The Bounds of Judgment - from Frege to cognitive agents and human thinkers (PTDC/FIL-FIL/109882/2009) (2011-2013)

Director: Sofia Miguens

This is the main Mind and Language project for 2011-2013.

1. The Bounds of Judgment

This project is about what it is to be a thinker, centering on the notion of judgment. Judgment is a posture towards the world, held rightly or wrongly (in one sense) solely in virtue of the world being as it is. A judgment fixes how the world would matter to its correctness; the world then does its mattering. This is a rough account, which needs careful elaboration. But it is enough to point to some bounds within which some people have thought judgment must remain. In some cases, one might question whether judgment is so constrained, or whether the bounds are genuinely bounds at all.  These questions have shaped a very great part of modern philosophy. In this project we intend to consider them according to four guiding ideas, taking Frege´s conception of judgment (Urteil) as the starting point:

1. Emptiness of demands on the world. A posture may fail to be judging by failing to ask the world to matter in any substantive way. Wittgenstein once, or sometimes, had such an idea. One might suspect such failures in laws of logic, some of mathematics, paradoxes and definitions.  If, e.g., a law of logic would be true no matter what, as Frege thought, just how can the world speak to its correctness?

2. Objects not sufficiently woven into the fabric of the world. A posture might fail to be judging because it is (ineliminably) towards something unfit to be an object of judgment. That is the case of what Frege termed ‘Vorstellungen’ (contents of consciousness). Which raises a set of issues in philosophy of mind, and elsewhere. a) What sort of posture can we take to our own inner experience? Can it ever be an object of judgment? If not, when we have inner experience what might this consist in? b) What forms might special access to one’s own mental life take? When, if ever, is special access ‘privileged’? Both a) and b) are deeply involved in the issue how intentionality could be the mark of the mental, hence, what it might be.

3. Usurpation. a) Expressivism: From Hume on many philosophers have thought they detected, in various areas of discourse, putative judgements which were imposters. The trouble was that something—usually some sensibility parochial to us—seemed to usurp the world’s sole sway over the correctness of the posture. That sort of worry has arisen for ethics, aesthetics, causation, and a host of other things. b) Alien thought: The worry under a) can also be put this way: if, say, ethics were really a domain of judgment, then seeing what was thus judged to be a fact or not would have to rely on some parochial capacity: one available, perhaps, to thinkers like us; but not available to just any thinker, merely in virtue of being a thinker. So, to see how bad that is (Frege apparently took it to be bad enough), one might ask whether there could be judgments available to one sort of thinker but not another, whether, if so, such differences are necessarily confined to certain areas of judgment, and how alien judgments might be different from ours; conversely, how judgment could be possible at all without benefit of parochial capacities.

4. Articulation and Agency. A judgment is a (partial) articulation of a thinker’s posture towards the world. In turn, it is what is articulable into elements—given concepts, applied to given (ranges of) objects. a) On the first of these points, it is interesting to ask just how essentially tied up with agency a posture towards the world must be to be articulable into judgments. It is sometimes said that to be a thinker is, essentially, to be an agent. It is seldom said what it means to say this, or why one should. Frege provides the basis for saying more. Here a leading question is: to what extent, if any, is a judgment obligated (if it is to be a judgment) to make the world matter to it in a way that the world might matter to our conduct of our lives. Which is a way of asking: Is there any truth at all behind the attraction some feel in some form of verificationism? b) The second question centres on the issue, raised by Frege, of whether, and in what sense, a judgment might have essential structure. How does a judgment differ, notably, from a vehicle for its expression in the way it is (or is not) tied to particular articulations of it? This issue is interesting, for one thing, because of its bearing on issues in philosophy of psychology. But it is also of interest because we are unlikely to be able to so much as formulate coherently issues under 3 above without answering these questions.

These issues span a very wide swathe of philosophy, from philosophy of logics to moral philosophy. The main aim of this project is to focus on relations between them, trying to understand how the fate of judgment with respect to one of these problems bears on its fate with respect to others.

 

State of the art / Literature review

This project arose from the conviction that Frege’ thought is of heuristic value for the issues regarding logic, mind, language and action on which the Porto-Santiago research team has been working for a number of years (for some recent results cf. Miguens 2008, Pinto 2007, Vazquez 2006, Martinez, Falguera, Saguillo 2007)). In thinking this we were very much influenced by Ch. Travis and by his wittgensteinian readings of Frege (or fregean readings of Wittgenstein) (Travis 2006, 2008).

