Three challenges to normativity

Ok.  With apologies, this post will be nothing more than a rehash of earlier posts. I’m trying to get my categories lined up, and I’m afraid the blog is where I do this kind of thing.

So.  I’ve said that there are three very broad orientations to the analysis of social phenomena:

1. Naturalistic or scientistic: analysing human social life as you would any natural phenomenon; no specific ‘empathetic’ or ‘interpretive’ dimension.
2. Intentional: analysing human social life in terms of goal-oriented or intentional action.
3. Moral or values-based: analysing the meanings or norms that structure and shape social life.

I’ve also said that there are three major challenges to normativity associated with ‘modernity’ – in an earlier post I called these nihilism, relativism, and cynicism.  I now want to say that these two sets of three categories line up with each other.

1. Naturalistic or scientistic approaches study social or human life as if it were a natural phenomenon.  Here we seem to risk a specifically scientistic form of the denial of normativity – evacuating human meaning from a world understood in coldly mechanistic terms.  This is the risk of ‘nihilism’.
2. Intentional or goal-oriented analysis can seem to risk ‘explaining’ meaning or norms in terms of gratifications or drives or utility-maximisation – that is, in purely instrumental terms, or in terms of desires or interests rather than values.  This may seem to miss what’s meaningful and valuable in human meaning and value.  This is the risk I’m calling ‘cynicism’.
3. Moral or values-based approaches don’t seem to risk evacuating morality or values – after all, these are the explicit object of analysis.  However, as a social-scientific perspective this is engaging in the comparative analysis of different value systems.  This may seem to risk ‘relativising’ those value systems – undermining what is truly valuable in value, and meaningful in meaning, by treating all values and meanings alike.  This is the risk of ‘relativism’.

So, at this very high level of abstraction we have three different approaches to the analysis of social phenomena, each of which exhibits a characteristic apparent threat to our value- or meaning-systems.  Of course there are many ways we can subdivide each of these categories.  Moreover, there are different ways these categories can interact.  There are characteristic ‘reductionist’ projects associated with the scientistic and intentional approaches, and there are characteristic ‘anti-reductionist’ projects associated with the intentional and values-based approaches.  Or we can try to bring multiple perspectives together, in some kind of grand synthesis.

Anyway, this is a very crude map to the space I’m trying to navigate – but (at least as of right now) it feels (at least to me) like a useful one.

Typologising social theory

How to think about the terrain of social theory?  This is another post flailing around in connection to a vast literature I largely haven’t read, making basic points that will no doubt still manage to be wrong in important ways – but still, I want to draw some distinctions.

Start with the distinction between the natural and social sciences (or, archaically, the moral sciences; or, more broadly and loosely, the humanities) – Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft.  The idea here is that there is some kind of fundamental difference between the appropriate method and stance to take towards the study of nature and the study of humanity.

The first distinction to draw within the social sciences, then, is the distinction between those who agree with this distinction and those who do not.  One ‘scientistic’ approach within the social sciences argues that the exact same methods that are appropriate to the natural sciences are also appropriate to the social sciences: humanity is a natural phenomenon like any other, and can be studied in the same basic way one studies planets and atoms and mountains and so on and so forth.  This scientistic approach disdains the idea that there is some special meaning-stuff that requires special analytic techniques, when dealing with the human or social world.

Then there are a broad range of social-theoretic approaches that reject such ‘scientism’.  These approaches believe there is something in human social life which cannot be captured by the tools used to study the natural world.

What does this ‘special human sauce’ consist in?  My thinking here is very crude – hopefully I will come back to this typology and greatly improve it, down the road.  For now, though, I’m going to draw a distinction between those who emphasise intentionality and those who emphasise values.  

Intentionality, in this sense, is goal-oriented activity.  The idea is that objects in the natural world obey laws, but we cannot reasonably ascribe intentions or goals to those objects.  Humans, by contrast, exhibit goal-oriented behaviour.

We can further subdivide this ‘intentionality’ category, by asking: how is intentionality understood?  Here, again, my categories are very crude, but I’m going to draw a distinction between two models of intentionality.  

On the one hand, there is the ‘instrumental rationality’ approach.  Here we have goals that are ‘given’ as desires, and then the exercise of instrumental reason to guide the social actor towards those goals.  The most developed form of this approach is decision theory, which is a dauntingly vast field full of extremely developed formal resources for understanding decision principles given preferences.

On the other hand, there is what I’m going to call the ‘drives’ approach.  Here, again, we’re dealing with desire, but instrumental reason is backgrounded.  In the ‘drives’ approach, desire and action are more bound together.  I don’t feel like I really have a handle on how to characterise this category, but obviously my paradigm here is the psychoanalytic model of the psyche.

This is all on the ‘intentionality’ side of the distinction between ‘intentionality’ and ‘values’.  Shifting over to the ‘values’ side, I feel like my categories are even vaguer.  But this is where ‘norms’ live.  Theorists concerned with values think that what characterises the human is not intentionality per se, but rather the fact that we participate in some kind of moral substance.  From this perspective (or at least a popular version of it), animals can exhibit intentionality – animals can engage in goal-oriented activity – but animals cannot participate in a world of norms and values.  The goal of Geisteswissenschaft, then, is to study this moral content of the human world.

Alright.  All this is humiliatingly crude.  But it does the work I want it to do, for now.  In the first instance, I have a three-component typology – three different perspectives which take a different kind of object as their proper domain.

• The scientistic or naturalistic perspective.  This perspective treats human action as just one other kind of natural phenomenon.  Behaviourism is an example of this approach.
• The goal-oriented or intentional perspective.  This perspective sees the characteristic feature of human life as intentional action.  Rational choice theory is an example of this approach.
• The values-centred or moral perspective.  This perspective sees the characteristic feature of human life as participation in a world of values.  Weberian sociology would be an example of this approach.

Ok.  Now.  There is obviously a great deal of controversy about the relation between these three broad kinds of approaches.  In particular, there are reductionist ambitions on the part of the scientistic approach, to explain both intentionality and values in terms of natural-scientific categories.  There are also reductionist ambitions on the part of the intentional approach, to explain norms or values in terms of (take your pick:) instrumental reason or psychological drives.  The values-centred or moral perspective, by contrast, tends to disdain the other two approaches precisely for their reductionism.

All well and good.  My simple point, for now, is that Brandom’s philosophy is basically interested in the relationship between the first of these categories (the scientistic approach) and the third (norms or values).  It’s not that Brandom has nothing to say about goal-oriented action.  But, as I’ve said in recent posts, Brandom’s strong anti-psychologising commitments tend to evacuate much of the substance of this second (intentionality) approach.  Brandom is no friend of instrumental reason; nor does he have anything to say about psychological drives and their vicissitudes.  To a useful first approximation, Brandom is interested in the relation between what he calls ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ Sellarsian theoretical approaches: scientific naturalism, and an analysis of normativity in terms of the space of reasons.

I’m interested in approach number two, though.  This is where I want to live, on the blog, for quite some time.  This is where psychoanalysis lives; it’s where rational choice theory lives; it’s also (as I keep saying) the space that Hegel is wrestling with in important sections of the Phenomenology. The claim I keep making and remaking in recent posts on the blog, is that in his treatment of the Phenomenology Brandom conflates the kind of reductionism associated with the scientistic perspective with the kind of reductionism associated with the intentionality perspective. I think this conflation badly distorts A Spirit of Trust’s analysis of the Spirit chapter. In any case, I want to start thinking about everything from this intentionality perspective – at the cost of significant crudity, no doubt, but with some gains too, I hope, eventually.

Moving on

Ok. I started blogging almost exactly 17 years ago.  The goal was then – as it still is – to get to grips with economics.  In one sense I’ve done OK at that goal – among other things, I managed to pick up a PhD in economics in that period.  But in a more accurate sense, progress has been painfully slow.  I’m not going to self-flagellate, but there’s a lot of very basic work still to do.

