Explaining our Knowledge of Normative Supervenience

It is commonly assumed that if normative terms are analyzable in descriptive terms, as claimed by analytic reductionists, this provides an easy explanation why normative supervenience would be a conceptual truth. This chapter argues that our knowledge of normative supervenience has two important features this explanation fails to account for: first, the idea that normative properties supervene on descriptive properties seems obvious to us and, secondly, we don’t come to accept this thesis distributively by finding it plausible in each of its particular instances but rather by seeing a pattern that all normative properties must conform to. An alternative is suggested, an expressivist account of normative supervenience that allows us to explain both of these features. The chapter closes by arguing that they require explanation even on the assumption that normative supervenience is not a conceptual truth. This makes the explanation problem concerning our knowledge of normative supervenience more general than previously thought.

Conceptual Truth, Necessity, and Negation

Throughout his philosophical career, Hilary Putnam was preoccupied with the question of what survives of the traditional notion of a priori truth in light of the recurring historical phenomenon, made prominent by the scientific revolutions of the early decades of the twentieth century, through which “something that was literally inconceivable has turned out to be true” (1962b). Impugning the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, Putnam’s redefinition of “conceptual truth” in terms of “quasi-necessity relative to a conceptual scheme” is meant to accommodate the possibility of transitions of just this sort. In this essay, I trace the origins and development of Putnam’s account of “quasi-necessity.” I try to defend it against some objections naturally arising in connection with the interplay of modality and negation. My main contention is that the main tenets of Putnam’s semantic externalism inform his reconception of conceptual truth, and that they must be recognized to hold of such basic logical notions as those of judgment and negation.

The Coercion Thesis and the Content Problem of Legal Normativity

Chapter 8 addresses the Content Problem of Legal Normativity, arguing that the content of the only first-order motivating reason to which the practices constituting something as a system of law are reasonably contrived to give rise is an objective motivating reason to obey law as a means of avoiding being subject to coercive sanctions. It rejects one possible solution to the Content Problem, arguing that there is nothing in objective norms of practical rationality that would encourage us, even presumptively, to obey a norm simply because it has the status of law. Since there is nothing else in these practices reasonably contrived to give rise to an objective motivating reason with different content, neither the How Problem nor the Content Problem can be solved without assuming it is a conceptual truth that some mandatory legal norms governing non-official behavior provide objective motivating reasons to comply in virtue of being backed with the threat of a coercive sanction.

Causal Efficiency of Intentional Acts

Willusionists claim that recent developments in psychology and neuroscience demonstrate that consciousness is causally inefficient [Carruthers, 2007; Eagleman, 2012; Wegner, 2002]. In section 1, I show that willusionists provide two types of evidence: first, evidence that we do not always know the causes of our actions; second, evidence that we lack introspective awareness of the causal efficiency of our intentional acts.In section 2, I analyze the first type of evidence. Recent research in the field of social psychology has shown that irrelevant factors affect human behavior. For example, it has been shown that pleasant smells make a person more helpful toward strangers [Baron, 1997], whereas images of eyes that a person sees on a poster reduce the likelihood of cheating [Bateson, Nettle, & Roberts, 2006]. I argue that minor influences do not necessarily lead to something more sinister, and the contrary has not been empirically proven so far.In section 3, I analyze the second type of evidence that Daniel Wegner [2002] provides in favor of willusionism. Wegner claims that conscious will is usually understood in one of two ways: (1) «as something that is experienced when we perform an action» [Wegner, 2002, p. 3] or (2) «as a force of mind, a name for the causal link between our minds and our actions» [ibid.]. According to Wegner, it is a conceptual truth that for something to count as an instance of conscious will it must both be (1) felt as voluntary, and (2) causally efficient in bringing about a certain effect. Wegner claims that what satisfies (1) can fail to satisfy (2), and vice versa. The major part of Wegner’s book is the review and analysis of diverse psychological phenomena: automatisms, hypnosis, illusions of control, influence of unconscious factors on human behavior, as well as some neuroscientific data. I briefly review the data provided by Wegner, and come to the conclusion that, although they show that there is a double dissociation between consciously willed processes and the acts that are supposedly caused by these processes, they do not justify further conclusions made by Wegner.According to Wegner, the feeling of conscious will is just an indicator of unconscious processes which, in fact, cause our behavior. I argue that the data considered by Wegner do not provide direct information about the neuronal processes that underlie conscious intentional processes. Moreover, double dissociation can only show that one process neither a necessary nor sufficient cause of another process. It cannot show that one process is not among the causes leading to another process.In section 4, I argue that the experimental data discussed in the article are important for philosophical theories of intentionality.

