Abstract
Cliff Hooker’s effort at developing a naturalistic philosophy for scientific and quotidian reason is formidable. With Barry Hoffmaster, Hooker has recently expanded his naturalism to encompass moral reason and moral epistemology by considering a real life example of moral decision-making. Hoffmaster and Hooker’s work thus presents a unique opportunity to examine a thoroughgoing naturalism applied to a concrete, complex case. This paper offers a critical assessment of the Hoffmaster and Hooker piece through the lens of an externalist approach to naturalism developed by Adam Morton. General lessons for naturalism about reason are revealed before a rough sketch of a novel account of problems and problem-solving is given to illustrate the importance of externalism.
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Notes
“Naturalism” is notoriously ambiguous. The naturalism that this paper is concerned with roughly conforms to a combination of what Goldman (1994) calls substantive naturalistic epistemology and methodological naturalistic epistemology. Specifically, the naturalist accounts of reason referred to here are given in terms of natural (non-normative) properties or relations; they maintain that theorizing about reason and rationality cannot be carried out (completely) a priori, but must be informed by empirical work in the relevant scientific disciplines; they are devoted to a descriptive realism regarding human agency such that proposed norms are realistically achievable by such finite and fallible creatures.
In this paper I use “reason” (as a noun) to refer to the capacity to think, decide, and solve problems. “Account of reason” refers to any characterization of reason. I use the terms “reasoning” and “to reason” (as a verb) to refer to the exercise of the capacity of reason. And I use the term “rationality” to refer to any normative framework that sets out criteria of acceptable ways to reason.
Whereas HH use “women” to refer to the people studied, I will use “counselees” to maintain generality, since not all of the individuals were women.
“Intelligence” and its cognates are slippery terms. They are employed in different ways in different contexts, from colloquial assessments of intelligence to more technical uses in psychology (such as with respect to assignments of Intelligence Quotients). (See Morton 2012, Chapter 6, for a glimpse at the many meanings of “intelligence”). Hooker and HH often use the term “intelligent”, even though it is not entirely clear what property they are referring to (other than perhaps rationality). To avoid problems and ambiguities, I try not to use “intelligence” to refer to anything substantial about an agent or individual. Throughout the paper, “intelligence” and its cognates are used or mentioned only with respect to Hooker’s or HH’s uses of the terms, save for reference to “intellectual virtue(s)” which is a term of art in virtue theory (in ethics and epistemology).
There will be exceptions of course. Some who know of the mechanisms of the framing effect may present information in a certain way with the intention to manipulate people. The obvious examples of this occur in commercial advertising, and (to a certain extent) politics. But these are special cases.
Gigerenzer continues to criticize such Kahneman–Tversky-style heuristics, arguing that they are vague labels that are not of much use in scientifically studying heuristics (see e.g., Gigerenzer 1996; Gigerenzer and Todd 1999; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011). It would take us too far afield to address this debate. For the purposes of this paper I will follow mainstream psychology research and take the Kahneman–Tversky-style heuristics at face value.
The vast amount of research on dual process theory of cognition is relevant here. Dual process theory posits two types of cognitive processes that are responsible for our thoughts and actions. Type 1 processes are typically characterized as implicit, automatic, and unconscious, while Type 2 processes are characterized as explicit, controlled, and conscious (see e.g., Evans and Frankish 2009). According to researchers such as Kahneman (2011), Type 1 processes dominate most of our thought processes.
There is a further common distinction between access internalism and mentalist internalism. Access internalism is what is characterized in the main text here, whereas mentalist internalism holds that a justifier is a mental state of an agent (Feldman and Conee 2001; see also Goldman 2009). The externalism that will be proposed below is construed in terms of reason (as opposed to justification or knowledge), but it nonetheless denies both access and mentalist internalism.
It is important to keep in mind that whether a justifier is inside or outside the head (or mind) does not determine whether the justifier is internal or external. The view that things residing inside the head (mind) are internal while things residing outside the head (mind) are external invokes a different sense of internal/external (which is more closely aligned with mentalist internalism; see the previous note).
Though the idea of externalism about reason and rationality isn’t original (and my arguments below rely heavily on the work of Adam Morton), the main contribution here consists in clarifying the shape and contours of externalist naturalism and naturalism about reason and rationality generally speaking. This is not a trivial task, since externalism about reason and rationality is not very well developed at this point. My assessment of Hooker’s naturalism helps in understanding subtle distinctions among naturalists’ camps, and it reveals strengths and weaknesses of various positions along the internalism/externalism debate. In another respect, my assessment offers an original diagnosis of the difficulties which confront current popular naturalist theories of rationality, and in response a proposal is advanced which is shown to adequately deal with such difficulties.
Hooker’s (1995) characterization of reason in terms of self-correcting regulation approaches the externalist naturalism I’m about to propose here. However, his reliance on the four tools serving to improve judgment, and indeed the central role that judgment plays in his account of reason, places him squarely in the internalist camp, and therefore he is vulnerable to the criticisms given in the main text.
Nevertheless, Gigerenzer seems to misconstrue the internalism/externalism distinction. In one work, for instance, Gigerenzer acknowledges that internalism about rationality “is based on the assumption that internal ways to improve cognition are under our control, whereas the external ones are not” (Gigerenzer 2006, p. 127, emphasis added). Yet he goes on to remark, “This assumption, however, is often incorrect, and reveals a limit of an internalist view of cognitive virtue. I conjecture that changing environments can in fact be easier than changing minds” (ibid.). Gigerenzer proceeds show how altering the environment (e.g., changing the format of statistical information) can improve reasoning, concluding that “Cognitive virtue is, in my view, a relation between a mind and its environment, very much like the notion of ecological rationality” (p. 128; cf. Gigerenzer 2008, pp. 16–18). Notice that insofar as an individual can change aspects of the environment, such aspects are not external in the sense described above. Externalism about reason and rationality maintains that there can be factors that contribute to an individual’s rationality that she has no epistemic access to or control over. If one is able to change the relevant features of the environment (e.g., format of statistics), then such features aren’t external to the individual.
Of course, a lot (though not all) of what goes on in reason is psychologically unavailable—these are the “hidden” cognitive processes referred to above, and they are external in the relevant sense. It might seem, therefore, that the self-knowledge needed to appropriately govern one’s reasoning is practically unachievable. Nevertheless, the required knowledge need not be (and tends not to be) explicit. One can acquire implicit self-knowledge by monitoring one’s reactions and reasoning in a variety of circumstances. This may not reveal the specific cognitive processes that are involved in one’s reasoning, but it will implicate general tendencies, patterns of strengths and weaknesses, and overall cognitive dispositions—in short, it will provide the material to develop the required skills to deploy effective reactions to our current situations (see below). (A more restrictive account of reason and rationality requiring that only accessible and explicit processes belong to reason/rationality would just be a version of an internalist view that I’m urging against.) Of course, there will still be much about our psychologies that remains hidden from us, to the extent that even implicit self-knowledge is not achievable. This suggests that we might rely on outside (external) advice from others. It also suggests that our efforts at improvement will be unavoidably imperfect.
Perhaps one would want to refer to such a skill as phronesis, though I would hesitate to refer to phronesis as a unified capacity (cf. Morton’s 2012 treatment of the concepts of rationality and intelligence). Whether phronesis, in this sense, can be construed in externalist terms is an important open question. The themes presented above suggest that a case should be made for this. However, this is a topic that lies beyond the scope of the present paper.
This division in ambitions for a theory of rationality is given by Morton (2010).
This is an ability that virtue epistemologists refer to in terms of exercising intellectual virtues.
There is, or course, a rich and ancient tradition in which rationality is conceived in terms of skilled judgment. My criticism here is not meant to dismiss or devalue such a tradition—indeed some of my arguments borrow from this tradition. Rather, the criticism is aimed specifically at Hooker’s deference to judgment in rationality without providing an account of what judgment is. Additional problems associated with Hooker’s lack of a theory of judgment are indicated below. As we shall see presently, proffering a framework for reason—a framework such as virtue theory (which may also be interpreted as a proxy for a theory of judgment)—can help in understanding the role of judgment in rationality.
Morton (2012) makes a convincing case that rationality is not a single capacity (cf. Stich 1990), and he argues that rationality is not a concept we necessarily need in evaluating others and ourselves. I am sympathetic to these views, though I still employ the concept rationality throughout this paper so that I can engage Hooker (and Hoffmaster) directly. In any event, I think that Morton’s position about rationality can be likewise maintained with respect to judgment.
A worry might be raised here that it seems as if the position I’m adopting (following Morton) is a sort of “anything goes” position, and that this sounds like an empty thesis. I must concede that there is a sense in which the position I’m adopting is “anything goes”, but this doesn’t entail that it lacks content. This can be explained as follows. The position is “anything goes” in the sense that there is no delineated set of strategies (reactions) that an individual is confined to in rationally dealing with a problem. Really, anything goes, whatever works. But this is not an empty sense of “anything goes” in at least two important ways. First, as we saw in the previous section, something more than a general grab-bag of strategies is needed to usefully apply the strategies in question, and to successfully navigate a problem. In addition to strategies, one must possess the right sort of skills in managing the strategies and in knowing when and in what measure to apply them. It is true that anything goes, but not without appropriate management (which partly constitutes what I am here calling “effective reactions”). Indeed, we saw above the difficulties that Hooker faces with his account of unrestrained problem-solving resources. Second, although anything goes on the present account, only what works is understood as useful, and what works well is understood as more useful than what doesn’t work as well. And what works, and what works well, is relative to an individual in specific circumstances. Providing the details of what reactions work for a given individual in specific circumstances is no trivial matter, and it would require a lot of empirical work (and there are potentially insurmountable problems in providing these details, as I discuss below). But in any case, there are facts about what works and what doesn’t, and why, and these facts help to demonstrate that the foregoing position is not a naïve view of “anything goes”.