Why has progress been so slow?  A lot of the reason is that I’ve really been pursuing two parallel projects here, one in economics or political economy, the other in philosophy.  I don’t seem to be able to ‘just’ do economics – I seem to need to have some philosophical comprehension of the categories I’m using – and that impulse has taken me very, very far afield, over the years.

From my current vantage-point, it seems to me that I can periodise my philosophical progress on here into two long phases.  Phase one – which began before I started blogging – was deconstructionist.  When I started blogging I was a Derridean, for some value of the term ‘Derridean’.  I had reacted very negatively to an undergraduate education in philosophy, which seemed to me to be most dogmatic precisely when it took itself to be being most rational.  Since Derrida was the hated enemy of reason, for many of my professors, I read Derrida – and I found him to be incisive and scholarly, albeit also literary and provocative.  So – through most of my twenties I was some kind of Derridean.

I learned several things from Derrida.  I learned the importance and power of close reading.  I also learned a toolkit of analytic tricks.  The most central of those tricks was as follows: find some category that a theoretical system insists is self-contained, and which the system analyses in contrast to some lesser, incidental category; demonstrate (or, I suppose, at any rate, claim) that the lesser category is in fact constitutive of the ‘self-contained’ category.  I learned to be wary of a metaphysical desire for purity of essence.  Finally, Derrida’s arguments about a) the role of social context in determining conceptual content, and b) the openness of social context to an unknowable future, seemed important in pointing ‘beyond’ philosophy towards more social-theoretic resources.  This element of Derrida seemed (and still seems) to me to intersect productively with the more pragmatist and social-theoretic dimensions of the analytic tradition.

So – phase one of my philosophical approach on here was a pragmatist- and sociologically-inflected deconstructionism.  The problem with this approach is that deconstruction basically runs out of resources (and/or interest) when it gets to the more social-theoretic and pragmatist dimensions of its arguments.  My vague idea, when I started blogging, was that I could ‘deconstruct’ economics as I educated myself in the discipline.  But, as it turned out, deconstruction just didn’t have the right kind of social-theoretic resources for a very productive engagement with economics – or, arguably, with anything much beyond metaphysics.

Phase two of my philosophical approach on here was Brandom.  I read ‘Making It Explicit’ in 2010 – and really I’ve been working through Brandom’s apparatus ever since.  I still have more work to do in that regard.  But now – and especially since working through ‘A Spirit of Trust’ – I think I can fairly comfortably ‘embed’ the deconstructionist apparatus I started with, on the blog, within Brandom’s system.  Derrida’s key intellectual moves, as I now see it, are basically tweaks of Hegelian moves: the argument that an apparently ‘independent’ category is in reality constituted by disavowed content that the theorist aims to exclude from the independent category’s true essence now strikes me as a Hegelian ‘dialectical’ argument par excellence.  And Brandom has convincingly rendered these arguments in an analytic idiom that makes them, to my mind, much more tractable than they are in either Hegel or Derrida – easier to understand, and easier to integrate with other intellectual projects.

Anyway, I’ve spent a huge amount of time and effort trying to get to grips with Brandom.  In many important ways my understanding of Brandom is still inadequate – when it comes to his work in formal logic, for example, I barely know or understand the first thing.  But there’s a lot that I do follow.  I note with some dismay that even back in 2010 I was writing on the blog that “I’m interested in connecting the practice-theoretic foundation of Robert Brandom’s philosophical apparatus to the basic categories of Freud’s ‘discourse on desire’”.  Well – that’s still my interest.  And I think it’s fair to say that I’ve made… well, if not exactly zero progress on that project, certainly not 14 years’ worth of progress.  None of us really have enough life to work ~this~ slowly.

I do, however, think I now understand much better why I had such difficulty making progress on that project, over the years.  As I now see it, Brandom has systematically evacuated the ‘psychological’ from his philosophical system.  Brandom’s hugely impressive apparatus gives one very little purchase, if one tries to put it to ‘psychological’ use, and this is by design.  As Brandom quips, citing Stanley Cavell, Kant de-psychologised epistemology, Frege de-psychologised logic, and Wittgenstein de-psychologised psychology.  Brandom inhabits and extends this de- or anti-psychologising tradition.  He talks about “reliable differential responsive dispositions” rather than “experience” – cutting the Gordian knot of the Sellarsian ‘myth of the given’ by simply evacuating empiricist categories from his system altogether.  On the propositional side, he talks about “commitments” not “beliefs”.  And Brandom’s work is all about reasons for action – not motives, still less drives.

In a certain sense, then, I’ve spent the better part of fifteen years holding two dramatically incompatible sets of theoretical commitments.  On the one hand, there is a fundamentally and programmatically anti-psychologising philosophical framework.  On the other hand, there is a set of social-theoretic resources that are all about desire, gratification, utility, etc.  The two major social-theoretic traditions I am perhaps most interested in – psychoanalysis and political economy – have fundamentally subjectivist and psychologising theoretical roots.  Hardly surprising, then, that although I’ve frequently posted about my desire to reconcile these frameworks, I haven’t actually made much, if any, progress doing so.

Well, I don’t want to sound premature, still less triumphalist – as I say, my dominant affect is dismay, as I think about how slow things go on here, and just how much work I have still to do.  But it feels, affectively, as if I’ve finally cleared this hurdle.  The last set of posts on the blog – as well as the vague inchoate ideas at the back of my mind that I’ll hopefully eventually try to work through properly on here – seem to me to go a long way towards squaring this circle.  It feels to me, then, whether rightly or wrongly, that I’m now heading into a third long phase of philosophical work on the blog.  Just as the Brandomian apparatus could ‘incorporate’ most of the Derridean apparatus, so I have hopes for keeping ahold of all the hard-won pragmatist insights I’ve found in Brandom’s work, while breaking with the de-psychologising elements of Brandom’s project.  This feels to me like a big enough break with Brandom that it merits a new ‘phase’ of work on here – a phase that can finally, maybe, make proper contact with the psychological and – especially – political-economic approaches that were, after all, meant to be the point of the entire enterprise.

As ever, only time will tell whether this is all a mirage.  It’s hard not to feel that I’m simply moving too slowly on here to actually reach my destination within any reasonable human timespan.  But so it goes – one keeps moving on.

Human nature

Ok.  A number of times on the blog before I’ve used a formulation something like the following: “Human nature, as I am using it here, expresses a stochastic rather than an essentialising category.”  I feel this is a little hand-waving and opaque, and in this post I’d like to unpack what I’m trying to get at a little more.

The core point here is that I want to hold two positions simultaneously.  One is an anti-essentialism about human nature – there is no one essence of human behaviour.  The other is a relatively high degree of cynicism about human nature – given the opportunity, people will behave in cruel and/or self-interested ways a fair amount of the time.  Both of these positions are important to me and to the project I’m pursuing here, but I think they stand in some tension.  In general, if you are an anti-essentialist about human nature, it may seem natural to also believe that human nature could in principle be transformed in fairly dramatic ways – including in positive ways, so what’s the basis for a high degree of cynicism?  On the other hand, cynics about human nature often understand that cynicism in more or less essentialising terms – there is an ineradicable darkness in human nature somewhere, which can maybe be tamed and managed but which cannot be eliminated.

