Mind, Language and Morality

Essays in Honor of Mark Platts

Gustavo Ortiz-Millán, Juan Antonio Cruz Parcero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351202572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Mark Platts is responsible for the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics and for turning a generation of philosophers on to the Davidsonian program. He is also a pioneer in discussions of moral realism, and has made important contributions to bioethics, the philosophy of human rights and moral responsibility. This book is a tribute to Platts's pioneering work in these areas, featuring contributions from number of leading scholars of his work from the US, UK and Mexico. It features replies to the individual essays from Platts, as well as a concluding chapter reflecting on his philosophical career from Oxford to Mexico City. Mind, Language and Morality will be of interest to philosophers across a wide range of areas, including ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of law, and philosophy of language.

1 Ways of Meaning and Knowing Moral Realities

Barry Stroud

I would like to take up in rather general terms some of the important and distinctive features of Mark Platts’s explanation and defence of his views of morality. Not his own personal moral views, about which he warns us we are better off not knowing anything. I mean his views of the nature of morality and of the kind of knowledge and understanding human beings have of it.

I find those views and his defence of them very congenial, and I am happy to have a chance to pay tribute to them and to their author here. I will eventually draw attention to one place in his reflections where Mark speaks of a certain resistance one might feel to the kind of view he has been defending. He considers a way of accommodating the source of that resistance, and so in that way overcoming it. I raise the question whether what he suggests is really a successful response to the resistance he has in mind. That turns out to be a more complicated matter than it looks, and I will try to explain why. It depends on what the resistance Mark identifies actually is, and from where it comes. That raises some large, difficult questions in turn.

In his Ways of Meaning Mark’s aim was “to present and discuss […] the most important recent contributions to the philosophy of language.”¹ The most important recent contributions to that subject through the 1970s were Donald Davidson’s elaborations of the idea of a theory of meaning for a particular language. What came to be called a Davidsonic boom had been resounding through Oxford and beyond in those years, and Ways of Meaning tells us what it was all about. And it tells it, as it aspired to, “in a straightforward and accessible manner.” That book was the best and most thorough book-length treatment of that whole subject up to that time. It explained and developed the basic ideas of the new theory of meaning and investigated its implications as an account of a speaker’s understanding of the words of his language: what a speaker who knows English, or Spanish, knows simply by being a competent speaker of that language.

Davidson’s idea was that a speaker of a language can be said to know the conditions under which each of the indicative sentences he understands would be true. The task of what he called a theory of meaning for a particular language was then to give a systematic description of the structure of the language in a way that would yield, for each sentence, a statement of what the truth-conditions of that sentence are. If all those statements about sentences of the language are derivable from the structure of the language itself, they would all express something that someone who understands that language can be said to know. A speaker of English, for instance, knows that the sentence “Ripe tomatoes are red” is true if and only if ripe tomatoes are red.

It seems very hard to deny that a speaker of English does know such a statement to be true, and that his knowing it is involved in his understanding the English words in the sentence. But however undeniable that might be, it was regarded by many philosophers at the time as completely inadequate as an account of a speaker’s understanding of the meanings of his words. It was thought to offer no explanation of how a competent speaker knows what he knows, or how his mere knowledge of the truth of such biconditional statements “issues in” or is connected with the actual applications and responses he makes in real life with the words he is said to understand. Behind this objection was the thought that a speaker’s use of her words requires the grasp of certain “procedures” or “grounds” on the basis of which she applies or withholds her words on particular occasions. If some such “recognitional procedures” or capacities are required for a speaker to use and understand her words, it was thought that they must be an essential part of any account of the meanings of those words. And a theory of meaning in terms of truth-conditions alone says nothing about that aspect of a speaker’s competence.

Mark did everything he could in that book—short of the “evangelism” to which he assures us he would never stoop—to disarm this line of resistance to the truth-conditional theory. And what he and others did was as much as I think should have been needed. The resistance came largely from those of a broadly verificationist persuasion, or those with a basically “epistemic” conception of truth. Mark accordingly called the kind of theory he defended a “realist” account of a speaker’s understanding, and a “realist” conception of meaning and truth. One can perhaps see why. But just how robustly metaphysical that talk of “realism” was meant to be is not easy to say. I think this is connected with the difficulty I will consider.

Mark calls the theory he defends a form of “realism.” That is presumably meant to imply more than the evident fact that the conditions under which each of the sentences a speaker understands would be true can be stated in the very words used in the sentences the speaker is said to understand. That is an important feature of the theory, but there seems to be nothing distinctively “realist” about it. It means that anyone who understands the words used on the right-hand side of the relevant biconditional statement will know the conditions under which the sentence mentioned on the left-hand side is true. What enables a speaker to know such a thing is the speaker’s competence in the language used in the biconditional statement. That is the language the theory of meaning is expressed in. Someone who does not understand that language could not learn from such biconditionals the truth-conditions of their mentioned sentences. This shows that a theory of meaning of this kind is not meant to provide a way into a language for someone who does not already speak and understand a language; it does not explain new words or concepts to someone who does not already have them. A theory of this kind could state the truth-conditions of sentences of one language in the words of another language. But only someone who already understands that other language could learn from that theory of meaning what competent speakers of the first language know and understand. This means that speakers must rely on the understanding they already have of some language to know what a theory of meaning for that language or for any other language says.

