage in dialogue and argumentation but never invoke the third norm (truth) in doing so. They “criticize each other for insincerity and for lack of coherence, or personal warranted assertability. But they go no further than this.”33 Agreement between two M’oans would not entail assent to a proposition believed to be objectively true, but rather function like an agreement of opinion that takes place in a “bar or restaurant” such as “Ditto” “Here, Here!”34 But agreement concerning what particular state of affairs Price now inquires? Surely M’oans who are in agreement with one another express agreement over some matter of fact and agree as to what the facts of the matter are. A Moan’s opinion is about something after all, and the belief in the content or aboutness of a conceptual construal of some state of affairs entails that one accepts, at a minimum, the following theses. 1) That the belief assented to is justified and 2) that one’s construal of the 26 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 belief is an accurate representation of the thing discussed. It is difficult to see how sincere agreement over anything important could take place if individuals did not give assent to the truth regarding the content of an interlocutor’s statement or indeed to their own. Disagreement in an M’oan community is perhaps even more perplex- ing. For Price, real disagreement in such a community would not occur because it would be otiose—if there is no objective matter of the topic at hand, and no epistemic purchase of objective reality to be had (truth as adequatio) then disagreement is either meaningless or something else entirely. Without a way to resolve the disagreement, Price avers, the mere approval and disapproval of assertions would lose their bite and thus enervate assertive discourse entirely by depriving it of one of its primary sources of motivation: the reward a community bestows on an argument or position accepted as true.35 Although Price is not explicit in stating that assertoric discourse is an agonic practice it is heavily implied in his paper and responses.36 The agonic aspects of discourse will be sharpened towards the end of this paper. In effect, I argue that while Price sees the principal agonic struggle intersubjectively, I see it as intrasubjective. The upshot of Price’s account is that truth must remain the end- goal in the game of assertions for without truth, contrary assertions and denials would be too slippery and skate past each other without any encounter. “Without truth, Price declares, the wheels of argument do not engage; disagreements slide past one another.”37 It is only the normative desideratum of truth that compels those engaged in assertive practices to consider the sincerity with which others and themselves hold statements as well as the justificatory merits of statements made by others who hold such assertions as warranted and, therefore, likely to be true in that agent’s subjective opinion. Truth as a third norm may not be as obvious as the other two because it is the ever-elusive holy grail of all statement-based discourse. However, for all its elusiveness, it remains a goal that all investigators seek to attain. To my mind, Price has raised an essential condition of assertoric practice that Rorty overlooks. There are, however, troubling aspects to Price’s answer to those who believe that truth is more than just a norm. One of the issues with Price’s argument is that it is unclear what role truth would play, if any, once two speakers deflate truth to a normative position. If two interlocutors attempt to argue with each other while knowing that there is no metaphysical, no nominalized objective standard that can be reached then it seems difficult to imagine how an Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 27 argument would get off the ground. Surely participants in an argument need to believe in a realist metaphysics and an epistemic adequatio notion of truth for the initiation, sustainment and if required, possible resuscitation of inquiry. Once the illusion of truth as nominalized idea is rejected and only a pragmatic, normative ground remains then the jig is surely up, argumentation would not take place. Price anticipates the above objection, but his response is on rather shaky ground. According to Price, those who recognize that truth is just “convenient friction” would still argue in exactly the same way before the ‘true’ structure of truth, as it were, was revealed. Price calls this objection the threat of “dialogical nihilism” and dispatches it quickly using, in my view, a rather questionable analogy.38 He claims that seeking truth is analogous to seeking an individual who is sexually attractive or food that is savory: though we may believe that there are clear criteria that a person or food item would need to satisfy such that we call either one attractive our criteria are not causally efficacious. We do not act based on these criteria but rather invoke them to justify what we, presumably, are already biologically determined to find desirable. Moreover, it may be the same with truth, Price declares. There may be a biological need to recognize the third norm as more than just a norm. The recognition of truth for what it truly is, namely as a biologically imposed norm, however, would not change the goal of propositional communication precisely in the same way that the recognition of why I believe some person or food item to be attractive would not weaken my desire for that person or object. Interlocutors would continue to pursue the truth of some matter just as diligently and energetically as before. But if the pursuit of truth is analogous to the pursuit of food and sex, then can we not reduce truth to an evolutionary capacity in the Morin and Mascaro sense? Assuming Price is right, that is, once the curtain on truth is pulled back and the real picture on truth is revealed then surely the norm of truth is no norm at all. Truth becomes a hard-fact biological restriction, an evolutionary a priori necessary condition for the very possibility of argumentation. The idea of truth cannot simply be shaken off whether construed as “convenient friction” or “justification to the hilt” but instead must be adapted within prescribed contexts just as the children in Mascaro and Morin’s study group intuitively adapt to the false assertions made by their primary caregivers by reinterpreting these statements so as to make them true.39 Truth, under Price’s model, sheds its normative skin and begins to adopt a metaphysically necessary descriptive quality. 28 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42

Also, Price’s analogy seems to contradict findings in experimental psychology and common-sense. The concept of cognitive transformation shows that belief and desire are a two-way causal conduit. Appetites may influence the belief one may come to have about an object which may make it more or less desirable than it otherwise would be and vice versa–belief can come to assess an object as less or more desirable depending on the features of the object on which one focuses. What’s more, there is voluminous empirical research confirming cognitive transformation. As one researcher wrote regarding appetite sup- pression: “It became clear that delay of gratification depends not on whether or not attention is focused on the objects of desire, but rather on just how they are mentally represented. A focus on their hot features may momentarily increase motivation, but unless it is rapidly cooled by a focus on their cool, informative features. . . .it is likely to be excessively arousing and trigger the “go” response.”40 Parsing the conclusion of this meta-study, the researchers showed that appetites can be aroused or cooled depending on how agents think about the features of the objects desired. If one focuses on “hot” aspects of an object such as the crunchiness of one’s favorites flavor of potato chips, then one is more likely to indulge the appetite.41 If, however, one focuses on “cool” aspects such as the abstract shape a potato chip might take one is more likely to delay the satisfaction of the appetite or indeed negate it completely. The same could be said for the sexual appetites: focusing on the unappealing aspects of some individual makes that person less attractive overall and vice versa–delaying sexual appetites may make some person appear more desirable than he or she otherwise would be. If Price’s analogy holds then truth is a biological need on the same level as either sex or food, and therefore our so-called “appetite” for truth would be subject to the psychological principle of cognitive transformation as well. But, if this is the case, then Price is wrong: two sophisticated arguers who know that truth merely is a norm and not an objective state of higher understanding would be disinclined to inquire into the nature of nature, they would lose their appetite for truth, just as reframing food appetites can change their hot or “go” properties. The identification of nutritional needs and sexual appetites with truth is false in another way too. One can give up sex by becoming celibate or, give up foods that we may be biologically programmed to find highly desirable. Indeed, if one is sufficiently motivated one may give up food Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 29 altogether. However, can one give up truth? What would it mean to extricate truth from belief and correspondingly tether belief to some other concept? Take celibacy for example. The practice is often coupled but not always to some religious or spiritual belief set. Whether the celibate is a Catholic priest or Buddhist monk one is celibate because one believes that there are lower and higher perspectives on oneself. One can see oneself as a sexual creature, essentially, or one may choose to think of oneself through a different perspective (e.g. as a child of God in the case of the priest or if Buddhist to see sex as a Dharma, an illusion and form of thirst preventing one from true Enlightenment/Nirvana). In either case, one seeks to establish a higher, more profound, more truthful relationship to one’s body and soul (or lack thereof in the case of the Buddhist), than that afforded by secular society. Sexuality can be transcended because the celibate believes in a higher calling, a higher truth. Likewise, one can swear off certain foods high in fat or sugar because one recognizes lower and higher truths: that such foods are delicious but that these same foods will likely lead to an early death. In more extreme circumstances, there are those who have gone on hunger strikes to draw attention to a cause deemed more important than one’s own existence. Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army who died of starvation on the 66th day of a continuous hunger strike while in prison helps concretize this point: if Sands simply viewed the truth of his cause as stemming from a biological need it is doubtful that he would go to such extreme lengths to bring attention to it. The question to be asked, then, is whether such extreme ascetics could view their practices as anything other than one motivated by a higher truth or indeed truth itself.42 Phrased another way (and in Pricean influenced terms) could individuals who believed that truth was merely biological need, (TMB’ans) be celibates? Could TMB’ans go on hunger strikes? Could these types of ascetic practices be possible if one held the desire for truth to be nothing more than a glitch in our biological programming? I would submit no because in order to engage in such practices one needs to view such rigorously severe exercises as something more than merely true according to one’s biology. Freely denying one’s basic biological need for food to advance some cause entails that the belief must be coupled to truth: no other coupling such as opinion, justification or even aesthetic criteria would provide the propulsion and continued impulsion for such a painful, excruciating practice. Truth cannot be a mere bio- 30 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 logical endowment on par with either sex or food because it is the desire for, and realization of, the truth that can negate the inclination of these other desires.

Section III: Global Expressivism: A Pricean Defense?

One possible objection to the above line of argument is that it leads to other issues most notably “placement” or “location” problems. Such problems are, after all, one of the primary motivators for Price’s global expressivist position, and, as such, I would be remiss if I did not at least examine what these problems entailed. Price notes, that, given a particular framework of reality say, empiricism or physicalism, expressions that appear to be statements of fact are hard to place. “Where are moral facts to be located in the kind of world described by physics? Where is our knowledge of causal necessity to go, if a posteriori knowledge is grounded on the senses?”43 The expressivist solution to these claims, following Hume, is to argue that supposed moral facts, such as, “Stealing is wrong!” for example, are not facts all. That is to say, they do not reflect external states in the world but are really expressions of approval or disapproval presented by a subject for a myriad of purposes (e.g., communication, admonishment, etc) which then “stain and gild the world.”44 The solution, Price avers, “..is to move these problem cases outside the scope of the general program in question, by arguing that our tendency to place them within its scope reflects a mistaken understanding of the vocabulary associated with the matters in question.”45 Once one recognizes that said expressions have been placed under the wrong category all along, the problem disappears. But there remains something troubling with this solution, Price notes. The issue is that it retains the representational language from which a true pragmatist wishes to free herself. Representationalism is reinforced because the answer cleaves language in two: scientific assertions represent the world, while statements made in other vocabularies, like ethics and aesthetics, do not. There are, then, two parts to a traditional expressivist or non-cognitivist position: an anti-representationalist aspect which Price contends is a negative thesis in that it claims that ethical (or aesthetic statements) are “non-referential, non-truth apt, non- descriptive, non-factual or something of the kind.”46 And a positive thesis Price calls the expressivist in “that it expresses or projects from evaluative attitudes.”47 The problem with the negative thesis is that Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 31 it is difficult to see how the expressivist can make metaphysical claims about the world as to which statements are capable of reflecting external states and which in principle cannot. If, after all, moral, aesthetic or even causal statements are in principle non-descriptive then an expressivist who holds the negative thesis is making a descriptive claim about such statements in claiming that they do not refer to the world. Price’s expressivism solves this dilemma. It rejects this negative, representational aspect of traditional expressivism and instead embraces expressivism of a global kind where “global” refers to an assemblage of local vocabularies. “Expressivism,” Price relates, “in its local varieties gives us an indication of what the theoretical conversation is going to be about, given that it is not to be conducted in a semantic key.”48 Price argues that we can have the same robust arguments in ethics as we had before an expressivist turn, but that we are no longer talking about concepts such as ““goodness” “seven” “cause” “knowledge” and “truth” do[ing] the job of referring—in other words, that they stand at one end of a relation of some significant kind.”49 In thinking about these terms as referring to distinct objects, we thereby open the door to placement problems. Price’s adoption of the positive thesis, by itself, resolves this issue. How then should we conceive of these terms? We should think of them in terms of how they are used, within a context, within their respective vocabularies. Price’s global expressivism, then, is not a metaphysical position but simply denotes a collection of local discourses. Inquiries should be directed not along semantic lines but should be about “..the role and genealogy of evaluative and modal vocabularies—and these are questions about human behavior, broadly construed, rather than questions about some seemingly puzzling part of the metaphysical realm.”50 It is the asking of traditional philosophical questions like, “What really is truth?” that one engages in a metaphysical aporia because one is no longer asking how a term is used effectively, but what the term stands for, what is it about? It is this way of talking that leads to an unbridge- able chasm from linguistic use and the object that said use supposedly represents.51 We must shift away from doing philosophy of language in a metaphysical key, Price exhorts, and instead recognize that we are “. . . doing something like anthropology.”52 At present we seem to be at an impasse. An anthropological ground does not exhaust the uses of truth, especially in those cases where one is engaged in a Rortian movement, of the sort described near the end of section II. As already noted, if one believes that truth is grounded 32 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 on anthropological/biological need, it is doubtful that this belief will generate the type of momentum to move along one’s quest to pursue higher, more profound truths. Yet, truth as adequatio does seem to be vulnerable to the sort of placement problems noted by Price. Perhaps his alternative, while certainly lacking in some respects, is preferable to an adequatio model. Is there a way through this impasse? In the next section, I demonstrate how a rapprochement of sorts may be enacted between Price and the position I have thus far expounded here.

Section IV: What then is truth?

Is truth an evolutionary adaptation as Mascaro and Morrin suggest? Is it a norm, dispensable or indispensable depending on one’s view, as the pragmatists argue or something else entirely? I would argue it is both. Truth, here understood as adequatio, appears to be an evolutionary adaptation, a transcendental condition that makes inquiry possible, but it is also a norm. More accurately stated, it is not truth per se that is a norm but truthfulness. Truthfulness, I submit, is the actualiza- tion of a latent capacity to judge the representation of a state of affairs accurately. For every investigation, inquiry and experiment or conversation with assertoric elements requires that the participants are truthful regarding their findings along with the presentation of said findings to others and, of perhaps greater importance, to themselves. Thus, adequatio provides humans the ability to view the world–at least from our distinct species perspective, which because it is a perspective does not make it any less true than some other–but it is truthfulness that must be practiced. To be truthful is to remain vigilant in avoiding distorting lenses through which to view the picture represented. The authors hint at the distinction I am drawing here between truth as the capacity to present the world propositionally and truthfulness as the ability to judge what is presented by others and oneself when one is engaged in argumentation. As children develop, Mascaro and Morrin conjecture, they are much more likely to call informants out on false statements because “vigilance towards misinformation could be an adaptive response to their increased social autonomy, as they come to interact more and more with their peers.”53 Self-deception, weakness of will, sub-optimal choosing are all examples of behavior which have been described as when an agent is not vigilant enough when it comes to processing the information before her.54 How might we explain these and other phenomena where agents are neglectful when it comes to filtering Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 33 and analyzing the information freely available to them? I think Mascaro and Morrin provide a clue to solving this question, unwittingly, by suggesting that there is a causal relationship between increased social autonomy and vigilance towards misinformation. Their explanation is only one half of the equation though, the adequatio side. What of the truthfulness side might we ask? I would argue that there is also a causal relationship between vigilance towards misinformation and personal autonomy. More accurately, truthfulness requires a special ethical relationship to oneself, (of which not everyone may be capable). A critical ethos such that one is committed to the strongest picture of adequatio one can muster (or endure) even if this entails that one rejects a well-justified (and therefore perhaps comforting) picture of reality already in place. In thinking of personal autonomy as a critical ethos, I have in mind Kant’s Enlightenment motto Sapere Aude! (Dare to Know). According to Kant, the Age of Knowledge was not so much a watershed in history that marked a turning towards and building up of Science (although this was an important aspect of it) but rather the cultivation and expression of an attitude. “Enlightenment, Kant writes,

“Is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Im- maturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Having courage to use your own understanding!”—that is the motto of the Enlightenment.55

A key take away from this passage is the deﬁnition of immaturity: “the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” One is immature and therefore not autonomous if one cannot help but rely on others to make decisions for oneself because one lacks the cognitive ability for independent thinking. Here Kant does not use immaturity pejoratively. Immaturity is used pejoratively when, as Kant notes, the cause of using others for guidance stems from a lack of courage and/or laziness. “They (cowardice and laziness) are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on–then I have no need to exert myself.”56 In this case, Kant claims, the immaturity is self-imposed, and the agent is epistemically and morally blameworthy. 34 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42