By contrast, I think we can (so to speak) have our cake and eat it here (not that it’s very appetising cake).  The three-tiered framework for thinking about psychology and behaviour that I’ve been (extremely sketchily and crudely) outlining in the last few posts seems, to me, like a good way to think about this problem space.  That framework incorporates the basic insight of ‘homo economicus’ – that humans are centrally motivated by self-interest – but it can also accommodate extremes of non-self-interested behaviour (above and beyond the simple modification of our basic individual-level preference functions to be other-oriented).  There are two mechanisms for departure from homo economicus within the framework.  On the one hand, the ‘investment’ of the individual in the judgement of peers means that social pressure can play a major role in shaping preferences, beliefs, and behaviour.  This means a recognitive community can ‘bootstrap’ itself into more or less any behaviour if its self-reinforcing mechanisms are strong enough.  On the other hand, the individual is internally divided against itself, and can bring its own ‘internal sanctions’ to bear against itself (the individual is already, in a sense, an internal community).  Here, I’ve suggested, we can think in terms of habits or dispositions (which bear implicit norms or preferences), or in terms of the intentional preferences of subcomponents of the psyche.  Taken together, the dispositions of the self, the ‘preferences’ of the subcomponents of the self, and the structural features of the internally divided psyche’s sanctioning and reward system all amount to what we call a person’s ‘character’.

So this is my ‘behavioural framework’.  This framework is extremely formal – it doesn’t commit us to any specific analysis of human beings’ likely behaviour.  There is no ‘core essence’ of the human – whether a benign and generous core that has been corrupted by oppressive social relations, or a malign and vicious core that has been tempered by socialisation.  At the same time, I think the following things make sense within this framework: 1) an expectation that a large proportion of humans will behave in a self-interested way a large proportion of the time (a la homo economicus); 2) ‘group behaviours’ of both very positive and very negative kinds; 3) departures (again both positive and negative) from both group behaviour and self-interest that arise out of the internal dynamics of the psyche.

You’ve gotta have all three of these things if you want to have any hope of analysing social behaviour in any kind of useful way, I feel.  Frameworks that try to make do with just some of this story end up missing out a large proportion of human behaviour.  Now, that’s not necessarily a problem – our stories or models don’t have to include everything all of the time, and it’s ok for us to adopt, in any given case, a very partial perspective.  But for my own thinking I like to be able to have some vague sense of how the different elements of our different accounts fit together – and this is my (still obviously very gestural) effort at that, on the topic of human behaviour or human nature.

Pragmatism, rationalism, habits, decisions

Ok – in this post I want to make some very basic points about the relationship between habits and decisions, against the overly-elaborate backdrop of a discussion of the relation between pragmatism and rationalism in Brandom.  First comes a discussion of pragmatism and rationalism, then a discussion of habits and decisions.  I think this is all pretty basic stuff, but working through basic stuff is a lot of what the blog is for, so here it is.

One of the central productive tensions of Brandom’s work is the relationship between his pragmatism and his rationalism.  Very roughly speaking (and I’ve done enough detail-work on Brandom on the blog that I’m giving myself permission to write very loosely indeed here) the pragmatist order of explanation is to start with practices – or dispositions to act – and to explain other categories (like those of reason) in those terms.  This seems to stand in tension with a rationalism which gives pride of place to reason.  In his discussion of ‘regulism’ in Making It Explicit, Brandom discusses the paradoxes and infinite regresses that result when we pursue a certain rationalist emphasis on rules and reasons – we need, Brandom argues (following Wittgenstein) to have a way to follow a rule ‘blindly’, or we can’t make sense of rule-following at all.  Yet it is easy to tip from this kind of emphasis on the tacit dimension of rule-following, to a fuller rejection of the role of reasons in our normative lives.

A somewhat random example of the latter problem (selected by me, not by Brandom) would, in my view, be Michael Polanyi.  I see Polanyi’s work on the social structure of scientific research communities as extremely important and insightful – but in his more ‘psychological’ writings on “the tacit dimension” of thought, Polanyi takes a step too far for my tastes into an anti-rationalist space.  In that work (again summarising very loosely), Polanyi argues that: 1) there must be a tacit, non-explicitated dimension to our intellectual practices; 2) this tacit dimension is ineradicable; 3) something something something; 4) some sort of mystical-sounding conclusions.  One of the challenges Brandom faces is to maintain his emphasis on pragmatism and the tacit dimensions of rule-following, without ending up in this kind of basically anti-rationalist theoretical space.

Brandom achieves this by an extremely simple mechanism.  He argues that there must always be backgrounded, tacit, implicit dimensions to our intellectual practice, but none of those dimensions are necessarily or intrinsically implicit or tacit.  That is to say: any norm implicit in practice can in principle be made explicit.  Nothing is out of bounds for the process of explicitation – and once the rule implicit in a practice has been made explicit, it is then open to contestation and debate within the discursive space of reasons.  The fact that at any given moment we must have lots of backgrounded, implicit, non-contested dispositions doesn’t mean that there is some ineradicable element of our practice that cannot be explicitated – it just means that we can’t explicitate everything all at once.  Rather, we work like Neurath’s sailors: any given element of our background practices can be foregrounded at any moment, and over time we can cover a huge amount of terrain in this way, subjecting vast amounts of implicit practice to rational contestation and debate – we just can’t do it all simultaneously.

It goes without saying that there’s vastly more to Brandom’s apparatus than this – but this very simple procedure is, I think, the core of how Brandom reconciles his pragmatism and his rationalism.  Our reason is supported by a vast mass of implicit commitments, unexamined within practice; but over time and as a rational, discursive community, we can in principle expose any and all of those practices to the light of rational debate.  There is no fundamental or ineradicable “tacit dimension” – only a necessary practical one.

Ok – so I endorse all of this.  But then, I want to say, something similar applies to decision principles in the sphere of practical reasoning.  Rational choice theory sort of assumes that every action taken is an explicit decision in which all possible options are known and evaluated.  Of course we all know that in practice most, or at least many, of our actions are taken out of habit – dispositions to act have developed within us, over the years, and they guide our actions.  So what is the relation between background dispositions and (practically, instrumentally) rational decision-making?

I think the relation is the same as the relation between rules that are implicit in practice and rules that are explicit as stated commitments.  Our decision-making has to exist against a background of countless actions that are not ‘decided upon’, but are simply taken out of habit or disposition.  But that doesn’t mean that any given disposition-action cannot become the focus of decision-making – in principle any action or disposition can become a matter for active, considered decision.  Of course there are complexities here – but I think this is a useful (albeit, yes, sort of obvious and basic) way of thinking about the relationship between habit and decision-making.

Of course, from an ‘external’, behaviourist perspective, it’s all disposition – one of the claims of at least one strand of pragmatism is that it’s dispositions all the way down.  But of course there’s a difference between the complex dispositions involved in the game of asking for and giving reasons, versus the dispositions involved in the backgrounded practices that are acted upon without being (at that moment) the subject-matter of that game.  And from a more ‘subjectivist’ perspective, I think we can all acknowledge the difference between actions taken out of habit, versus actions taken after rational reflection and consideration.

Now, thinking about things in this (yes, again, I acknowledge, very basic) way is also illuminating (at least for me) concerning what’s going on in some other theoretical traditions.  Consider Bourdieu’s sociological category of ‘habitus’, which at least has some strong family resemblances to pragmatist ideas of socially-inculcated tacit dispositions.  Or consider what Aristotelians are talking about, when they talk about the inculcation of character.  Both of these theoretical traditions are interested in the social formation of the tacit dispositions of the self.  The (broadly Brandomian) approach I want to endorse has no problem with this kind of talk.  But – as pragmatists who are also rationalists – we want to be wary if this kind of talk starts implying that there are ineradicably tacit dimensions to our dispositions.  As rationalists, we think that dispositions can be explicitated into rules, which can then be subject to rational debate.  From this perspective, the opposition in some moral philosophy between an emphasis on rules and an emphasis on character is something of a false opposition – each approach is simply emphasising one pole of the complex relationship between explicit rules and background dispositions. 

