Abstract
Just as Quine and others have argued for a deflationism about the property of truth, Sinan Dogramaci has argued for a deflationism about rationality. Specifically, Dogramaci claims that we have no reason to think that the basic, deductive, epistemic rules we call “rational” have any sort of “unifying property.” A “unifying property” is a property that is necessary, sufficient, and explanatorily illuminating. My goal in this paper is to undermine Dogramaci’s argument for this radical position. I do this by first outlining Dogramaci’s distinctive view on the function of our epistemically evaluative terms. This view, called epistemic communism, has it that the function of terms like “rational” is to support the coordination of our community on a single set of epistemic rules. I offer a reconstruction of Dogramaci’s argument from epistemic communism to deflationism about rationality. I next raise an objection to Dogramaci’s argument: different sets of epistemic rules do not equally support the coordinative function. Dogramaci has a response to this objection, but I argue that this response is less than satisfactory. I illustrate that this response is unsatisfactory by employing work by David Enoch and Joshua Schechter. After pushing my objection to Dogramaci’s argument, I develop, on Dogramaci’s behalf, an objection to my non-deflationary attempt to undermine his argument. In the final section of the paper, I reply to this objection offered on Dogramaci’s behalf and conclude that whether we are epistemic communists or not, we need not accept deflationism.
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Notes
For most of what follows, I will leave “basic” and “valid” unmentioned. It should be assumed that throughout this paper I am discussing valid and basic epistemic rules.
I got this “epistemic island” way of putting it from Schoenfield (2015), p. 265.
This is not exactly right. We may still want the rules that our community coordinates on to be sufficiently general. For example, the basic deductive rule that takes us from the Peano axioms to Fermat’s Last Theorem may not be of much use to generally employ throughout our reasoning. So, it may be more felicitous to say that we could, in principle, coordinate on any sufficiently general set of valid rules to serve as the basic deductive rules in our community. However, there are still infinitely many sufficiently general deductive rules we could coordinate on.
In correspondence, Dogramaci has written “I meant ”necessary and sufficient” in the metaphysical sense, that is, a property unique to just that thing in all worlds.” I have interpreted “a property unique to just that thing in all worlds,” I think rather accurately, as a property that is instantiated by a single object across every possible world, and is only instantiated by this unique object in every possible world.
I do not mean to imply that Dogramaci says that the theorists of rationality that he is citing have this account of a unifying property explicitly in mind. But, Dogramaci does think they have something like this guiding their theorizing.
The italics here are my own.
Or perhaps, given our cognitive psychology, the particular set of rules that is the actual set we call “rational” would best serve the function of epistemic coordination for us.
Dogramaci has written to me in correspondence that “I meant ‘necessary and sufficient’ in the metaphysical sense, that is, a property unique to just that thing in all worlds. Since properties that involve thinkers’ psychologies and circumstances are contingent, they would not be unifying in this sense.”
Dogramaci says on p. 794 of “Communist Conventions...” that merely psychologically significant properties can not be normatively deep. Though, he does go on to mention Boghossian, Wedgewood, and Enoch and Schechter, as all proposing views on the justification of our deductive rules that do offer properties that are normatively deep in the right kind of way. Given that these views can be cashed out in terms that cite psychological features, these accounts do seem to be able to meet the EI condition. This tension and what I have to say about it will be more thoroughly explained in what follows within the body text.
I do not want to get into details defending the specifics of their account. Since I am using their account as a working assumption to prove a general point (that I think could just as equally have been proven by employing Wedgwood’s or Boghossian’s views as working assumptions), it is not important, for my purposes, to defend, or explain in much detail, the intricacies of Enoch and Schechter’s account.
Just to add a bit more concrete detail to Enoch and Schechter’s view, I’ll briefly explain the difference between Peirce’s Rule and Modus Ponens on their account. Peirce’s Rule is not psychologically indispensable for us to complete any of the projects rationally required for creatures like us; Modus Ponens is. Peirce’s Rule could be of some use in meeting some rational requirement, but it is not indispensable.
I will often use “indispensable” or “rationally-indispensable” as short hand for “psychologically indispensable for a rationally required project.” This just allows me to capture the Enoch and Schechter-type properties, like P, with fewer words.
Is this rigidification justified? Yes, I think it is. We are interested here in whether our rules (the rules rational for us to employ) have a unifying property. If we do not do the rigidification, then we are not examining whether our set of rational rules exemplifies the candidate property in other worlds; instead we would be examining whether counterparts of our set of rational rules exemplify the property.
I call it P(a) here to focus on how it contrasts with what I call P(1) shortly. But notice, P(a) and P are the same.
Thank you to reviewer three for introducing this objection.
Thank you to reviewer two for introducing this objection.
Thanks go to Declan Smithies for bringing this objection to my attention.
I use “unify” in this quoted way to signify that I am no longer talking about Dogramaci’s sense of unification.
References
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Sinan Dogramaci, Declan Smithies, three anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the 2019 moral epistemology seminar at Ohio State for helpful feedback and discussion of this work.
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DeWitt, J.A. Dogramaci’s deflationism about rationality. Synthese 199, 4437–4455 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02985-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02985-6