Relying on guardians for one’s moral and epistemic cues because one lacks the courage or work ethic to discover truths for themselves, is to remain immature, benighted. However, this unfortunate predicament in which so many of us find ourselves fails to explain the Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis. For clearly if Morrin and Mascaro are right, there is a waking up of our capacity very early on in normal, childhood, intellectual development to understand statements as accurate or inaccu- rate descriptions of states of affairs and to call those out who mispresent reality in our peer group. And yet this dual capacity for truth and truthfulness lies dormant again in many otherwise physically, emotionally and financially independent, cognitively sophisticated adults. What causes this renewed dormancy? What causes some of us, indeed the best of us (Kant himself!) to remain in dogmatic slumber? I would argue that Kant’s diagnosis of cowardice is largely correct but would add the following: cowardice is a kind of knee-jerk response to the gradual recognition of harsher and harsher truths, as we mature. As we age, we begin to realize the severe, tragic nature of life all around us. It slowly dawns on children that all those they love will die and that they too will also die. They begin to perceive, only dimly at first, that an unimaginable number of innocent lives suffer in this world without purpose and that there are evil people who do not always get their just desserts. As children begin to comprehend these truths, some require more powerful ideologies to numb and dull the species’ naturally endowed truth-seeking capacities. Indeed, it is for this reason that Kant is especially critical of pastors in What is Enlightenment? Be- cause it is uncritical, unenlightened religious teachings that provide one with ready-made dogmas for life’s deepest and most heart-breaking questions. Utilizing Kant’s insight I argue that truthfulness then, is a virtue, an activity, consisting, primarily, of fighting against epistemic cowardice which, if Kant is right, begins a downward moral spiral leading first to immaturity and, subsequently, subservience to a guardian.57 Remaining truthful to the picture of reality before one requires a vigilant practice that, if given up, leads to personal heteronomy. In advancing the position that truth as adequatio acts as a condition for the very possibility of assertoric practice, while truthfulness acts as a norm that stimulates argumentation—a principle that one may yet (and often does), fail to live up to, entirely in practice—do I not sidestep the placement problems articulated by Price? Perhaps, but I would maintain that the placement of evaluative, moral or model judgments within a physical universe is not a problem at all. It reflects a myopic Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 35 view of naturalism and one that Price himself rejects in some places. Let me explain. Price’s expressivism fails to consider, fully, the projection of evaluation on that other object of naturalism, namely the subject. Evaluative, aesthetic or modal judgments are not just projections superimposed on the world by a subject as na¨ıve expressivism would have it but reflect the attitudes of the subject who holds them; attitudes are commitments that, if meaningful, have been projected first, on the mental screen, as it were, of the subject herself. They are reflected upon, questioned, challenged, reformulated, confirmed, and then reaffirmed because they were found to be accurate—truthful reflections of the subject who judges them to be true as they pertain to some aspect of the world. In this sense, such judgments are doubly reflective reflecting both the commitments of the subject and the domain of the world in which they are applicable. Because they are doubly reflective they may be doubly false—false in that the subject avows a norm but then fails to live up to it and false in another way too in that the norm does not apply to that domain of the world in which the subject thinks it operates. Perhaps even more intriguing is that Price comes very close to adopt- ing this dual projection view regarding his own expressivist position: “But if language is not a telescope then what is it? As Bran- dom points out, a traditional expressivist option is the lamp. I think that modern technology allows us to make this a little more precise. Think of a data projector, projecting images onto an external screen. Even better, helping ourselves to one of tomorrow’s metaphors, think of a holographic data projector, projecting three-dimensional images in thin air. This isn’t projection onto an external, unembellished world. On the contrary, the entire image is free-standing, being simply the sum of all we take to be the case: a world of states of affairs, in all the ways that we take states of affairs to be.”58 Presumably, this holographic projector casts images from both subjects (in the form of expressive attitudes) and objects (in the form of physical properties) and thus advances Price’s call for a true naturalism that con- joins both subject and object.59 However, there is a crucial dimension missing—time. A more accurate metaphor is to recognize that the holo- graph produced by the projector is subordinate to the changing alethetic relationship a subject has to the nature of the images projected. A true naturalism must include an ethos that helps generate inquiry, investigation and the challenging of one’s current stock of beliefs continuously, 36 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42 throughout the course of the subject’s life. In conclusion, OEH is a compelling and illuminating theory offering a powerful explanatory narrative regarding how and why children view and reconstruct statements in their peer group. Morrin and Mascaro argue that truth as adequatio is a naturally endowed capacity in humans but- tressed and contoured at times by natural selection and self-preservation. Yet if OEH is true, then it is inconsistent with pragmatic attempts to deflate adequatio notions of truth. The question I have asked throughout this paper is: Can pragmatic approaches to truth be saved in light of OEH? The answer to this question is a qualified yes: it is not so much truth that is a practice or norm, but rather truthfulness. Being truthful to the truth, that is truthful to the picture of reality one believes to be justified, is a kind of epistemic virtue which is infrequent to find and ever rarely practiced in full. Truth as adequatio is not a third norm but the end-goal of all declarative discourse. Truthfulness to adequatio becomes the third normative practice in assertoric discourse guaranteeing the initiation and sustainment of inquiry and argumentation alike.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1[10] 2[10, p.4] 3[10, p.4] 4[14] 5 Both Rorty’s and Price’s respective versions of pragmatic deflationism differ from those of other philosophers who agree with the spirit of “anti-inflationism” but who nevertheless may be “deflationists of a merely b variety” to quote Paul Hor- wich. Andrew Horwat in his [6], uses Paul Horwich’s useful distinction between inflationism and deflationism of an a and b variety, which I will exploit here. Ac- cording to Horwat’s reading of Horwich, “An inflationist is someone who believes that the concept of truth picks out a natural property (e.g., correspondence to the facts), and is therefore naturalistically reducible. A deflationist is someone who believes that the concept of truth either (a) does not pick out a property at all or (b) picks out a non-substantive property.” Horwat, [6, p.937]. Horwich conceives his project of deflating truth as one belonging to the b variety. He proposes to minimalize truth–at least in its logical manifestations–by converting truth statements to his Equivalence Schema: Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 37

ES: ‘It is true that p if and only if p’. [7, p.6]. For example, “quarks really exist is true if and only if quarks really exist. [7, p.5] The purpose of ES is to exhaust the concept of truth in all is sentential manifestations whether these sentences are stated directly, as with the quark example above, or are used in more complex embedded phrases (e.g. if the statement quarks exist is true then . . . ) But there is a fatal flaw in this approach from a pragmatist perspective, as Hor- wat makes abundantly clear: Horwich’s book, Truth, “. . . has two significant deficiencies from a pragmatist perspective. The first is that despite its rhetoric, the book contains very little description of, or reflection upon, linguistic practice with ‘true’ and its cognates, in all its messy variety. The second deficiency of the book is that Horwich repeats several times Russell’s unfortunate canard that pragmatists think ‘p is true iff it is useful to believe that p’ (e.g. p. 34, p. 47). As a result, Horwich overlooks the best insights pragmatists have had to offer on issues of truth, assertion and inquiry, and their substantive interconnections, in favor of a familiar but misguided caricature of the views of William James and F.C.S. Schiller.” [6, p.936]. The upshot of the pragmatist critique is that Horwich’s overall strategy to minimalize truth may be successful with respect truth’s semantic content but is insufficient when it comes to minimalizing truth’s illocutionary aspects. In other words, true and its cognate terms may very well be content equivalent to ES but they are not force equivalent. To see why consider the following statement and reasoning provided by Horwat: (‘to assert p is to take responsibility for the truth of p’) is unobjectionable and yet—for a Minimalist—inexplicable, since it does not submit to ES.” [6, p.948] What Rorty and Price do, in opposition to Horwich, is to present a more nuanced and, therefore, more encompassing deflationism of truth in all its myriad uses. 6 I use ideology to denote when one is suffering from false consciousness. False consciousness may be defined as i) an individual has false beliefs which legitimize oppressive social institutions, and ii) an individual is also blocked in some way from recognizing the false beliefs they hold (through the media, the educational system, repressive sexual laws, etc). Thus, false consciousness, as I am using the term here, includes non-religious and religious interpretations. See [12, p.217]. 7[17, p.11] “Nietzsche has caused a lot of confusion by inferring from “truth is not a matter of correspondence to reality” to “what we call ‘truths’ are just useful lies.” The same confusion is occasionally found in Derrida, in the inference from “there is no such reality as the metaphysicians have hoped to find” to “what we call ‘real’ is really real. . . Such confusions make Nietzsche and Derrida liable to charges of self-referential inconsistency—to claiming to know what they themselves claim cannot be known. See [18, p.8]. 8 See [14, p.229]. 9[19, p.281] 10[19, p.295] 11 The labelling of the third dogma is often called scheme/content dualism. See [4]. 12[19, p.295] 13[18, p.18] 14[18, pp.11f] 38 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42

15[18, p.21] 16 See Rorty’s reply to Price’s paper [14], [21, p.255]. 17[19, p.281] 18[19, p.295] 19[19, p.295] 20[19, p.281] 21 In using the term convenient ‘fiction,’ I do not take Rorty’s approach to be ‘fictionalist’ in the sense invoked by Bradley Armour-Garb and James Woodbridge. In their work, Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalisms and Their Applications, they make use of philosophical fictionalism “. . . in order to resolve well-known puzzles and paradoxes in philosophy of mind, language and epistemology.” ( See [3, p.687]). Like Horwich who focuses on the content side of truth and not on the force side, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge argue in favour of “. . . semantic pretense-involving fictionalism –‘SPIF’, for short – over an alternative pragmatic PIF of the sort developed by Fred Kroon (2001, 200h)” ([3, p.688]) “In general, a SPIF account of some apparently problematic discourse will apply a particular notion of fiction (make-believe) to implement semantic redirection away from a face-value reading of the sentences of the discourse.” ([3, p.688]) For example, the sentence: “Captain Ahab does not exist.” on a face value reading is incoherent—”Captain Ahab” appears to be a proper name and thus refers to some definite person. In taking up this reading, we are both claiming that such a person exists and does not exist. But by taking up a SPIF account, we can make sense of this claim by employing a pretense—we are using Moby Dick by Herman Melville as a fictional frame of discourse to situate the placement of the sentence “Captain Ahab does not exist.” Thus to say that, “Captain Ahab does not exist” presupposes this fictional frame of reference and therefore, “. . . generates what we call the serious content of that utterance, viz., what it can be used to say about the real world outside of the make-believe.” [3, p.688]. Turning to SPIF and truth, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge propose that ‘True’ performs an anaphoric function within a fixed fictional pretense. That is, truth is a representational aid used to facilitate expression. For example, one might re- spond to someone who quotes Benjamin Franklin’s “Fish and visitors stink after three days” with “That’s very true!” ‘True’, here, is used to give assent to the original statement without having to repeat Franklin’s idiom all over again. De- spite appearances to the contrary, the word true does not pick out a substantive property much like the pronouns ‘he ‘or ‘she’ do not pick out some identifiable subject unless there is a prior pretense that explains what these terms refer to. As Armour-Garb and Woodridge put it, “True thus appears to express a substantive property when in reality there is no such property and a fortoriori there is no such property and no such property for the truth predicate to express” See [2, p.71]. For example, “X is reflective” or “X is conductive” are statements that describe substantive, testable properties of some object but to say that X is true does not pick out a discernible property existing independently of the frame of reference in which it is embedded. It appears that when we engage in “truth talk” that we are picking out a property like in those instances with the sentences above. But for Armour-Garb and Woodridge, “There are no pretense-free use of truth locutions because pretense is invoked in their basic functioning.” “Why Deflationists Should be Pretense Theorists (and Perhaps Already Are)”, [2, p.72]. The same problem with Horwich’s account of exhausting the semantic content Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 39

of ‘true’ as equivalent to ‘endorsement’ appears once again. From a pragmatist perspective, the real question is whether such a construal can exhaust the force- equivalent uses of truth. For example, how would a fictionalist account of truth handle sentences where ‘true’ acts as an intensifier such as: “He is a true hero!” Because of limitations of space, I cannot address the inadequacies of a fictionalist account in this paper. 22[5, p.53] 23[19, p.283] 24[19, p.283] 25[23, p.270] 26[19, p.300] 27[19, p.300] 28[20, pp.28f] 29[20, p.119] 30[14, p.245] 31 Wilfrid Sellars, “In characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what it says.” [22, p.159]. 32[14, p.238] 33[14, p.238] 34[14, p.238] 35[14, p.241] 36 See Huw Price, [15, p.258]. See also [14, p.241] where Price writes: “The third norm makes what would otherwise be no-fault disagreements into unstable social situations, whose instability is only resolved by argument and consequent agreement–and it provides an immediate incentive for argument in that it holds out to the successful arguer the reward consisting in her community’s positive evaluation of her dialectical position.” 37[14, p.241] 38[14, pp.246f] 39[10, p.4] 40 Quoted in [11, p.81]. 41 See Mele’s extended discussion of this phenomenon in [11, pp.81–85]. 42 I recognize that there may be many different reasons to practice celibacy, hunger strikes or other extreme ascetic exercises that at first glance may seem to have nothing to do with the distinction I employed between lower and higher truths. One might practice celibacy for practical reasons that are psychologically and/or socially based (e.g anxiety disorder, commitment fears etc). But whatever reason one gives to justify the practice of some exercise there must be a recognition, on behalf of the agent engaged in said practice, that the reasons he tells herself are true. 43 Huw Price, “One Cheer for Representationalism” in [16, p.312]. Also see section 2 of “ The Semantic Foundation of Metaphysics” in [16, pp.254–259] for more on this problem. 40 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 17–42

44[8, p.294] 45 Price, “One Cheer for Representationalism”, [16, p.312] 46 Huw Price, “The Semantic Foundations of Metaphysics”, in [16, pp.260f] 47 Price, “The Semantic Foundations of Metaphysics”, [16, p.261] 48 Price, “One Cheer for Representationalism”, [16, p.308] 49 Price, One Cheer for Representationalism, [16, p.314] 50 Price, “One Cheer for Representationalism”, [16, p.315] 51 Huw Price, “Naturalism Without Representationalism” in [16, p.189]. Using true or truth to refer to a natural object according to Price commits a fallacy of equivocation between use and mention: “An expression of the form “’Snow is white is true’” contains a use masquerading as a mention.” ( 190) . 52 Price, “One Cheer for Representationalism, [16, p.315] 53[10, p.15] 54 Socrates is the first philosopher to conceive weakness of will or akrasia as a failure to measure correctly. In the Protagoras he famously declares that weakness of will does not exist because we are never overcome by pleasure or fear but instead have failed intellectually: “Well then my good people: Since it has turned out that our salvation in life depends on the right choice of pleasures and pains, be they more or fewer, greater or lesser, farther or nearer, doesn’t our salvation seem first of all to be measurement which is the study of relative excess and deficiency and equality? “It must be.” “And since it is measurement, it must definitely be an art, and knowledge. “ “They will agree.” Protagoras 357B in [13, p.786]. A contemporary explanation of weakness of will and procrastination for that matter can be found in the work of George Ainslie. Ainslie argues that humans are biologically programmed to “discount the future”, that is, we choose a lesser reward now rather than denying immediate gratification for the sake of a larger reward in the future. This explanation, as way of accounting for sub-optimal phenomena such as weakness of will and procrastination, is also a cognitive failure to process information correctly. See [1]. 55 Immanuel Kant,”An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)” in [9, p.41]. 56[9, p.42] 57[9, p.44] 58[16, p.28] 59[16, p.5,11]

Brian Lightbody Professor, Department of Philosophy Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario 500 Glenridge Aveune, L2S 3A1, USA Brian Lightbody: Letting the Truth Out 41

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[12] Owen, David. “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Crit- ical Theory‘ in European Journal of Philosophy 10:2, 2002, 216– 230.

[13] Plato: Plato Complete Works. John Cooper Ed. Indianapolis, In- diana: Hackett Publishing, 1997. [14] Price, Huw. “Truth as Convenient Friction”, in Naturalism and Normativity, Ed(s). Mario De Caro and David Macarthur. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 229–252.

[15] Price, Huw. “Price: Reply to Rorty’s Further Remarks (Feb. 2008)” in Naturalism and Normativity, 256–262. [16] Price, Huw. Naturalism Without Mirrors, Oxford University Press, 2011.

[17] Rorty, Richard. “Science as Solidarity” in Dismantling Truth: Re- ality in a Post-Modern World, Ed (s). Hilary Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. [18] Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1989.

[19] Rorty, Richard. “Is Truth a Goal of Enquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 45 No. 180, July 1995, 281–300. [20] Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country. Harvard University Press, 1998.

[21] Rorty, Richard. “Rorty Further Remarks” (Feb. 2005) in Natural- ism and Normativity, 254–256. [22] Sellars, Wilfrid. Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Rout- ledge & Kegan Paul), 1963.

[23] Taylor, Charles. “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition”, in Alan Malachowski (ed) Reading Rorty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) Towards a Uniﬁed Interpretation of Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects

PawelPijas

Abstract This article proposes an interpretive key to Bernard Williams’s philosophy. It posits the idea that at its core, his philosophy consists in the following interconnected epistemological and metaphysical views: (1) scientific realism, (2) metaphysical naturalism, (3) methodological pluralism, (4) anthropological contingentism and (5) a post-analytical/humanistic understanding of philosophy. These are extracted in the first two sections. The third section provides a demonstration of how this interpretation can be applied vis-à-visWilliams’s critique of morality. The text concludes with some critical remarks on Williams’s metaphilosophical position.

Keywords: Bernard Williams, science, philosophy, contingency, ethics

. . . the natural world is not designed as our home Bernard Williams [16, p. 111]

Introduction

Bernard Williams was one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, making significant contributions in many areas, particularly ethics. Yet it is striking that we do not have a comprehensive interpretation of his work. No doubt there are reasons for this state of affairs. His predilection for skepticism and anti-theory, since his philosophy is in

Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74. http://www.kriterion-journal-of-philosophy.org c 2019 The author 44 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 large part critical, is one of the most compelling. The other is his peculiar, essayistic style, often troublesome to a commentator. So if one wishes to remain faithful to the spirit of Williams’s writings, one may ﬁnd the pursuit of a comprehensive interpretation daunting. As a result, his writings are usually interpreted in isolation from any larger structure they may be a part of, as contributions limited to a particular debate [5, p. 73].1 There are reasons, however, not to follow such an approach. If Williams’s skepticism grew out of more basic claims and presupposi- tions, they will reveal the core of his views. And if this core is successfully extracted or reconstructed, it could link together major themes of his philosophy, thus improving our understanding of it. I propose an interpretation of Williams’s philosophy conducted in this spirit. Concen- trating mainly on ideas developed by Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [16] as well as his essay Philosophy as a Humanistic Disci- pline [20, pp. 180-199] among other texts, I shall advance the hypothesis that certain interconnected epistemological and metaphysical beliefs are at the core of Williams’s philosophy.2 In the ﬁrst two sections of this paper, I will extract these core epistemological and metaphysical beliefs. In the third section, I will use one example to show how those beliefs can provide an interpretive key for understanding the larger structure of Williams’s opus.

1 Science, Philosophy and the Absolute Conception

The views that form the core of Williams’s philosophy appear to be shaped by his understanding of diﬀerences between science and philosophy. This account is elaborated in his discussion of scientism and pragmatism, which Williams interprets as both extreme and narrow accounts of a rather complex matter. In this context Williams introduces the absolute conception of the world.3

A. The Rejection of Scientism

Let us start with scientism. The term is vague. Williams distinguishes some characteristics of scientism that were or still are common in his own analytical tradition: scientism as a matter of writing style; scientism as a way of teaching or conducting philosophy (through imitating scientiﬁc procedures); scientism as ahistoricism [20, pp. 180-184, 204-205]. All of Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 45 this, however, is derivative of a more substantial view. This view seems to Williams to consist of the following beliefs (SB = scientistic belief):

(SB1) Science is a reliable and successful cognitive discourse. (SB2) The reliability and success of science are grounded on and secured by its methodology, which aims at an objective description of the world. Scientific methodology includes empirical data, logical scrutiny, repeatability of experiments and so forth, thus, ensuring reliable cognitive contact with reality. Contingent, non-epistemic factors do not influence the process of formulation, justification and acceptance of this or that scientific claim or theory in any significant way. These positive characteristics of science are confirmed by its technological achievements. (SB3) Therefore, we have reasons to think that science actually does describe reality in an objective manner. Thus, the intellectual authority of science is justified. (SB4) In comparison, other discourses, such as philosophy or the humanities, do not appear to be as reliable or successful; on the contrary, their outcomes seem to be largely contingent. (SB5) The overall defectiveness of other discourses must follow from their defective methodologies. Contingent, non-epistemic factors influence the process of formulation, justification and acceptance of respective claims and theories. The intellectual authority of these discourses is therefore not justified. (SB6) In general, science is superior to other discourses [Ibid., pp. 184- 190].