A pragmatist rationalism, then, argues that there is no disposition that cannot in principle be made the subject of rational debate.  There is then an additional fork in the road: to what extent can rational debate then reflect back on the disposition, transforming it?  In individual, psychological terms, this question can be asked as follows: how fixed are our characters?  Is explicitating our dispositions a mechanism for the ready transformation of those dispositions?  Or is it simply a route to a form of self-knowledge that does not in fact do anything much to transform the self?  If we think dispositions can be transformed, how does that work?  Is knowledge enough?  If not, what else is needed?

These are, I think, interesting questions!  But for now my main goal is just to get some acknowledgement of the importance of dispositions (rather than decisions) into my toy model of the structure of the psyche.  The toy model I proposed in my document on non-transitive preferences was a rational choice model ‘all the way down’.  Of course this is silly, if it is understood as the idea that every level of action is following an explicit decision rule.  (This would be a sort of action-theoretic, instrumental reason version of ‘regulism’.)  It is not quite so silly, though, if we understand many of our actions in terms of dispositions and habits, rather than decision rules – but also take a ‘rationalist’ approach to the understanding of human dispositions as always in principle analysable via the ‘explicitation’ of decision principles.

In any case, all of this is very hand-wavy – but this is where I’m at for now in thinking about these issues.

The economist and the preacher

There exists in every human breast an inevitable state of tension between the aggressive and acquisitive instincts and the instincts of benevolence and self-sacrifice. It is for the preacher, lay or clerical, to inculcate the duty of subordinating the former to the latter. It is the humbler, and often invidious, role of the economist to help, so far as he can, in reducing the preacher’s task to manageable dimensions. It is his function to emit a warning bark if he sees courses of action being advocated or pursued which will increase unnecessarily the inevitable tension between self-interest and public duty; and to wag his tail in approval of courses of action which will tend to keep the tension low and tolerable.

That’s Dennis Robertson, in a much-cited passage that I (like I assume many people) first read in ‘The Calculus of Consent’.  I think this is a fantastic passage, which really sums up a lot of what’s good and important about economics as a social science.  ‘Homo economicus’ – that rationally self-interested meagre shadow of a vision of the human animal – provides a salutary check against institutional structures that rely too heavily on non-self-interested behaviour from their inhabitants.

But what about the “preacher” side of this quote?  Do we have nothing to say about the behaviours of the human animal that break with ‘homo economicus’?  Isn’t there a danger that, in neglecting other elements of human behaviour, economists’ proposals and analyses will miss essential components of even those “incentive-compatible” institutions which rely for their primary motive force on rational self-interest?

I think the three-tiered analysis of the motive structures of human behaviour that I’ve recently been outlining goes some way towards addressing this category of worry.  On that approach, the ‘homo economicus’ framework resides on the ‘middle’ of the three analytic tiers: straightforward individual-level preference functions.  But ‘above’ and ‘below’ this level of analysis are two additional analytic tiers, which can greatly complicate our understanding of the motive structure of the human animal.  At the ‘social’ level, there is the desire to enjoy the approbation and escape the disapprobation of one’s peers.  And at the ‘sub-individual’ level there are the potentially conflictual subcomponents of the psyche, as (for example) analysed by Freud.

Because this three-tiered analysis can, if we wish, be articulated in rational choice terms, this approach does not necessarily take us outside the space of the economist’s analytic toolkit.  Specifically, it keeps us within the domain of one of the discipline’s central analytic principles: people respond to incentives.  When we move between analytic tiers, we are shifting our focus from one category of incentive to another – but we are still working within a framework that can be understood in incentive-compatibility terms.

This in turn allows us to think about what “the task of the preacher” amounts to, at least from this perspective.  In terms of the social level of analysis, the task of the ‘preacher’ is to institute a culture of moral approbation and disapprobation that itself incentives the “right” behaviour.  And I think this is a pretty useful (albeit, yes, perhaps slightly crass or reductionist) way to think about ethical communities.  It’s not the case (contra some cynics) that people only behave well because they fear the negative judgements of their peers, but the negative (and positive) judgements of peers clearly do function as a substantial set of incentives in shaping behaviour – a community that rewards good behaviour with approbation and bad behaviour with disapprobation will tend to encourage more good and less bad behaviour than a community of which the reverse is true.  (Of course, what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour is a vastly contentious matter, but that’s not the point here.)

What about the ‘sub-individual’ level – the level of the internal subcomponents and dynamics of the individual psyche?  Here, too, we can think in terms of incentives: the interaction of the different subcomponents of the psyche involves internal praise and blame, internal gratifications and distress.  Here, too, then, we can think (perhaps with a little straining of terminology) in terms of the construction of an ‘incentive structure’ – the internal incentive structure of the psyche’s gratifications.  And the formation of this internal ‘incentive structure’ is another way of thinking about the formation of character.  (More on this, hopefully, soon.)

So if we want to we can extend the concept of ‘incentive compatibility’ to character-formation and the ethical dynamics of a community.  Of course, we need to keep straight which sense of ‘incentive compatibility’ we’re talking about – and we need to remember that this is just one way of thinking about these phenomena, and not invariably the most productive one.  Still, I find it helpful.  Thinking about things in this way also allows us to retain (what I regard as) the core insight of the Robertson quote, without committing ourselves to all the baggage that comes with a generative distinction between aggressive/acquisitive versus benevolent/self-sacrificing instincts within the human psyche.  Rather, that distinction can be folded into and generated out of a larger story about the moral economy of our motives and behaviour.

In this next post in this series, I want to return to the issue of character-formation, and talk a little about the distinction between habits and decisions.

Two forms of moral scepticism

In the last post in this series I articulated in perhaps a slightly more coherent way than previously my reasons for rejecting the ‘Kant-Rousseau’ model of autonomy.  This rejection has some potentially unwelcome consequences, though.  In this post I want to speak briefly to a couple of them.

The first unwelcome consequence of the approach I’m recommending is that it seems to limit the degree of individual autonomy we can plausibly claim for ourselves.  On the Kant-Rousseau model we are, first and foremost, autonomous creatures: your norms are your norms – you have chosen them, as an individual.  On the approach I’m recommending, by contrast, a good case can be made that we cannot achieve ‘real’ or full autonomy: our normative commitments – and therefore our normative selves – are chosen, in part, by our social milieu; we are enmeshed in a normative environment from which we cannot fully differentiate ourselves as individuals.

Of course, if you’re one of a range of different kinds of philosophical communitarian, this is a positive feature of the approach I’m recommending, not a negative one.  From this communitarian perspective, to reject the Kant-Rousseau model of autonomy is to reject a pernicious ideology that conceals our real nature from ourselves.  Our real nature is as community creatures; our selves cannot in fact be separated from community; it is an illusion of bourgeois individualism to think that autonomy is either achievable or desirable.  From this perspective, then, the metatheoretical approach I’m recommending should be seen as an invitation to reject the alienating illusions of bourgeois individualism, and re-embrace the communal character of our human natures.

As I’ve said on the blog before, more or less in passing, my stance on this is roughly as follows: I acknowledge that the ‘communitarians’ are right about the non-tenability of the Kant-Rousseau model of autonomy at a metatheoretical level, but I don’t accept that this deals any kind of devastating blow to autonomy – or to other forms of ‘bourgeois individualism’ – as a political or social ideal.  I don’t see why we can’t ground ‘first order’ political-ethical individualist commitments within a metatheoretical framework that rejects the philosophically ‘foundational’ role of the Kant-Rousseau autonomy model.  Obviously I’ve not done anything much to cash out – or even really elaborate – that position, but that’s my stance, for what little it’s worth.  Maybe I’ll come back to this one day.

In this post, though, I want to focus on a second apparent unwelcome consequence of the approach I’m recommending: a form of moral or normative scepticism.

