Reasoning and normative beliefs: not too sophisticated

Abstract

Does reasoning to a certain conclusion necessarily involve a normative belief in support of that conclusion? In many recent discussions of the nature of reasoning, such a normative belief condition is rejected. One main objection is that it requires too much conceptual sophistication and thereby excludes certain reasoners, such as small children. I argue that this objection is mistaken. Its advocates overestimate what is necessary for grasping the normative concepts required by the condition, while seriously underestimating the importance of such concepts for our most fundamental agential capacities. Underlying the objection is the observation that normative thoughts do not necessarily cross our minds during reasoning. I show that proponents of the normative belief condition can accommodate this observation by taking the required normative belief to guide the reasoning process and offer a novel account of what such guidance consists in.

Keywords:

• reasoning
• taking condition
• normative belief condition
• sophistication objection
• guidance

Acknowledgements

This paper includes material presented at various occasions in Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Münster and Vienna. I have greatly benefited from the discussions on these occasions. I am especially grateful to Sinan Dogramaci, Jan Gertken, Ulf Hlobil, Benjamin Kiesewetter, Christian Kietzmann, Errol Lord, Susanne Mantel, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Michael Smith, Ralph Wedgwood, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andreas Müller is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He is currently completing the manuscript of a book entitled Constructing Practical Reasons. He also works on the moral relevance of consent and co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent (2018).

ORCID

Andreas Müller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8911-9897

Notes

1 Many authors acknowledge such benefits, including Audi (1993), Boghossian (2014), Hlobil (2014) and Valaris (2014).

2 Versions of this objection have been raised by Winters (1983, 209), Audi (1993, 241), Wedgwood (2006, 675), Broome (2013, 229), Boghossian (2014, 6–7) and McHugh and Way (2016, 317).

3 There are other objections against the normative belief condition. In particular, it is often accused of leading into a vicious regress, see e.g. Valaris (2014) and Wright (2014). I cannot address these other objections in this paper, but I do so elsewhere, see Müller (2018, ch. 2).

4 Reasoning can also result in dropping an attitude (cf. Harman 1986, ch. 1). However, like Broome (2013, 221), Boghossian (2014, 3), and many others I will focus on reasoning that results in the formation of a new attitude.

5 McHugh and Way also focus on the kind of reasoning Boghossian is concerned with, which they take to be “a personal-level phenomenon, to be contrasted with subpersonal information-processing” (2016, 314).

6 Joseph Raz (2011, ch. 7) denies that there is a form of reasoning that concludes with an intention. He claims that all reasoning concludes with a belief. Others, particularly those inspired by Aristotle, claim that practical reasoning concludes with an action (see, e.g. Anscombe 1963, 57–62). I think that these authors are mistaken, but the issue is largely independent of the argument in this paper and I will not address it in what follows.

7 See § 6 for a more detailed account of the reasoning process and the roles various attitudes play in it.

8 This is only the first half of the Taking Condition, the second half states that the thinker draws the conclusion because he takes it to be supported by the premises (Boghossian 2014, 5).

9 Cf. Audi (1993), Koziolek (2017), Leite (2008), Neta (2013), Pauer-Studer (2014), Thomson (1965) and Valaris (2014).

10 I understand “being cognisant of p” as entailing that p, similar to “being aware of p”.

11 This does not mean that requiring an attitude with normative content is the only way to accommodate that intuition. Some authors suggest that taking something to be a reason can be understood in terms of treating it as a reason, where this only involves a complex disposition and does not require any normative concepts or attitudes (cf. Sylvan 2015, 2016). This paper is not intended to refute such views, and it does not address them. My aim here is to defend accounts of reasoning that include NBC against a common objection, not to establish that those accounts are overall preferable to their alternatives.

12 I defend this assumption elsewhere, see Müller (2018, ch. 5). For a helpful discussion, see also Way (2015).

13 Hlobil argues that on the interpretation of the Taking Condition that Boghossian (2014) himself ultimately endorses, it actually fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of (IMP). But, as Hlobil explains, this is because Boghossian’s reasons to reject a doxastic interpretation of the Taking Condition – which include the sophistication objection – commit him to denying that “taking” amounts to a propositional attitude at all. That makes it difficult to see how (IMP) could be explained by reference to a consistency constraint that is violated by the “taking” involved in the reasoning and the judgement that it is not good reasoning, because such constraints appear to only cover attitudes with propositional content (Hlobil 2014, 425). NBC requires a belief, so it does not face this problem.

14 Related concerns are also raised by certain non-human animals who appear to engage in mental processes akin to reasoning. They, too, provide counterexamples to NBC only if these processes qualify as the kind of active, conscious, person-level reasoning I identified in § 2. Even if we acknowledge that not all of them amount to the purely automatic processes that are characteristic of system 1 in humans, this strikes me as implausible, partly because those processes lack the connection to justificatory practices I point out below. However, fully addressing the complexities of animal cognition goes beyond the scope of this paper.

15 See e.g. Winters (1983, 209), Audi (1993, 241), Wedgwood (2006, 675), Broome (2013, 229), Boghossian (2014, 6–7) and McHugh and Way (2016, 317).

16 The same is true for the “members of primitive cultures” that feature in Winters’ other example (Winters 1983, 209).

17 Note that her ability to understand and answer such requests also shows that she has at least a rudimentary understanding of believing and doing something, i.e. of the kind of things that NBC requires reasoners to believe themselves to have reasons for.

18 Of course, advocates of NBC still bear the burden to make a compelling positive case for it and show that accounts of reasoning that embrace the condition are preferable to those that do not. Discharging that burden is not the aim of this paper.

19 I adopt the terminology of premise- and conclusion-attitudes from Broome (2013, 221).

20 See Harman (1986, ch. 1), Raz (2011, ch. 7), Broome (2013, 221–25) and Boghossian (2014, 1–2).

21 Hence, the “considerations” from which someone reasons (as NBC puts it) are the contents of the premise-attitudes, not the attitudes themselves.

22 This far, I agree with Wedgwood (2006) and Broome (2013, ch. 12). But, as I explain below, I think that there is an additional role for normative beliefs to play in the reasoning process.

23 See Valaris (2014) for a critique of this orthodoxy.

24 Thus, insofar as the manifestation of a disposition can be said to occur because of its stimulus, I also accept the second part of Boghossian’s Taking Condition, according to which the conclusion-attitude is formed because the reasoner takes it to be supported by the premises (2014, 5; see also note 8).

25 An objection like this is raised by Valaris (2014, 107–108). Rather than rejecting NBC, he suggests giving up the causal conception of reasoning.

26 Note that at this point in the discussion, the issue is not whether reasoning necessarily involves a normative belief, but whether, assuming that it does, the role of that belief can be distinguished from that of a premise-attitude. On that assumption, the Guidance condition allows us to draw this distinction.

27 Of course, they need not deny that the premise- or conclusion-attitudes can include normative beliefs. After all, sometimes we do think consciously about what we have reason to do or believe.

28 Note also that, on the account of guidance proposed here, such guidance does not involve another episode of reasoning in which the guiding attitude is somehow applied to one’s reasoning. To say that an attitude guides an episode of reasoning is simply to characterize it as a stimulus attitude with a certain modal property. As I argue in Müller (2018, ch. 2), this allows advocates of NBC to avoid the objection of leading into an infinite regress (see note 3).

29 One reason for him to do so is the sophistication objection (Wedgwood 2006, 675).