Are you actually able to address my critique or will you avoid the critique and change the topic to whether you believe I read your work (which we should agree you should have no objective reason to).
In short, are you actually in pursuit of truth and open to having your ideas challenged. or are you just another fake philosophy blogger on here whose too weak minded to have your ideas challenged. Original comment below.
This is an interesting set of reasons to not accept reasons, which makes the argument self-defeating.
See the below article on what a “reason” is (happy to address any questions or critiques). But in short, a reason is an objective explanation, they serve to reduce doubt of something for anyone who understood the relevant meanings.
This is my “last chance” I am offering before I dismiss this viewpoint entirely. This is actually quite polite as I’m providing the author a chance to defend his position notwithstanding his prior failure to do so. A true philosopher would take it, a fake one wouldn’t.
I’m new to your work so apologies if you’ve answered this previously:
Do you think the argument here can be extended to epistemic reasons? For example, “I have a good reason to believe X is true”
Like if we extend the analytic anti-realist account naively this would be read as something like “my desire to form true beliefs leads me to believe X”
But is this really enough anchoring for epistemic reasons?
Intuitively it seems like epistemic reasons have better grounding than moral reasons because “good” epistemic reasons allow us to track truth more reliably.
But someone could always come along and say they don’t care about tracking truth and there’s no stance independent reasons to track truth.
Yes, I reject all normative reasons, not just moral reasons. This includes epistemic reasons. And yes, I think a desire for true beliefs is sufficient to do epistemology; I don't know exactly what you have in mind by "anchoring" but I don't think there are epistemic reasons so I don't think we need to anchor them.
Basically I’m sympathetic to the premises in parity arguments which draw an equivalence between moral norms and epistemic norms. So, by my lights, we should either accept both or reject both.
Sometimes when I ask moral anti-realists about epistemic norms they feel the intuition that these norms should be grounded stance-independently and try to draw a principled distinction between moral and epistemic norms which I think gets them into trouble.
I think your move of just rejecting all normative reasons - including epistemic ones - is much cleaner.
I think the aim of converging on truth is just baked in from the beginning to the notion of "epistemology", at least the way we normally use that word. Or at least every epistemological discourse I've participated in has presumed that arriving at truth was desirable.
You could certainly imagine a differently-scoped conversation about how one decides what to think or what to believe that did not presume one wanted to be correct, but I'm not sure it would be very interesting.
I'm almost entirely in agreement with you. But I don't see the need to deny at we have literal reasons, even if all reason-talk terminates in desires. I can completely agree with your picture of what's going on, but, to me, having a reason, even literally, just means the same thing that you mean when you use it figuratively. It's sort of a real pattern, in Dennett's sense, so I'm comfortable saying they actually exist and people literally have reasons.
I think the distinction between reasons and desires is useful, but that's maybe because I think of desires differently than you do. For you, it seems, desires determine what we ultimately do after considering all options, so that we always desire to do only what we end up doing. I don't think of desires this way. I think we can have competing desires. Somebody can really desire to eat a cake, but choose not to eat it, because the desire to be healthy wins out.
With this in mind, I think the distinction between "desire" and "reason" indicates a distinction between terminal goals and instrumental goals. So I might say that I desire to eat the cake, but I have reason not to, because it conflicts with my greater desire to be healthy. I'm less inclined to say that I desire to avoid the cake, even if that's what I actually do.
(Although, in the right context, I might agree that I desire to avoid the cake. If someone asks me if I want the cake, and pragmatically I interpret this as a request for a decision to eat it or not, then I will say that I don't want it.)
But yeah, substantively, I agree with you. It makes no real sense to say that we have stance-independent reasons to do anything, and I can only motivated by reasons that relate to my desires/values.
The literal sense of denial is one that avoids reifying on the basis of grammar. Real patterns talk shouldn’t be taken as a basis for granting ontological status to incidental features of the way people happen to speak in English.
For you, it seems, desires determine what we ultimately do after considering all options
Not sure how I gave that impression but I don’t think that (I wrote a lot so maybe I got sloppy somewhere). That desires are tied to motivation doesn’t mean that all desires ultimately prompt action. Not all motivations are acted on.