Although the project has Frege as a reference, its main aim is not historical: what we are ultimately interested in is developing an approach to thought and cognition. Yet, we do have a concern with history, both with Frege scholarship and with Frege’s place in the history of contemporary analytic philosophy (Floyd & Shieh). As for Frege scholarship, the whole project takes as starting references the work of important interpreters of Frege such as Dummett (1981, 1991), T. Burge (2001, 2005), C. Diamond (1991), T. Ricketts (2010), P. Sullivan (2005),W. Goldfarb (2001) as well as Ch. Travis (2006, 2008). Some of these authors use Frege to deal with questions regarding truth, thought, mind (Burge 2001, 2005, Travis 2006, Travis 2009a) some are particularly interested in Frege’s views on logics (Ricketts, Sullivan, Goldfarb), some in his influence on Wittgenstein (Diamond, Travis). All of this aspects are of interest to us in this project, in which our intent is to aplly the lessons of Frege’s conception of judgement to four main areas: philosophy of logic, philosophy of mind and perception, moral philosophy and issues regarding (and connecting) language and action. Thus the project engages with a number of ongoing discussions in different fields of philosophy, which we believe come together by our focus on judgment.

 

Section ´Emptiness of demands on the world´ of the project is dedicated to the issue of judgment in the philosophy of logics. It starts from the way Frege (Frege 1983, 1993) himself addresses questions such as What is a law of logics? What is it for a law of logic to be true, if it is true? Are laws of logic a priori? If so, what does that mean?. The way Frege interpreters such as Dummett, Burge, Sullivan, Goldfarb and Ricketts see his positions will be our reference here. For Frege laws of logic are thoughts, they are not about how people reason. Yet people reason by making steps from thoughts to thoughts – what do the laws of logic tell us about the validity /invalidity of human reasoning? All these questions speak to members of the research team who work in history and philosophy of logics and mathematics (Martinez, Saguillo, Pinto, Rego). They will bring former work conceptions of the nature of logics (and mathematics), the nature of the a priori, relations between computation, information and reasoning (Martinez, Falguera Saguillo) inspired by authors ranging from Boole to H. Field and J. Corcoran to bear on our study of Frege on logic and judgment.

Section ‘Objects not sufficiently woven in the fabric of the world’ is dedicated to the issue of judgment in philosophy of mind and perception. We think that if one looks carefully at Frege, one finds, among other things, a fertile philosophy of mind and perception (Frege 1918). So we intend to use Frege as guide of our approach to the current debate in the philosophy of mind and perception known under the name of ‘disjunctivism’ (Byrne & Logue, Haddock & McPherson, Szabo-Gendler & Hawthorne). In particular, we want to assess Travis’ hypothesis that Frege is the ‘father of disjunctivism’. We are also particularly interested in understanding the disjunctivist approach as a critique of qualia and of representationalism in philosophy of mind (Putnam 1999, Martin 2006, Travis 2009b) – these are issues which have been at the center of the interests of the philosophers of mind in the group (Miguens 2002, Miguens 2008, Pinto 2007, Vazquez 2006).

Section ‘Usurpation’ is centrally dedicated to the issue of judgement in moral philosophy – according to expressivist, non-cognitivist, positions in cases such as those of ethic judgments, these putative judgments are imposters, i.e. not real judgments, whose correctness is decided by how things are in the world, but rather mere expressions of emotional states of subjects (Travis 2006 McDowell 1998). We will build on previous work on McDowell (Miguens 2008) and on the idea of ‘the parochial’ (a main theme of Ch. Travis work, whose forthcoming (2010) OUP collection on Wittgenstein will bear that title) to develop an approach to the objectivity of moral judgments (here we have also been influenced by Putnam (Putnam 1992)).

The central idea of section 5, ‘Articulation and Agency’, is the claim that thinkers are necessarily agents. This is the idea which connects contextualist positions in the philosophy of language (formulated for truth, thought and language, and thus for the ‘personal level’ of agents) with antirepresentationalist approaches to cognition (Noe 2004, Noe 2006) formulated for the subpersonal level. We will work on both language as action (as it appears in the contextualist side of the contextualism-anti-contextualism debate (Preyer & Peter 2005)) and cognition as action, trying to explore relations between the two. In the background Travis occasion-sensitive conception of truth (see Occasion sensitivity, Travis 2008) and Noe’s proposal of mind as action. As a result of contrast (human) thinkers should appear as a specific kind of mind, yet sharing this ‘enacting’ characteristic with other kinds of minds. In this context we also want to consider the role of language in thought (Travis 2008).

These are the sections of the project. In them, buiding on readings of Frege and of Frege on judgment we will be working on logics, mind, language, action. There is yet another strand in the project: the contrast bewteen Frege and Kant on judgment, where we will be guided by B. Longuesse’s work (Longuenesse) and its relevance for history of contemporary philosophy. We chose Frege for this project to help us in thinking about thinking to build a case against what we see as the dominance of a naturalized epistemology stance in philosophy of mind language and action in the last half of the 20^th century (this was already an issue in Miguens 2002).