At least one example comes to mind here: Gigerenzer and colleagues explore presenting probabilities in terms of natural frequencies to aid understanding. Natural frequencies are “absolute frequencies as they result from observing cases that have been representatively sampled from a population” (Hoffrage and Gigerenzer 1995, p. 684; see also, Hoffrage and Gigerenzer 1995, 1998; Hoffrage et al. 2005; Hoffrage et al. 2000).
In their book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgement (Bishop and Trout 2005), they discuss numerous other sorts of problems. I choose to discuss this moving example because it has interesting connections with the discussion of Hooker’s account of reason and HH’s assessment of the reproductive decision-making case.
Even if we give up the true belief outcome of the reliable process, so long as reasoning strategies are assessed according to a reliabilisit measure (that a strategy reliably produces outcomes of some sort) my point goes through.
It’s difficult to precisely pin down the role of reliabilism in Morton’s account. However, there are heavy hints of reliabilism throughout his book, Bounded Thinking (Morton 2012; see especially chapter 1), and he has a clear tendency to value truth.
The standard conception of problem-solving also has important roots in prior behaviourist and Gestalt psychology research. Cf. note 27 below. An account of the history of problem-solving research (even though it wasn’t always called that) will take us too far afield.
Nowadays the extended mind hypothesis challenges this assumption. Even so, I think the conclusions I draw below can apply in equal measure even if the mind is extended. Besides, the externalist framework that I am pushing here poses its own challenges to the assumption that all of reasoning occurs inside the head.
Conceiving the problem as a fixed structure was (and continues to be) important—as it was for behaviourism—to allow for a measure of improvement, and ultimately a conception of learning. For behaviourists this meant strengthening in operant conditioning. For cognitivists this means progressing in finding more efficient procedures to reach the goal state.
Many of the problems that contemporary philosophers focus on are decision-making problems. Though decision-making is distinct from problem-solving generally speaking, decision-making problems are still assumed to be fixed structures with respect to which decision-making strategies (e.g., heuristics) are deployed. Indeed, decisions are typically construed in terms of choice between well-defined alternatives. Therefore, my arguments concerning the difficulties in conceiving problems as fixed structures also apply in the context of decision-making.
Note, too, that this attack on reliability is unlike Hooker’s (1995, pp. 336–341) attack, in which he argues that reliability need not be the most important aspect in terms of which to theorize reason.
Again, even if we choose not to adopt the true belief part here, as long as there is some measure that is used as a criterion my argument applies. See note 23 above.
I actually borrow the term “cognitive irritation” from Gabbay and Woods (2005), who, in following Peirce, develop an account of abductive reasoning. This is a project completely different from mine here. Gabbay and Woods’ sense of cognitive irritation is probably more closely aligned with what Peirce intended by “irritation of doubt”. But, with Peirce’s pragmatism in mind, I don’t think that my use of the term (as explained in the main text) strays too far from Peirce’s ideas.
We might compare here Simon’s notion of satisficing. When an agent satisfices, she sets a goal which is satisfactory (or in some sense “good enough”) with respect to her desires and limitations, and aims to achieve that goal instead of aiming for an optimal solution (in the sense of neoclassical economic theory). Once the agent reaches the satisficing goal, her task is complete. With respect to the resolving a cognitive irritation above, we might say that a cognitive irritation is resolved in a satisficing manner, i.e., when the position adopted satisfies some pragmatically defined criteria.
As it stands, a lot more can be said about the nature of cognitive irritations and how they contribute to u-problems. These are important tasks. However, my central aim is to shed some initial light on some important problems and issues confronted by naturalist accounts of reason which have not received much attention heretofore. A fully detailed account of “cognitive irritations” and of “u-problems” can occupy a manuscript of its own, so the task will have to wait for another occasion.
A sense in which truth is involved may be as follows: “It is true/false that she would like her child to be …”. But this is a trivial way that truth figures in the problem.
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the following people for comments and discussions, suggestions and criticisms, through many drafts of this paper: Alain Ducharme, Uljana Feest, Barry Hoffmaster, Jeremy Schmidt, Chris Viger, and Charles Weijer.
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Chow, S.J. How reason confronts experience: on naturalist accounts of reason. Mind Soc 16, 51–80 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-016-0191-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-016-0191-6