I think we can have competing desires. Somebody can really desire to eat a cake, but choose not to eat it, because the desire to be healthy wins out.
I also think that. What I’d add, though, is it’s important to emphasize that “desire” is a folk term, and that a technical language of human psychology might not always describe conflicting processes contributing to our motivations as “desires.”
Entirely aside from whether you and I are roughly correct, I am frustrated at the poor quality of Bentham’s arguments and his general lack of engagement with views like mine.
I think I'm more ontologically liberal than you. I don't think granting ontological status to something is a big deal. Because I don't really think these ontological questions really have determinate answers. We deem things to exist or not to exist, on pragmatic considerations, and that's all there is to it. So reifying doesn't bother me, at least until it leads to unwarranted metaphysical leaps like moral realism.
Features of the way people happen to speak in English may correspond to real patterns, and may be more than incidental. I think reasons and seemings (or related concepts/words such as the verb "to seem" at any rate) are real patterns, and not merely incidental. I would guess that there are corresponding words in most other languages too, since languages tend to find words for real patterns, and I think these are real patterns. If this were not the case, then that would be evidence against the view that they are real patterns.
(However, I am in general very sympathetic to the idea that people may be led astray by incidental features of language. I've made the same point in a debate with Mark Slight about the knowledge argument. I think that the idea that knowing-what-it's-like is a species of knowing a factual proposition is quite possibly a mistake introduced by taking incidental features of language too seriously.)
Sorry for getting you wrong about desire. It's an impression I picked up somewhere from your longer article, but I can't find what gave me that idea now, so let's just assume it's a reading comprehension problem.
> I am frustrated at the poor quality of Bentham’s arguments and his general lack of engagement with views like mine.
They would be whatever values the person has in mind when they say that.
>>If that's the case, then "you have a reason" means "you have a desire" which is just plain old vanilla internalism
What kind of internalism are you talking about?
>> This removes all normativity as the only claims being made are descriptive, natural claims. This is akin to nihilism.
I don't think the only claims people make have to be natural, so that doesn't seem right. In any case, I think normativity is a grammatical or linguistic category, not a metaphysical one. As far as whether such a view entails "nihilism," you'll have to be very specific about what exactly that means. That term is used in all sorts of ways, some of which are loaded with various negative connotations I wouldn't accept as an accurate characterization of my position.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said "what are *the* values." I misread your remark.
As far as what "values," are, as I said I'm using the term to distinguish it from the term "desires." "Values" is thus being used as a placeholder term to distinguish the relevant considerations from desires. It is neither my purpose nor goal to offer some full account of what would be relevant from an antirealist view if we're not opting for the term "desires" but something else instead. But a very rough account would be something like this: if you considered all of the factors that motivate you, the relevant values would be those that you yourself had a higher-order preference for taking precedent over the others. In very crude terms, it would be something like "those desires when in a sober state of mind one considered to have greater overarching worth than one's other desires." The problem with any of these terms: value, goal, desire, etc. is that they don't carve the relevant aspects of human cognition at their joints, and we don't have the research or vocabulary to do so in an empirically informed and robust way, at least not yet.
Appreciate the article, I see the appeal in this view. I lack sufficient engagement with this topic, if I ask you, could you please outline what would, hypothetically be the situation that would satisfy the criterion of an empirically informed and robust research and vocabulary? I struggle to conceptualize the aim (likely to my insufficient engagement with the topic).
I think there can be a layer in between purely descriptiveness and saying that universally true values exist.
For instance, you can say “I believe that human well being is a good thing, which values promote that?” I think most people implicitly try to optimize something like that, and so humanity continues to function. But there’s no third party enforcing it, or declaring it true.
Subjectivism as a view isn't bound to the notion that truth is determined by "desires." What it holds is that whether a moral statement is true or false depends on individual standards. If a person believes stealing is wrong, and regards this belief as a reflection of their preferences, values, standards, or whatever, then this is entirely consistent with subjectivism.
Are you actually able to address my critique or will you avoid the critique and change the topic to whether you believe I read your work (which we should agree you should have no objective reason to).