A theory of this kind is perhaps more appropriately called “realist” in contrast with the “anti-realism” or “non-realism” of verificationist or “justificationist” views. Unlike those views, a theory of meaning of the kind Mark defends takes no account of any alleged “recognitional procedures” speakers make use of in applying their words or in determining the actual truth-values of the sentences they understand. The theory is in that sense also what Mark calls “austere”; it offers no explanation of speakers’ application of their words and no “basis” or “ground” of their knowledge of the meanings of words. The main point in the label “realism” is that the theory

assumes that sentences can be true (or false) independently of our capacity, or incapacity, to recognise them as true or false […] that we can know what it is for a sentence to be true or false […] even if it is beyond our capacities to recognise whether those truth-conditions apply or not.

(WM, 5–6)

I think there is no question that this is the way Donald Davidson understood the implications of the kind of theory he had in mind.

As far as I know, Mark Platts was one of the first philosophers to publicly and explicitly take up the question of the extent to which a theory of meaning and understanding of this kind is applicable or can be extended to the domain of evaluative language. Mark had in mind specifically morality, and he certainly raised the question before Donald Davidson himself had begun to discuss the issue publicly. David Wiggins and John McDowell were already working in nearby territory. I believe they both had an influence on Mark’s thinking at that time, perhaps even in the direction I am going to question.²

In the early pages of Ways of Meaning Mark expresses some doubts about the plausibility of extending the application of what he calls his “realistic reading […] of the truth-predicate” to “an ethical sentence” (WM, 12). But in the last chapter of that book, “Moral Reality,” he begins to go into the question directly. It cannot be said that he carries the investigation of that question very far in that chapter. But he insists that to apply the truth-conditional theory of meaning and understanding to moral sentences we must honour what both “utilitarianism” and “intuitionism” would preserve. Both those theories are “realist” in seeing ethical judgements as either true or false, and intuitionism is also “austerely realistic” in rejecting “justificationist” demands for “explanatory” accounts of conditions or procedures of application of moral terms, or for reductions of their contents to non-moral bases.

The point to be preserved in any case is that “A speaker can know, have a grasp of, the truth-conditions of a moral sentence even if those truth-conditions are beyond his (present) recognitional capacities” (WM, 245). When this kind of account is generalized, it would mean that:

By the process of careful attention to the world, we can improve our moral beliefs about the world, make them more approximately true; by the same process, we can improve our practical understanding, our sensitivity to the presence of instances of the moral concepts that figure in these beliefs […] Our moral language, like all the realistic part of that language, transcends our present practical comprehensions in trying to grapple with an independent, indefinitely complex reality.

(WM, 247)

This is a good expression of what the successful application of the truth-conditional theory of meaning and understanding to moral language would give us. I think it captures the ways we actually think of moral assessment and helps explain whatever sense we have of discernible moral progress.

Mark pursues this apparently intelligible goal in his Moral Realities.³ In that book he explains how a proper defence of the view depends on the correct understanding of what he calls, broadly speaking, “desires”—those “active” or “practical” attitudes that are essential to all intentional action. This leads into an intricate discussion of such attitudes, always with an eye on this central question of motivation and reasons. For our purposes here we can focus on one particular set of attitudes he draws attention to: so-called “motivated” or “reason-following” desires, as opposed to other so-called “unmotivated” or “reason-producing” desires. These latter are desires or wants we just find ourselves with which seem in their very presence to give us some reason to do something that we did not have reason to do before.

“Motivated” or “reason following” desires, on the other hand, are present when an agent is moved or can be said to “want” to act in a certain way, not because he just feels like it or because it is a way of satisfying some desire he independently happens to have, but because he recognizes the desirability or value in acting in that way—either in its outcome or in the performance itself. The agent sees and takes something he recognizes to be true of the action or its outcome as reason to do it, and is so motivated by that recognition. For “desires” or attitudes of this distinctive kind, as Mark puts it: “The agent does what he does because he thinks that something—say, honesty, or scientific truth—is a value, or is of value, or matters, or is desirable, or is worthy of desire” (MR, 76). The point is that, in such cases the agent acts, or is moved to act, as he does because he thinks or believes something about the action or object in question; he sees some feature he takes the action or object to have as reason to act in that way, and he is moved to act in the way he sees there is reason to act.

The agent’s thought or belief in such a case could be called an “evaluative” thought about something. But an agent’s having such an “evaluative” thought or belief does not imply that the value she sees in the action or object is, or is thought to be, dependent on her or anyone else’s having that “evaluative” thought or belief, or “valuing” the thing in the way she does. The reason the agent sees in favour of doing such-and-such is a reason she takes to hold of the action she considers, and to hold of it whether or not she or anyone else actually thinks it holds.