Williams himself accepts SB1–3 as representing a correct view of science. At the same time he rejects SB6. To accept SB6, one needs to take SB4 and SB5 for granted, that is, that quality of cognitive achievement in objective terms is an appropriate ground on which to compare science and other discourses. In other words, Williams ascribes to scientism the claim that valid intellectual authority inheres only in a discourse that delivers an outcome approximating to an objective description of the world. If there is any hope for philosophy (and humanities, but for our purposes, let us put them aside) to claim intellectual authority, it would have to assimilate itself to the superior paradigm and adopt its methodology. 46 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74

In Williams’s view, scientism errs through “a misunderstanding of the relations between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences” [Ibid., p. 182]. It does not follow that the rather uncontroversial cognitive superiority of science in describing natural phenomena makes it superior in other functions that intellectual discourses can accomplish. Nor can we infer the overall defectiveness of other discourses. Scientism assumes a monistic standard of evaluation, as if every intellectual activity should have as its goal the most objective possible description of the world. But this is, Williams claims, certainly false. Our intellectual discourses are linked to a variety of aims, needs and aspirations. Science is especially concerned with our cognitive goals,4 but there are other, no less important goals. It is not unarguable, and may perhaps even be misguided, to think that science is well equipped to satisfy in particular the typically human, overarching need to make sense of life and the varied activities it consists of. Science is limited here because those other human aims, needs and aspirations are strongly tied to a less objective and more local way of apprehending things than science is designed for. There is a space, then, for a discourse or a set of discourses that operate within such a local outlook and aim at helping us to meet such a need [Ibid., pp. 186-187]. How much this can be satisﬁed through the intellectual resources of other discourses — for instance, philosophical analysis and insights — is a question whose gravity was appreciated by Williams [16, pp. 1-4, 21]. I will return to this issue later.

B. The Rejection of Pragmatism Pragmatism, associated in Williams’s writings with Putnam and Rorty, takes a diﬀerent approach to the problem of the relations between philosophy and science. For Williams, the approach of pragmatism consists in the following beliefs on these relations (PB = pragmatist belief):

(PB1) Each human discourse is a form of practice and as such it is guided by our goals and needs.5

(PB2) Our goals and needs are derivatives of the human way of life.6

(PB3) Therefore, there are no discourses within which it is possible to formulate a description of the world that is independent of the peculiarly human perspective; that is, there is no truly objective description of the world, even in science. Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 47

(PB4) Thus, no discourse should be taken as cognitively superior and therefore privileged in any sense.

(PB5) Therefore, various discourses have equal intellectual authority ([16, pp. 136-138] and [20, pp. 184-188]), if they are useful in obtaining the speciﬁc goals of their respective domains.

Pragmatism seems to offer a genuine pluralism in which each discourse has legitimate authority. According to Williams, however, like scientism, pragmatism too is committed to a monistic standard of evaluation. How is this possible? Pragmatists believe that no discourse, not even science, can arrive at an objective description of reality, for it is necessarily constrained by the peculiarly human way of apprehending the world, and thus its outcome is similarly constrained (PB1–3). The monistic standard is still implied, however counterintuitively, since it is argued that all discourses are equally unable to achieve an objective description of the world (PB4). Thus, no discourse has any claim to superiority on cognitive grounds. They are equally defective. The pragmatist fears that if we grant superior cognitive authority to science, other discourses become obsolete. But this follows only on the assumption, rejected by Williams as we have seen, that non-scientific discourses should try to deliver an objective description of the world, that they compete with science in the same league. In Williams’s view, pragmatism too does not provide a proper account of the plurality of our discourses, and thus fails truly to account for the distinctive goals that drive them [Ibid., pp. 186-187]. We need, then, two things at once that neither scientism nor pragmatism offer because of their monistic assumptions: a reasonable justification of the authority of science, and an account of other discourses that retains their distinctiveness and intelli- gibility (if they are such). We need a more pluralistic image of things.7

C. The Absolute Conception and Scientific Realism Williams’s own account of the relations between science and philosophy is anchored in his defence of scientific realism, a position he holds in opposition to pragmatism. Although he shares with pragmatism what he called “the fundamentally Kantian insight that there simply is no conception of the world which is not conceptualized in some way or another” [Ibid., p. 185], that is, that all discourses are grounded in a peculiarly human perspective of conceiving things, he discards the conclusion a pragmatist would draw from it, expressed in PB3. To accept 48 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 the pragmatist’s conclusion, one has to assume that after we interpret our concepts in this Kantian spirit, we are unable to differentiate them with regard to their cognitive value. In Williams’s view this is false, for even from within the human perspective we are able to distinguish concepts that are more or less dependent on it ([Ibid., pp. 184-188] and [16, pp. 137-140]). Compare, for instance, the concept of “republic” to the concept of “atom”. The former is linked to a whole range of peculiarly human concepts such as “regime”, “politics” or “government”. To make sense of them, we need to refer to the human perspective or even to a human way of life or, at least, to a form of life which would be in many points very similar to ours. The same is not true about the latter. The reference to the human perspective or the human way of life does not play any significant role in its explanation.8 Moreover, it is not unreasonable to presume that this kind of concept would be shared by any other possible race of rational investigators, even very alien to us, with regard to their cognitive apparatus. Science, in principle, does not refer to concepts that are in any significant sense tied to the human perspective. Therefore, Williams claims, there are profound differences between various discourses concerning the kind of concepts they tend to deploy. This allows Williams to formulate what he calls “the absolute conception” of the world: a description of the world through concepts that are to a maximum degree independent of the human perspective. These are intended to describe the world “as it is anyway” in contrast to “as it seems to us” [Ibid.; 10]. A discourse that uses such concepts has a reasonable claim for at least some objectivity. The absolute conception is in fact more substantial than that. Williams also posits that it would make sense of itself and various perspectives on the world — human, animal or alien. It would explain how they are possible and how they are related to it [16, pp. 139]. With this second feature the absolute conception becomes more ambitious and leads to some serious difficulties [2]. Leaving aside the difficulties for now, it should be asked what reasons, in Williams‘s view, we have to support the belief that science actually is a kind of discourse that is successfully conducted with the specific goal of reaching the description of the world “as it is anyway”. Williams’s general strategy is to show that scientific realism makes the most sense of certain substantial characteristics of science. Hence, it is reasonable to claim that objects and properties that science talks about do exist externally, independent of us, in the world “as it is anyway”. And as such they are a part of the world in the sense Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 49 of the absolute conception [11]. Although it is not very sophisticated, one intuitive argument that we may use here is the unquestionable fact of our technical achievements. This is quite straightforward. Science would not deliver technical devices that so successfully operate in the world if their theoretical background had been wrong. Williams seems to think that this argument undermines the pragmatist approach from the beginning. But he is aware of the limits of this argument. It is counter-productive if establishing the proper grounds for a variety of intellectual authorities is our goal. In this light, of course, philosophy is doomed, but science itself seems to be less than we think it is [20, pp. 188-189]. The first serious argument refers to the level of intersubjective agreement that is reached in science. We may describe it as an argument from convergence. Williams writes: In a scientific inquiry there should ideally be convergence on an answer, where the best explanation of the convergence involves the idea that the answer represents how things are. . . . [This explanation] does not turn on any difference in whether convergence will actually occur, and it is important that this is not what the argument is about [16, p. 136]. No doubt, the level of convergence in science is remarkable, at least in those fields with a rigorous methodology. However, Williams’s point is not primarily about the actual level of convergence in science, or convergence that has happened in the history of science, although “[it] is quite hard to deny that that history displays a considerable degree of convergence” [Ibid., p. 137]. His focus is on the reflective explanation of convergence in the realm of science. The most compelling explanation of it entails in fact the position of scientific realism. Within scientific discourse we agree on how things are, for there really are in the world objects and properties that science talks about. Our scientific beliefs are determined by cognitive contact with those objects and properties, since science is concerned with tracking the truth about them. The compelling force of this account lies in the fact that it allows us to make sense of three important characteristics of scientific theories: (1) they postulate the existence of certain objects, which is a fruitful explanatory move; (2) they deliver non-vacuous, substantial theories; (3) they open the possibility to provide a further explanation of how various perceptions based on different perspectives are possible [Ibid., p. 139-140, 149-151].9 Consider, for instance, the scientific account of vision. Suppose we reject a realistic interpretation — the claim that vision is really about 50 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 detecting external objects and it has something to do with light, sense organs, the brain and so on, and thus different variants of vision are possible. We will find ourselves in all sorts of trouble, starting with the difficulty of thinking in concord with our non-realistic interpretation. On the other hand, if we accept the realistic interpretation of this scientific theory, then the three characteristics of scientific theories start to make sense. So the convergence in science is best explained in a way that presumes scientific realism. What explains convergence in science also justifies the whole enterprise; it indicates that science is what it seems to be, a cognitive discourse on reality [Ibid., pp. 149-152]. The second argument invokes the history of science. Let me use a longer quotation to render what can be described as an argument from the error theory: The pursuit of science does not give any great part to its own history, and that it is a significant feature of its practice. . . . Of course, scientific concepts have a history: but on the standard view, though the history of physics may be interesting, it has no effect on the understanding of physics itself. It is merely part of the history of discovery. There is of course a real question of what it is for a history to be a history of discovery. One condition of its being so lies in a familiar idea, which I would put like this: the later theory, or (more generally) outlook, makes sense of itself, and of the earlier outlook, and of the transition from the earlier to the later, in such terms that both parties (the holders of the earlier outlook, and the holders of the later) have reason to recognize the transition as an improvement. I shall call an explanation which satisfies this condition vindicatory. In the particular case of the natural sciences, the later theory typically explains in its own terms the appearances which supported the earlier theory, and, furthermore, the earlier theory can be understood as a special or limited case of the later [20, p. 189]. This is an extension of the first argument, although it has an important new flavour. The argument is about the way we should understand the process of transition from one scientific theory to another, or about a proper understanding of the history of science in general. Compare a political transition, say, from the Russian Empire to the USSR. No doubt, advocates of both regimes supported their position with reasons. Maybe in some places there was even, at least before Bolshevik victory, Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 51 genuine discussion between the parties. But it is very unreasonable, or simply ignorant, to suggest that the former regime was replaced by the latter because both parties recognized the overall political superiority of the latter and the flaws of the former. On the contrary, many factors that do not count as reasons were involved in the process, for instance, violent acts, manipulations and pure contingencies, like the outcome of a battle. Now, the main difference between our political example and what happens in science consists in the fact that in the scientific world a change in a theory is recognized as necessary and is accepted by both parties, as both parties understand that there are cognitively relevant reasons involved in this process. How does this argument support scientific realism? It seems to be the most compelling interpretative option: the transition is accepted by both parties, for there has been some real discovery, a cognitive contact with an external reality, that they both recognize. That contact reveals the limits and flaws of an older theory and, therefore, prompts everyone to replace it. We think, then, that we really do know why scientific theories are rejected. It is important to note the Popperian spirit of the argument: it is not formulated in terms of a false theory replaced by a true one, but rather in terms of a recognition of the limits and flaws of a rejected theory. Thus, it is an argument from the error theory. Once again, what explains the transition in science from one theory to another also justifies the scientific enterprise by showing that science is what it seems to be.

D. The Absolute Conception and Philosophy Having argued for the idea of the absolute conception and the claim that science can, in principle, reach it, Williams undertakes a reﬂection on philosophy and the humanities. He seeks an answer to the following question: Are these discourses open to a realistic interpretation? That is, do their concepts mirror the objective world in the sense of the absolute conception? To answer this question, he analyses the possibility that the cognitive aspirations of philosophy could be supported as are those of science. Williams’s own examples and arguments come from ethics and political philosophy, but he states that his considerations go further aﬁeld [Ibid., pp. 190]. I take this to mean that his position, which I unpack in this and the following section, should be understood as a general account of philosophy10 and the humanities, that is, of academic discourses other than the natural sciences. Therefore, in what follows I simply refer to philosophy. 52 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74

Concerning the argument from convergence, we encounter a serious actual difference between science and philosophy. The amount of disagreement in philosophy is overwhelming. However, it goes much deeper than mere differences of opinion, since philosophy lacks convergence on methods and the status of the discipline itself. Consider, for instance, the difference between the Kantian and Aristotelian approaches to ethics or between analytical philosophers and postmodernists. Again, for Williams the problem is not so much about actual convergence or the lack of it in philosophy. Even if we enjoyed a much higher level of convergence in this field, the real issue would consist in explaining it [16, pp. 136]. An important difference between philosophical and scientific concepts comes to the fore in this context. Scientific concepts are presumed to be universal, so any fully developed human being, or arguably even a rational investigator from another species, should be able to deploy them if one is to some degree familiar with their theoretical framework. Re- gardless of any peculiarity he or she possesses, like cultural background, that is the case. Scientific concepts are, after all, presumed to express objective reality. The same is not true about philosophical concepts. There seems to be an intrinsic connection between the ability to deploy a particular set of philosophical concepts instead of an another and membership of a particular social world [Ibid., pp. 138-150; 20, pp. 185-187]. Why is that? For each particular set of philosophical concepts we can imagine a person who would be a sympathetic observer of the people deploying them. This person would know a great deal about this group, would understand meanings, references, all the necessary conditions of utterance and the entire theoretical background, but would be unable sincerely to deploy the concepts in question himself. This sympathetic observer lacks [t]he capacities. . . involved in finding our way around in a social world, not merely the physical world, and this, cru- cially, means in some social world or other, since it is certain both that human beings cannot live without a culture and that there are many different cultures in which they can live, differing in their local concepts. [16, pp. 150] Williams’s idea is that philosophical concepts are not directly connected with objective reality, but are rather impinged upon by the particular culture or social world to which the subject belongs. Therefore they are local rather than universal as scientific concept are. Because cultural differences exist, the explanation for either agreement or disagreement Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 53

“will presumably have to come from the social sciences” [Ibid.]. This seems to mean that this explanation would not, at least primarily, involve cognitively relevant reasons. Rather, the differences or similarities between the way people are brought up or socialized would take priority. If there is a convergence, it is convergence on a shared form of social life. Williams claims that an alternative to this way of thinking is the Aristotelian approach. It would assume that there are certain human universals that may ground a universal philosophical outlook, because regardless of our cultural differences, we all share a common human nature. The problem, however, with such an approach is that it would deliver very thin results, for human nature seems to be immensely flexible and allows human beings to develop differently under each culture and along many surprising patterns [Ibid., pp. 30-53].11 The best possible explanation, then, of either convergence (rare) or the lack of it (frequent) in philosophy entails an antirealistic understanding of the discipline. What about the other argument? Can we read the history of philosophy in a way that supports the cognitive aspirations of philosophy? It seems, again, that this is not the case. Let me quote at length from Williams:

Philosophy, at any rate, is thoroughly familiar with ideas which indeed, like all other ideas, have a history, but have a history which is not notably vindicatory. . . . If we ask why we use some concepts of this kind rather than others—rather than, say, those current in an earlier time—we may deploy arguments which claim to justify our ideas against those others: ideas of equality and equal rights, for instance, against ideas of hierarchy. Alternatively, we may reﬂect on an historical story, of how these concepts rather than the others came to be ours: a story (simply to give it a label) of how the modern world and its special expectations came to replace the ancien regime. But then we reﬂect on the relation of this story to the arguments that we deploy against the earlier conceptions, and we realize that the story is the history of those forms of argument themselves: the forms of argument, call them liberal forms of argument, are a central part of the outlook that we accept. If we consider how these forms of argument came to prevail, we can indeed see them as having won, but not necessarily as having won an argument. For liberal ideas to have won an argument, the representatives of the ancien regime would 54 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74

have had to have shared with the nascent liberals a conception of something that the argument was about, and not just in the obvious sense that it was about the way to live or the way to order society. They would have had to agree that there was some aim, of reason or freedom or whatever, which liberal ideas served better or of which they were a better expression, and there is not much reason, with a change as radical as this, to think that they did agree about this, at least until late in the process. The relevant ideas of freedom, reason, and so on were themselves involved in the change. If in this sense the liberals did not win an argument, then the explanations of how liberalism came to prevail—that is to say, among other things, how these came to be our ideas—are not vindicatory [20, pp. 190-191].

We saw that if a particular discourse has a vindicatory explanation of its history, the diachronic alteration of outlooks involved satisfies certain conditions. Science fits this model. Unfortunately, philosophy does not. It is rarely the case that philosophers agree on what should be rejected as a false belief or what counts as a cognitive improvement. Consider, for instance, that there are reasonable contemporary proponents of such an apparently anachronic position as metaphysical dualism. Moreover, one of the distinctive features of philosophy is its constant engagement with its own past, an example of which is the contemporary revival of virtue ethics. So the idea that the history of philosophy is simply progressive is not commonly accepted. But let us comment on Williams’s own example, the actual transition from hierarchical to liberal outlook (we should note that it was not universal), as it is very instructive. The fact that now in some places a majority accepts the liberal outlook and rejects the former hierarchical view is close enough to scientific diachronic convergence. Is there a vindicatory history behind this? Williams’s answer is negative. This seems to be explained by the phrase “until late in the process”. I take it to mean that because of the radical disagreement between involved parties, including the basic terms in which this discord should be expressed, the possibility of a consensus based on reason was excluded from the very beginning. Since reason was excluded, I read Williams’s explanation of the later convergence as meaning that first, historical changes altered the balance, and then produced enough social, moral and political pressure to make life according to the former view incompatible with the life of the majority of society. In other words, the fact that we are now liberal is primarily explained by historical contin- Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 55 gency that “has both made us, and made the outlook as something that is ours” [Ibid., p. 193], rather than by the success of an argument. If this is a general truth of philosophical outlooks, the history of philosophy is not vindicatory. Instead of a universal recognition of cognitive flaws and the limits of former theories, which would have supported their rejection and replacement, we only have a contingent history. And clearly, that is not enough to formulate a theory of error for philosophy. Thus, Williams is claiming that we cannot really support the cognitive aspirations of this discourse. In Williams’s view, a realistic reading of philosophical discourse or philosophical theories in terms of the absolute conception is unjustified, contrary to science. It is the case with philosophy that what explains its certain substantial features also undermines our belief that philosophy is what it seems to be — a genuine, cognitive discourse, again contrary to science. With this result, Williams effectively commits himself to a position of a scientific realist. Taking into account the way he supports this position as well as his ironic remarks on a conceivable anti-naturalist view (for instance in [23, pp. 301]) I see no other way than to interpret his commitment as meaning the acceptance of metaphysical naturalism, even if Williams‘s own words — in his typical, dialectical style - are more concerned with naturalism as an explanatory programme [24, pp. 22-27]. But his naturalism is not by any means a crude, reductive position. He searches for a more pluralistic image of things. Science is cognitively superior, but it does not follow that it is superior in every aspect that matters to human beings. To expand this point and to say some final words on the core of Williams’s philosophical project, it is necessary now to appeal to a concept that has already appeared in the previous paragraph, the concept of contingency. I take this to be an important element in the structure I aim to elucidate.