In short, are you actually in pursuit of truth and open to having your ideas challenged. or are you just another fake philosophy blogger on here whose too weak minded to have your ideas challenged. Original comment below.
This is an interesting set of reasons to not accept reasons, which makes the argument self-defeating.
See the below article on what a “reason” is (happy to address any questions or critiques). But in short, a reason is an objective explanation, they serve to reduce doubt of something for anyone who understood the relevant meanings.
https://neonomos.substack.com/p/what-is-a-reason
Why are you so angry? Do you think Lance, or anyone for that matter, is going to want to engage with someone so ill-mannered?
This is my “last chance” I am offering before I dismiss this viewpoint entirely. This is actually quite polite as I’m providing the author a chance to defend his position notwithstanding his prior failure to do so. A true philosopher would take it, a fake one wouldn’t.
Nice post!
I’m new to your work so apologies if you’ve answered this previously:
Do you think the argument here can be extended to epistemic reasons? For example, “I have a good reason to believe X is true”
Like if we extend the analytic anti-realist account naively this would be read as something like “my desire to form true beliefs leads me to believe X”
But is this really enough anchoring for epistemic reasons?
Intuitively it seems like epistemic reasons have better grounding than moral reasons because “good” epistemic reasons allow us to track truth more reliably.
But someone could always come along and say they don’t care about tracking truth and there’s no stance independent reasons to track truth.
Yes, I reject all normative reasons, not just moral reasons. This includes epistemic reasons. And yes, I think a desire for true beliefs is sufficient to do epistemology; I don't know exactly what you have in mind by "anchoring" but I don't think there are epistemic reasons so I don't think we need to anchor them.
Cool, this makes sense.
Basically I’m sympathetic to the premises in parity arguments which draw an equivalence between moral norms and epistemic norms. So, by my lights, we should either accept both or reject both.
Sometimes when I ask moral anti-realists about epistemic norms they feel the intuition that these norms should be grounded stance-independently and try to draw a principled distinction between moral and epistemic norms which I think gets them into trouble.
I think your move of just rejecting all normative reasons - including epistemic ones - is much cleaner.
I think the aim of converging on truth is just baked in from the beginning to the notion of "epistemology", at least the way we normally use that word. Or at least every epistemological discourse I've participated in has presumed that arriving at truth was desirable.
You could certainly imagine a differently-scoped conversation about how one decides what to think or what to believe that did not presume one wanted to be correct, but I'm not sure it would be very interesting.
Nice work, Lance.
I'm almost entirely in agreement with you. But I don't see the need to deny at we have literal reasons, even if all reason-talk terminates in desires. I can completely agree with your picture of what's going on, but, to me, having a reason, even literally, just means the same thing that you mean when you use it figuratively. It's sort of a real pattern, in Dennett's sense, so I'm comfortable saying they actually exist and people literally have reasons.
I think the distinction between reasons and desires is useful, but that's maybe because I think of desires differently than you do. For you, it seems, desires determine what we ultimately do after considering all options, so that we always desire to do only what we end up doing. I don't think of desires this way. I think we can have competing desires. Somebody can really desire to eat a cake, but choose not to eat it, because the desire to be healthy wins out.
With this in mind, I think the distinction between "desire" and "reason" indicates a distinction between terminal goals and instrumental goals. So I might say that I desire to eat the cake, but I have reason not to, because it conflicts with my greater desire to be healthy. I'm less inclined to say that I desire to avoid the cake, even if that's what I actually do.
(Although, in the right context, I might agree that I desire to avoid the cake. If someone asks me if I want the cake, and pragmatically I interpret this as a request for a decision to eat it or not, then I will say that I don't want it.)
But yeah, substantively, I agree with you. It makes no real sense to say that we have stance-independent reasons to do anything, and I can only motivated by reasons that relate to my desires/values.
The literal sense of denial is one that avoids reifying on the basis of grammar. Real patterns talk shouldn’t be taken as a basis for granting ontological status to incidental features of the way people happen to speak in English.
For you, it seems, desires determine what we ultimately do after considering all options
Not sure how I gave that impression but I don’t think that (I wrote a lot so maybe I got sloppy somewhere). That desires are tied to motivation doesn’t mean that all desires ultimately prompt action. Not all motivations are acted on.
I think we can have competing desires. Somebody can really desire to eat a cake, but choose not to eat it, because the desire to be healthy wins out.
I also think that. What I’d add, though, is it’s important to emphasize that “desire” is a folk term, and that a technical language of human psychology might not always describe conflicting processes contributing to our motivations as “desires.”
Entirely aside from whether you and I are roughly correct, I am frustrated at the poor quality of Bentham’s arguments and his general lack of engagement with views like mine.
I think I'm more ontologically liberal than you. I don't think granting ontological status to something is a big deal. Because I don't really think these ontological questions really have determinate answers. We deem things to exist or not to exist, on pragmatic considerations, and that's all there is to it. So reifying doesn't bother me, at least until it leads to unwarranted metaphysical leaps like moral realism.
Features of the way people happen to speak in English may correspond to real patterns, and may be more than incidental. I think reasons and seemings (or related concepts/words such as the verb "to seem" at any rate) are real patterns, and not merely incidental. I would guess that there are corresponding words in most other languages too, since languages tend to find words for real patterns, and I think these are real patterns. If this were not the case, then that would be evidence against the view that they are real patterns.
(However, I am in general very sympathetic to the idea that people may be led astray by incidental features of language. I've made the same point in a debate with Mark Slight about the knowledge argument. I think that the idea that knowing-what-it's-like is a species of knowing a factual proposition is quite possibly a mistake introduced by taking incidental features of language too seriously.)
Sorry for getting you wrong about desire. It's an impression I picked up somewhere from your longer article, but I can't find what gave me that idea now, so let's just assume it's a reading comprehension problem.
> I am frustrated at the poor quality of Bentham’s arguments and his general lack of engagement with views like mine.
Me too!
There's nothing pragmatic about reifyng reasons. It's what's causing this confused mess.
They would be whatever values the person has in mind when they say that.
>>If that's the case, then "you have a reason" means "you have a desire" which is just plain old vanilla internalism
What kind of internalism are you talking about?
>> This removes all normativity as the only claims being made are descriptive, natural claims. This is akin to nihilism.
I don't think the only claims people make have to be natural, so that doesn't seem right. In any case, I think normativity is a grammatical or linguistic category, not a metaphysical one. As far as whether such a view entails "nihilism," you'll have to be very specific about what exactly that means. That term is used in all sorts of ways, some of which are loaded with various negative connotations I wouldn't accept as an accurate characterization of my position.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said "what are *the* values." I misread your remark.
As far as what "values," are, as I said I'm using the term to distinguish it from the term "desires." "Values" is thus being used as a placeholder term to distinguish the relevant considerations from desires. It is neither my purpose nor goal to offer some full account of what would be relevant from an antirealist view if we're not opting for the term "desires" but something else instead. But a very rough account would be something like this: if you considered all of the factors that motivate you, the relevant values would be those that you yourself had a higher-order preference for taking precedent over the others. In very crude terms, it would be something like "those desires when in a sober state of mind one considered to have greater overarching worth than one's other desires." The problem with any of these terms: value, goal, desire, etc. is that they don't carve the relevant aspects of human cognition at their joints, and we don't have the research or vocabulary to do so in an empirically informed and robust way, at least not yet.
Appreciate the article, I see the appeal in this view. I lack sufficient engagement with this topic, if I ask you, could you please outline what would, hypothetically be the situation that would satisfy the criterion of an empirically informed and robust research and vocabulary? I struggle to conceptualize the aim (likely to my insufficient engagement with the topic).
It would just be doing conventional psychological research.
I think there can be a layer in between purely descriptiveness and saying that universally true values exist.
For instance, you can say “I believe that human well being is a good thing, which values promote that?” I think most people implicitly try to optimize something like that, and so humanity continues to function. But there’s no third party enforcing it, or declaring it true.
Subjectivism as a view isn't bound to the notion that truth is determined by "desires." What it holds is that whether a moral statement is true or false depends on individual standards. If a person believes stealing is wrong, and regards this belief as a reflection of their preferences, values, standards, or whatever, then this is entirely consistent with subjectivism.