The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism

Notes

Notes Chapter 1. Setting the Stage 1. Polanyi 1958, especially part 2. 2. Williams 1981, 101–2. Williams’s distinction between external and internal reasons is largely preserved in what follows, notwithstanding, though, his concern with the coherence of the former. If the rationality of a move is taken to turn exclusively on expert rather than on the actor’s own opinion, as this view of rationality maintains it should, the reasoning involved, though external to the actor, will always, and by definition, remain internal to those who count— namely, the consulted experts.We remain unconvinced, however, with regard to Williams’s main claim that the very idea of critically reviewing and justifying action one did not actually will is inherently incoherent. 3. Imre Lakatos’s notion of scientific rationality is a good example of such an approach. Lakatos (1971) urges historians of science to classify as rational any scientific decision of the past that conforms with what they, the historians , believe science’s true method to be, regardless of whether the scientists they are studying were, or could have been, aware of it. For criticisms of Lakatos’s approach, see Curtis 1986; Garber 1986; and Fisch 1994a, 1994b. For discussion of the Hegelian aspects of Lakatos’s historiography (the way rationality is conferred on one’s current position by rationally reconstructing the tradition to which it belongs), see Hacking 1979/1981. For a comparison of that to Brandom 2002a and 2009, see below chapter 7, first section. 4. Brandom 2002b, 96. See also his 2009, 182ff. 302 5. For a concise formulation of this position,see,e.g.,Korsgaard 1997,221. 6. Of course,“social choice”–type accounts of rationality of the first kind also foreground agency, especially those involving calculi of utility maximization . But it is not agency in acting that is required, only agency in willing or desiring the outcome of the action, which in itself could be performed unaware. See, e.g., Seligman 2000, 15ff. 7. Unless, of course, one denies the very idea of such normative diversity. As will become apparent in the chapters that follow, we take the existence of radical normative diversity as a given. 8. Korsgaard 1996, chaps. 2 and 3. Korsgaard’s concern in that work is the nature of normative obligation rather than that of rationality. She locates the source of normativity, late of Kant, in the essentially self-critical and autonomous self-governance of reason’s imprimatur but contributes little to articulating its precise workings. One way to describe the project the present study has set itself is to turn Korsgaard’s Kantian criterion of reflective endorsement on itself. For to discern the reflexive, second-order project of reason’s very own normativity is to ask how it is possible for the understanding,as McDowell (1994,81) puts it,“to reflect about and criticize the standards by which, at any time, it takes itself to be governed.” 9. As Robert Audi observes, practical rationality is addressed mainly in ethical works.“Very few writers on practical reason,”he observes,“have addressed the overall territory of reasons for actions, encompassing both moral and nonmoral conduct”(2001, vii).Without stating so explicitly,Audi’s remark obviously limits itself to works of the second kind discussed here, as few would consider a thoughtless act moral (good, perhaps, but not moral). In concentrating on moral conduct these works focus more on the rational and moral selection of goals (and in doing so, often sorely conflate the two) than on the more“practical”appropriation of means to morally valued ends. As a result, value-neutral instrumental rationality is routinely frowned on for its irrelevance to ethics. In conflating the morally desirable and the rational, such accounts tend to ignore the very possibility of an amoral or even an immoral rational act.Audi himself is less concerned with separating the rational from the ethical than with globally combining theoretical and practical rationality—a commendable initiative in itself. 10. This is true whether or not the actor and approver are one and the same. 11. Galison 1997, 803–44. 12. In our discussion of scientific trading zones in chapter 9, we go a step beyond Galison in locating them as the principal sites in which scientists are liable to encounter the kind of “trusted criticism” capable of prompting normatively transformative processes of scientific rethinking within the community. Notes to Pages 3–7 303 [3.145.60.166...