Volume 19 (2006), Issue 5
Manuscripts:
Neil Levy
Cognitive Scientific Challenges to Morality
Recent findings in neuroscience, evolutionary biology and psychology seem to threaten the existence or the objectivity of morality. Moral theory and practice is founded, ultimately, upon moral intuition, but these empirical findings seem to show that our intuitions are responses to nonmoral features of the world, not to moral properties. They therefore might be taken to show that our moral intuitions are systematically unreliable. I examine three cognitive scientific challenges to morality, and suggest possible lines of reply to them. I divide these replies into two groups: we might confront the threat, showing that it does not have the claimed implications for morality; or we might bite the bullet, accepting that the claims have moral implications, but incorporating these claims into morality. I suggest that unless we are able to bite the bullet, when confronted by cognitive scientific challenges, there is a real possibility that morality will be threatened. This fact gives us a weighty reason to adopt a metaethics that makes it relatively easy to bite cognitive scientific bullets. Moral constructivism, in one of its many forms, makes these bullets more palatable; therefore, the cognitive scientific challenges provide us with an additional reason to adopt a constructivist metaethics.
Georg Northoff & Kristina Musholt
How Can Searle Avoid Property Dualism? Epistemic-Ontological Inference and Autoepistemic Limitation
Searle suggests biological naturalism as a solution to the mind-brain problem that escapes traditional terminology with its seductive pull towards either dualism or materialism. We reconstruct Searle’s argument and demonstrate that it needs additional support to represent a position truly located between dualism and materialism. The aim of our paper is to provide such an additional argument. We introduce the concept of “autoepistemic limitation” that describes our principal inability to directly experience our own brain as a brain from the first-person perspective. The neglect of the autoepistemic limitation leads to inferences from epistemic properties to ontological features—we call this “epistemic-ontological inference.” Searle attempts to avoid such epistemic-ontological inference but does not provide a sufficient argument. Once the autoepistemic limitation is considered, epistemic-ontological inference can be avoided. As a consequence, one can escape traditional terminology with its seductive pull towards either dualism or materialism.
Continuing Discussions:
Michael Cholbi
Belief Attribution and the Falsification of Motive Internalism
Belief attribution and the falsification of motive internalism The metatethical position known as motive internalism (MI) holds that moral beliefs are necessarily motivating. Adina Roskies (2003) has recently argued against MI by citing patients with injuries to the ventromedial (VM) cortex as counterexamples to MI. Roskies claims that not only do these patients not act in accordance with their professed moral beliefs, they exhibit no physiological or affective evidence of being motivated by these beliefs. I argue that Roskies’ attempt to falsify MI is unpersuasive because the evidence used to attribute the relevant moral beliefs to VM patients is insufficient: Contra Roskies, that VM patients are proficient moral reasoners does not establish the presence of these moral beliefs. In addition, the linguistic evidence Roskies cites (a) is vulnerable to methodological worries about its reliability or authenticity, (b) does not override counterevidence derived from the patients’ nonlinguistic behavior, and (c) is undermined by VM patients’ inability to correctly attribute moral beliefs to others. I conclude with a proposal about how MI should be interpreted, given that it is not falsified by empirical evidence of the sort put forth by Roskies.
Adina Roskies
Patients With Ventromedial Frontal Damage Have Moral Beliefs
Michael Cholbi thinks that the claim that motive internalism (MI), the thesis that moral beliefs or judgments are intrinsically motivating, is the best explanation for why moral beliefs are usually accompanied by moral motivation. He contests arguments that patients with ventromedial (VM) frontal brain damage are counterexamples to MI by denying that they have moral beliefs. I argue that none of the arguments he offers to support this contention are viable. First, I argue that given Cholbi's own commitments, he cannot account for VM patients' behavior without attributing moral beliefs to them. Secondly, I show that his arguments that we should not believe their self-reports are unconvincing. In particular, his argument that they cannot self-attribute moral beliefs because they have a defective theory of mind is flawed, for it relies upon a misreading of both the empirical and theoretical literatures. The avenues remaining to Cholbi to support motive internalism are circular, for they rely upon an internalist premise. I provide an alternative picture consistent with neuroscientific and psychological data from both normals and those with VM damage, in which connections between moral belief and motivation are contingent. The best explanation for all the data is thus one in which MI is false.
Michael Cholbi
Moral Belief Attribution: A Reply to Roskies
I here defend my earlier doubts that VM patients serve as counterexamples to motivational internalism by highlighting the difficulties of belief attribution in light of holism about the mental and by suggesting that a better understanding of the role of emotions in the self-attribution of moral belief places my earlier Davidsonian "theory of mind" argument in a clearer light.
Hanni K. Bouma
Radical Interpretation and High-Functioning Autistic Speakers: A Defense of Davidson on Thought and Language
Donald Davidson argues in “Thought and Talk” (1975/2001f) that all speakers must be interpreters of other speakers: linguistic competence requires the possession of intentional concepts and the ability to attribute intentional states to other people. Andrews (2002) argued that empirical evidence about autism undermines this theoretical claim, for some individuals with autism lack the requisite “theory of mind” skills to be able to interpret, yet are competent speakers. In this paper, Davidson is defended on the grounds that the high-functioning autistic individuals in question have a more robust theory of mind than has been acknowledged, and that this is sufficient for them to be interpreters of other speakers. It is argued, further, that Davidson’s theory would remain intact even if one or more autistic speakers lacking a theory of mind were to exist, as he makes conceptual claims about thought and language that are to begin with not vulnerable to empirical counterexamples.
Kristin Andrews & Ljiljana Radenovic
Speaking Without Interpreting: A Reply to Bouma on Autism and Davidsonian Interpretation
We clarify some points made in Andrews (2002), and defend the claim that Davidson’s account of belief can be and is challenged by the existence of some people with autism. We argue that both Bouma and Andrews (2002) blurred the subtle distinctions between the psychological concepts of theory of mind and joint attention and the Davidsonian concepts of interpretation and triangulation. And we accept that appeal to control group studies is not the appropriate place to look for an individual who can speak but who has significant problems with interpretation. In this paper we argue that by turning to the clinical literature we can more readily find such a challenge to Davidson’s account.
Hanni K. Bouma
High-Functioning Autistic Speakers as Davidsonian Interpreters: A Reply to Andrews and Radenovic
In this paper, I provide further support for my earlier claim that the existence of high-functioning autistic speakers does not undermine Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation. Andrews and Radenovic, in criticizing my arguments for this position, have presented fresh evidence from the clinical literature on autism for the existence of an individual who speaks but does not interpret, and maintain that the existence of such an individual seriously challenges Davidson’s theory. I counter this claim by showing that the evidence they point to in fact better supports the conclusion that this autistic speaker, and others like him, are Davidsonian interpreters.
Book Reviews:
William Ramsey
Review of Timothy T. Rogers & James L. McClelland, Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach
James Phillips
Review of Edwin L. Hersch, From Philosophy to Psychotherapy: A Phenomenological Model for Psychology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis
Leslie Marsh
Review of Robert A. Wilson, Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences—Cognition
Cynthia Townley
Review of Jessica Brown, Anti-Individualism and Knowledge
Keld Stehr Nielsen
Review of Hugh Clapin, Phillip Staines & Peter Slezak (Eds.), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation