Abstract
Brentano is often considered the originator of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, on which to be valuable is to be that which it’s fitting to value. But there has been comparatively little attention paid to Brentano’s argument for this analysis. That argument advances the stronger claim that fittingness is part of the analysis of normativity. Since the argument rests on an analogy between truth and fittingness, its impact may seem limited by the idiosyncratic features of Brentano’s later notion of truth. I argue, however, that the Brentanian argument is defensible even if fittingness is analogized to a more typical realist account of truth. The result is what I call the worldly Brentanian account of normativity. I defend this account as a form of naturalistic realism. I then show how the account can fare better than prominent alternatives against two kinds of error-theoretic arguments.
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Notes
Subsequently, Schroeder (2021) suggests this may not be the most convincing argument for reasons-first, given the non-naturalist predilections of many meta-ethicists. But that doesn’t mean that X-first Definition may not offer the best approach for a naturalistic reduction, for those already inclined to argue for such a reduction.
Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, more literally translated as “On the Origin of Moral Knowledge.”.
Brentano did not distinguish precisely between conceptual analysis and real definition in the way we might now do. Below, I’ll couch my modification to the Brentanian project explicitly in terms of a real definition of fittingness and normativity.
For Brentano, judgments count as any mental state that can carry a value of true or false. Brentano’s notion of judgment is thus rather different than a contemporary view that takes judgments to be occurrent beliefs. There are other interesting features of Brentano’s notion of judgment, such as that judgments are true in virtue of affirming or denying the existence of things (Kriegel 2018). But these other features of Brentanian judgment are not my focus here.
Objectivity here indicates a kind of independence from prevailing social convention and context that Brentano likely would have endorsed; see §3.3 and §5.1 for further discussion.
My aim in §2.1 has been to summarize the classical Brentanian argument. To the extent that premise 2 may already favor a fitting-attitudes analysis, I think this reflects the nature of that argument. In later sections (§4 and §5) I offer something more akin to a serviceability argument for my modified Brentanian account of fittingness.
As Brandl (2017) discusses, the difference between Brentano’s earlier and later theories of truth is still contentious. What’s less contentious is the nature of Brentano’s later theory of truth.
Brentano recognizes that not all true judgments will be self-evident in the sense discussed below, given the constraints on what counts as self-evidence. By introducing the notion of “correspondence” to a self-evident state, Brentano can preserve the centrality of self-evidence to truth, while allowing for true judgments that aren’t self-evident.
In discussing Evaluative Representation, I’ve talked somewhat loosely of attitudes (e.g. admiration) representing both properties (e.g. being admirable) and objects that instantiate those properties (e.g. the admirable object). To be more precise, one might say: There are some properties P1…Pn, such that, if any x instantiates some property Pj (e.g. being admirable) in P1…Pn, then there is some attitude A (e.g. admiration) such that taking A towards x accurately represents x in virtue of x instantiating Pj, and (given Evaluative Representation) A is therefore a fitting attitude to take towards x. (The “in virtue of” locution is meant to explain why an attitude A (e.g. admiration) accurately represents x (e.g. the admirable thing)—it accurately represents x because x instantiates a certain property (e.g. being admirable)). This formulation is somewhat cumbersome, however, which may explain (if not excuse) the less precise talk above.
And fittingness-firsters would seek to analyze or define value, as well as other normative features, in terms of fittingness.
One might wonder, however, how Worldly Representation applies to belief. Belief is an evaluative attitude, and like other evaluative attitudes it’s often considered to have fittingness or correctness conditions (see McHugh and Way 2016; Howard 2019). A common claim is that the standard of correctness of belief is truth, but at least insofar as propositions are distinct from beliefs, this isn’t quite accurate. Rather, a belief is fitting just in case it takes as true a proposition that is in fact true. So, given Worldly Representation, the correspondence that determines the fittingness of belief would be between belief and a true proposition, or perhaps the fact of a true proposition’s obtaining. This doesn’t seem to me to be a problem for Worldly Representation, as truth is not a normative or value property.
As the normatively fundamental property, fittingness would in turn be part of the definiens in the definition of normativity; see §1 and §3.5.
Perhaps it’s not clear that this is a problem solely for the worldly Brentanian account. Even the normative non-naturalist may hold that reasons and fittingness are relations to actions and attitudes. Why shouldn’t the non-naturalist then face a similar symmetry challenge? Perhaps it’s a problem for the worldly Brentanian because the worldly Brentanian claims they can better respond to symmetry arguments. But I’m not sure I want to say the worldly Brentanian can respond better than non-naturalists to symmetry arguments—only that she can respond better than other naturalists. I do claim, however, that the worldly Brentanian can address queerness arguments more convincingly than non-naturalists (see §5.3).
Given this conception, one might still think that mathematical entities would count as queer on mathematical platonism (McPherson, 2012, p. 229). But that’s not clear. For one thing, of course, we might be able to have mathematics without platonism. Even assuming platonism, however, the fact that mathematics is vital to natural science, and is applied with considerable uniformity, suggests that mathematical entities themselves would be studied by a broad variety of theories (physics, chemistry, etc.) in addition to “pure” mathematics.
One could remove talk of “good reason to doubt,” and instead say flatly that there are no queer properties. But this could be false, depending on our understanding of queerness; it is at any rate quite a strong claim.
The utility of joint-carvingness extends far beyond normative realism. Indeed, joint-carvingness has typically been used for other theoretical goals, such as determining the content of laws, the semantic values of terms, and the objective similarities between things (Lewis, 1983, 1984; Sider, 2011)).
One might think that my use of “should” is itself vulnerable to a symmetry argument—what, after all, distinguishes should from should*? But there’s still a realist intuition that certain features are “objectively privileged” or “objectively to-be-preferred” over others. Even if it’s difficult to express this intuition precisely—and even if the most “neutral-sounding” formulations can still be given asterisks of their own—I don’t think that means we must disregard the intuition itself.
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The author thanks Uriah Kriegel, Gwen Bradford, and two anonymous referees for their insightful and informative comments on previous drafts.
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Sass, R. Normative realism and Brentanian accounts of fittingness. Synthese 202, 204 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04419-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04419-5