Here I want to make a very basic point, and differentiate between two different things that can be meant by “moral scepticism” – or by “scepticism” in general.  Scepticism about X can mean scepticism about the existence of X, or it can mean scepticism about the accessibility or knowability of X.  In epistemological scepticism about the ‘external world’, these options would correspond to, on the one hand, scepticism about the existence of the ‘external world’ (some kind of Berkeleyan idealism), and, on the other hand, scepticism about the ultimate knowability of the ‘external world’ (some kind of Kantian idea that the noumenal realm of the in-itself is not knowable, and our knowledge relates to the phenomenal realm alone).

The forms of normative scepticism that I’ve been addressing myself to on the blog to date almost entirely fall in the first category – scepticism about the existence of norms (“nihilism”).  I regard myself, whether rightly or wrongly, as having addressed that form of scepticism, at least to my own satisfaction, and it is largely going into the “done and dusted” bucket, for purposes of blogging.  The second form of ‘normative scepticism’ is, however, very different.  This isn’t scepticism about the existence of norms, but scepticism about the knowability of norms.

If you’re a ‘strong realist’ about norms, it’s clear enough that this is a kind of scepticism you have to wrestle with.  Norms exist ‘out there’ somewhere, and the moral-epistemological question is: how can we know what they are?  Let’s say you have a religious metaphysical standpoint in which norms are connected to the divine in some way.  (Again, I am maximally ignorant of theology and intend to remain so – there is more than enough to read without dipping into the theological literature – so this is all going to be very half-baked, but so it goes.)  In some kinds of religious metaphysics, it’s obvious why there might be a worry that you just don’t know what the right norms are: the gods know, but you do not.  At its sceptical extreme, there’s the worry that it might be impossible to know what the right norms are – maybe the divine understanding of the good is beyond the limited human self’s capacity to grasp.  Or maybe we are barred from knowing the good by our fallen natures, or by the malicious workings of malign supernatural forces, etc. etc.

If you have a ‘social constructionist’ understanding of normativity, it seems like this kind of thing isn’t going to be a problem.  Of course we know what the norms are – we made the norms.  Roughly speaking, then, it seems that the form of moral scepticism appropriate to social constructivism is nihilism, while the form of moral scepticism appropriate to strong and/or religiously-inflected normative realism is epistemic scepticism about the accessibility of those norms.

This loose line of reasoning is reinforced by the Kant-Rousseau idea that we are only bound by norms we have acknowledged.  Intuitively, on this approach, there’s no fundamental epistemic problem concerning what those norms are.

One of the things Brandom is doing (in both MIE and ASOT) is showing how much room there is for epistemic uncertainty about our norms even within this (‘Kant-Rousseau’) model.  For Brandom, we acknowledge binding norms as individuals, but we cannot determine the content of those norms as individuals – that determination of content is a social process.  We may, therefore, be ignorant of the content of the norms by which we have bound ourselves.  This possibility of ignorance of the content of our own commitments is then the ‘lever’ that opens Making It Explicit’s formal concept of objectivity: the standing possibility of a gap between what we think we are committed to and what we actually are committed to permits us to always formally differentiate our norms from any given set of normative attitudes at all.

Fine.  But this model still sharply limits the degree to which we could ‘lack contact’ with the relevant norms: we must in some sense acknowledge the norms that bind us, or they don’t bind us in the first place.

Now – what if we move away from this ‘Kant-Rousseau’ position, and adopt a metatheoretical stance whereby norms can be successfully instituted by people other than those upon whom the norms are (genuinely) binding?  On the approach I’m following here, we might have ‘first order’ normative reasons to believe that this scenario will not normally obtain – but there is no metatheoretical reason to rule it out.  In this framework, we can in principle rightly see a norm as binding upon someone, even if the person in question does not in any sense acknowledge that norm.  (Here, then, we need to talk about “obligations”, not “commitments”, since no commitment has been undertaken but the norm in question still binds.)

If we adopt this approach, then we are confronted by the spectre of a form of moral or normative scepticism that is very close to the problem confronted by strong normative realists.  The problem is this: what if the right norms – the norms we ought to adopt – simply aren’t norms that have been instituted by our community of practice?  We can imagine our way back into the historical past, into societies where norms that we ourselves regard as bedrock weren’t even really on the moral-philosophical table.  We feel (or at least we may feel) that it is possible to pass normative judgement on those societies, from our current normative standpoint.  And yet it’s unclear how a member of those societies is meant to have had access to the social perspective from which such judgement can be passed.  This, of course, raises (‘relativising’) questions of what normative attitudes to take (now) to members of those societies.  But this problem also ‘relativises’ our own normative stance.  We can imagine some other normatively distant society adopting a similar judgemental perspective towards our own current norms.  Imagining the possibility of this perspective can play a similar ‘formal’ role to the role played in Brandom’s account by our standing knowledge of the possibility that our own current sense of the content of our commitments might not be accurate.  But, again, we are here not dealing just with the content of our commitments, but with the question of whether these are even the right commitments – whether our entire normative framework is the right one.

This reflexive perspectival shift therefore opens up a ‘relativisation’ that is stronger than the forms of ‘relativisation’ Brandom’s apparatus addresses.  If we follow the route I am recommending, this ‘relativisation’ does not lead to a relativism that leads in turn to nihilism – that’s not the category of problem we’re dealing with.  Rather, this is a problem of moral epistemology: what if we are completely wrong about the correct normative stance, from top to bottom?  Just as Descartes imagined a scenario in which we know nothing empirically – all our sensory input is deceptive – so this raises the spectre of a scenario in which we know nothing normatively – all our normative judgements and perspectives are fundamentally awry.  This is a ‘secular’ version of a gnostic worry that what we mistakenly believe to be a divine source of normative guidance is actually a malign demiurge, or some such.  Here we’re worrying that our community, which has formed us normatively, is evil through and through, and the right norms have been instituted by a community to which we have no social access.

Of course, Descartes believed he had resolved his sceptical worries by finding a source of judgement within the self to which those worries did not apply.  And, normatively speaking, this is more or less the Kantian strategy.  Kant says – look, we can’t be fundamentally lacking access to the correct source of normative judgement, because the moral law is necessarily implied by the structure of any and all rational creatures.  Provided you are rational (and thus a normative creature at all) you have access to the basic moral law.  This is the Kantian strategy for dealing with the spectre of this kind of worry in moral epistemology – and it’s a strategy that is (very roughly speaking) also adopted by Brandom, as well as by various other figures in this kind of liberal critical-theoretic tradition (e.g. Habermas).

I’m rejecting this strategy.  My rejection operates by analogy with my rejection of the Cartesian solution to epistemological scepticism about the empirical world.  In regular epistemological terms, the stance I recommend has two dimensions.  First, a thoroughgoing fallibilism.  I recommend adopting the idea that what it means to know something is to not know it for sure.  It is baked into our concept of knowledge that it isn’t perfect knowledge.  (If it were known with true certainty, then it wouldn’t be part of the space of legitimate discursive challenge, and therefore wouldn’t be the kind of thing we should treat as having any epistemic authority, either.)  Then (second) the critique of Cartesian scepticism is that it is a hyperbolic scepticism – it regards an impossible level of certainty as the criterion of knowledge as such.  Once this hyperbolic criterion has been dropped, the question becomes not “do we know for sure that we’re not being deceived by a malicious demon?” but rather “is there any reason to think that this is a scenario worth taking very seriously?”  On this more reasonable epistemic standard, Cartesian hyperbolic scepticism goes into the box of “ok, sure, I guess in principle it’s possible, but so what?”  Nevertheless, a salutary awareness that we always might be wrong about anything is important to adopting a set of non-dogmatic epistemic standards in general.

