Valuation by behaviour

Abstract

Valuation consists in a positive or negative response by a subject S to an entity X. Any positive or negative response has a structure that involves a cognitive and a non-cognitive component, as well as a reason relationship between these. This structure is shown to be present in the explicit value judgement ‘Hans is a kraut’, and then also pointed out in the reflex-like feeding behaviour of a frog, where S treats X as providing an affordance. The conclusion is that valuation need not involve mental states. The article ends with a discussion of the elusive question: what makes a response positive or negative?

Keywords:

• value judgement
• intentionality
• behaviour
• affordance
• response
• reason

Notes

I will in this paper ignore the possibility of responses that are valuationally neutral such as, perhaps, the contraction of one's pupils when lightness increases.

Putnam (2002) presents this as a central thread in the philosophy of John Dewey.

Locus classicus is Searle (1983).

I admit that in contexts where making a distinction between good-in-a-respect and good-all-things-considered is not crucial, it is quite natural to call the attribution of goodness-in-a-respect ‘evaluation’, or the terms in which this is done ‘evaluative’.

Compare Anderson's (1993, chap. 1) notions of evaluation, experiencing as valuable, valuing and judging as valuable.

Relatedly, think of the debate on ‘fitting attitude’ analyses of intrinsic value (e.g. Heathwood 2008). One of the unstated premises of this debate is that valuation happens by mental states. But what if we substituted ‘fitting attitude’ by ‘fitting response’?

One prominent example is Taylor (1989). It is sometimes even held, e.g. by Elton (2000), that only human beings are genuinely conscious.

Compare Burge (2009, 251), speaking of ‘primitive antecedents of the higher-level types of agency that we as philosophers tend to be most interested in – intentional agency, norm-guided agency, deliberative agency, morally responsible agency, intellectual agency, and so on’. Burge continues: ‘I believe that by setting these higher levels of agency in a broader, more generic framework, we gain insight into them’. Burge's account is focused on representation and does not address valuation.

If it is objected that from a microphysical point of view objects are processes as well, we should note that an organism is a process, or set of processes, that is non-randomly organized in such a way that it is self-preserving and self-renewing.

At least, today's molecular biologists no longer seem to regard DNA as a ‘blueprint’ in any serious sense.

Think of the Frege-Geach objection to emotivism and expressivism in metaethics (see, e.g. Fisher and Kirchin 2006, part 6).

Not that the speaker is supposed to be sincere in his response. I may call Hans a kraut and say that Hitler was evil without actually having contempt for Germans or morally disapproving of those disposed to hurt others.

Perhaps value judgements are primarily thoughts, rather than statements. If so, the value judgements will be the thoughts expressed by the statements. Now, although by itself the thought that Hans is a kraut does not express contempt publicly, the thought does seem to be expressive of contempt. In this way, thoughts may also be prescribing and recommending, borrowing this aspect from their spoken counterparts.

Discussed, for different reasons, by Dennett (1987, 106–16), among others.

Being edible is a different kind of property from being German, and one might argue that it has its reason-giving character already built in. But insofar as the fly's edibility is a genuine fact, this does not seem to affect the parallel with the kraut-example.

The frog's behaviour is obviously not a speech act, so the frog cannot be said to ‘presuppose’ anything. For the moment, I am in (3) and (6) attributing assumptions to the frog to do the same work.

The most ambitious theory along these lines is Millikan (1984).

Thompson (2007, chap. 5) speaks of autopoiesis, or self-creation. No matter how we choose to articulate it, the idea seems quite robust. At issue is not, it seems, whether living entities are really self-maintaining, but how relevant this difference with conventional robots is in making sense of what the frog does.

This term was introduced in the context of Gibson's (1979) theory of perception. Gibson himself used this term in a narrower sense, as ‘action possibilities’. It is not my intention here to convey the canonical sense of this term, if any such sense exists.

I assume here that this does allow for even a majority of false positives.

See, e.g. Dretske (1988, 63–4), who describes how marine bacteria signal oxygen-poor water by means of their so-called magnetosomes.

No doubt, counterexamples could be cooked up to show that not every reaction occurring in virtue of a signalled affordance is plausibly called a response. But the claim is not that it must always be determinate whether some reaction is a response or not.

Where ‘self’ is to be understood in the sense of ‘biological’ or ‘bodily’ self, not ‘psychological’, ‘social’, or ‘narrative’ self.

Note the absence of terms such as ‘health’ or ‘well-being’. These are typical all-things-considered notions and, as such, frustratingly imprecise.

I am aware that many readers would rather confine the normative terminology of reasons and rationality, needs, concerns, success/failure, good/bad, and selves to the domain of human affairs. And there is no doubt that in that domain, these terms take on a richer meaning. But in order to develop the naturalistic and ‘embodied’ conception of agency that I referred to in section 1, and to make visible the continuity between primitive and human agency, it is crucially important to signal the normativity that is already present at the level of primitive organisms.

Note that on the proposed scheme the response is supposed to be ‘aimed at’ some F or G concerning X. This is not a coincidence. ‘Response’ is a teleological notion, with conditions of success and failure built in. Without these, there will be (causal) reactions, but not (intentional) responses.

I have anyway to assume this. If they can, a general naturalistic discussion of valuation such as this would be pointless from the very start.

In the context of his discussion of emotions, Thompson (2007) speaks of ‘fluctuations’ of ‘the body's feeling and movement tendencies’ (378). He then points out: ‘These fluctuations are valenced in the following sense. As movement tendencies, they exhibit movement and posture valences – toward/away, approach/withdrawal, engage/avoid, receptive/defensive. As feeling tendencies, they exhibit affective and hedonic valences – attraction/repulsion, like/dislike, pleasant/unpleasant, and positive/negative. As socially situated, they exhibit social valences – dominance/submission, nurturance/rejection. And as culturally situated, they exhibit normative and cultural valences, that is to say, values – good/bad, virtuous/unvirtuous, wholesome/unwholesome, worthy/unworthy, praiseworthy/blameworthy. (…) [V]alence needs to be understood not as a simple behavioral or affective plus/minus sign, but rather as a complex space of polarities and possible combinations (…)’ (378). Translated to the present discussion, Thompson's message might be that responses – at least emotions – should not simply be classified as positive or negative, but situated somewhere in a multi-dimensional ‘complex space of polarities’. What Thompson tells us here, however, is that emotions are complex episodes that are not valenced in just one way. But the polarities themselves, except dominance/submission, are all instances of ways to be positive/negative.

The difficulty of the subject of emotional valence is also nicely illustrated by Kraut's (2007, 148–58) discussion of positive and negative valence of sensations and emotions. Kraut distinguishes ‘negative’ from ‘bad’ or ‘undesired’, dubs it ‘affective unflourishing’, and claims that negative sensations are a disorder, pathology, malfunction, disturbance or turbulence of our sensory capacities (150). Negative emotions, in his view, have to be understood in an analogous way (153–4). This rather cursory part of Kraut's account strikes me as quite unconvincing.

It is true that calling World War II ‘fascinating’ (intuitively a positive response) does not imply that one does not deplore its having taken place, all things considered. But in this one respect, there is a reason not to deplore it.

Valuating a state of affairs by mere behaviour does not seem possible – a snail, it seems, can valuate particulars, but not states of affairs.