2 Contingency and the Limits of Philosophy

The fact that the concept of contingency plays an important role in Williams’s project has not gone unnoticed by other philosophers ([3], [13]). Williams’s increasing interest in contingency was perhaps determined by his increasing engagement in Nietzschean topics (for instance ([23, pp. 299-337] and [24, pp. 12-19]). Although there is no expressis verbis theory of contingency in his writings, there seems to be enough material there to justify the interpretative move that I advance in this section: mainly, the attribution to Williams of a certain anthropologi- 56 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 cal view as one of his key presumptions. I call this view anthropological contingentism. What I have in mind is that Williams interprets human beings as radically contingent creatures. Of course, this formulation requires an elaboration.

A. Some Preliminary Remarks on Williams’s View on Contingency

The term “contingency” has a long history and a technical meaning in philosophy. It appears in many different contexts, including natural theology, metaphysics and (the philosophy of) logic. However, it would be more useful and also consistent with Williams’s thought to use the term in a rather ordinary sense, as a generic term for phenomena that could have been different or might not have existed at all, if something in natural or actual history — or both — had not happened. In other words, I use “contingency” as a term to describe things that are mere facts. Williams was quite concerned with the historical contingency of our outlooks, practices and institutions [20, pp. 191-194]. In addition, he was very much aware that they are rooted in — and at the same time they transmute — various human capacities, which are in turn a product of a contingent process, the biological evolution of our species [23, p. 79-81]. I will now examine this view in detail. It is helpful to begin by noting that Williams was an atheist. This is perhaps clear from his commitment to metaphysical naturalism and the way he justifies it. Furthermore, here and there Williams offers a few reasons for his rejection of Christianity. Let us discuss them briefly. First, the acceptance of Christianity entails the state of mind called “faith”, which for him has quite an unintelligible form. To Williams, having faith means both to affirm an account of something — since I need to have some idea of the things I believe in — and not to affirm it, as these things are supposed to radically exceed human cognitive abilities by their nature [20, pp. 3-21]. Second, from the viewpoint of believers, religious doctrines are systems of ultimately true beliefs, for they are shaped under the influence of a divine power. However, religious beliefs in fact evolve along with historical and cultural changes as all cultural items do. Williams was convinced that they are doomed to collapse due to the substantial incoherence of these two conflicting characteristics [16, pp. 32-33]. Third, Christianity endorses — in Williams’s view, at least — unrealistic and misguided moral ideas such as that of the eternal, overarching moral law or of a moral subject who is primarily a spiritual agent and thus is autonomous vis-à-visthe empirical conditions of his or Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 57 her life. These ideas fail to survive the scrutiny of psychological realism favoured by Williams [22, pp. 94-95, 103-129]. Fourth, the religious idea of an afterlife has no desirable content as seen from the perspective of a human motivational system [21, pp. 82-100]. Seen from this angle, then, Christianity is either unintelligible or inconsistent with our moral and historical experience or both. I think that something along these lines might be argued as well against other religions. It is worth noting that the rejection of theism, combined with metaphysical naturalism, excludes any profound, metaphysical or “cosmic” rationale behind the existence of human beings. Perhaps this is not a very optimistic view. We can compare it to Christian theism, in which all creatures are also understood as contingent, because God in principle could have decided not to bring them into existence. At the same time, their contingency is, so to speak, balanced by the fact that the creation happened by the agency of a being who is not contingent himself. In Williams’s view, however, there is no such “staging” for our appearance and in this sense his position is radical ([18, pp. 109-110] and [3, pp. 32-38]).

B. Layers of Contingency12

The contingency of human beings occurs on several levels [3]. First of all, there is biological contingency. Because Williams was devoted to scientific realism and naturalism, it follows that he accepts the evolutionary explanation of our appearance due to chance and adaptation. Our capacities and adaptations could have been different or we could have not evolved at all as a species, according to this account, if our natural history had gone another way. However, this interpretative approach would not explain much, if it were all about biological contingency. The mere possibility that our natural history could have been different, or that we could have no natural history simply because we might not have appeared in the first place, is not very relevant, if our aim is to explain phenomena related to humans. After all, human beings do in fact exist as a species [Ibid.].13 Still, when we reflect on the appearance and functioning of human beings from the evolutionary perspective, some significant issues come to the fore. There is the question of whether the resources of such disciplines as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology are particularly useful in explaining more complex human practices. Williams’s own answer is quite skeptical ([14, pp. 44] and [18, pp. 102-109]). It was not motivated 58 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 by any reservations about metaphysical naturalism. Rather, by questioning the usefulness of those disciplines for explaining complex human practices, Williams expresses his doubts about the reductive form of naturalism. In Williams’s view, reductive naturalism is doomed to failure, because even the simplest ethological question about human beings entails the kind of reflection that exceeds a purely biological approach: When we get to the peculiarities of human beings, a special set of problems emerges. The huge innovation represented by Homo sapiens is the significance of non-genetic learning, which, with regard to both its nature and its effects, marks an overwhelming ethological difference between human beings and other animals. Every species has an ethological description, and Homo sapiens is no exception; but in this case, uniquely, you cannot tell the ethological story without introducing culture (consider, for instance, what is immediately involved in answering the question “In what sorts of places do they sleep?”). Consequently, the story is likely to differ significantly between groups of human beings, and in ways that typically involve history; in many cases, the human beings who are being described will also be conscious, in varying degrees, of that history. All this follows from the peculiar ethological character of this species [24, pp. 23-24]. If the reductive approach is out of question, any genuine understanding of our species necessarily involves reflection on its cultural environment. What is more, if there is a strong link between understanding our species and understanding its cultural milieux, it follows that this connection applies to understanding human history as well, for all cultures are entities that appear, exist, evolve and vanish in history, that is, not during natural history, but human history. Having said that, we approach another level on which the contingency of human beings may be discerned, that of their cultural identity and the history that created it. To a great extent the exact form of any culture is always shaped by a variety of human undertakings, such as technical or conceptual innovations, customs laid down by extraordinary individuals or traditions, large-scale human endeavors like battles, trade policies and so on. Williams claims that if we trace the origins of cultural items, such as institutions or norms, we find out that “in the beginning was the deed” [17, pp. 23-28] — that they are contingent on human culture- creating action, i.e. the establishing of convention. This is true even if a particular cultural item is a response to a human universal, be it Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 59 limited resources or a biological need. This response, as is clear from the anthropological and historical data, could have been different ([18, pp. 79-81, 100-110] and [16, pp. 150-151]). Of course, it was moral culture that was at the center of Williams’s attention, so let us move in that direction. Williams was convinced that a moral culture inheres in the form of the moral dispositions of its members. These moral dispositions are in- stilled, preserved and transmitted by the processes of social upbringing and interaction, which help an individual to be a member of that culture. Moral dispositions shape the first-person perspective and imbue it with a moral content. This should not be understood as acquiring this or that set of moral beliefs. Rather, moral dispositions work one step before moral cognition, reasoning or acting. They are the necessary ground for those moral functions ([16, pp. 8-11, 20-22, 30-53, 93-119, 154-158, 185-186, 199, 201] and [20, pp. 67-75] and [6]). For instance, if I am disposed to treat a particular kind of behaviour as treacherous, it means that my moral framework conceptualizes this kind of behaviour as such. At one and the same time, my moral framework both inclines me to perceive the behavior as morally bad and triggers my emotional reac- tion to it. Only then do judgement, reasoning or action follow. Williams claims that moral dispositions are represented in language by so-called “thick” moral concepts, such as shame or bravery [16, pp. 8-11, 128- 131, 140-155]. Thick concepts are an entanglement of description and evaluation,14 and, being tied to moral dispositions, are culturally relative. They are contrasted with “thin” concepts, such as right or wrong, which are the product of abstract rational reflection. Without the additional context of a moral system, like Utilitarianism or Kantianism, thin concepts are hollow and cannot guide our conduct [Ibid., pp. 123-131]. I shall not treat this topic in detail.15 It is important, however, to note that if thick concepts are tied to moral dispositions, then the ability to use them correctly depends on having a particular social history and cultural membership through which moral dispositions are acquired. To illustrate this, we can return to the idea of a sympathetic observer. Imag- ine the experience of a cultural anthropologist visiting feudal Japan. It is true that through the process of learning their language and extensive contact with the feudal Nipponese, our investigator would be able to understand their moral concepts. He would not, however, be able to deploy them as his concepts, at least not until he had experienced a profound social conversion and thereby greatly modified his former cultural identity. He would not be able, for instance, to perceive a particular failure 60 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 as sufficient reason to commit ritual suicide [Ibid., pp. 140-145]. If this is so, the moral culture we inhabit and the moral goods we pursue, because they are recognized as goods by the culture, are contingent. They could have been different, if only we had a different social history and cultural membership. The contingency of human beings is recognizable on yet another level, since almost all the factors that play an important role in shaping our peculiar personal identity are to a great degree contingent as well.16 This especially includes the cultural and historical environment that we happen to live in, Williams’s discussion of character and shame in ancient Greek culture is very relevant here [22, pp. 75-102]. All of this could have been different, as it is a product of contingent history [20, pp. 190- 197]. Moreover, being formed this way we find ourselves committed to particular individual projects, understood by Williams as the loci of our drives and motivations ([16, pp. 54-70] and [19, pp. 5-19, 20-39, 101- 113]). As is widely known, Williams eagerly embraced the idea that the contingency of human beings extends to their actions, to attempts to realize individual projects, as elaborated in his famous essay Moral Luck [Ibid., pp. 20-39]. It might be helpful to sum up the key points of this section, following from the concept of “moral luck”. Moral luck refers to the existence of factors that interfere with our moral judgements, choices and actions to the degree that they significantly change their moral character. Since these factors could have been different, the moral quality of our choices and actions is contingent, at least if the concept of “moral luck” is correct. In a text also titled “Moral Luck”, Nagel distinguished among (1) constitutive, (2) circumstantial, (3) causal and (4) resultant luck [12, p. 28]. My suggestion is to introduce the concept of “anthropological luck” to express the different layers of the contingency of human beings, since our identity, environment, determinants and the actual course of our life could all have been different. Constitutive and circumstantial anthropological luck account for biological and cultural contingency, while causal and resultant luck accounts for the more individual dimension of human contingency. In this sense, anthropological contingentism refers to the basic architecture of the local human world, as opposed to the world understood in terms of the absolute conception. Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 61

C. Post-Analytical Philosophy

Having unpacked the anthropological view that I ascribe to Williams, I will close this section by providing my answer to the question of his metaphilosophical position. Recall that Williams stresses that human beings are characterized, inter alia, by a variety of needs. He claims that science is superior to other discourses in meeting our cognitive needs, but there are other needs of a more practical or existential kind. Arguably, satisfaction of those needs is only possible from the first-person perspective, by responding with reflection and action to questions such as “How should I live?” or “What sense can I make of things that happen in my life?”17 Scientific tools are not much help here, or at least they are severely limited, since I need answers for me, that is to say, answers that fit my particular perspective on the world. As such, they would refer to many concepts that are not a part of the absolute conception, but instead have a more local character. The more local they are, the more they are entangled in peculiar contingent forces that have shaped my cultural and personal identity. From Williams’s point of view, there is a niche for philosophy here. Philosophy may help us to navigate at the level of local, contingent concepts. As abstract, conceptual reflection, it might be a useful tool “to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves” [20, p. 182]. However, Williams was honestly skeptical of the power of philosophy actually to do so [16, pp. 1-2]. One condition that he puts forth openly, if philosophy was supposed to be such a useful tool for our local concerns, is that it must be historically and culturally well-informed. In this way, philosophy would be free of scientistic illusions. It would become a humanistic discipline. Williams was content to accept the label “post-analytical philosophy” for this position [20, pp. 180-213]. Certain questions naturally follow: What state of mind will be created by a successful philosophical reflection? What will be the status of a philosophical account that truly makes sense of something important to us? Will it be knowledge? In Williams’s view, it depends on the idea of knowledge that is presumed in the process. According to an objective idea of knowledge the answer is negative, because the result of philosophical reflection is entangled in local concepts. But we can instead consider a more modest model of knowledge, one that grants the status of knowledge to a belief that is true, that is believed to be true, and for which both features are nonaccidentally linked. That is, there is something in a way we acquired this belief that honestly tracks the 62 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 truth and, as a consequence, our belief would be different if the truth on the subject had been different. Such a model enables us to say that there may be knowledge under the local concepts ([16, pp. 142-155] and [14]). However, some important details must be acknowledged. Instead of having a theoretical character, this knowledge would be about practical or social means to navigate the particular social reality one inhabits [Ibid., p. 149-152]. It would help one to obtain the variety of items recognized as good in that social world. We could, perhaps, call this knowledge wisdom or prudence. It is important to remember, nevertheless, that it is intrinsic to a certain perspective. As such, it would be vulnerable to confrontation with a more detached, scientific or more abstract philosophical point of view. It would also be vulnerable to the criticism that it is dependent on prejudices or false assumptions or a particular, cultural peculiarity. This kind of knowledge would be subject to the conclusion that reflection can destroy knowledge — a conclusion that Williams was not afraid to draw [Ibid., p. 148]. There is yet another question that Williams poses in this context: Do we really need philosophical knowledge? Is it desirable? His answer is, quite surprisingly, negative. We should not be too concerned with the epistemic status of our philosophical beliefs. Rather, what really matters is their helpfulness in making the best sense of our life ([18, pp. 203-211] and [16, pp. 170-171]). I take this to mean that they will be helpful if they provide us with meaning, generate hope or ward off despair, and if they are stable under critical reflection and do not force us to deceive ourselves. (Williams‘s expression of hope that concludes Ethics and The Limits of Philosophy as well as his remarks on Nietzsche‘s view on truth are very relevant here [Ibid., pp. 198-202; 24, pp. 12-19]) Under these conditions, we are justified in putting our confidence in our philosophical beliefs. Summarizing Williams’s metaphilosophical position in a single descriptive term is not an easy task. Perhaps “post-analytical philosophy” or “humanistic philosophy” are apt, however vague they may be (as we have seen, Williams himself has had reasons to deploy them). Williams opts for a more practical or existential understanding of philosophy, leaving behind any pretensions to competing with other discourses on cognitive grounds, but promoting instead an engagement with culture and history, our local human peculiarities. According to his view, philosophy is not a discourse in the sense that realism entails, but he does not exclude the possibility that it could help us to acquire some knowledge Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 63 of a practical, local sort — knowledge that is still helpful for us, taking into an account what kind of creatures we human beings are.

3 The Scope of This Interpretation

According to the account proposed here, the core of Williams’s philosophical project consists in the following interconnected views (WCV = Williams’s core view):

(WCV1) Scientiﬁc realism

(WCV2) Metaphysical naturalism

(WCV3) Methodological pluralism

(WCV4) Anthropological contingentism

(WCV5) Post-Analytical/Humanistic understanding of philosophy

I believe that these interconnected views can explain and make sense of most of Williams’s ideas and positions. To further support this interpretation and to illustrate its explanatory potential, I will apply my approach to Williams’s critique of morality and ethical theory. For the sake of space I will leave out arguments aimed at particular forms of ethical theory. Instead, I will briefly sketch arguments he deploys against their common background, which is morality. In Williams’s view, morality is a particular historical paradigm of ethics. According to this paradigm, the ethical sphere is the ultimate area of human actions, strictly distinct from non-moral affairs [16, p. 7]. Emphasis is placed on the quasi-scientific approach to the field, which results in attempts to construct an ethical theory conceived as “a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are, which account...implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles” [Ibid., p. 72]. A successful ethical theory delivers a code of conduct that is rationally justified through the aforementioned test, conceptualized in terms of moral judgements, rules, duties and obliga- tions and governed by blame. At least in principle, morality also grants each subject moral autonomy, which makes the person fully responsible for the moral dimension of his or her actions. From Williams’s point of view, utilitarianism and Kantianism embodied morality ([Ibid., pp. 93-119, 174-196] and [19, pp. 1-5]), although he was convinced that this 64 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 paradigm was taken for granted by many important contemporary figures in moral philosophy as well, for instance Hare, Rawls and Singer, which is at least partly explained by their commitment to the contin- uation of either the utilitarian or Kantian tradition of moral reflection [Ibid., pp. 71-119]. What exactly is wrong with morality? Williams argues for the following faults (F):

(F1) Reductionism: Morality reduces rich ethical reality to a few phenomena: beliefs, rules, duties, theory and blame. Its methodological proclivity for theory ends in disregard for those ethical experiences that are not easy to reconstruct from a third-person, impartial perspective ([Ibid., pp. 15-18, 93-119,174-196] and [19, pp. 1-19]).

(F2) Narrow rationalism: Morality presumes a simplifying, crude account of emotional life as if it were the realm of irrational and subjective forces coming from our egoistic drives. Consequently, it favours a rationalistic understanding of practical rationality. How- ever, the nature of emotions is much more complex, and they play an important and irreplaceable role in ethical life, for instance, by constituting moral motivation [21, pp. 207-229]. This suggests that what actually matters in the ethical sphere is the development of moral dispositions, instead of searching for a rationalistic account of this sphere ([16, pp. 15-18, 35-52, 185-186, 201] and [20, pp. 67-75]).

(F3) Personal detachment: Morality demands that reasons for actions be justiﬁable from an impartial, theoretical perspective. It also implies that such reasons are practically superior and override any other kind of reasons. It follows, then, that the demands of morality override any personal commitments we may have, including concerns for our closest relationships and personal projects. Therefore it demands an abandonment of the commitments that provide the basic motivation to carry on and to engage in moral life to begin with. By following the demands of morality we put our personal integrity at risk [19, pp. 1-39; 9, pp. 110-138].