Relationships Between Law and Morality

This chapter distinguishes three types of inquiry about law. It articulates the two conceptual views about morality and the nature of law that comprise the focus of this volume. First, the chapter explains positivist and anti-positivist views with respect to whether it is a conceptual truth that the criteria of legal validity include moral constraints on the content of law. It then turns to the dispute between inclusive and exclusive positivists with respect to whether it is conceptually possible for a legal system to have content-based moral criteria of validity. Finally, this chapter argues that the claim that conceptual jurisprudence should not be done is either unclear or false.

Law’s Claim of Legitimate Authority

This chapter determines whether the Authority Thesis is true. The Authority Thesis is based on the idea of a conceptual truth that law claims legitimate authority and hence that it is a conceptual truth that law is capable of being legitimate. This is the foundation of the Incorporation Thesis. Insofar as the notion of legitimate authority is a concept with morally normative content, it is important to understand whether it is part of law’s nature that it claims legitimate authority. To this end, the chapter attempts to determine whether the arguments against the Incorporation Thesis succeed, as well as to facilitate a deeper understanding of the conceptual relationships between law and morality.

Debunking, supervenience, and Hume’s Principle

Debunking arguments against both moral and mathematical realism have been pressed, based on the claim that our moral and mathematical beliefs are insensitive to the moral/mathematical facts. In the mathematical case, I argue that the role of Hume’s Principle as a conceptual truth speaks against the debunkers’ claim that it is intelligible to imagine the facts about numbers being otherwise while our evolved responses remain the same. Analogously, I argue, the conceptual supervenience of the moral on the natural speaks presents a difficulty for the debunker’s claim that, had the moral facts been otherwise, our evolved moral beliefs would have remained the same.

Afterword to the Panel Discussion on Armchair Philosophy

In this paper I discuss Timothy Williamson’s panel paper “Armchair Philosophy”, the objections of the participants of the panel discussion and other possible reactions to it. The correspondence of the content of Williamson’s paper to the main themes of his book “Doing Philosophy” is shown, as well as the greater emphasis of his paper on the method of model building, upon which he bases his hope for the future of armchair philosophy. The analysis of the responses to the paper by Williamson received from Daniel Stoljar, Joshua Knobe, Daniel Dennett, and Anton Kuznetsov shows, however, that the version of the armchair philosophy proposed by Williamson does not raise much objections among principal opponents of the armchair approach and thus does not promote an a priori methodology that this kind of philosophy is supposed to defend and promote. More effective defense would require the use of a conceptual analysis that promises getting a priori or conceptual truths. Williamson, however, doubts the prospects for productive conceptual analysis. Nevertheless, the author of this afterword tries to show that the traditional conceptual analysis can be improved and that it is possible that such an improved analysis would perform its function of promoting the radical armchair philosophy much more effectively. Instead of clarifying some more or less interesting concepts conceptual analysis might aim at clarifying our natural beliefs, such as belief in causal dependance of ordinary events, in independent existence of the objects of our experience, in identity of some objects, in other minds, etc. In the process of such a clarifying we can also try to understand some non-trivial relations between our natural beliefs. The author provides an example of such an analysis, resulting in getting a truth which has all the marks of necessary conceptual truth, claiming there are a lot of similar truths to be found.

Beyond Perfect Being Theology

Following seven chapters of negativity, this chapter sketches some positive answers to the questions which perfect being theology has been used, unsuccessfully in the author’s view, to answer. It argues that, in our attempt to discern the divine attributes, there is little hope to finding a starting point in a conceptual truth about God. Rather, the only two real alternatives are the traditional ones: the method of natural theology and what Aquinas calls the science of sacred doctrine. Pursuing a version of the second strategy which begins with assumptions about God which are less specific than, for example, exclusively Christian doctrines is advocated. A positive view of the semantics of ‘God’ is also sketched.