Moore's paradox and commitments

Volume on Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Moore’s paradox, the infamous felt bizarreness of sincerely uttering something of the form “I believe grass is green, but it ain’t”—has attracted a lot of attention since its original discovery (Moore 1942). It is often taken to be a paradox of belief—in the sense that the locus of the inconsistency is the beliefs of someone who so sincerely utters. This claim has been labeled as the priority thesis: If you have an explanation of why a putative content could not be coherently believed, you thereby have an explanation of why it cannot be coherently asserted. (Shoemaker 1995). The priority thesis, however, is insufficient to give a general explanation of Moore-paradoxical phenomena and, moreover, it’s false. I demonstrate this, then show how to give a commitment-theoretic account of Moore Paradoxicality, drawing on work by Bach and Harnish. The resulting account has the virtue of explaining not only cases of pragmatic incoherence involving assertions, but also cases of cognate incoherence arising for other speech acts, such as promising, guaranteeing, ordering, and the like.

The Journal of Philosophy, 2015

Moore’s paradox comes in two forms. Namely, (1) “I believe that P and it isn’t the case that P” and (2) “I don’t believe that P and it is the case that P”. The paradox is widely taken to have significant implications for a variety of issues in philosophy of language and mind, as well as in epistemology, and to be emblematic of peculiarities in the first person point of view. Yet, its nature remains elusive. Since it was first discovered by G. E. Moore, two main kinds of analysis of it have been proposed. One, which goes back to G. E. Moore himself, holds that the paradox arises only when (1) and (2) are asserted, since, in that case, pragmatic norms governing the speech act of assertion are violated. In contrast, another kind of analysis, which can be traced back to Wittgenstein, maintains that (1) and (2) come down to outright contradictions of the form “P and not-P”. In the paper, both kinds of analysis are criticized. Furthermore, it is claimed that, surprisingly, there are cases in which (1) and (2) can be legitimately judged and/or asserted. Close inspection of those cases, however, reveals that the doxastic conjuncts in (1) and (2) are self-ascriptions of beliefs as dispositions. That is to say, of mental states that mediate between sensory inputs and behavioural outputs, need not be self-known, yet, when they are, they are known in a third-personal way and aren’t normatively constrained. It is then argued that, in order to save the paradox, one must resort to a thoroughly normative notion of beliefs as first-personal commitments. These depend on subjects’ mental agency, are necessarily self-known, and are normatively constrained also from a subject’s own point of view. The bearing of beliefs as commitments on the account of the paradox is presented and explored in detail. In closing, the idea of beliefs as first-personal commitments is defended from possible criticisms.

While working on this paper, I discovered that one of our graduate students, Kent Linville, was also thinking about Moore's Paradox. I hauled him in as collaborator. The paper, for not good reasons, was published in a philosophically obscure place. Some years later, Kent was in an NEH Summer Seminar with Jaakko Hintikka. Hintikka became interested in our stuff and asked Kent to do a new version. He did - and it was first published as 'Moore's Paradox Revisited' in Synthese (v 87, 1991) and then reprinted in Wittgenstein in Florida, ed. J. Hintikka, 1991. Since I was totally passive in the writing of that paper - the new ideas were Kent's - I am not including that essay here though I am listed as co-author. For later developments in my own thinking see Ch 5 of On Being True or False: Sentences, Propositions and Such which will be put up on this site soon.