I think something like this applies in the moral-philosophical realm too.  We should reject both the idea that we have some intrinsic built-in moral guidelines associated with being thinking creatures at all and the idea that the absence of such a standard is a reason to adopt a hyperbolic scepticism about all our norms in general.  The possibility that our own moral standards might be seen as monstrous by another community whose norms it would be proper to see as better than ours, if only we had access to them, is a salutary reminder of the importance of moral-philosophical humility, but it is not a reason to treat the normative standards we do have access to with hyperbolic scepticism.  Obviously this is quite a hand-wavy position, but something in this broad moral-philosophical space seems compelling to me.  Like the Brandomian social-perspectival understanding of objectivity via the formal difference between de dicto and de re commitments, this perspective opens a standing uncertainty about our moral stances – but this uncertainty (in fallibilist spirit) is the reason moral commitments have the ability to bind us at all – without this possibility we couldn’t properly treat them as objective.  When we talk about the ‘objectivity’ of moral stances, we mean not that there is a divine will which resides outside the human realm; rather, we mean that it is always possible that there could exist a community from the perspective of which we could properly see our own norms on any given issue as profoundly flawed.

There’s more to say on all of this, and I’ll try to come back to it in the future, but this post is already getting a little long, so I think this will do for now.

Autonomy and normative statuses

Ok.  This is the first in a short series of posts in which I want to do a few things.  First, I want to revisit my critique of the ‘Kant-Rousseau’ dimension of Brandom’s argument in ‘A Spirit of Trust’, and hopefully articulate my objections to this position a little more clearly.  Then I want to talk about some of the implications of my preferred alternative to this ‘Kant-Rousseau’ approach.  In particular, my preferred approach opens the spectre of a form of moral scepticism that Brandom’s own position cuts off at the pass.  Then I’ll start to talk about why I don’t think this form of moral scepticism should be seen as a fundamental problem with my preferred alternative approach.

Start by backing up and discussing again one dimension of the Kantian idea of autonomy.  At the start of Chapter 9 of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ Brandom discusses the early modern traditions of theorising freedom that Hegel is picking up and developing.  These traditions culminate:

in the idea of normativity in terms of autonomy that Kant develops out of Rousseau’s notion of freedom.  This is the idea that “[o]bedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”  Kant endorses this thought about freedom, and puts it to a new use: distinguishing normative constraint, characterized by freedom, from nonnormative compulsion.  According to this line of thought, one is genuinely normatively bound only by norms one has oneself acknowledged as normatively binding.  That makes the status of being a normative subject, being liable to assessment according to norms, an essentially self-conscious achievement.  For taking oneself to be normatively bound (adopting such a normative attitude) shows up as an essential component of being normatively bound (having a normative status).

ASOT 265

Now, in interpreting this passage and others like it, I think it is important to understand that Brandom’s argument is operating at two different levels.  First of all, we have the ‘basic’ level of moral philosophy.  Here the idea is that one is only bound by norms one has chosen to bind oneself by.  At this level of the argument, we are already in a normative space, and the question is which norms are binding upon us (answer: only those we acknowledge as binding).  At the second level of the argument, we are concerned with a ‘deeper’ philosophical question of what norms even are – how norms come to exist in the first place.  Brandom’s claim is that Hegel adopts, or transforms (or ‘hacks’) the first-order moral-philosophical Kant-Rousseau account of which norms are binding upon us, to provide an answer to the general philosophical question of what norms even are.  The answer to that question is: norms are things that we institute ourselves – we make norms binding upon ourselves.  In other words, an argument that begins as a way of differentiating between binding and non-binding norms has been repurposed into an argument that differentiates between the normative and the non-normative tout court.

Ok.  Now.  I endorse this second level of Brandom’s argument.  I think that norms are instituted in practice, and there are no norms that we have not in some sense instituted.  (Obviously “in some sense” is bearing a lot of weight here, but god knows I’ve spent enough time over the last fifteen years trying to cash out that clause on the blog, and I’m just going to treat that end of things as solid, established ground from here on out.)  That’s all fine by me.  My claim for a little while now, however, has been that Brandom’s argument sort of bundles the the first-order moral-philosophical claim into the metatheoretical claim adapted from it, and that this is unwarranted: the first-order moral-philosophical claim is in fact false, and the fact that a true and insightful metatheoretical apparatus has been constructed out of an adapted version of it is neither here nor there.

Moreover, my claim is that this first-order moral-philosophical claim is false for Hegelian reasons.  Shifting back to the metatheoretical level now, Brandom-Hegel’s argument goes something like this.  Begin with Kant: Kant just fiats that sapient creatures possess the fundamental faculty of being able to normatively bind themselves.  For Kant this feature of sapient creatures is just a bedrock fact about us; it is in a sense untheorised.

Hegel is unsatisfied with this dimension of Kant’s argument.  Hegel wants to know where this ability to bind ourselves by norms comes from.  And Hegel answers as follows: this capacity is itself socially instituted.  For Hegel, our ability to bind ourselves by norms is itself a normative status that has been granted us by other normative actors treating us as normative actors.  Moreover, this is the only way the normative status of being a normative actor can be instituted.  For this reason, normative actors come into existence only when an entire community of normative actors ‘bootstraps’ itself into the space of norms by treating its members as normative creatures.  This is Hegel’s reciprocal recognitive account of the institution of normativity.

Good – I endorse all of this, and moreover endorse Brandom’s version of all this.  But what does the act of treating someone as a normative actor consist in?  Here, I want to argue, Brandom-Hegel is committed to an ultimately untenable distinction between the formal and the substantive dimensions of this category of normative attitude.

Recall that one of Hegel’s central objections to Kant’s approach is a critique of Kantian ‘formalism’.  Hegel consistently argues that Kant’s formal categories cannot actually possess the formal content that they do without that formal content being supplied in part by the categories’ non-formal elaboration in semantic practice.  Brandom reworks this Hegelian critique of formalism in his entire approach to logical semantics.  In Brandom’s semantics, material inference comes first – that is, the kind of inference from substantive claim to substantive claim that we make in day-to-day, ground level reasoning.  Then, for Brandom, formal inference – the kind of inferential relations expressed in formal logic – is a way of explicitating or expressing the inferential practices that are already present in our material inferences.  (This is Brandom’s logical expressivism.)  Brandom therefore rejects a distinction between form and content that draws a sharp line between the formal and the substantive, or that sees the substantive as being slotted into a pre-existing formal framework.  The semantic content of formal inferences can be found in material inferences.  This approach informs Brandom’s general interpretive or analytic strategy of “semantic descent”.

Ok.  I endorse all of this too.  But I think Brandom-Hegel’s adoption of the (first-order, moral-philosophical) Kant-Rousseau account of autonomy contravenes this ‘methodological’ approach.  In ‘A Spirit of Trust’ Brandom-Hegel seems to imply that normative actors can attribute (and thereby successfully institute) the normative status of “being a normative actor” in a way that does not institute any additional substantive first-order normative statuses.  That is to say, social actors can treat another social actor as a normative actor ‘pure and simple’, without thereby instituting any specific normative obligations or entitlements.

I want to argue that this is, if not exactly incoherent, at least strongly in tension with the entire thrust of Brandom’s theoretical approach.  Much better and more consistent, in my view, to adopt the following position: normative actors grant the status of being a normative actor by (successfully) attributing actual substantive obligations and entitlements; the formal status of “being a normative actor” then immediately follows from being an actor that has obligations and entitlements.  This means that those ‘originary’ obligations and entitlements must be successfully instituted by normative actors other than the actor to whom they are attributed.  This in turn means that it cannot be the case that we are only bound by norms that we have bound ourselves to – it must be possible (even necessary?) for at least some of our obligations and entitlements to ‘precede’ our own acts of normative self-binding.  And this is so because it is the existence of these ‘originary’ (non-chosen) obligations and entitlements that makes us into normative actors in the first place.

