Reason explanation a first-order rationalizing account

Abstract

How do reason explanations explain? One view is that they require the deployment of a tacit psychological theory; another is that even if no tacit theory is involved, we must still conceive of reasons as mental states. By focusing on the subjective nature of agency, and by casting explanations as responses to ‘why’ questions that assuage agents' puzzlement, reason explanations can be profitably understood as part of our traffic in first-order content amongst perspectival subjects. An outline is offered of such an account of reason explanation, one that fully acknowledges the distinctive first-order first-person normative perspective of agency.

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were given at departmental seminars in Reading and Bristol; at the Moral Sciences Club Cambridge; at the St John's Moral Sciences Club Cambridge; and at the School of Advanced Study seminar series at the University of London. In addition to thanking the audiences at these talks for useful feedback I would particularly like to thank Peter Lipton and Jennifer Hornsby, and two anonymous referees for a range of useful comments and objections. I should also like to thank King's College Cambridge for the research fellowship that made work on this paper possible.

Notes

Because ‘belief’ is used both for the relational property and for one of the relata (what is believed), there is much more scope for relation/relata conflation in the ‘belief/belief’ case than in the ‘marriage/spouse’ case.

Kant overstates things when he says ‘We cannot say that anything in nature ought to be other than what in all these time-relations it actually is. When we have the course of nature alone in view, “ought” has no meaning whatsoever’ (Kant 1933, 472–73).

Melden, in a similar vein, suggests that motive-citing is ‘giving a fuller characterization of the action’ (1961, 88).

One way of cashing out this problem is that the account here seems to be an account of ‘justificatory’ reasons, not ‘motivating’ reasons.

Brandom (1995, Chap. 8) elaborates upon the cross-perspectival role of ‘belief’. He puts his account of the cross-perspectival discursive role of ‘belief’ to use in trying to secure the notions of representation and objectivity for his inferentialism.

Robert Gordon argues that ‘belief’ is secondary to ‘factive’ forms of mental discourse (1986b, see especially 130–34).

A point stressed by Stone and Davies (1996, 136).

On the ‘theory’ view, by way of contrast the elements which secure explanation are not the elements which fall within the agent's point of view, they are, rather, the systematic causal properties which fall within the point of view of a party other than the agent.

It is no accident that the keenest advocate of instrumentalism about mentality declares his ‘starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical sciences’ adding that ‘This is the orthodox choice today in the English-speaking philosophical world’ (Dennett 1987, 5).