(F4) Anti-contingentism: Morality promises a certain secular vision of the possibility of salvation. Since you are an autonomous moral subject, you are fully responsible for what is assumed to be the ultimate dimension of your practical life, that is, whether you are Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 65

a morally good person. On the other hand, our moral life is subject to contingent forces of moral luck, which takes away at least some voluntary control over the moral dimension of our actions. If we are subject to moral luck, there is no way of guaranteeing that you can save yourself in the moral sense via morality ([16, pp. 176-196], [18, pp. 241-247] and [19, pp. 20-39]).

(F5) Value monism: If morality aims at delivering an ethical theory, the theory itself should satisfy some general conditions for theories, e.g. consistency or as few assumptions as possible. Thus it tries to exclude the possibility of conflict among rules or duties that stand for values, either by reducing different values to one or by insisting that a lack of inconsistency at the level of theory translates into the impossibility of such conflict in moral practice. One of the conflicting duties should always prevail and moral dilemmas are illusionary. However, moral experience may be inconsistent (partly because our moral sensitivity is a mixture of elements that have different social origins) and moral values seem to be resistant both to reduction to other values and to comparison. Sometimes we really do experience a conflict of values, which is marked by feeling regret for acting on what seemed to be the prevailing duty. The top-down approach of morality ignores this aspect of moral experience ([Ibid., pp. 71-82] and [21, pp. 166-186]).

There are common patterns in Williams’s arguments. First, he refers, sometimes via the concept of moral intuition, to the supposed actual moral experience of human beings [16, pp. 93-119]. Second, he is persis- tent in attempts to show that the more ambitious, theoretical pretensions of morality should be rejected. If we look at the background of these arguments, it seems to be clear that this critique actually ﬂows from the views that I have reconstructed in previous sections:

(F1) Williams’s critique of reductionism is anchored in his proclivity for pluralism (WCV3) and the complexities expressed by anthropological contingentism (WCV4). His skepticism about moral theory is also explained there (WCV4), as well as in his metaphilosophical views (WCV5).

(F2) Narrow rationalism is rejected because of Williams’s understanding of how moral capacities are actually transmitted and how they are rooted in personal identity (WCV4) and in light of his 66 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74

account of the relation between science and philosophy (WCV1 and WCV5).

(F3) Personal detachment is seen as a serious risk, because there is no stable moral point of reference beyond the moral identities that humans have as an eﬀect of their contingent history and to which they are justly committed, since ethics rises from the ﬁrst-person perspective (WCV1, WCV4 and WCV5).

(F4) The redemptive claims of morality are unreasonable in view of the actual ontology of the moral sphere and the impact of moral luck on our lives (WCV1 and WCV4).

(F5) The pluralism of values that opens the possibility of value conﬂict is a consequence of both the complex historical origins of our moral commitments and the plurality of needs that we have as a species (WCV3 and WCV4).

This pattern of arguments applies, in my estimation, to Williams’s contributions to other areas of philosophy as well. One may ﬁnd the assumptions and views described here, for instance, supporting his genealogy of truth-related virtues [24, pp. 20-40] or his political philosophy [17, pp. 18-28, 52-61]. Therefore, I think this illustration adequately supports the proposed interpretation.

Conclusion: An Authentic Pluralism?

Aspects of Williams’s philosophical project have been challenged by prominent figures in the field. Since these controversies are available in the relevant literature, I hope that I am justified in closing with my own critical remarks. I shall limit myself to just one issue that seems to be crucial in Williams’s project, namely, scientism. We have seen that Williams’s account of cognition, intellectual authority and objectivity is tied to his reflections on science. Science has, to use his helpful phrase, “some chance of being more or less what it seems, a systematized theoretical account of how the world really is” [16, p. 135]. The best possible explanation of important qualities of scientific enterprise, e.g. the convergence that happens in science and the mechanism through which scientific theories are replaced, implies Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 67 reference to epistemically relevant reasons. The same is not the case with philosophy, whose history is influenced by contingent factors, and in which not only is the level of convergence much smaller, but it would be explained differently if it was in fact closer to science in this respect. Williams is, therefore, eager to reject the cognitive aspirations of philosophy and replace them with more practical tasks. On the surface this looks like honest methodological pluralism, since each discourse, according to his approach, has its own distinctive area and goals, and since Williams himself is profoundly critical of methodological monism. However, there are some issues here. It seems in particular that Williams stops halfway in his rejection of scientism. If philosophy and science are really distinct kinds of activity, then it is at least a controversial move to try to judge their cognitive pretensions according to the same standard. And this is precisely what Williams did in his metaphilosophical reflections, before he introduced his own account of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. The cognitive aspirations of philosophy were dismissed due to the negative results of its comparison to science. The conceptual tools used in Williams’s reflection are borrowed from the philosophy of science; the ideas of convergence, error theory or vindicatory history (scientific progress) clearly come from this source. Isn’t this a form of scientism? If philosophy and science are really distinct, shouldn‘t philosophy have its own standard of cognitive evaluation? It is probably valid to think that philosophy should not contradict anything science says, though if we are concerned with philosophical problems, sometimes it is hard to figure out what exactly science says on these topics, if it says anything decisive at all. But it is another thing entirely to think that both philosophy and science play on the same court and by the same rules. We may well ask why Williams puts so much effort into criticizing scientism if his own view is not far from it, especially since so much of Williams’s project is connected to his view on science. Korsgaard argues against Williams’s position in a similar spirit, pointing out that to apply to ethics — and I would add, to philosophy — an idea of objectivity that is appropriate to science is to misunderstand the nature of ethics [7, pp. 310-317]. But instead of referring to Kant as Korsgaard does, I would prefer to say a few words on contemporary virtue ethics. One interesting thing about it is that it is actually a modern revival of an ancient set of concepts. Similar revivals of older ideas happen quite often in philosophy. Consider, for instance, Williams’s own flirtation with history-oriented philosophy and the ethical concepts of ancient Greeks, which occurred after a period of a fierce ahistoricism 68 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74 in analytic philosophy. It is difficult to see how such recurrences fit the idea of linear progress in science, which is clearly endorsed by Williams in his concept of the vindicatory explanation and which conditions his metaphilosophical position. The rejection of the cognitive account of philosophy leads Williams to the view that philosophical claims are not and cannot be objective. He puts forth the idea that they are formulated from a perspective which is permeated by a contingent, “local” form of cultural life. They are culture-relative. But this view is correct only on the assumption that I have pointed out before, that the scientific paradigm constitutes the proper standard of evaluation for philosophy. Williams’s understanding of objective cognition — a description of the world from a perspective that is to a maximum possible degree independent of the investigator‘s peculiarities — is quite similar to an account of knowledge that follows from what Zagzebski calls “the guiding principles of Enlightenment philosophy” [26, pp. 394-397]. According to this account, a proper candidate for knowledge, a reasonable belief, would be that which is accessible to any ordinary, intelligent person, independent of his or her peculiar beliefs. This paradigm excludes from being reasonable — and thus from possibly having the status of knowledge — beliefs that originate in authorities, traditions, testimonies or participation in a community. But what if the opposite is true? Williams’s Enlightenment-style view may be contrasted with an aretaic approach. It weds epistemic concepts to a certain set of character traits that ideally the reliable cognitive agent has developed, such as open-mindedness or inquisitiveness. These traits are conceptualized in terms of virtues — stable, socially transmitted, cognitive-emotional dispositions aimed at a certain desirable goal, in this case, at acquiring truth. An aretaic approach would suggest that to become a competent, insightful investigator, one has to empower one’s own perspective with these dispositions. So the way to truth, according to this view, would not be completely separate from local perspectives. On the contrary, it may even be argued that epistemic concepts would have the shape of that which is recognized as epistemically praiseworthy from many local perspectives by the most virtuous people in a community ([1, 8-65], [25] and [27]). With such an approach, it would be easier to avoid the temptations to scientism that Williams himself wanted to avoid (albeit with mixed results) and to construct a position that would not exclude philosophical, ethical or other peculiar varieties of knowledge. Such an account would be profoundly pluralistic. Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 69

Acknowledgements

The article is a result of the project Ethics and Contingency. Bernard Williams‘s Project of Anti-Theoretical Ethics (2013/09/N/HS1/00721, PRELUDIUM program) funded by Polish National Science Center. I am grateful to an anonymous referee of Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy for very helpful comments.

Notes

1 There is a general truth in what Joshua Gert wrote about responses to Internal and External Reasons: “. . . it is surprising how little effort is typically made to fit this paper into the large and complex context of Williams’ views. It is generally treated as if it were a one-off contribution by an anonymous philosopher who emerged from the mists and disappeared again, returning at intervals only to attempt to deliver virtually the same message” [5, p. 73]. It is in my estimation true of one monograph and available collections of essays devoted to Williams‘s philosophy, all of which are divided into sections concerned with his contribution to different disciplines of philosophy, but mostly lack an effort to present such a large and complex image. [See, for instance, Altham, J. E. J.; Harri- son, Ross (ed.). World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Callcut, Daniel (ed.). Reading Bernard Williams. New York: Routledge, 2009; Heuer, Ulrike; Land, Gerald (eds.). Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; Jenkins, p. Mark. Bernard Williams. Trowbridge: Cromwell Press, 2006; Thomas, Alan (ed.). Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007]. 2 I do not want to say that either his epistemology or metaphysics takes priority. Williams himself endorsed a coherentionist model of philosophy or knowledge in general [16, p. 113]. However, this issue may deserve further inquiry. 3 First introduced in [15, p. 49-52 and further]. Later advanced in [16, pp. 132-155] and [20, pp. 180-199]. 4 In the context of history, Williams subtly analyzed the cognitive needs of human beings in [24, especially 41-62, 233-269]; see also [4]. 5 In more contemporary versions of pragmatism, PB1 is supported by or combined with Wittgensteinian philosophy of language (see: Putnam, Hilary. Pragmatism: An Open Question. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995, pp. 27-56). A version more oriented to the philosophy of language of PB1 would be something like: (PB1‘) Each human discourse or intellectual activity is a form of language game and as such has an irremovable normative character, for every language is governed by a set of rules. Then, these rules are (PB2‘) derivatives of the human way of life. Thus, PB3 follows. In Putnam‘s argument there is an another twist which is a conceptual relativity present at the level of PB1‘: even the basic ontological categories such as “object” are relative to the chosen language game (Putnam, Hilary. The Many Faces of Realism. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 3-21). Therefore, the possibility of a truly objective description of the 70 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74

world is excluded already at the very beginning of the process of cognition, the moment we “choose” our language. 6 As opposed to any other possible species of investigators that would have a different way of life and, therefore, different needs and goals. 7 For details of this discussion see Williams’s cited work and Putnam, Hilary. Re- newing Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 80-107; Putnam, Hilary. “The Reply to Bernard Williams‘ ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’”. In: Philosophy, 76 (4/2001), pp. 605-614. 8 Another way of presenting this difference is to make a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, although that carries with it some Lockean associations [2]. 9 It would be difficult for a pragmatist to formulate an alternative story, for in accord with his own assumptions no discourse should be interpreted as objectively compelling [16, p. 137-140]. 10 Excluding, perhaps, those areas of philosophy that are not autonomous, because they are strongly linked to the results of science, e.g. philosophy of logic or cosmology [20, p. 182]. 11 As a consequence yet another serious issue appears, at least for anyone who would like to posit a realistic understanding of philosophical claims: any reading of philosophy in this spirit seems to be under the obligation to explain why it is possible for two persons to have outlooks which are incompatible. We assume that in science every two pieces of knowledge can be accepted at the same time, while it is probably the case that it is impossible to hold at once two distinct moral or philosophical outlooks [16, p. 152]. 12 In what follows I was under the influence of John Cottingham, although his account is limited to Williams’s take on the ethical [3]. 13 Nevertheless, this is part of what makes this position so radical, since it presumes a certain ontological dynamism (species are constantly evolving) ruled by chance and, therefore, excludes any natural teleology for our species [3]. 14 Williams rejects a prescriptivist account of moral language [16, pp. 123-131, 141- 145]. 15 For some further reading see [6] and [14]. 16 One can argue that there is a certain necessity in our biological identity. It is true that when we are conceived, our genetic code is determined by the relevant material from our parents. It is hard to make any sense, in light of this, of the idea that I could have been a member of other species or, more importantly, I could have had some other genetic material. In such a case, what is the “I” that I am referring too? It is, however, a limited argument, concerning the scope of anthropological contingentism. First, this necessity displays itself under the condition of the contingent history of evolution going one way instead of the other. In the ultimate sense, human beings are no less contingent, even if this argument is valid. Second, the whole set of environmental influences on what follows from my genetic material is still contingent in the proposed way, thus having a huge impact on my identity. For instance, even while I had the same genetic material, it would have made a big difference to my identity if my parents had left the communist regime or not. 17 Those are also the questions that gave rise to ethics as a discipline [16, pp. 1-21]. Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 71

Pawel Pijas Department of the History of Ancient, Medieval and Modern Philosophy Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Journalism The Faculty of Social Sciences The University of Gdańsk Ul. Jana Ba˙zyńskiego 4 80-309 Gdańsk,Poland

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[7] Korsgaard, Christine. The Constitution of Agency. New York: Ox- ford University Press, 2008.

[8] Louden, B. Robert. “The Critique of the Morality System”. In: Bernard Williams. Ed. by Thomas, Alan. 2007, pp. 104-134. 72 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 43–74

[9] Markovits, Daniel. “The Architecture of Integrity”. In: Reading Bernard Williams. Ed. by Callcut, Daniel. 2009, pp. 110-138. [10] Moore, W. Adrian. Introduction. In [19], pp. xi-xx. [11] Moore, W. Adrian. “Realism and the Absolute Conception”. In: Bernard Williams. Ed. by Thomas, Alan. 2007, pp. 24-46. [12] Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1979. [13] Nussbaum, Martha. “Bernard Williams: Tragedies, Hope, Jus- tice”. In: Reading Bernard Williams. Ed. by Callcut, Daniel. 2009, pp. 213-241. [14] Thomas, Alan. “The Nonobjectivist Critique of Moral Knowl- edge”. In: Bernard Williams. Ed. by Thomas, Alan. 2007, pp. 47-72. [15] Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. New York: Routledge, 2005. [16] Williams, Bernard. Ethics and The Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press, 1985. [17] Williams, Bernard. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Ed. by Hawthorn, Geoﬀrey. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005. [18] Williams, Bernard. Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philo- sophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. [19] Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Philosophical Papers 1973 -1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. [20] Williams, Bernard. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Ed. by Moore, W. Adrian. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. [21] Williams, Bernard. Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. [22] Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. [23] Williams, Bernard. The Sense of the Past. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pawe lPijas: Bernard Williams’s Philosophical Projects 73

[24] Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Geneal- ogy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002. [25] Zagzebski, Linda. “Phronesis and Christian Belief”. In: The Ratio- nality of Theism. Ed. by Br¨untrup, Godehard; Tacelli, K. Ronald. 1999, pp. 177-194. [26] Zagzebski, Linda. “Religious Knowledge”. In: The Routledge Com- panion to Epistemology. Ed. by Bernecker, Sven; Pritchard, Dun- can. 2011, pp. 393-400.

[27] Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of The Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Relative to What? – Interpretation with higher-place predicates

Michael Samhammer

Abstract Ordinary language contains groups of related predicates with diﬀerent arities. Interpreting utterances that appear to contain an n-place predicate by using an n+m-place predicate to dissolve merely apparent disagreements and other misunderstandings is an established practice in everyday discourse. This paper aims to present hermeneutical maxims to guide and evaluate these interpretations through arity raising. In interpreting utterances by using a higher-place predicate, we should use only expressions that their authors themselves reasonably could have used and which would have been suitable to achieve their supposed purposes. The goal is to achieve a charitable, accurate reading that also maximizes the text’s transparency to improve our understanding of it.

Keywords: predicates, arity, relativism, hermeneutics

1 Arity raising as a means of interpretation

Understanding other authors often requires interpretation on part of the recipients as the utterances themselves suﬀer from various forms of underdetermination [17, p. 155]. I want to examine one such type of interpretation more closely:

Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104. http://www.kriterion-journal-of-philosophy.org c 2019 The author 76 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104

Imagine that Ida (= I) and Henry (= H) are preparing to move. They are packing their books into boxes. Each one faces a shelf in front of them while they work. To pack the boxes, they share a roll of tape (= T). In this situation, the following exchange takes place:

H: “Where is the tape?” I: “It’s to the left.” [Henry turns to his left and is unable to ﬁnd the tape.] H: “Ah, you meant it’s to the left of you from your point of view.” [Henry turns around and ﬁnds the tape.]

