In Search of Normativity of Unconscious Reasoning

Keywords
emotion, practical reason, reasoning, normativity, unconscious, appropriation

Puzzles

Church Is "deeply" puzzled by "the idea that we can be ignorant of our own rea-sons" (2005, 31). I was, at first sight, puzzled by this puzzlement.

There is no question that we, indeed, are ignorant of many of our reasons. In cases of routine behavior, for instance, we are often not, or only dimly, aware of the reasons for doing something. When I use the indicator when taking a turn to the left with my car, I have no conscious reason for doing so. It has become routine behavior, acquired during my lessons in car driving. My non-awareness may even be considered as sign of my excellence as a driver. This non-awareness is most noteworthy in all those cases in which we, again routinely, withdraw from a particular action. Education and training not only teach us how and why to perform certain activities, they also give us reasons to refrain from all sorts of other actions. There are many reasons to do certain things; there seem to be many more reasons for not doing other things. To suppose that having reasons would by necessity involve conscious awareness of these reasons would life make impossible to live.

So, ignorance seems to be very common, not to say trivial. This raises the question whether there is anything nontrivial in the attempt to make sense of ignorance of our reasons. What element or aspect of ignorance is it that may evoke philosophical interest? Jennifer Church seems to have in mind different overlapping concerns. In the first part of her paper, she addresses

1. the issue of legitimacy; that is, the specification of conditions under which attributions of unconscious content are legitimate or illegitimate; and
2. the issue of normativity; that is, the question how and why unconscious reasons can be normative for me.

The first question can be discussed without reference to a self; the second question cannot. In the second part of the paper there arise new concerns:

3. the issue of having reasons that can not be recognized as reasons by oneself, "strange reasons" so to say, with spatial reasoning as a paradigm case; and
4. the issue of being moved by ones reasons through the visceral connection between desires and beliefs on the one hand and motor activity (external or internal) on the other hand; this connection is secured by our emotions.

Recapitulation

Let me try to recapitulate some of the main issues. Church makes, first, a distinction between having access to one's reasons and recognizing one's reasons as reasons. She proceeds by discussing the no-access problem in terms of a functionalist metaphysics of mental states. Then she suggests that ascribing unconscious content (or reason) to a person, in fact, boils down to the evaluation of the appropriateness of the ascription of a specimen of practical reasoning to the subject. Practical reasoning involves the structured connection and interaction between beliefs and desires. This structure can be studied at the level of animal psychology; however, there are some important differences between humans and animals: humans can withhold assent, they can lie, and they may recognize mistakes, whereas animals cannot. The possibility of being mistaken about one's reasons leads from the issue of legitimacy to the issue of normativity. For a reason to become my reason, the belief–desire network should make sense, I should feel normatively compelled in some way. So the issue of normativity cannot be studied apart from the possibility of recognition. To recognize a reason as one's reason, one has—at some level of understanding—to assent with its content, even if this occurs implicitly.

In the second part the conditions for recognition are investigated in the form of an analysis of unconscious reasons that are strange. Strange reasons are not recognized because they function in some different way compared to normal conscious reasoning. Strangeness is defined here in terms of a different way of...