It is our conviction that some impasses in current analytic philosophy call for a look upon history (Floyd & Shieh 2001, Putnam 1992, Putnam 1999) as a good route to new views. This is one reason for the project to center on Frege, a founding figure. The connection with more general history of contemporary philosophy we want to explore is the following: Frege began his career with a critique of Kant and he had Kant, and Kantians, in mind throughout his career. To a Kantian—certainly to his contemporaries—this may seem to be confined to a small, encapsulated, point—Kant’s conception of analyticity. As philosophy developed in the 20th century, maybe this is not such a small point. The way we see it, Frege was particularly concerned to attack idealism in its 19th century German form (‘transcendental’ or not).

 

Table of Contents:

The Bounds of Judgement (BJ)

 

Consultants

Charles Travis – KCL

Tim Crane – University of Cambridge

Quassim Cassam – University of Warwick

Jocelyn Benoist – Université de Paris – Panthéon Sorbonne

 

Some former publications by members of the research team:

 Martinez, Falguera e Saguillo, 2007 Current Topics on Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Santiago de Compostela, USC Publicacións.

Miguens 2002 Uma Teoria Fisicalista do Conteúdo e da Consciência – D Dennett e os debates da filosofia da mente, Porto, Campo das Letras.

Miguens 2008, Será que a minha mente está dentro da minha cabeça? – da ciência cognitiva à filosofia (ensaios), Porto, Campo das Letras.

Pinto 2007 Materialismo, superveniência e experiência – uma perspectiva sobre o problema da consciência na filosofia da mente, Porto, Campo das Letras.

Vazquez 2007, Mente y Mundo, Madrid, Akal.

 

References 

Benoist, 2009, Sens et sensibilité – l’intentionalité en contexte, Paris, Cerf.

Burge, 2001, Frege on apriority, in Boghossian & Peacocke 2001, New Essays on the A Priori, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

Burge 2005, Truth, Thought and Reason, Essays on Frege, Oxford Oxford University Press.

Byrne and Logue 2009, Disjunctivism – contemporary readings, Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Dummett, 1981 Frege Philosophy of Language, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd edition

Dummett, 1991, Frege and Other Philosophers, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Diamond, Cora, 1991, The Realist Spirit – Wittgenstein and the mind, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

Floyd e Shieh 2001, Future Pasts – the analytic tradition in 20^th century philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Frege 1983, Nachgelassene Shriften und wissenschftlicher Briefwechsel, Hrsg. Von H. Hermes, K. Kambartel, F. Kaulbac, F. Meiner Verlag, Hamburg (Bd I und Bd II)

Frege 1993, Logische Untersuchungen, Gottingen, Vandenhoek und Ruprechet, Hrsg Gunther Patzig

Frege 1918, Der Gedanke, Beitrage zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, 2, 58-77

Goldfard, 2001, Frege’s conception of logic, in Floyd and Shieh 2001

Haddock e McPherson 2008, Disjunctivism – perception, action, knowledge, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Longuenesse, Béatrice, 1998, Kant and the Capacity to judge – sensibility and discursivity in the transcendental analytic of the critique of pure reason, , Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

McDowell, 1998, Mind, Value and Reality, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press

Martin 2006, On Being Alienated, in Szabo-Gendler & Hawthorne 2006

Noe 2004, Action in Perception, Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Noe 2006, Experience without the head, in Szabo-Gendler & Hawthorne 2006

Preyer & Peter 2005, Contextualism in Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Putnam, 1999, The Threefold Cord: mind, body and world, New York, Columbia University Press.

Putnam, 1992, Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.

Ricketts, 2010, The Cambridge Companion to Frege, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2010, many papers available at authors websites)

Sullivan 2005, Metaperspectives and internalism in Frege, in M. Beaney and E. Reck, eds, Frege: critical assessment, London, Routledge, vol 2, 85-105

Szabo Gendler & Hawthorne eds 2006, Perceptual experience, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Travis 2000, Unshadowed Thought, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press

Travis 2004, The silence of the senses, Mind, 113, 449, 59-94

Travis 2006 Morally Alien Thought”, in What Determines Content, Tomas Marvan, ed., Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 243—270.

Travis 2006 Thought’s Footing, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Travis 2008 Occasion-Sensitivity – Selected Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Travis 2009a, Truth and Merit in M Gustafson & R. Sorli eds. New Essays on the philosophy of J L Austin, forthcoming

Travis 2009b, Gazing Inward, A. O’Hear ed, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures for the year 2007/2008, forthcoming

Membros que participam neste projecto

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