In this situation Henry is confronted with the utterance of ‘It’s to the left.’ and initially misunderstands it. He incorrectly interprets Ida’s utterance and is unable to locate the tape. He then revises his interpretation by paraphrasing Ida’s utterance, making use of the higher-place (= higher-arity) predicate ‘.. is left of .. from the point of view of ..’. This is not the predicate that Ida herself used. This simple example illustrates how higher-place predicates are used during everyday discourse as part of a paraphrase. This technique can also be used to resolve the appearance of disagreement between utterances. Often times when people make utterances, they make use of lower- place predicates, even if higher-place predicates are available, which can result in the appearance of disagreement. For example, the utterance of ‘curry is (not) tasty’ uses a 1-place predicate and is very prone to creating at least the appearance of a disagreement with others. This appearance can be dissolved through paraphrasing the respective statements, using higher-place predicates (e.g. ‘curry is (not) tasty for me.’).1 Of course, the mere appearance of disagreement could have been omitted by using the higher-place expression outright. This paper aims to discuss the use of higher-place predicates as part of exegetical interpretations2 independent of semantic limitations e.g. to predicates of personal taste. Scenarios akin to the example above can be constructed using predicates from a variety of areas, not just spatio- temporal relations. This broad approach means that certain forms of relativism naturally fall within the area of inquiry. Of course the landscape of discourses on relativisms (of morals, justice, truth etc.) is vast and each of the discourses harbours itself a variety of positions that differ on what the relevant questions even are.3 Given this overwhelming situation, only a blanket statement can be made here: The methodological guidelines for the interpretation through arity raising as I propose Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 77 them take inspiration from certain discourses on relativism and might be gainfully employed in such debates. Specifically, linguistic approaches to relativisms of various kinds might profit.4 Following such an approach, one might ask questions like “Is the predicate ‘.. is just’ elliptical?” instead of questions like “Is the justice-property, which predicates like ‘..is just’ purport to describe, relative to something?”. In addition, a hermeneutic approach to different types of (merely apparent) disagreements can serve as an alternative to others, such as proposed by relativists and contextualists, which often require fundamental revisions of the underlying theories of truth and meaning (5). The example above (and many others) suggest that higher-place predicates can be used as part of interpreting utterances to resolve a lack of understanding. In light of this notion, I want to propose answers to the questions of how and when we should perform interpretations of this kind. This is not always as self-evident as the left-right-scenario may suggest. Using higher-place predicates such as ‘.. is a fact for the person ..’ as part of paraphrasing utterances can be a highly controversial move. Paraphrasing statements that supposedly aim to describe something as a fact by means of a person-relative predicate seems to run counter to the notion of a fact. Similar concerns can be voiced with regards to using relative justice, truth, or knowledge predicates as part of a paraphrase and the debates on these relativisms reflect that. Interpretations, as understood here, should aim to be as defensible as possible and at the same time resolve underlying problems with understanding the text, even if any hopes of finding the one correct reading may be futile.5 The overall approach taken towards analysing the use of higher-place predicates here can be compared to a pragmatic-normative approach to logic: There is an established practice, which has proven itself to be useful and reliable in most cases. In regards to logic, this is the practice of performing inference acts, in regards to the use of higher- place predicates it is the practice of paraphrasing utterances in the way showcased above. The established practice, while useful and fruitful, is prone to errors and other disturbances. To counter this, one can propose rules that serve to govern and evaluate what is already being done (e.g. inferring, paraphrasing).6 The example provided earlier should suffice to establish that this is indeed a part of everyday discourse, but it does also extend to scientific and political discourse.7 To support this practice, I aim to outline a hermeneutic method, which is backed by more explicit rules. Thus the 78 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 overall goal is to provide useful hermeneutic tools for producing interpretations in the context of rational debates of any kind. This includes scientific, legal, or political discussions. To answer the questions of how and when we should perform paraphrases of this kind, I will first take a step back and examine the role of related predicates of different arity in ordinary language (2). This serves as a backdrop for the hermeneutical maxims to guide interpretation through arity raising (3). Then I’ll specify when we should consider using the suggested methodology (4) and turn towards some related questions, such as debating the merits of different-place predicates and the relation of arity raising to the ongoing debate between contextualists and relativists (5).

2 Related predicates of diﬀerent arity in ordinary language.

To prepare for the formulation of hermeneutical maxims applicable to the use of higher-place predicates, a closer look at the selection of predicates in ordinary language is warranted. Consider the following exchange:

A: “I’m going to give Peter a book for his birthday. How about you?”

B: “I’ll probably give him money.”

C: “For his last birthday, I gave him a game. This year, I’ll give him a geode.”

A: “A geode is a strange gift. Why would you chose that?”

C: “I’ll give a geode for his recently started mineral collection.”

Apparently there are subtly different ways to talk about the practice of gift giving. If someone attempted to reconstruct an exchange such as this, one possible way to do it would be to use different-place predicates. A’s initial utterance could be accurately reconstructed as using a 4-place- predicate ‘.. give .. a .. for ..’ with places for giver, giftee, the gift and the occasion. B’s utterance suggests the use of a similar 3-place predicate but with no place for the occasion. C is again using a 4-place predicate, but uses the fourth place to talk about past events. C’s second utterance seems to use yet another expression, this one having just three places ‘.. give a .. for ..’ where the last place is reserved for the intended purpose of the chosen gift, not the occasion for giving a gift in the first place. Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 79

This example showcases related predicates: these are ordinary language expressions that could be formalized as different-arity predicates in a formal language but which seem to share at least some common meaning. An alternative approach to this phenomenon would be to view them as different forms of one and the same predicate. For example, one might be tempted to reconstruct the exchange above by simply using a 5-place predicate everywhere (giver, gift, giftee, occasion, intended purpose). This would have drawbacks. First, it would not mirror the way the persons involved actually talk as closely. Second, in a lot of places such a reconstruction would come up blank. For example, B provides no intended purpose of his cash gift. As such, the place for the purpose could at best be filled with a quantified expression (e.g. “for some purpose”). Third, it would suggest that gift-giving necessarily requires there to be an intended purpose of the gift, which is not always the case.

While the notion of related predicates hopefully has some initial plausibility, defining it in exact terms has proven to be a challenge. Initially, it seems clear enough: predicates are a type of expression from grammars based on standard predicate logic. In terms of linguistic grammar, they encompass a verb and optional prepositions and/or nouns, which can indicate addition places (e.g. ‘.. is to the left of ..’). Prepositions are not required, though. Compare ‘Ida loves Henry.’ and ‘Ida loves Henry today.’, where no additional preposition is required to include a time parameter in the form of ‘today’. Another problem with the notion of related predicates consist in the fact that in typical predicate logic a predicate is commonly defined as an n-place operator with fixed arity. Yet this linguistic phenomenon seems to suggest that a predicate can change arity or that it can be modified somehow. An alternative approach to the topic would encompass the creation of alternative grammars that allow for predicates of varying arity, so that ‘.. is left’ and ‘.. is to the left of ..’ could be addressed as being two instances of the same predicate (albeit of different arity) instead of as being two distinct but related predicates. Graves [5] made an effort to develop such a grammar in order to allow reduction of arity (e.g. inferring ‘Brutus stabbed Caesar’ from ‘Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife in the forum’) without the need for specific regulations (e.g. setting as an axiom that ‘For all things x, y, z : if x stabbed y with z, then x stabbed z’) of the relevant predicate. I decided against the option for using an alternative grammar since conventional predicate logic is so well entrenched. Abandoning this well-established theoretical foundation just for the sake of a proper definition of ‘related predicate’ seemed unwise, as long as one can make due with the less 80 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 precise characterization outlined above. It is presupposed here that authors perform speech acts in order to achieve one or more purposes. Just as other actions may serve to bring about some state in the world (e. g. The opening of a door by means of the action of pressing its handle), speech can serve as a means to attempt to achieve the author’s goals. To perform speech acts authors make use of linguistic expressions. These expressions can be thought of as tools for performing speech acts and one type of these are predicates. The business of performing speech acts that serve their purposes comes down (at least in part) to picking the right expressions. This general sentiment applies to various aspects of the process: when asking someone for a favour, authors need to pick the right form of address, the right illocutionary expressions, the right predicates and so forth. Teleological considerations affect various parts of communication, but I’ll focus on related predicates of different arity here. Of course, the notion that performing a speech act involves the choice of any expressions whatsoever suggests that there is conscious decision making involved. This is merely a useful fantasy employed here and not meant to suggest that authors always ponder questions of language choice as part of their ordinary discourse. In practice, most authors talk instinctively, without going through the (at times) extensive considerations suggested in the following. The goal here is to map out ways by which an informed choice of predicates could take place, if authors were to put their minds to it, not to describe what mental processes are actually involved. Such considerations become relevant when we attempt to troubleshoot our use of language, for example when clearing up or explaining a misunderstanding. Under this premise, one can outline some of the factors that influence the choice between related predicates of different arity. Authors generally aim to use expressions that do not convey more information than is needed to achieve their purposes in a given environment.8 This can be illustrated with the example from earlier: B uses the predicate ‘.. give .. a ..’ and omits reference to the occasion. That is a sensible choice given the environment of that conversation: it is clear that the topic is now Peter’s birthday. He could have uttered ‘I’ll probably give him money for his birthday.’ and achieved his purpose of informing the others about his intentions, but would also have conveyed a piece of redundant information. In other environments, where this particular point is less clear, B might have reasonably opted for another predicate. Another factor is that some information which can be conveyed Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 81 through use of higher-place predicates can simply be superfluous in a given situation. In difference to information being redundant, this encompasses cases where the recipient may not know this information yet, but where they are unlikely to be able to make any practical use of it. Looking back at the gift-giving-example, B could have uttered something like ‘I will probably give him money for his birthday in a red envelope in person in the morning of that day to relieve his poverty.’. An utterance like that can be understood as involving a 8-place gift- giving-predicate: giver, giftee, gift, occasion, presentation of gift, mode of delivery, precise point in time, and motivation behind the choice of gift. As has been pointed out by Kenny, pretty much any predicate used to describe an action has related expressions with additional places for spatio-temporal information [9, p. 113.]. It requires little imagination to come up with predicates of a very high arity. However, in everyday discourse we rarely make use of these as the information they convey is only useful for recipients of our utterances in very specific environments. The information which envelope contains money might be relevant when plotting a heist to steal Peter’s presents, but will have little bearing on many other conversations.

3 Arity raising as a hermeneutic method

In this section I’ll turn back to the use of related predicates as part of an interpretation, as outlined before (1). A few things about this kind of paraphrase stand out. First, it is highly dependent on the given environment that an utterance is made in. Paraphrasing an utterance that contains the predicate ‘.. is to the left’ by means of ‘.. is to the left of .. from the point of view of ..’ may not always yield clarification. Imagine a case where the misunderstanding has its root in an object moving. In such cases, including the relative perspective in the interpretation may not provide a helpful result, as the object may have moved away already. On the other hand, paraphrasing ‘.. is to the left’ by means of ‘.. is to the left at the point in time ..’ may clear up matters. Different environments and their connected misunderstands require different paraphrases of the same predicate in order to achieve understanding. This suggests that this type of interpretation is highly context-dependant and can not be modelled as the straightforward assignment of one and only one sequence of expressions (including a higher-place predicate) to a given n-place predicate. This makes this type of paraphrase different from others, such as the elimination of an expression through its definition or the 82 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 replacement of an expression with a synonym. There have been attempts to explain the linguistic phenomenon of predicates with different arity in such a linear manner. Bach, for example, suggests that utterances containing certain n-place predicates need to be “completed” in order to express full propositions. The examples he presents seem to imply that utterances like ‘Steel is strong enough’ always need to be completed by means of ‘.. is strong enough for the purpose ..’. The problem with this approach is that the justification that Bach presents for claiming that utterances containing ‘.. is strong enough’ do not express propositions can also be used to claim that utterances containing ‘.. is strong enough for the purpose ..’ do not express propositions either. We might point to the fact that certain materials get softer with higher temperatures, for example, to claim that only utterances with ‘.. is strong enough for the purpose .. at the temperature ..’ express full propositions [1, p. 125-136.]. Another argument in favour of the notion that we can not assign a single fixed n+m-place predicate to a given n-place predicate for the purposes of interpretation in all contexts can be made on the basis that it is the recipient of the utterance that has to fill in the blanks. The author may not even be aware of the information relevant for a given paraphrase. Imagine a situation like that of Henry and Ida but wherein Ida is a small child, who has mastered the use of ‘.. is to the left’ already but is still unfamiliar with the intricacies of spatio-temporal- relativity. Cases like that suggest that we can not appropriately frame these examples as involving straight-forward elliptic speech that can be resolved along the lines of ‘You said ‘It’s to the left’, but what you really meant was...’. If the author in question has no access to higher-place predicates, then we can not claim that the meaning of their utterances relies on these.9 A similar point can be made with regards to the information that the recipient uses to fill in the additional places in the course of a paraphrase. Consider the following utterances: ’Universal Suffrage is progress.’ ’The German family is important.’ ’Let’s make America great again.’ Utterances like these appear frequently in conversations regarding politics or society. All of these can become the subject of a total or partial lack of understanding and paraphrases employ higher-place predicates can come to the rescue. People lacking understanding might ask questions like: ‘Towards which goal was universal suffrage progress?’, ‘The Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 83

German family is important for what?’, ‘Let’s make America great again for whom?’10. Other questions aiming at different higher-place predicates are of course possible. When presented with questions such as these, it is entirely possible that even an honest and well-meaning author will (maybe only temporarily) come up empty. Not everyone who makes utterances involving predicates like ‘.. is progress’ immediately has an answer when asked for the overall goal to which said progress is being measured. In fact, questions like ‘Is there progress in human history?’ have been dealt with by philosophers without the question of the overall goal being made explicit.11 This state of affairs suggests that we are not merely dealing with some sort of abbreviation that the author can easily resolve for us. Paraphrases leading from utterances like ‘Universal suffrage is progress.’ to ‘Universal Suffrage is progress towards the ideal of universal equality.’ appear to be more complex than those leading from ‘The FBI is part of the executive.’ to ‘The Federal Bureau of Investi- gation is part of the executive.’. That being said, it still seems fruitful to regard interpretation through arity raising as an interpretation by assignment, where expressions of the interpreted text are assigned another sequence of expressions to yield a reading [17]. In the remainder of this section, I’ll outline some principles for how such paraphrases should be performed. As a first step, it is worthwhile to spell out the overall goal of the enterprise. I take it that paraphrases of this style are used as a tool for better understanding utterances. As such, they often serve at least two goals: to present an accurate, charitable, and transparent reading of the author’s utterance and to clear up potential problems with understanding it on the side of the recipient. What makes a paraphrase that employs arity raising accurate, charitable and transparent? Put briefly, such an interpretation has to contain expressions that the authors reasonably could have used themselves and with which they could have achieved their purposes in the original environment of their utterance. In addition, the reading should strive to present the utterance as relevant to the original context and not distort the alethic state of the proposition expressed. The various steps and decisions involved in the process of interpretation also need to be documented in a clear manner. Hermeneutical maxims can act as guidelines to facilitate the creation of this kind of interpretation. Perhaps the most widely known maxim of interpretation is the principle of charity. In its general form it states that our interpretations should aim to be as charitable as possible, meaning that when there are 84 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 competing readings or options, we should pick the one that presents the author and his utterances in the most favourable light.12 The second maxim to be included here is the principle of accuracy. Generally speaking it demands for our interpretations to be as accurate as possible with regard to the authors, their text, and the environment in which it was produced. This broad demand can touch upon various aspects of the hermeneutic process, such as including as much of the relevant text as possible to prevent cherry picking.13 Lastly, interpretations should be transparent. The principle of transparency demands that we outline the decisions (and their possible alter- natives) we make during the interpretation process, so as to not deceive a potential audience with regards to alternative readings. An ideal interpretation is one where each step is presented so transparently that it can be judged on its own merit. In addition, an interpretation should strive to increase transparency, relative to the interpretation’s overall goal, over the initial text. In other words, an interpretation should clar- ify the matters under debate and not be more difficult to comprehend than the initial text. The hermeneutical maxims as presented by Reinmuth are tailored towards his overall goal of guiding the logical reconstruction of argumentative texts. As a consequence, some of the maxims and sub-maxims target aspects that are exclusive to or found predominately in relation to argumentative texts. In the following, I’ll outline how these maxims may be specified and adjusted to guide an interpretation through arity raising. For this goal, I’ll outline two important components of this interpretative process. The first component is the selection of a predicate. When we are presented with an utterance that uses an n-place predicate, for example ‘Universal suffrage is progress.’, we have to determine which predicates we may use as part of a charitable and accurate interpretation. For this purpose, general reflection on the notion of progress can offer up some starting points. When people talk about progress being made, it implies that there is a special kind of change from some previous state of affairs. This suggests the use of expressions like ‘.. is progress from ..’. In addition, progress is often connected to (at least implicit) notions of certain goals, like achieving a state where men and women enjoy universal equality. This suggests the use of expressions like ‘.. is progress towards ..’ or the combined ‘.. is progress towards .. from ..’. In the case of the example utterance above, our inquiry may be motivated by problems when trying to understand utterances: if something Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 85 is said to be progress, with regard to which overall aim do we judge that? If we were to come up with a paraphrase using an expression like ‘.. is progress towards ..’, we could make substantial headway towards resolving our problems. But how can we justify such a reading of the initial utterance? First, we have to make sure that the authors of the utterance had access to the predicate we wish to use. In the broadest sense, this means that they basically could have used this expression themselves. There are cases where this is very easy to establish, for example when the authors use this predicate themselves in a related context. In other cases, we have to rely on data about the linguistic community the authors were a part of. Negative evidence regarding the availability of a predicate for the authors can consist in them explicitly rejecting the use of certain expressions. For example, in the context of debates about moral relativism, authors frequently make utterances to the effect that they would not use expressions such as ‘.. is morally justified according to the code ..’. This can be seen as a clear indication that this expression is not available to the authors, due to their convictions. This whole line of reasoning goes back to the idea that in ordinary language, we usually have a vast selection of related predicates at our disposal. Which expression we use is often determined by economic considerations, which may be to the recipient’s detriment. In the case of utterances like ‘Universal suffrage is progress.’ the authors might take it to be self-evident what sort of goal they have in mind when judging progress. They then might presuppose (perhaps incorrectly) that it is also self-evident for the recipient of their utterance. Even if that is the case, their utterance might still create a misunderstanding when presented to someone other than the originally intended recipients, for example a researcher reading a transcript of their conversation many decades later. It is also entirely possible that the authors had no clear notion of what the presupposed goal is. They might just have never really thought about it and just talk about universal suffrage as progress because they are part of a socio-political environment where that is just >something people say<. Second, we have to make sure that the predicate we wish to use is one which would have suited the purposes of the author.14 To make a call like that, we have to speculate about what purposes the authors were trying to achieve with their utterances. In the example of the progress-utterance, it seems reasonable to suggest that the authors want to classify things (events, ideas, laws) into at least two groups: things 86 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 that are progress and things that are not. A lot of times, people employ expressions like that in an attempt to create an at least partial order. This purpose could also be achieved by use of ‘.. is progress towards..’. Using this expression one can still sort things into groups, albeit more than two. For example, universal suffrage might represent progress towards the equality of genders, but it obviously represents no progress towards the establishment of a global patriarchy. Unless the authors are somehow committed to the two-value progress/not-progress way of talking, the fact that higher-place progress-predicates allow for more diverse classifications should not be considered a downside. After all, they could always specify which goals they think should be pursued with our policies / laws / judgements. During both steps the hermeneutical maxims of charity and accuracy come into play. For our assessment of the higher-place predicate’s availability to be accurate, we need to take into account the broader context of the utterance in question, which includes potentially other texts of the same authors.15 This serves to limit issues like cherry picking. For our judgements on the availability to be charitable, we need to take into account the authors’ personal use of language, as well as that of the surrounding community. For example, it may be charitable and accurate to assert that an author could have used a given expression, based on the fact that other people at the time made frequent use of it and it appears to have been common enough to be available to the author as well. So while any given present-day author might not have used an expression like ‘.. is progress towards ..’ in any of their writing, it still seems plausible – barring evidence to the contrary – to presuppose that the expression was available to the author. With regards to judging if a certain higher-place predicate would have been suitable for the author’s purposes, accuracy can demand a thorough search of the utterance’s extended context for clues as to what purposes the author wanted to achieve. Sometimes we are presented with explicit statements to that effect. Here a hermeneutical presumption comes into play: if the authors express their intention to achieve certain goals with their utterances, it can be presumed that they are being sincere, as long as no counter-evidence is presented. Of course we can never really know what the authors intended in their heart of hearts with a given utterance, but there are some rules of thumb we can apply: In general it is fair to assume that people are being honest and overt.16 People might pursue all sorts of sinister purposes that are not reflected by any of their utterances, but for the purpose of interpretation, this possibility should Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 87 be ignored, unless evidence to back up such a claim is presented. The second component of an interpretation through arity raising is the content selection for the new places of the predicate. Evidently, if we replace an n-place predicate in an utterance with a higher-place predicate, we create open places that need to be filled with something in order to yield syntactically correct utterances as the result of our paraphrases. In general, there are several ways to fill these places, depending on what type of expressions are available in the language we are dealing with. We can use quantified variables. For example, the utterance of ‘Uni- versal suffrage is progress.’ could be paraphrased as ‘There is an x such that: Universal suffrage is progress towards x.’, or ‘For all x: Univer- sal suffrage is progress towards x.’, ‘For many x: Universal suffrage is progress towards x.’, ‘For some x: Universal suffrage is progress towards x.’. Singular terms are another way to fill additional places in the process of interpretation. For example, we might read ‘Universal suffrage is progress’ as ‘Universal suffrage is progress towards the state of universal equality.’, ‘Universal suffrage is progress towards the best possible world.’ etc. In general both simple names as well as definite descriptions or similar constructs can be used in this role.17 These are merely outlines of possible content that can fill additional places. The more interesting question is: How do we decide which content should fill these additional places when we interpret a given utterance? Again the principles of charity and accuracy can act as guidelines. Our content selection needs to be accurate as to what expressions the authors had available in their language. The idea is that we want our interpretation to produce an utterance that the authors themselves could have uttered, if they had elected to use a higher-place predicate. It follows then that we should not use expressions that the authors could not have used themselves (e.g. names of concepts that did not exist when they were alive). Under the principle of charity, the content we select for the additional places needs to present the authors’ initial utterance as relevant and correct as possible. For example, if the utterance of ‘Universal suffrage is progress.’ appears in a political discussion, in a context unrelated to any debates about nature preservation, we should not interpret it as ‘Universal suffrage is progress towards preserving panda bears.’. This interpretation would present the initial utterance as being completely irrelevant in the context in which it was made if nobody was talking about species preservation beforehand.18 In this case, the initial utterance was such that we could not be sure if the proposition expressed is true or 88 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 false. A charitable interpretation in this case will produce a reading that at least could plausibly be true (e.g. ‘US is progress towards the state of universal equality.’) or could have plausibly been true in the original context it was uttered in (e.g. ‘It is hot in Greifswald on 4.7.2018’), instead of a reading that is overtly false or nonsensical (e. g. ‘Universal suffrage is progress towards the state without universal suffrage.’). The principles that I have outlined here are not rigid enough to single out the one and only correct interpretation of a given utterance. Given the diverse landscape of higher-place predicates that is available in ordinary languages, the search for such a thing seems misguided. An utterance in a given environment can usually be assigned several readings that are accurate and charitable. A lot of times, the initial problem with understanding an utterance will serve as a tiebreaker: we ought to strive for interpretations that are accurate, charitable, and resolve as many of our problems as possible. Some have argued that certain places of predicates should inherently be filled with content of a given type [4, p. 3]. For example that the predicate ‘.. eats’ is part of a special type of predicate, which requires the implicit place for the food that is being consumed to be filled with a particular expression (e. g. ‘.. eats something.’). As has been hinted at earlier, this approach ignores the fact that different utterances and different environments warrant different interpretations:

