Against "Against Subjectivism" (Part 3)

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6.0 Effing the Ineffable

If we’re going to take a reasons-first approach, it’d be helpful to know what a reason is. Unfortunately, like Parfit, Christian can’t help us:

So what then is a reason? Well, reasons are… undefinable. I could truly tell you that reasons are facts which “count in favor of” an action, belief, or attitude. But “counts in favor” roughly means “gives a reason for” (OWM II, 272). That may be unsatisfactory but that’s also to be expected of a fundamental concept. Nor is this unusual. Other baseline concepts like space, time, consciousness, possibility, and necessity are similarly non-circularly undefinable. The best we can do is wave our hands around and utter enough noises until the thoughts which contain this concept (or that of space, time, etc.) are elicited in another’s mind. This is true even of colors.

We’re given the standard reasons = things that “count in favor,” coupled with the acknowledgement that this doesn’t really get us anywhere. What I take issue with is this: Christian simply declares the concept a “fundamental” concept. Ordinarily, we might expect someone using some term, especially a technical term, to tell us what it means. We’re not told what it means. Instead, Christian suggests that (a) we already use terms like this and (b) we can at best try to point and grunt until someone gets the idea, like colors.

I don’t find either of these satisfactory, though it also remains unclear to me what Christian means by the term being undefinable. That could have a fairly narrow meaning (something like that we can’t give a conceptual analysis or dictionary definition) or something broad (we can’t communicate the concept at all). I don’t have a huge problem with the former, but I do have a problem with the latter. Regardless of whether a concept can be defined, we at least expect people who introduce us to a new term to do something to cause us to acquire the concept.

If a biologist identifies a new organ in an animal, we expect them to be able to tell us what it is. Describe it. Show us a picture. Tell us about what it does. Tell us where we can find it.

If a physicist posits a new particle, they’ll tell us what observations it explains, what problems positing it solves, and what predictions we might make, conditional on the particle existing, that we’d expect if it does exist and that differ from alternative accounts that don’t posit it.

I could go on, but the general point here is that if one throws a new term or concept out there, we typically expect some account of what it is. And in the case of the other terms Christian claims are undefinable, I think we can give an account of all of them, with the possible exception of “consciousness,” which, if it refers to phenomenal consciousness, is a term I explicitly regard as meaningless.

But Parfitian normative reasons aren’t like this. Nobody can tell us what they are, or how they work. They’re mysterious. Those who claim to understand the concept of a reason simply insist they have the concept. People who think they have qualia or phenomenal consciousness do much the same. But terms like space and time readily figure into models in physics. They may be difficult to grasp but they aren’t “primitive” or incapable of being understood.

Personally, I think the notion of a normative reason is a pseudoconcept. I think that what’s happened is that English-speaking philosophers have reified certain terms, like “reason,” and mistakenly taken them to be things-in-themselves, something one can have, something that can be “generated” by facts or desires. But really, it’s just a word that figures into our discourse in various ways but isn’t something independent of those phenomena that we uncontroversially do have, such as desires or beliefs. As a result, the notion of a “reason” can break away from its role in explaining or appealing to our desires and serve some other purpose, a purpose it doesn’t serve in ordinary language and is instead a philosophical invention, a mutated extension of its everyday uses that emerges only in theoretical contexts and that cannot be reabsorbed into ordinary practice in any distinctive way. I could be wrong about this. But I am not convinced any of those other terms are “undefinable” in any nontrivial sense.

But even if they were, why should we induct normative reasons into the hallowed halls of terms like “time” and “space”? How does one identify concepts that belong in this category rather than instances in which one is confused or mistaken and in the possession of a pseudoconcept?

The best we can do is wave our hands around and utter enough noises until the thoughts which contain this concept (or that of space, time, etc.) are elicited in another’s mind.

How does one know when they’ve acquired the concept rather than simply become confused and mistakenly think that they have it? How does one know that one’s concept is the same as someone else’s?

This is true even of colors.