This theoretical move, if adopted, is much more ‘communitarian’ than the Kantian approach.  I don’t have much enthusiasm for (or indeed knowledge of) the theoretical traditions that emerge out of this communitarian approach.  I am not a communitarian, and I want to preserve as much space for individual autonomy within my theoretical framework as I reasonably can.  But in my view the strong distinction between the formal and the substantive that seems to be implied by Brandom-Hegel’s retention of the (first-order, moral-philosophical) Kant-Rousseau account of autonomy just isn’t going to work.  We need to accept, in my view, that our formation as normative actors involves us ‘coming into the normative world’ with obligations and entitlements already instituted by that world, which we had no say in as autonomous moral actors.

Now, if I knew more about Heidegger I could probably talk about “thrownness” here – and in general I assume that there is a vast philosophical literature that thematises this kind of thing.  Maybe at some point I’ll get around to reading more of that literature.  For now, though, I just want to again mark that this is one of the areas where I depart from Brandom.  

In the next post in this series I’ll talk about one of the (apparent?) unpleasant implications of this departure.

Levels of analysis of individual action

I’ve uploaded another short document to my ‘draftwork’ page – The Social Construction of Non-Transitive Preferences [PDF].  The goal of this post is to gloss and associate around that document in a more informal way (not that the document itself is a paragon of rigour).

I’ll start by flagging that, in the train of thought to which this post contributes, I’m going to be moving unceremoniously between analysis couched in terms of motives and analysis couched in terms of commitments (or at least, claims that I’ve reached via analysis couched in terms of commitments).  This is (understandably) a mortal sin from at least some theoretical perspectives.  As I’ve said before, my overarching claim in this space is that the paired terms in the oppositions “motives / commitments” and “desire / duty” can be rendered strongly compatible (albeit certainly not synonymous!) with the right philosophical heavy lifting, and that the concluding sections of the Spirit section of Hegel’s Phenomenology are my reference point for how that argument ought to go.  (My claim, further, is that Brandom refuses to follow Hegel down this element of the Phenomenology’s argument, for again understandable but in my view ultimately misguided anti-subjectivist methodological reasons.)  In any case, I intend to come back to all this, life permitting, but for now I’m giving myself permission to move freely and carelessly between non-equivalent vocabularies that fall on different sides of these oppositions, on the heroic but relatively strongly-held assumption that this can all be made to work out in the wash.

Ok.  So the document is working in a rational choice paradigm, and sort of using that paradigm to produce a model of the individual that is completely intractable within that paradigm, thereby losing most of the paradigm’s modelling virtues.  Still – what I want to talk about in terms of the document I’ve uploaded, is the three levels of analysis of individual action it’s working with.  [Some might say “Are you really going to start posting commentary on your own writing here now??  This seems like new levels of self-absorption for the blog” And to those people I say: “Look, ….”]

On the one hand, we have analysis of the individual in traditional rational choice terms – the individual has a well-behaved preference function which exhibits the attributes of completeness and transitivity.  But then, still staying within the rational choice framework, we can treat the individual as an ‘aggregation’ of other preference functions, at which point we can wave goodbye to transitivity (because Arrow).  There are two (potentially overlapping or intersecting) ways in which we can treat the individual as an aggregation of preference functions.

1. We can treat the individual as composed of multiple subcomponents, each of which can itself be analysed in intentional terms.  This is, basically, the Freudian strategy.  So, for example, the ‘id’ is a unit within the individual psyche with its own intentional structure, while the ‘superego’ is another unit within the individual psyche with its own, different intentional structure.  One of the tasks of the ‘ego’ is to reconcile incompatible desires associated with conflictual subcomponents of the psyche.  I’m suggesting this can in principle be understood as a preference aggregation mechanism.
2. We can treat the individual as channelling the preferences of others in their social environment.  So, for example (and very simply), I might tend to adopt the opinion of the majority of people in my social milieu on any given topic.  (There’s a whole ton of opinion dynamics modelling in this broad space.)  Obviously this is not how we adopt all our opinions – but I think it would be a naive model of the human animal that doesn’t treat this dynamic as playing a major role in opinion- (and therefore preference-) formation.

Then of course given these two approaches, we have:

3. A combination of the two.  For example: the subcomponent of the self that is the superego is formed by the ‘introjection’ of the preferences of others in one’s social milieu.

That’s basically what the linked document says, in the idiom of rational choice theory.  In this post I want to shift partly out of that idiom, and go a little further with this line of thought.

Start by shifting from the language of preferences to that of commitments, and then re-introduce the Brandomian de dicto / de re distinction.  So, staying with the example of the superego, we might say that rather than introjecting another’s preference function, the superego introjects a set of normative commitments.  But then we could in principle distinguish between (what we take to be) the de dicto and de re commitments of the individual(s) whose commitments are introjected.  I could even in principle attribute a different assessment of the de re content of the introjected commitments to different subcomponents of the psyche.  So, for example, I (as my ego) might attribute to my superego commitments that I don’t believe correctly track the commitments it has introjected.

One of the consequences of this “double bookkeeping” dimension of commitment tracking is that one can end up with selves that are really very complexly divergent from their social milieux, even if all of the selves’ commitments are derived from or constituted by those social milieux.  This is important to me, metatheoretically speaking, as a (somewhat, loosely) “cashed out” explanation of how the individual self can diverge from its social milieu even on a quite strongly social constructivist account of the self.

If one wanted to make this point in a more ‘rational choice’ idiom, I suppose one could argue that because we can never fully know another’s preference function (but only its expression in a finite number of decisions) one can easily “introject” a reconstructed preference function that is in fact significantly divergent from the “real” preference function that “really” underlies those decisions.  I prefer the Brandomian way of doing things, but this rational choice version will carry much of the same argumentative weight, in terms of the divergence of self from milieu.

What does this apparatus give us?  Well, it gives us three different lenses on analysing the actions of the individual.

First lens: standard rational choice theory.  Here we have an individual with a specifiable preference function behaving in accordance with that function.  Obviously the most prominent version of this approach is ‘homo economicus’ – the idea that we have a rationally self-interested individual maximising their utility construed in fairly ‘crass’ material terms.

As I’ve said before, I have a lot of time for this ‘homo economicus’ approach, which I think captures a lot of human behaviour.  However – there is clearly also a lot of human behaviour that this approach does not capture.  Some of that non-homo-economicus behaviour can be modelled by simply changing the content of the individual’s preference function (for example: making it, at least in part, other-oriented).  But the apparatus I’m discussing here gives us two additional ways to modify ‘homo economicus’.

Second lens: the socially-constituted individual.  Here the idea is that individuals’ preferences are radically shaped by the preferences of those around them.  If I have a meta-preference for my preferences to align with the preferences of those around me, and if those around me have the same meta-preference, then this provides another mechanism via which all our preferences can diverge quite radically from those of ‘homo economicus’, as we mutually reinforce each others’ preferences (and beliefs, and behaviours).  I think there’s a useful, albeit very loose, analogy here with sexual selection in biology.  The functionalist dimension of the Darwinist explanatory framework suggests that animals should be ‘adapted’ to their environment.  But since that environment includes other animals of the same species, sexual selection preferences can produce really weird evolutionary features that don’t have any obvious ‘environmental’ function beyond matching the sexual preferences of other animals, where those preferences have themselves evolved as part of the same dynamic.  Similarly in social life, preferences can diverge from those that might appear ‘rationally self-interested’ very dramatically, even on a rational choice model, because ‘self-interest’ includes an interest in the preferences and opinions of others.  Once this ‘specular’ dimension of self-formation is permitted to enter the picture, it is in principle possible for almost any behaviour to be socially instituted by a mutually-reinforcing community of practice.