[A and B conspired to poison the king. A is observing through a hole in the wall how the king is moving down the buﬀet, working his way towards the poisoned oysters.] B: “Did he eat the oysters yet?” A: “Not yet. Just wait... Any minute now... Aha! He’s eating now!”

Given the context presented above, it seems plausible to interpret the utterance of “He’s eating now!” as “He’s eating the oysters now.”. A paraphrase using a particular expression is of course still possible (’He’s eating something.’) but given the context of the exchange above, this seems like a less charitable interpretation, as it would make the utterance appear less relevant to B’s question. B asked speciﬁcally about the oysters, not whether the king was eating in general. To illustrate the application of the suggested principles of interpretation in action, I will now turn to a few real-world-examples. They also serve to illustrate diﬀerent situations and interpreter may encounter. Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 89

4 Accuracy and charity in practice

Judging if a higher-place predicate is available to an author and how the additional places should be ﬁlled is easiest if the author himself makes clear remarks to that eﬀect. Authors often make explicit statements as to when they omit certain higher-place predicates for the sake of brevity:19

“The following considerations always presuppose a reference to a language: all remarks I will make are to be completed by the phrase “in such-and-such a language.””20

Where such announcements are present, they justify certain interpretations. This can be framed in terms of the suggested principles: such statements make it clear that the authors had access to certain higher- place predicates in their language and would have considered them to be appropriate tools for their purposes. The same can be said for the content on the additional places. In addition, any charitable and accurate interpretation of their following utterances needs to take this announcement into account and supply at least an additional place for the language. In most cases, authors won’t make any explicit statements on how or why they use a certain predicate and not one of its higher-place rel- atives. However, even uncommented use of language can provide useful information for the interpreter:

“The category of Quantity relates to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.” [6, p. 45]

In the ﬁrst maxim Grice supplies an additional place through the brack- eted part, yet omits it in the second maxim. Grice means to say something other than he has written down here and the second maxim needs to be read as ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required for the current purposes of the exchange.’ In this situation this ought to be obvious to most readers due to the parallelism evoked by the similar phrasing of the numbered maxims. However, this interpretation can also be sanctioned in terms of the hermeneutical maxims outlined above.21 90 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104

The first maxim and its use of a higher-place predicate containing a place for a purpose makes it clear that such expressions are available to Grice and that he deems them suitable for his purposes. The same can be said for the content used to fill the additional place. When formulating the second maxim, Grice elects to use a lower-place predicate, most likely to avoid a redundant repetition of what was said before. As has been discussed, this seems to be a frequent motivation for the use of lower- place predicates. Given the wider context of his work, the principle of charity provides further backing for the outlined interpretation: if we were to not read it as relative to conversational purposes, it would stand out among Grice’s work as the sole maxim that is supposedly independent of such teleological constraints. This would warrant further explanation – which the text does not provide – so this reading would present it as flawed. Since the proposed interpretation through arity raising comes with no such baggage – the second maxim fits in well with the others if read as relative to conversational purposes – it is the more charitable and thus preferable reading. Perhaps the most difficult situation for an interpreter concerned with higher-place predicates is the one where neither explicit comments on related expressions nor their use are present in the text. Consider the following example:

“The antirelativist asserts: some recent accounts are better (truer, more detailed, more accurate) than earlier interpretations. Progress in art history consist in the creation of such better accounts. The relativist replies: the fact that styles of interpretation do thus change does not show that art history progresses.” [3, p. 154]

Frequently when people talk about progress in various areas (e.g. science, morals, art, weight loss, house construction), they omit any reference to a goal by which progress is being judged. In many of these cases, the goal is fairly obvious from the environment of the utterances and background knowledge about the world, so it does not need to be mentioned. Still, the notion of progress in ordinary language seems such that it appears at least reasonable to ask by approximation to what goal one judges any given change to be progress. Luckily, a lot of times the way people talk about progress, even if they do not use higher-place predicates such as ‘.. is progress towards ..’, can provide some evidence as to what state of affairs they have in mind as the goal. In the quote above, the author portrays the antirelativist position as asserting that Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 91 progress in the interpretation of art is to be judged by an approximation to the state of the maximum of true assertions and the maximum amount of details and accuracy. In light of textual evidence like that, one can argue for an interpretation through arity raising of related utterances in this depiction of various positions on art history. An interpretation like this is supported by the hermeneutical maxims outlined before. Under the principle of accuracy, we are supposed to assume that the author uses expressions in the way it is common in their linguistic community, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary.22 This general aspect of interpretative accuracy can be narrowed down to settle the question of the availability of higher-place predicates in the author’s language: since ordinary English has progress-expressions with a place for the goal and there is no evidence to the contrary (e.g. the author vigorously rejecting the notion of judging progress relative to a goal) it is fair to assume that they had these linguistic tools available to them as well. We can also settle the question of the author’s purposes by examining what he is using the lower-place progress-expressions for. The goal is apparently to debate whether or not certain trends in art history constitute a progress or not. There is no reason to assume this goal could not be achieved at least as good by use of higher-place predicates, so again it seems accurate to use an expression like ‘.. is progress towards ..’ as part of our interpretation. With the question of accuracy settled, it remains to be answered if the proposed reading is a charitable one. In this instance the author’s initial utterance is easy enough to understand by us to see that they probably attempt to make a true statement. We should strive towards interpretations that do not distort the utterance into expressing a false- hood, as far as the principle of accuracy permits. The proposed reading appears to express a true statement as well. In addition, a charitable interpretation should present the interpreted utterance as at least as plausible in its original context as the initial statement was. The text asks the question, if there is progress in art history, yet never questions towards which goal (if any) progress should be judged. Instead, exactly one such goal is implicitly assumed to be relevant – the use of higher-place predicates is consequently omitted – and there is no consideration of whether this phrasing of the question is particularly fruitful. Through interpretation of arity raising we can make explicit what we believe to be self-evident and thus open up new avenues of questioning, such as ‘Why should this be the goal towards which we judge progress in art history?’, ‘How should we talk about progress in 92 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 art history?’. These new lines of inquiry may lead us to more productive or at least new debates on long-standing issues. Situating interpretation through arity raising in the context of Philos- ophy is a difficult task, because the relevant state of the art can be both extremely large or extremely small, depending on what one considers to be the limiting factors. To make the task of situating interpretation through arity raising in the wider landscape of philosophical research easier, it can be characterized by three main properties: a) It is supposed to be a general methodology for using higher-place predicates of any kind in interpretation and is not limited to certain semantic areas e.g. predicates of personal taste. b) It is taken be an activity that people can engage in and which can be done (im-)properly, as opposed to e.g. a part of a theory of meaning. c) I strive to provide a useful tool for the purposes of everyday and scientific discourse, not a purely descriptive theory of how certain utterances relate to each other. Generally speaking, the more of these three properties one disregards, the wider the relevant philosophical context becomes. There has been a lot of written on the relation between taste, justice, and truth predicates of different arity, but in contrast to property a) these debates are limited by semantic lines (See, for instance [2]). Similarly, Bach and others (see [10, 11, 13]) discuss examples of related predicates with different places, but do so in the context of debating different theories of truth of meaning, not to develop guidelines for the activity (b) of performing such interpretations. Thus, if one approaches the subject broadly, the relevant context of research quickly encompasses all of the various relativism- themed debates of the last centuries, rendering the subject unwieldy. Of course that is not to say that nothing vital can be gained from debates like that one between contextualists and relativists. I have touched on some parts of them here and more has been detailed elsewhere already [19, p. 150]. If the three properties outlined above are to be taken as limiting factors for the relevant state of the art, one contribution deserves special mention. Ota Weinberger wrote a seldom-reviewed paper in 1965, shortly before escaping to the west [23]. In it, he offers methodological guidelines to actively resolve disagreements by using higher-place predicates and discusses a variety of examples from different semantic areas. He offers these guidelines as part of a subtle attack on the Hegelian di- alectics that dominated much of Eastern European Philosophy at that time. Weinberger leads one to question that if contradictions are, as some Hegelians claimed, are a fundamental part of nature, how come Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 93 they can sometimes be dissolved by using higher-place predicates? As this brief outline hopefully makes clear, Weinberger’s work shares the three central properties of my approach and has provided much inspiration. He never followed his paper up, to the best of my knowledge, and is today remembered mainly for his contributions to the Philosophy of Law.

5 When to use interpretation through arity raising?

Any presentation of a supposedly useful method needs to include not only an account of what it can achieve but also of when it should be used. During the previous sections it has already been mentioned that interpretation through arity raising is primarily a tool for resolving problems when trying to understand an utterance. This point will be expanded here. As a regular part of conversation, we are presented with utterances by other authors. The process of understanding utterances as speech acts involves understanding the kind of the speech act that’s being performed (asking a question, asserting a proposition etc.) and understanding the content. Both parts of the process are vulnerable to problems. For example, by mistaking an order for a request, one fails in correctly identifying the type of speech act that is being performed. This can be called a performative misunderstanding, where ‘performative’ indicates that the trouble relates to the question as to what kind of speech act is being performed. If the content of that order is misunderstood, due to ambiguous wording, for example, this can be called a propositional misunderstanding [16, p. 126]. Both areas, performative and propositional understanding, can also give rise to a total lack of understanding. The person afflicted by misunderstanding arrives at some interpretation of the utterance and falsely considers it to be correct. Being convinced to have the right interpretation, one such afflicted is not even aware that they have a problem. In contrast, the person afflicted by a lack of understanding does not even get that far: they are stuck in some stage of the process and are aware of this problem. It seems plausible then that any method aimed at resolving problems with understanding a text can only ever target the person afflicted by a lack of understanding, not the person trapped in a misunderstanding: one needs to be aware of the problem, to even consider the self-application of problem-solving methods. Interpretation through arity raising is a method for dealing with a 94 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 special kind of lacking propositional understanding, the lack of a pred- icative understanding. As the name suggests, it denotes trouble when dealing with a supposed predicate contained in an utterance. Other types of problems in the propositional area can arise regarding the reference of names or complex descriptions. This is the general area of inquiry where the interpretation through arity raising becomes a relevant tool. For further illustration, I will present a few specific examples from this broad field. Whenever an informal argument is reconstructed as a formal language argument, perhaps as part of a philosophical investigation, interpretation through arity raising can serve as a valuable tool in paving the way. It has been pointed out that understanding the speech acts involved in an argument is a key part of the hermeneutic process [17, p. 152], [16, p. 116]. At this point it is worth mentioning that the approach outlined here differs from question on the logical form of sentences. A given utterance can be interpreted by using different higher-place predicates and these readings will be judged differently according to the maxims outlined here, if they occur in different environments. It follows then that interpretation through arity raising is not a tool designed to reveal the one and only logical form of an utterance. A more specialized area of application is the dissolution of merely apparent disagreement. Generally, people at least try to (but often fail to) express themselves as briefly as possible to get the job done and often do not say enough for their utterances to be unambiguous in terms to what speech act could be performed with them. For example, outside of strictly regulated environments people will often omit indicators like ‘I assert ..’ in favour of emphatically uttering the proposition in a declarative tone of voice when they want to assert something. This creates a gap between the utterances we encounter in ordinary discourse and pairs of speech acts that might constitute a genuine disagreement (e.g. the assertion and denial of a proposition). However, one can bridge this gap by analysing and interpreting utterances. During such activities we may encounter utterances that appear to be disagreements at first glance. Consider the following example:

P1: “This curry is tasty.” P2: “This curry is not tasty.”

Are P1 and P2 in disagreement? I expect most people would say so. A common view in philosophy is that a disagreement consists between parties asserting contradicting propositions. However, it is important Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 95 to note that we are presented with two utterances here, not with two propositions. Determining which (if any) propositions are expressed in an utterance requires some interpretation and is not necessarily straightforward. If we want to talk about disagreement on the level of utterances, we have to deal with the phenomenon of merely apparent disagreement. It consists in utterances that appear to constitute a disagreement, but where further interpretative work yields the result that the parties involved are not really expressing contradictory contents. Consider the utterances in contexts that make a different interpretations plausible: P1: “This curry is tasty. I love the prawns.” P2: “This curry is not tasty. The beef is really chewy. I should have gone with seafood too.” P1: “This curry is tasty. I love how spicy it is.” P2: “It’s too spicy for me. This curry is not tasty.” The first context makes it apparent that P1 and P2 are really talking about different dishes, so ‘this curry’ does not refer to the same object. It follows then that their utterances – despite their appearances – do not constitute a genuine disagreement. The second example illustrates a context where interpretation through arity raising can be used to dissolve the appearance of disagreement. The way P1 and P2 talk about their curry-tasting-experiences provides some hints that they have different standards of taste. These may warrant paraphrases such as ‘This curry is (not) tasty for me.’. It is important to note that I am not suggesting here that all such utterances should or even may be appropriately paraphrased in this way at all times. I am merely suggesting that there are instances were people make utterances that are best understood as relativized in this manner. This phenomenon is of course not limited to any specific area of predicates, even if examples from the realm of taste are prevalent. One can always imagine contexts, for example in the industrial production of food, where there are clearly defined taste-predicates that determine if a given sample is acceptable for sale or not. There are professional tasters whose job consists in applying these objective standards, e.g. to determine if a given batch of product tastes like Coca Cola ought to taste.23 In these contexts, using predicates relative to personal standards of taste seems less plausible than in casual dinner conversation. All of these examples aim to show that interpretation through arity raising can dissolve some merely apparent disagreements. This is a 96 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 special case of understanding utterances as speech acts. Here one might interject that authors in cases such as the examples above certainly may take themselves to be disagreeing, so trying to dissuade them of that notion might not be appropriate.24 This objection can be countered by referring to the fact that people in ordinary discourse take themselves to do all sorts of things – even when that is often not truly the case. For example, they often take themselves to be presenting valid and sound arguments for certain propositions, yet philosophers are often keen to show this appearance to be deceptive. Why should the fact that people take themselves to be disagreeing matter in answering the question if they are in a real or merely apparent disagreement? There certainly are cases where people want to disagree, for example in the case of a political debate, and will actively try to promote the appearance of a disagreement. There are also cases where people disagree about important parameters relative to which to make certain judgements. For example, disagreements about taste might show themselves to be hinging on different standards of taste, but might also include a serious debate over which standards should apply. One might argue, for instance, that someone else’s standard of taste should not be used to judge the taste of a dish, if they are a frequent smoker, or know little about the special cuisine in question, etc.