This is, after all, a familiar aspect of propositional thought in general, about virtually any subject-matter. In the thought that ripe tomatoes are red, for instance, what one thinks is something that holds, or fails to hold, and is thought to hold or fail to hold, quite independently of whether anyone, including the present thinker, actually thinks that ripe tomatoes are red. If the same is true of evaluative thought, then whatever value- or desirability-characteristic an agent takes an action to have is something thought to be true of or present in that action independently of whether anyone, including the agent, actually thinks that characteristic is present, or even takes that characteristic to be a desirability-characteristic at all. Mark sums up his view of so-called “motivated” or “reason-following” valuings or desirings in this way:

in these cases valuing can count as a case of being presented with some value-property or “quality in objects” which is there anyway and which is at least worthy of being valued independently of actual human desirings and valuings; […] an agent’s desiring the thing concerned can be at least a reasonable response to the value independently had by the thing.

(MR, 69)

Having ably explained and defended this view, Mark then considers a certain objection he thinks many would make against it: the charge of what he calls “transcendentalism.” Here we approach the source of my doubts. Mark puts the objection like this:

In view of what has been said in defence of the idea that […] such valuing can count as a cognitive response to some value-property or value-feature which is independently there in objects without the mind, the thought might be invited that this account holds the existence of such value-properties or value-features […] to be completely independent of human valuings and desirings. And that might be judged rather hard to swallow.

(MR, 98)

This is the charge or reaction Mark calls “transcendentalism.”⁴ Whatever it is called, it is an expression of resistance to the idea that the properties we ascribe to objects or actions in our evaluative judgements about them are independent of, or transcend, actual human valuings and desirings. Mark suggests that might that be thought hard to swallow because it appears to be incompatible with what many regard as an obvious truth: that “actual human valuings and desirings are the source of all value” (MR, 95). I find this last idea (“the source of all value”) a very slippery thought. We can begin to get a firmer grip on it by asking whether the thought is obviously true, or even true, in a way that threatens the idea of something’s having a certain value independently of anyone’s valuing or desiring it.

There seems to be one way in which that slippery thought represents no threat to that form of independence, as we have just seen. Ripe tomatoes are red (or not) independently of whether anyone thinks they are red, so someone who thinks that ripe tomatoes are red thinks something that is true (or false) independently of whether he or anyone else thinks it. Of course, if a certain person thinks that ripe tomatoes are red, then someone does actually think it, but what that person then thinks does not itself imply that he thinks it or that anyone else does. Similarly, it seems, someone who thinks that slavery is wrong or deplorable can think it is wrong or deplorable independently of whether he or anyone actually thinks it is wrong, even if everyone (except maybe the slaves) actually thinks it is a wonderful idea. Of course, someone who condemns slavery does in fact make that particular evaluation of slavery, but what he thereby thinks about slavery does not imply that he or anyone else makes that or any other judgement about it. Mark gives other examples of valuings that are understood to hold independently of whether anyone actually makes such valuings or even would make them.

How, then, does the complaint of “transcendentalism” represent a threat or challenge to the idea that the value-properties we ascribe to objects in evaluative judgements can hold of them independently of all actual human valuings or desirings? What exactly makes that thought of independence hard to swallow, if it is? Mark does not try to answer that question directly. His first step in trying to “free” his view from what he calls “its appearance of (a certain kind of) ‘transcendentalism’ ” is to consider the well-known view of Hume that “Vice and virtue […] may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.”⁵ The introduction of this view at this point is somewhat puzzling.

Of course, Mark does not recommend the full Humean doctrine of values as something like so-called “secondary” qualities. That is precisely the kind of view he opposes. For his particular purpose here he means to endorse only that aspect of the view that says that so-called “secondary qualities” are dispositional properties. They are in effect dispositions objects have to produce certain responses in certain kinds of conscious subjects under certain specified conditions. Let us not ask for the moment what those responses might be, or under what conditions they would be produced. The point so far is that the ascription of such qualities to something takes a conditional form: the object would produce such-and-such effects if such-and-such conditions were fulfilled.

Qualities of this kind are of course just as much quali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Ways of Meaning and Knowing Moral Realities
• 2 Platts on Kant and Mandeville
• 3 Wrong Direction? A Criticism of Direction of Fit
• 4 Equality as a Foundation of Ethics
• 5 Inflation or Deflation of Rights?
• 6 The Debate on the Abuse of the Concept of Human Rights
• 7 Convergence or Divergence in the Evolution of (Criminal) Rights? A Case Study of the Multiple Incoherencies of the Presumption of Innocence
• 8 Wittgenstein on Rule Following: Some Themes and Some Reactions
• 9 Kantian Neuroscience and Radical Interpretation: Ways of Meaning in the Bayesian Brain
• 10 Reflections and Replies
• 11 Closing Comments: Philosophical Life
• Contributors
• Index