From the OUP Catalog: Description * Impressive line-up of excellent contributors * Illuminates numerous areas of contemporary philosophy * Includes an introductory survey accessible to non-specialists G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' would be 'absurd'. Moore calls it a 'paradox' that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Over half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers and other students of language, logic, and cognition. Ludwig Wittgenstein was fascinated by Moore's example, and the absurdity of Moore's saying was intensively discussed in the mid-20th century. Yet the source of the absurdity has remained elusive, and its recalcitrance has led researchers in recent decades to address it with greater care. In this definitive treatment of the problem of Moorean absurdity Green and Williams survey the history and relevance of the paradox and leading approaches to resolving it, and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area. Contributors Jonathan Adler, Bradley Armour-Garb, Jay D. Atlas, Thomas Baldwin, Claudio de Almeida, André Gallois, Robert Gordon, Mitchell Green, Alan Hájek, Roy Sorensen, John Williams Readership: Scholars and students of philosophy Contents I. Introduction and Historical Context Introduction , Mitchell Green and John Williams The All-Seeing Eye: A History of Moore's Paradox , Roy Sorensen II. Moore's Paradox and Knowledge Moorean Absurdity: An Epistemological Analysis , Claudio de Almeida The Normative Character of Belief , Thomas Baldwin Moore's Paradoxes, Evans's Principle and Iterated Belief , John Williams III. Moore's Paradox, Belief, and Assertion What Reflexive Pronouns Tell Us about Belief - A New Moore's Paradox De Se, Rationality, and Privileged Access , Jay D. Atlas Moore's Paradox and the Transparency of Belief , Jonathan Adler and Bradley Armour-Garb IV. Moore's Paradox and Consciousness Consciousness, Reasons, and Moore's Paradox , Andre Gallois Moorean Absurdity and Showing What's Within , Mitchell Green V. Arguments from Moore's Paradox My Philosophical Position Says 'p' and I Don't Believe 'p' , Alan Hajek Moorean Pretence , Robert Gordon

Synthese, 2021

The paper analyzes the nature and scope of Moore's paradox, articulates the desiderata of a successful solution and claims that psychological expressivism best meets these desiderata. After a brief discussion of prominent responses to Moore's paradox, the paper offers a solution based on a theory of expressive acts: a Moorean utterance is absurd because the speaker expresses mental states with conflicting contents in commissive versions of the paradox and conflicting states of mind in omissive versions. The paper presents a theory of expressivism for self-ascriptions of mental states (avowals). In addition, it introduces the idea of expressive denegation-the speaker's expressing the absence of a mental state-as an analysis of negative self-ascriptions of mental states (disavowals). Some of the consequences of expressivism for (dis-)avowals are explored.

Ethic@: an International Journal for Moral Philosophy, 2003

We present counterexamples to the widespread assumption that Moorean sentences cannot be rationally asserted. We then make an attempt to explain why Moorean assertions of the sort we discuss do not incur the irrationality charge. The explanation involves an appeal to the dual-process theory of the mind and a contrast between the conditions of ascribing beliefs to oneself and the conditions of making assertions about independently existing states of affairs. In the last section, we elaborate on the proposal by contrasting beliefs of the sort we discuss with the structurally similar but rationally impermissible beliefs of certain psychiatric patients.

Skepticism. From Antiquity to Present, B. Reed and D. Machuca (eds.), Bloomsbury, forthcoming

The paper presents G.E. Moore's "Proof of an External World" (PEW) and the main contemporary interpretations of it offered so far. It criticizes them all, for inadequately representing Moore's views and puts forward an alternative interpretation. The key move in Moore's PEW is to decouple knowledge from being able to redeem it. Hence, it qualifies as a proto-externalist view.

2019

G. E. Moore famously pointed out that all sincere assertions of the form ‘p, but I don’t believe that p’ are inherently absurd. John Turri strongly disagrees with the consensus evaluation of such assertions as inherently absurd and offers a counterexample according to which it is possible to say ‘Eliminativism is true, but of course I don’t believe it’s true’ sincerely and without any absurdity. I argue in this paper that Turri’s attempt misses the point entirely, for the most natural interpretations of his counterexample are either absurd or do not represent genuinely Moorean assertions. The critical analysis of Turri’s counterexample will enable me to reach the general conclusion that precludes the possibility of omissive Moorean assertions that are inherently non-absurd (regardless of their content), at least if we hold that our assertions ought to have some normative function.