The curry-example in particular also highlights one reason why philosophers should concern themselves with arity raising as a form of interpretation: whenever people engage in arguments, there lurks the danger of one or more place of a vital predicate in their utterances being omitted. To have fruitful and productive discussions, it is of key importance to try and understand each others positions as best as possible. Probing for interpretations that reveal hitherto implicit places of predicates can be a useful tool to prevent misunderstandings. The examples examined here may appear simplistic, since they were chosen for the relative ease with which they can be analysed. This is part of a divide- and-conquer-strategy: many utterances such as ‘Diana is smart.’ may be diﬃcult to interpret in regards to higher-place predicates, particularly as part of a heated debate. Excavating hermeneutic maxims for simpler cases should be seen as groundwork for approach more philosophically or socially loaded utterances. The idea being here that general principles supported for cases such as the left-right-scenario may at least be partially transferable to more complex cases. If such a transfer should prove impossible, this failure of the principles could oﬀer new insights in itself. Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 97

Paraphrasing and understanding utterances is of course a vital part of scientific discourse as well. Philosophers and others engaged in rational debates, have an invested interest in having access to normative standards that guide how actions like inferring, arguing, and paraphrasing ought to be done. A framework of hermeneutic maxims as outlined here can thus have a supporting function for everyone engaged in such debates. In addition, the debate about different types of disagreement and various types of pseudo-disagreement has been prominent in recent years. In this debate, two main lines of reasoning have emerged: contextualism and relativism. Given the scope of this paper, I can sketch them only briefly.25 The relativist argues that the truth of propositions expressed with sentences like “This curry is tasty” ought to be relativized to certain additional parameters. The number and nature of these parameters varies with the individual brand of relativism proposed. Kölbel [10] outlines such a semantic for predicates of taste, using a standard of taste as an extra parameter. Other parameters, such as points in time, are also frequently used. The contextualist argues, often similar to Bach [1], that the meaning of expressions such as the predicate ‘.. is tasty’ is dependant on the context of the utterance. Frequently, this is phrased in terms of implicit parameters that need to be supplied in order to make the expressions meaningful. Whereas the relativist wishes to revise the truth-predicate, a meta-language expression, the contextualist tries to deal with phenomena like faultless disagreement through shifting object-language expressions like taste predicates. This rough outline of two diverse and prominent lines of reasoning should suffice to highlight two points: One, both approaches have huge implications: the relativist has to argue that (at least for some) properties truth is relative, while the contextualist has to explain how the meaning of an expression can depend on its context. In short, one invites the question for a revised semantic framework, the other for a revised theory of truth. The approach I outlined here presents a middle way that appears feasible to explain at least some of the phenomena under discussion, but which does not incur sweeping revisionist implications. Like the contextualist, I maintain that some utterances will have to be interpreted in such a way that additional parameters are supplied. However, I take this to be a hermeneutical act that is part of correctly understanding the propositions expressed with utterances, not a semantic mechanism that 98 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104 invites calls for a revised theory of meaning that explains how the some proposition can have context-dependant meanings. All that hermeneutics presupposes is that people’s utterances are not always understand- able as propositions right away. Like the relativist, I maintain that some truth judgements may be relative, simply because truth judgements are just another form of utterance that might require interpretation to ex- cavate their proposition. Which particular theory of truth – if any – one presupposes is not yet relevant at the level of trying to understand utterances as propositions.

6 Open questions

This paper presented an outline for the methodological interpretation of utterances by means of higher-place predicates. To achieve this, the role of these expressions in ordinary language was analysed as being governed by principles of economy and purposefulness. However, this linguistic phenomenon can give rise to other questions that can not be answered here but still warrant a brief exploration. While this paper discussed the use of higher-place predicates as tools for interpretation, one can also ask when authors should make use of predicates of a certain arity as part of speech acts. When, for example, should we use the three-place-predicate ‘.. gives .. for ..’ as opposed to the two-place-predicate ‘.. gives .. ‘ when we want to inform others about our gift giving? What are the criteria by which we judge a lower-place predicate to be sufficient to achieve our purposes? The fact that conversation usually goes well and is not constantly plagued by misunderstandings seems to suggest that people are remarkably good at picking predicates of an appropriate arity for the given situation. I’ve outlined in a previous work why this type of expression-selection is a vital part of performing speech acts in order to achieve given purposes and also respect the economic constraints of discourse [19, A and B]. One could even ask more fundamental questions such as when we should use predicates of a certain arity as part of a language or a theory. This question relates to various debates on relativism (of truth, moral, motion, knowledge etc.), which can be framed as debates about why we should (not) use predicates of a certain arity when talking about certain matters. Various forms of moral relativism, for example, can be framed as advocating the use of certain higher-place predicates (e. g. ‘.. is morally justified according to the code ..’) as opposed to using lower- place predicates (e. g. ‘.. is morally justified’) when we perform certain Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 99 value judgements. One way to approach questions like this is to view the selection of predicates as part of language construction as a specialized question about how language in general should be structured. This constructivist approach lends itself to criteria like fruitfulness of expressions (What purposes can I achieve, given this definition of an n-place predicate?), the ease with which they can be used (How long-winded will my judgements about progress be, given this 14-place predicate?), or their flexibility (Can I use this language and its expressions in any given context without creating inconsistent statements?) [19, A and D].

Notes

1 Explaining away disagreement is often seen as problematic, when it comes to discussing contextualist semantics. See [10, p. 390], [11, p. 18] for examples. However, this particular debate should not distract from the fact that in practice, being able to dissolve a disagreement can be a good thing. It can save the eﬀort of arguing a case and lead to a speedy resolution of what might otherwise become (or already has been) a lengthy debate. 2 ”Exegetical interpretation should not lead to results that are arbitrary or in the same need of interpretation as the interpreted text itself. On the contrary, the aim is to provide readings that the author in question could be asked to accept to the best of our knowledge and which are less in need of interpretation in the relevant respects.” [17, p. 152]. 3 Wellman provides a list of diﬀerent objects that are regarded as the object of relativism-debates by various authors. These include values, judgements and moral norms. The diversity of this list illustrates part of the fragmentation in this area of discourse. [22, p. 107]. 4 Harman [7] outlines such a form of Relativism. He emphasizes that certain lower- place predicates such as ‘ought’ can be treated as elliptical and should thus be paraphrased. He rejected this view later. See [8]. 5 ”Among exegetical interpretations, one may (at least and roughly) distinguish between interpretations that aim at a true understanding of a text as uttered by an author, i.e. an understanding that corresponds to a (or even the) meaning this author intended, and interpretations that aim at a defensible understanding, i.e. an understanding that can be defended as being fair and plausible to the best of our knowledge.” [17, p. 153]. 6 For a more detailed overview of this approach to logic see [18]. 7 The following list of expressions can be used to construct similar examples, which may be familiar from personal experience: ‘.. is important / to .. / for ..’, ‘.. is neccesary / to .. / for..’, ‘.. is correct / according to the standard ..’, ‘.. is expensive / compared to .. / for the person ..’, ‘.. is a restaurant / at the point in time ..’, ‘.. is chancellor / of .. / at the point in time ..’ 8 This should be taken in the spirit of Grice’s [6] maxim of quantity. 9 In contrast: It is a rainy Saturday morning in Palo Alto. I have plans for tennis. ” But my younger son looks out the window and says, ‘It is raining’. I go back to 100 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 75–104

sleep. What my son said was true, because it was raining in Palo Alto. There were all sorts of places where it wasn’t raining: It doesn’t just rain or not, it rains in some places while not raining in others. In order to assign a truth-value to my son’s statement, as I just did, I needed a place. But no component of his statement stood for a place. The verb ‘raining’ supplied the relation rains(t, p) – a dyadic relation between times and places as we have just noted. The tensed auxiliary ‘is’ supplies a time [. . . ].“ [12, p. 138]. 10 See for example: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ make-america-great-again-for-whom_us_58d2d026e4b062043ad4af69 (checked on 9.7.2018) 11 For an example, see [20]. 12 “[...] the ascriptions and statements that are connected with an interpretation should be as fair as possible – in particular, there should be no already known interpretantia or interpretantia which one could “easily” construct which are as accurate but under which the author fares better.” [17, p. 169]. 13 “Pay heed to the interpretandum, its author and the author’s language and interpret accordingly.” [17, p. 163]. 14 This can be seen as a modified version Reinmuth’s path accuracy. “If possible, interpret texts in such a way that their authors reach their (presumed) aims on paths they have (presumably) chosen.” [17, p. 166]. The modification is that interpretation through arity raising deals with paths that the author might have reasonably taken, but in practice did not. 15 Reinmuth calls this accuracy with respect to the verbal context. [17, p. 166]. 16 This is a presumption of normality that can be considered part of the hermeneutic framework employed here. For details on presumptions like these, see [17, p. 171]. 17 “The case of enemy raises interesting issues concerning the relative primacy of the two-place relation enemy of and the one-place property that results when the second argument is filled in – e.g. The one-place property that Richard Nixon had in mind in compiling his “Enemies List”, which might be expressed as “enemy of Richard Nixon”.” [13, p. 263]. 18 Reinmuth provides similar characterizations for malevolently reconstructing arguments: “Someone who reconstructs an argumentative text malevolently puts forward a reconstruens according to which the reconstruendum has an absurd or problematic thesis or contains incorrect inferences or undischarged assumptions or involves absurd or problematic reasons, while he knows of an (at least equally) accurate reconstruens which does not generate such ascriptions or could with reasonable effort produce such a reconstruens.” [17, p. 169]. 19 One area where this practice plays an important role is in the standardization of certain predicates in the applied sciences. When engineers, for example, want to talk about a certain property of a material (e.g. hardness), they will frequently use lower-place predicates, despite the property in question being relative to various factors (e.g. temperature). This does not create inconsistencies since the predicates are tied to standardized procedures which usually set parameters like temperature to a constant value (e.g. 21 ◦C). The trouble-free use of lower-place predicates becomes possible by explicitly keeping certain factors constant. 20[21, p. 44]. Another example can be found in Quine’s “Word and Object”. He talks about the concept of stimulus meaning, using a variety of different-place expressions, only to explicitly state what he considers to be the full arity: “Fully Michael Samhammer: Relative to What? 101

ticketed, therefore, a stimulus meaning is the stimulus meaning modulo n seconds of sentence S for speaker a at time t.“ [15, p. 33]. 21 Including the context of the interpreted utterance, as these last examples did, can be considered a form of accuracy with respect to the verbal context. See [17, p. 166]. 22 This can be seen as a consequence of Reinmuth’s linguistic accuracy and normality presumptions: “Identify the language of the utterance and then the author’s language properly and align the interpretation to the author’s language. Only consider usages that are in accordance with the conventions of the author’s language.” [17, p. 164]. and “Normality presumptions concern the situation of agents and those agents themselves, their (linguistic) behavior and acts, the propositions they hold to be true and their beliefs about each other.” [17, p. 173]. 23 That is not to suggest that these standards do not have fuzzy boundaries. Any- one who has done substantial travel will tell you that even products that pride themselves on their uniformity like Coca Cola and Big Macs can taste slightly diﬀerently in diﬀerent parts of the globe. But the fact that the taste standards for these products have fuzzy boundaries does not mean that they are entirely subjective. 24 MacFarlane phrases such an objection to a similar example after a proposed contextualist treatment: “Intuitively, though, it does seem that we are disagreeing. We certainly take ourselves to be disagreeing. I may say, “Wrong!” or “That’s false” – neither of which would be appropriate if you had said explicity that apples taste good to you.” [12, p. 18]. 25 For more detailed overviews on the debate between contextualists and relativists see [2] and [11]. Cappelen and Hawthorne in particular devote much attention to the general landscape of this ongoing debate. For more detail on the relation of arity raising to this discourse see [19, p. 150].

Michael Samhammer Department of Philosophy University of Greifswald Baderstr. 6 17489 Greifswald, Germany

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Conference Report: SOPhiA 2019

Giuseppe Flavio Artese

The tenth edition of The Salzburg Conference for Young Analytic Phi- losophy 2019 (SOPhiA; Salzburgiense Concilium Omnibus Philosophis Analyticis) took place from September 18 to 20 at the University of Salzburg, Austria. 150 philosophers from 23 different countries (Australia, Austria, Bel- gium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, In- dia, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, and USA) took part in the conference. The number of talks was about 125 and, as in the previous years, they have been mostly given by PhD and Master Students. The majority of the talks were in English and a small mi- nority in German. Furthermore, there have been three plenary lectures (one of them sponsored by the publishing house Metzler), and four affiliated workshops. The titles of the affiliated workshops were: “Mindless Explanations? The Causal and Explanatory Role of Mental States”, “Philosophy of Aging: Theoretical and Practical Aspects”, “Responsi- bility and Agency” and “Time.Image”. A multitude of areas belonging to the analytic philosophical tradition were covered during the whole event. More specifically, the conference was divided into sections explicitly related to different philosophical subdisciplines such as Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ontology, Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language, Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Mind. The conference started with the announcement for the Best Paper Award. The winner was Marco Hausmann (University of Munich) with his paper “The Consequence of the Consequence Argument”. The opening was immediately followed by the first plenary talk given by Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford). The title of the talk was: “Distributional Weights in Cost-Benefit Analysis”. Greaves discussed and compared two main approaches that play important roles in the development of potential government projects that involve both benefits and costs for a group of individuals. Generally, a possible project would

Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 105–108. http://www.kriterion-journal-of-philosophy.org c 2019 The author 106 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 105–108 on balance benefit a group of people, and would on balance harm another one. At this point, the problem that automatically emerges is to understand how benefits/costs are aggregated across people. Theorists generally disagree on how this aggregation should be performed. Some argue that such aggregation needs to be unweighted, because, so they argue, it suffices to sum individuals’ willingness to pay (in monetary terms) to have a project go ahead. In contrast, defenders of the weighted approach argue that a project should go ahead depending on whether the benefit or cost of a fixed size (also in monetary terms) counts for more when it accrues to a poor than to a rich person. Many philosophers seem to consider the weighted approach as the correct one. Greaves discussed sources of opposition to this consensus coming both from governmental and private actors. More particularly, she analysed cases where projects that seem to pass a cost-benefit analysis test actually reduced social wel- fare. The first day of the conference had six parallel sessions (each slot included between six and eight talks) explicitly related to the areas of Epis- temology, Metaphysics and Ontology, Ethics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, and Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. The day ended with a get together in form of a warm evening buffet. On the second day, the sections dedicated to Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language and Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics were substituted by the ones related to the areas of History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Mind. One whole slot was fully occupied by the affiliated workshop “Mindless Explanations? The Causal and Explanatory Role of Mental States”. The other sections remained unchanged. In the afternoon, Philip Kitcher (Columbia University) held a plenary lecture entitled “Pragmatism, Truth, and Progress”. Roughly, Kitcher tried to shed light on and reconcile two different approaches to the notion of truth: Pragmatism and Tarski’s formal account. In Kitcher’s investigation the notion of progress (seen under pragmatist lenses in the sense of allowing for solving problems) played a central role. In his view, truth emerges as you solve problems. Potential truths remain as such and improve their qualifications the longer they remain effective in problem-solving. Kitcher also discussed how his approach can become useful in clarifying the idea of correspondence between representations and the world. After the plenary, the conference hosted a Session: Open Access Publishing – Info and Discussion. On this occasion, Christoph Schirmer, senior commissioning editor at the publishing house De Gruyter gave Giuseppe Flavio Artese: Conference Report: SOPhiA 2019 107 a short introduction into current developments in scholarly publishing. The introduction was followed by Q&A and a vivid discussion. The remainder of the day was assigned to the previously mentioned workshops. The workshop “Mindless Explanations? The Causal and Explanatory Role of Mental States” featured talks of Margit Scheibel (University of Duesseldorf), Maria Sekatskaya (University of Duessel- dorf), David Hommen (University of Duesseldorf) and Alexander Geb- harter (University of Groningen). The workshop “Time.Image” featured talks of Sarah Kolb (University of Vienna/Linz), Vivien Grabowski (Uni- versity of Cologne), Maximilian Lehner (University of Linz), and Eva Kernbauer (University of Vienna). The speakers of the workshop “Phi- losophy of Aging: Theoretical and Practical Aspects” were Cristian Saborido (University of Madrid), Pablo Garc´ıa-Barranquero (Univer- sity of Málaga),Michael Breitenbach (University of Salzburg), Mark Rinnerthaler (University of Salzburg), Stefano Giaimo (Max Planck In- stitute for Evolutionary Biology), Günter Lepperdinger (University of Salzburg), Gregor Greslehner (CNRS), and MaëlLemoine (University of Bordeaux). The workshop “Responsibility and Agency” featured talks of Hannah Altehenger (Bielefeld University), Sofia Bonicalzi (LMU Munich), Leonhard Menges (University of Salzburg), and Jan-Willem Wieland (University of Amsterdam). The third day started with the same sessions as the day before (with the only difference that the slot dedicated to Metaphysics and Ontology began in the early evening instead of the morning). In the afternoon, participants had the chance to listen to Hannes Leitgeb, editor in chief of the Springer journal Erkenntnis. His talk aimed at explaining and elucidating the academic publication processes for early-career scholars or, more generally, to participants with less experience in publishing and collaborating with academic journals. Afterward, the parallel talks proceeded without impediments until in the evening the Metzler Lec- ture was given by Hannes Leitgeb (MCMP, LMU Munich). The title of his talk was: “On Merely Expressive Devices”. As the title suggests, Leitgeb developed a new semantics for merely expressive devices (linguistic expressions that can help in expressing or grasping a thought without influencing the truth conditions of the propositions expressed themselves). Roughly, Leitgeb argued that his approach to semantics can throw light on different current philosophical debates in philosophy of language, logic and metaphysics. The conference ended with a closing dinner. The conference was supported by: KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, Land Salzburg, Men- 108 KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, 2019, 33(3): 105–108 tis, J. B. Metzler, Springer, De Gruyter, Stadt Salzburg, Oeh-Salzbug, Oesterreichische Gesellschaft fürPhilosophie (OeGP), and the Univer- sity of Salzburg. The members of the organizing committee were: Albert J. J. Anglberger, Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla, Alexander Gebhar- ter, Gregor Greslehner, Markus Hierl, Sebastian Krempelmeier, Stephen Müller,Raimund Pils, Stefanie Orter and Sebastian Sattlecker. Further information about SOPhiA 2019 is available at: https:// www.sbg.ac.at/sophia/SOPhiA/2019/languages/en/index.php

Giuseppe Flavio Artese Ruhr-University Bochum Department of Psychology Universit¨atsstraße 150 44801 Bochum, Germany