Reasons and Causes

Philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein rejected the idea that the explanatory power of our ordinary interpretive practices is to be found in law-governed, causal relations between items to which our everyday mental terms allegedly refer. Wittgenstein and those he inspired pointed to differences between the explanations provided by the ordinary employment of mental expressions and the style of causal explanation characteristic of the hard sciences. I believe, however, that the particular non-causalism espoused by the Wittgensteinians is today ill- understood. The position does not, for example, find its place on a map that charts the territory disputed by mental realists and their irrealist opponents. In this paper, I take a few steps toward reintroducing this ill-understood position by sketching my own understanding of it and explaining why it fits so uncomfortably within the contemporary metaphysical landscape.

Since the publication of Davidson’s “Actions, Reasons and Causes” the philosophy of action has been dominated by the view that rational explanations are a species of causal explanations. Although there are dissenting voices, anti-causalism is for the most part associated with a position that tended to be defended in the 1960s and that was successfully buried by Davidson’s criticism of the logical connection argument. In the following I argue that the success of causalism cannot be fully accounted for by considering the outcome of first-order debates in the philosophy of action and that it is to be explained instead by a shift in meta-philosophical assumptions. It is the commitment to a certain second-order view of the role and character of philosophical analysis, rather than the conclusive nature of the arguments for causalism, that is largely responsible for the rise of the recent causalist consensus. I characterise the change in meta-philosophical assumptions in Strawsonian terms as a change from a descriptive to a revisionary conception of metaphysics and argue that since the disagreement between causalists and non-causalists cannot be settled at the level of first-order debates, causalists cannot win the philosophical battle against anti-causalists without fighting the meta-philosophical war.

Pre-final proofs of paper published in journal of the philosophy of history 9 (2015) 372–392.  In this paper, I revisit some anti-­‐causalist arguments relating to reason-­‐giving explanations of action put forth by numerous philosophers writing in the late '50s and early '60s in what Donald Davidson dismissively described as a 'neo-­‐Wittgensteinian current of small red books'. While chiefly remembered for subscribing to what has come to be called the 'logical connection' argument, the positions defended across these volumes are in fact as diverse as they are subtle, united largely by a an anti-­‐scientistic spirit which may reasonably be described as historicist. I argue that while Davidson's causalist attack was motivated by an important explanatory insight borrowed from Hempel, it caused serious damage to the philosophy of action by effectively brushing over a number of vital distinctions made in the aforementioned works. In seeking to revive these I propose an approach to the theory of action explanation that rescues anti-­‐causalist baby from the historicist bathwater.

In this paper I draw the outline of a psychological genealogy of normativity: an account of normativity as a complex neuro-psychological fact, entirely analysable in non-normative terms. As a first step, I introduce two of the main problems faced by the genealogical approach. I call the first one “Gibbard problem”: what kind of neuro-psychological state is normative judgment? I call the second one “irreducibility of normativity problem”: normative dynamics seem to be irreducible to causal dynamics. As a second step, I examine the “dual model” of the psychology of normative judgment developed by J.
Haidt and J. Greene. I argue that the dual model is not able to solve the aforementioned problems. However, it points at the right direction. Moving from the conceptual framework and the difficulties outlined in the discussion of the dual model, I eventually propose an alternative model, the “model of control”. According to this model, normative guidance consists of a network of recursive control processes. Normative judgment is the conscious mental state we access when the relevant control process is completed. Reasons and norms are parameters that causally guide the process.

Kant sometimes compares human beings with animals and angels and grants human beings a middle position. But contrary to what one might expect, his transcendental philosophy does not apply well to animals or angels. The question of whether we share perception with animals has no good answer in his system that has to be taken as a single piece and does not allow for introducing steps of empirical, real developments. Differently from Kant, McDowell does compare human beings with animals, but he is not a transcendental philosopher and his attempts to find support in Kant are problematic. Although McDowell says that concepts go "all the way out" and Kant says the categories go "all the way down," which sounds similar, Kant talks of a priori categories, not empirical concepts. Burge is definitely not a transcendental philosopher like Kant. Up front he strongly relies on empirical studies, especially animal perception. Nevertheless, his quest into mental content introduces first-person perspectives that have a metaphysical flavor, and this makes - at least to me - comparisons with Kant tempting again.