Third lens: Instead of looking at individual behaviour via this kind of group dynamics, we can also see the individual as formed out of the internal dynamics of the subcomponents of the psyche.  As I said above, this approach is strongly compatible with the ‘social milieu’ approach – but it also allows us to explain high levels of ‘disconnect’ between individual and social environment.

Now – one of the problems with ‘homo economicus’ approaches is that they often seem to have a debased and narrow understanding of the motives that inform individual action.  People can behave in highly non-’rational’ ways, at least as ‘homo economicus’ construes reason.  But I think a lot of those behaviours can be thought about using the apparatus sketched above.  Critics of homo economicus often complain that the framework doesn’t accommodate major forms of collective action or social solidarity – I think the ‘specular’ dimension of the framework sketched above can easily do this.  It’s important to recognise, however, that ‘collective action’ and ‘social solidarity’ are morally neutral terms.  Pogroms and lynch mobs are also examples of collective action and (in-group) social solidarity.  In fact, one of the biggest problems with the ‘homo economicus’ framework, from my perspective, is that it doesn’t easily or intuitively accommodate these major negative features of actually-existing social reality: the vigilante mob; the murderous fury of the community directed against its demonised others.

At this same time, the ‘internal dynamics of the psyche’ dimension of this approach can also accommodate behaviours that radically depart both from narrowly-understood individual self-interest and from group dynamics.  The self, once forged, can have its own internal ‘specular’ dynamics which reinforce preferences, commitments, and behaviours which dramatically diverge from those of the individual’s social environment.  Again, this is in itself morally neutral – moral superheroes and sociopaths can both possess these qualities.

In any case, this three-tiered approach to thinking about individual motives and intentionality is what I want to be working with, at least for now.  There’s much more to say about all of this, but I think that’s enough for this post.

Homo psychoanalyticus

My ‘taking stock’ post of January 6th laid out what I think is basically my current philosophical or metatheoretical research programme.  I don’t want to recapitulate that post here, but the basic idea is that I want to bolt a ‘subjectivist’ or ‘Humean’ account of the motivational structure of action onto the Brandomian-Hegelian metatheoretical apparatus that I otherwise largely endorse (albeit with important caveats that I’ve outlined elsewhere on the blog).

The basic idea of that ‘subjectivist’ or ‘Humean’ framework is that people are essentially motivated by gratification and/or desire.  (This claim needs to be caveated immediately, because as pragmatists we of course know that habit is central to human behaviour also – but that side of things can wait for another time.)  I am interested in two big divergent theoretical streams that come out of that basic philosophical move.  On the one hand, you have psychoanalytic approaches; on the other hand, you have rational choice theory.  There are (obviously) major points of difference between those two traditions.  Nevertheless, they share a basic assumption that “the pleasure principle” is a fundamental explanatory category.  Psychoanalysis understands the “pleasure principle” in terms of libidinal drives and their vicissitudes; rational choice theory understands the “pleasure principle” in terms of instrumentally rational utility maximisation.  But there is a fundamental commonality here which I am interested in – and which I endorse.

In working through Brandom’s interpretation of the conclusion of the Spirit section of the Phenomenology I have argued that Brandom misinterprets Hegel’s interest in this thematic.  Hegel, I am claiming, is attempting to integrate a “pleasure principle” motivational structure with a “duty-oriented” moral philosophy – integrating these key elements of Hume and Kant’s moral philosophies, if you like.  I claim that this project closely parallels Brandom’s integration of a “normative attitudes” explanatory framework with a “normative statuses” account of semantic content.  Brandom, however, conflates these two projects (the project focused on the relation between duty and desire, and the project focused on the relation between norms and practices), in a way that does not do justice to the subtlety and force of Hegel’s argument in ‘Spirit’.  This in turn can be explained by Brandom’s resolute refusal to make use of fundamentally subjectivist categories (experience; belief; desire) as core explanatory planks of his system.  I want to break with Brandom on this issue.

I’ve said that rational choice theory and psychoanalysis share a basic philosophical approach.  But I want to make a stronger claim than that – I want to argue that there is considerably more potential overlap between these two frameworks than is typically recognised.  What I want to start thinking about on the blog in more detail, then, is how (or to what extent) this latter claim can be cashed out.  How far is it possible to integrate these apparently very different approaches?  I don’t think they’re going to be fully synthesisable – even I wouldn’t go that far.  But I want to push this line of thought and see where I can get to with it.  This is also a way of trying to talk myself into finally doing the work on getting to grips with rational choice theory in economics – or at least give myself some way of thinking about what is and isn’t implied by these elements of the standard formal econ toolkit.

What are some objections to this project?  Non-exhaustively, the following immediately spring to mind:

• Objections from simple “that alternative framework is obviously malign in some under-elaborated way.”  Lots of people in a critical theory or qualitative social-scientific space just object to formal approaches on sight, and vice versa.  Most of the time I think this is just a ‘two cultures’ in-group out-group dynamic, and I don’t intend to pay it much heed.
• Objections from “what becomes of normativity on this account?”  I want to subdivide this objection into two subcategories.  First there are objections to pragmatist approaches in general – I take it Brandom has addressed these, and I have covered this terrain extensively in my posts about Brandom on the blog.  Second, there are objections from within a broadly Brandomian framework, which reject the move to “pleasure principle” or to instrumental rationality accounts of motivation or behaviour as undermining key dimensions of the Brandomian project – I’ll want to speak more to this kind of objection as I go.
• The apparent incompatibility of an approach that presupposes rationality (rational choice theory), and an approach that studies irrationality (psychoanalysis).  No doubt there’s something in this objection, but I think people sometimes forget the extent to which Freud’s project is a sense-making one.  Semantically, Freud’s goal is to uncover the meaningful content in apparently meaningless cognitive content (parapraxis; dreams); in the theory of action, Freud’s goal is to expose the intentional structures behind apparently irrational, unintended action.  The psychoanalytic project is to explain irrational behaviour in terms of action that is, at some level, rational.  I think it’s worth pressing on this side of things.
• The incompatibility of the two frameworks’ conceptions of the subject.  Rational choice theory typically assumes a unitary subject, while psychoanalysis typically assumes a divided subject.  I think this is very true, and in fact this is going to be my main initial strategy for synthesising these approaches – arguing that rational action at the sub-individual level can result in irrational action at the individual level, just as rational action at the individual level can result in irrational action at the collective level (Arrow’s impossibility theorem, etc.).  So I’m going to embrace this difference rather than aim to minimise it.
• Deep philosophical problems with the conceptions of intentionality involved in either or both frameworks’ understanding of the relation between desire and gratification.  I can already see some murky philosophical depths here that presumably at some point I’ll have to dip my toes into – for now, though, this side of things is going onto the back burner until such time as I’ve worked through some of the other objections in this list a little more thoroughly.
• Objections of pseudo-science.  Both psychoanalysis and rational choice theory have frequently been characterised as pseudo-scientific, on the grounds that both approaches posit unobservable explanatory factors that can always be ‘preserved’ by explanatory epicycles which render the basic framework compatible with any empirical observations whatsoever.  I think this objection has some force, and should be taken seriously, but I ultimately don’t accept it as a basis for rejecting either framework (or, obviously, their synthesis).  I probably need to do more work in the philosophy of science to elaborate or justify this opinion of mine, though, as I go.

Anyway, those are some objections to the project I’m pursuing here, most of which I want to at least keep at the back of my mind as I pursue it.  For now, though, I want to trudge on.  To repeat, the project – or subproject – is to see to what extent the psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of behaviour can be integrated with the rational utility-maximising framework of ‘homo economicus’, producing something like ‘homo psychoanalyticus’.  I feel like Jon Elster is a theorist who has explored quite a bit of this kind of terrain already (though not always with positive conclusions for any of these traditions), and I haven’t read nearly enough Elster, so I think he’s an obvious starting point in trying to work through this kind of space.  Onward.