Abstract
According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions can be taken to be constituted by facts about the subject’s best opinions about them formed under certain optimal conditions. This paper aims to defend this account against three main objections which have been made to it by Boghossian, Miller and implicitly by Wright himself. It will be argued that Miller’s objection is implausible because it fails to take into account the partial-determination claim in this account. Boghossian’s objection also fails because it is based on an unjustified reductionist reading of Wright’s account. However, Wright’s own attempt to resist Boghossian’s objection seems to display a shift from his Judgement-Dependent account to an Interpretationist account of self-knowledge, in which case Wright’s new account would face the same problem which he himself has previously put forward in the case of Davidson’s Interpretationist account of self-knowledge. Nonetheless, I will argue that Wright does not need to make such a move because Boghossian’s objection is not applicable to his account.
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Notes
See, e.g., Wright (2001, p. 201).
See, e.g., Kripke (1982, pp. 21, 38, 62, 70–71). Here, due to limitations of space, I had to assume readers’ knowledge of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and solution. For more on Kripke’s Wittgenstein, see Kripke (1982). See also Boghossian (1989), Hattiangadi (2007), Kusch (2006), and Wilson (1994).
See also Wright’s remarks on the ordinary notion of intention (2001, p. 113).
See also Wright (2003, p. 388).
It seems that it also violates the Independence Condition, as it involves facts about S’s (not being ignorant about her) intention, on which the satisfaction of the C-conditions depend. See also Miller (1989, pp. 171–173).
I would not take side on this matter, that is, whether we need actual interpretation or potential interpretability and whether the interpreter is to be a normal speaker or an ideal interpreter. For it would not be crucial for the general distinction I am trying to make between the Interpretationist Constraint and the Interpretationist account. For discussion of Davidson’s remarks on ideal versus actual interpretation, see, e.g., Verheggen (1997, 2006), Glüer (2011, pp. 234-235), and Byrne (1998).
See also Boghossian (1989, p. 547).
See also Davidson (1987, p. 38).
Consider again Wright’s description of his solution: “the proposal reinstates both a standard of correctness for my opinions about what I mean and the authority of those opinions—but in order for it to do so, I need to be considered as an at least potential object of interpretation, with my claims about my own meanings essentially defeasible in the light of the shape assumed by my actual practice. This—the second effect—is a step in the direction of a broadly Communitarian [view]” (2001, p. 87).
This gets close to the sort of (Interpretivist) account which, for instance, Byrne (1998) attributes to Davidson, according to which facts about what a speaker means and believes are constituted by the Ideal Interpreter’s best judgement about those meanings and beliefs. Whether it is a plausible interpretation of Davidson’s account of meaning is an entirely different issue which I do not have space to discuss here. But just to make a point which may later be useful for my discussion, Davidson surely believes that there are facts of the matter about what a speaker means (and believes), that is, facts about fine-grained meaning (and the content of beliefs). This is the reason why he claims that indeterminacy has no ontological consequences for his account, contrary to what Quine claimed. This puzzling claim and the inconsistency it brings about in Davidson’s discussion of Quine’s indeterminacy of translation arguments and Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical problem have been recently discussed elsewhere; see, e.g., Verheggen and Sultanescu (2019), Verheggen (2017), Verheggen and Myers (2016) and Hossein Khani (2018a, b, 2019). Nonetheless, from these problems alone it does not necessarily follow that, for Davidson, facts about meaning and mental content are constituted by some other (reductive) facts about the interpreter’s interpretation of the subject. Rather the interpreter can still be taken to be merely good at tracking such facts, rather than determining them.
See also Davidson (1987, p. 34).
Here, I will only concentrate on the way Wright reads and criticizes this account, rather than the way I think is the plausible way of understanding it.
See also Wright (1992, pp. 120–121).
See, e.g., Boghossian (1989).
For Wright, the problem is to answer the question “How is it possible to be, for the most part, effortlessly and reliably authoritative about, say, one’s intentions if the identity of an intention is fugitive when sought in occurrent consciousness … and the having of an intention is thought of as a disposition-like state?” (2001, p. 148).
For instance, on indefinite ‘fecundity’, Wright says: “Well, suppose I intend, for example, to prosecute at the earliest possible date anyone who trespasses on my land. Then there can indeed be no end of distinct responses, in distinct situations, which I must make if I remember this intention, continue to wish to fulfill it, and correctly apprehend the prevailing circumstances” (2001, pp. 112–113). We also saw his response to the problem of self-knowledge in terms of his J-D account.
There is a second point which is worth noting. Boghossian’s objection concerns Wright’s general account, i.e., whether it is capable of construing intention as judgement-dependent at all. The objection is not concerned with the Independence Condition in this account. As Boghossian emphasizes, the problem is that “the content of the judgements said to fix the facts about mental content have to be presupposed” (1989, p. 547). Recall that, according to the Independence Condition, the question about whether the C-conditions obtain is to be independent of obtaining the facts about the subject’s intending to φ. The C-conditions should not presuppose any fact obtaining which can independently of the subject’s best judgements determine what S’s intention is. Boghossian’s objection, however, is that the content of the judgements involved in the biconditional fails to get determined, not that some of the conditions in the C-conditions presuppose some facts which determine the subject’s intention independently of the subject’s relevant best judgements. As I have indicated earlier in my discussion of Miller’s objection and the no-self-deception condition, Wright’s account is free of this charge if the Interpretationist Constraint is interpreted and implemented in the right way.
Of course, it is not to say that my arguments in this paper, if sound, would solve all of the problems Wright’s account would have to deal with. For instance, those outlined in Johnston (1993) would need to be reserved for an independent investigation. See, e.g., Miller (1995) for an attempt to deal with Johnston’s Missing-Explanation Argument.
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Hossein Khani, A. Interpretationism and judgement-dependence. Synthese 198, 9639–9659 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02670-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02670-8