Expressive Inquiry and Practical Reasoning

Pragmatism, Expressivism, and the Rational Roots of Moral Experience

The aim of this article is to offer a contribution to our understanding of the place and function of reason in human agency, notably in that specific part of human agency that can be qualified as "moral" and whose main trait is that it presupposes some reference to normativity. In this perspective, through the concept of "expressive inquiry" I would like to propose a theory of how reason enters our moral practices. In line with the pragmatist tradition, I take this theory to be at the same time grounded in effective existing practices and as being a normative description of how agents should resort to reasoning in practical (and notably moral) affairs.

My methodological starting point can be devised in what I call the "epistemology of practice," a theory of knowledge and rationality whose main sources can be traced back to John Dewey's logical and epistemological writings.¹ While having explicitly in mind a pragmatist paradigm of human rationality—as also the term inquiry should have made clear—in this article I attempt to extend the pragmatist paradigm, integrating it with more recent contributions to moral philosophy. In so doing, I do not intend to take part in the recent debate over pragmatism and perfectionism, although that last develops around a similar awareness of the necessity to open classical pragmatism to different sources and traditions.² I, rather, intend to follow a different path, which consists in developing a notion of moral rationality that is rooted in the Deweyan paradigm of rationality as inquiry and that at the same time takes into account those articulative and expressive dimensions that characterize the specifically moral form of inquiry. In this way, it will become easier to qualify the general notion of situation with respect to moral experience.³ In so doing, we will have reached a better position in order to extend the reach of the notion of inquiry from the general naturalistic dimension of problem solving in problematic situations to the dimension of critical self-reflection and self-transformation that is typical of many moral experiences.

In order to develop such a conception, I will rely on two main concepts, which can be traced back both to the pragmatist epistemology of practice and to what, faute de mieux, I will call an expressivist theory of the moral agent.⁴ These themes, which are both present in each tradition, are identified by the notions of articulation—which denotes a process through which something that is indeterminate becomes determinate—and of transformation—which denotes an active form of relationship of thinking to experience. The concept of inquiry—and so that of expressive inquiry—implies that reasoning should be conceived as being grounded in a set of implicit beliefs, habits, and attitudes and that in problematic situations we need to articulate them in order to become aware of them and their consequences (our inferential commitments). To this extent, articulation and transformation are logically irreducible parts of any form of reasoning.

But these notions are here considered according to the expressivist intuition that reflective activity is not merely aimed at representing to others beliefs that would be already given (in order to defend them) but, rather, that through their articulation we constantly revise and transform them as a consequence of their further determination. As a consequence, in expressing our moral standing, according to expressivism we do not merely represent to others our given and justified set of beliefs but, rather, engage actively in their transformation, so that moral reasoning always has an irreducible transformative dimension.

Through reference to the category of expressive inquiry I intend to account for the epistemological implications of this irreducible intertwining of external problem solving with critical self-engagement (and self-transformation) of the agent.⁵ In defining expressive inquiry as a form of rational reasoning, the aim of this article is therefore theoretical: it proposes to highlight some of the epistemological requirements of a theory of rationality as inquiry suited for dealing with moral experience. The outcome of this project will be twofold: on one side, the...