Color discrimination is a functional ability with a well-described basis in features of human anatomy (eyes, the brain, etc.) and physics (light). Since I don’t think there are any qualia at all, including color qualia, I don’t think there is some distinctive phenomenon that resists definability in this case, either. Again, though, this is going to hinge on what one means by something being “undefinable.” Since I’ll have to keep repeating that point, I’ll set these concerns aside for now and simply say this:

My current stance on normative reasons is not that they don’t exist, but that there is no actual concept of a normative reason. I think talk of such reasons is a conceptual confusion invented by philosophers. It’s hard to say more against the concept because so little can be said about it in the first place. And yet despite this, it serves a foundational role in Parfit’s and similar metaethical views. I think this should be a massive red flag.

Christian goes on to say that we may still ask:

When do we have a reason to act?

We can ask this, but I don’t think it means anything. Christian continues:

For every philosophical question, there’s typically a “common sense” answer, at least from the perspective of Western, usually STEM-educated or otherwise analytical individual [sic]. These individual [sic] are usually secular, favor reductive explanations, and operate out of a materialist worldview. Perhaps they’ve even read a little philosophy and are familiar with Kant’s idea of a hypothetical imperative which, translating to our reasons-first language, states that one has a reason to X when one has a desire or aim to X. This seems so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. It’s an apoditic [sic] truth a Kantian would probably say. Wanting to do something counts in favor of doing that thing! Duh! This is the fundamental intuition behind the Subjectivist tradition dating back most famously to Hume.

I really like the emphasis on demographic characteristics influencing people’s worldviews, because this is a point I stress constantly. I don’t know quite why we’d consider the views of this population “common sense” or what that’s supposed to mean, but I don’t personally grant that “one has a reason to X when one has a desire or aim to X.” I suspect Christian and others who say things like this mean it literally: that desires cause there to be reasons, but I think this is confused. I think people have goals and they are motivated to pursue those goals. And I think there are no further facts in the relevant sense. I don’t think their goals (or desires, or aims, or whatever) “give” them reasons or that one “has” reasons. While I might say “Mike has a reason to go to the store,” what I don’t mean is that if Mike desires to get something he could get at the store, this “gives” him a reason to go to the store. What I mean is something like “It would serve Mike’s (or some other person’s) goals to go to the store.” Talk of desires (or any other facts) “giving” reasons should be understood as a figure of speech. I worry that philosophers may have inadvertently elevated mere figures of speech to the status of serious metaphysical theses. I’ve said more about this elsewhere, such as here, but I’ll have more to say about this in the future.

I don’t think wanting things “counts in favor” of doing them since I deny that this is meaningful. And I don’t think subjectivism should be saddled with the conceptual confusions that plague realists. In other words, I don’t think desires “give us reasons” or “count in favor” of actions any more than anything else does. So my account rejects any kind of metaphysically or conceptually laden subjectivism if it, too, takes such notions on board by adopting ineffable conceptions of “reasons.” Note, in other words, that so long as subjectivism or any other antirealist account is saddled with weird conceptions of “reasons,” then its problems may stem (at least in part) from this rather than whatever other issues the position has. Ironically, then, the main issue with some antirealist positions may be that they’re too much like realism.

I don’t want to dwell on the notion of reasons being “undefinable” too much, so I’ll cut things short here. I’ll end with two remarks.

First, that “reasons” talk is “undefinable” should be taken as a significant red flag about a view. It is always better to define or in some way communicate what you mean than to concede that you’re unable to do so and evoke a mysterious or obscure notion that you can’t explain.

Second, framing these matters in terms of “reasons” is a relatively recent, parochial development. It is quite strange when proponents of such views take their perspective to be so inescapably self-evident that they don’t bother to ensure that others think the same way, either historically or in the present. There is little empirical evidence that ineffable notions of normative reasons are a feature of ordinary thought or language, among native English speakers or otherwise. As such, those who claim to “have” the concepts in question are not entitled to insist that their possession of such concepts is ordinary, typical, or representative of some universal way of thinking. That’s an empirical question, and nobody’s done the work to show that it’s true. So people allegedly in possession of these concepts are making a mistake when they treat those, like me, who are skeptical that there even is a concept to be had as though we are psychological outliers: this has yet to be demonstrated.