Self evaluation affective and social grounds of intentionality

Tai ngay!!! Ban co the xoa dong chu nay!!! 16990024162041000000 Self-Evaluation PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES VOLUME 116 Founded by Wilfrid S Sellars and Keith Lehrer Editor Stephen Hetherington, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Senior Advisory Editor Keith Lehrer, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, U.S.A Associate Editor Stewart Cohen, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, U.S.A Board of Consulting Editors Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, U.S.A Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, U.S.A Marian David, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, U.S.A John M Fischer, University of California, Riverside, CA, U.S.A Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A Denise Meyerson, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia Franỗois Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS, Paris, France Mark Sainsbury, University of Texas, Austin, TX, U.S.A Stuart Silvers, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, U.S.A Barry Smith, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, U.S.A Nicholas D Smith, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, U.S.A Linda Zagzebski, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, U.S.A For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6459 Anita Konzelmann Ziv · Keith Lehrer · Hans Bernhard Schmid Editors Self-Evaluation Affective and Social Grounds of Intentionality 123 Editors Dr Anita Konzelmann Ziv University of Geneva Department of Philosophy Rue de Candolle CH-1211 Geneva Switzerland anita.konzelmann@unige.ch Prof Keith Lehrer University of Arizona Department of Philosophy 213 Social Sciences Building Tucson, AZ 85721-0027 USA lehrer@email.arizona.edu Prof Dr Hans Bernhard Schmid University of Basel Department of Philosophy Nadelberg 6-8 CH-4051 Basel Switzerland Hans-Bernhard.Schmid@unibas.ch ISBN 978-94-007-1265-2 e-ISBN 978-94-007-1266-9 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927921 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Editorial Self-evaluation is a term recently reassessed in academic philosophy by the joint efforts of two Swiss research teams The topic was launched on the occasion of the workshop “Self-Evaluation – Individual and Collective”, held in Basel in January 2009 The aim of the workshop was to open new approaches for investigating traditional questions such as the scope and purpose of self-knowledge, the interrelation between the social and the individual person, and the significance of emotional appraisal The scientific added value created by a perspective that shifts the focus from “self-knowledge” to “self-evaluation” is threefold: (i) the wider extension of the concept of self-evaluation allows a broader perspective on the structure of personal reflexivity; (ii) the notion of self-evaluation implies a matrix of values, and insofar as valuations imply a social context, the broadened perspective on personal reflexivity incorporates social relations; (iii) since affective states and attitudes play a crucial role in the detection and recognition of values, the broadened perspective on personal reflexivity incorporates affective assessment In short, self-evaluation is a conception of personal reflexivity which incorporates sociality and affectivity That this approach is more than promising was confirmed by positive responses of leading philosophers in the respective fields of research The initial exchange of ideas on the occasion of the workshop led to deepened discussions on the topic which eventually materialized in the present volume The workshop in Basel was jointly organized by the research group Collective Intentionality – Phenomenological Perspectives, hosted at the Philosophy Department of the University of Basel, and the research group “Thumos” – Emotion, Values and Norms, hosted at the Philosophy Department of the University of Geneva We would like to express our gratitude to the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel and the University of Basel for their generous support of the workshop and the research leading to this volume on the philosophy of self-evaluation Basel and Geneva October 2010 v This is Blank Page Integra vi Contents Self-Evaluation – Philosophical Perspectives Anita Konzelmann Ziv Part I Evaluative and Self-Evaluative Attitudes How to Have Self-Directed Attitudes Lynne Rudder Baker 33 Interpretation, Cause, and Avowal: On the Evaluative Dimension of Selfhood Axel Seemann 45 Who Do You Think You Are? The How–What Theory of Character and Personality Federico Lauria and Alain Pé-Curto 59 Part II Self-Evaluation and Rationality Self-Evaluation and the Ends of Existence Carol Rovane 81 Self-Evaluation and Action Juliette Gloor 97 Self-Trust and Social Truth Keith Lehrer 119 Part III Self-Evaluative Emotions Sentimentalism and Self-Directed Emotions Jesse Prinz 135 Psychopathic Resentment John Deigh 155 10 Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of Others, and “the thing called love” Edward Harcourt 171 vii viii 11 Contents Is Shame a Social Emotion? Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni Part IV 12 193 Evaluating the Social Self Feeling Up to It – The Sense of Ability in the Phenomenology of Action Hans Bernhard Schmid 215 13 Self-Evaluation in Intention: Individual and Shared Lilian O’Brien 237 14 Where Individuals Meet Society: The Collective Dimensions of Self-Evaluation and Self-Knowledge Ulla Schmid 253 About the Authors 275 Index 277 Contributors Lynne Rudder Baker Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA, lrbaker@philos.umass.edu John Deigh Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA, jdeigh@law.utexas.edu Julien Deonna Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, Julien.Deonna@unige.ch Juliette Gloor Department of Philosophy, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland, juliette.gloor@unibas.ch Edward Harcourt Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, and Keble College, Oxford, UK, edward.harcourt@philosophy.ox.ac.uk Anita Konzelmann Ziv Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, anita.konzelmann@unige.ch Federico Lauria Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland, Federico.Lauria@unige.ch Keith Lehrer Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA, lehrer@email.arizona.edu Lilian O’Brien Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, l.obrien@ucc.ie Alain Pé-Curto Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland, Alain.Pe-Curto@unige.ch Jesse Prinz Department of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, City University, New York, NY, USA; Department of Philosophy, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA, jesse@subcortex.com ix 266 U Schmid the subject’s intentional effort Taking a stance viewed that way involves that the subject sees herself as a subject, that she is capable of taking (causal) responsibility for certain events and that she makes up and therefore is able to express her mind And expressing one’s mind simply consists in uttering sentences that contain the ascription of particular intentional attitudes to oneself Similarly to expressing one’s sensations or colour impressions, uttering propositions concerning one’s intentional attitudes gives immediate insight to the constitution of the speaker in her relatedness – be it responsive or reactive – to the world Sentences of both types are best characterised as avowals because they not only make claims about the subject’s current state of mind, but also give the subject reason to act accordingly, and if she fails to so, reason to make them fit by changing, modifying or adding either her attitudes or her behaviour For we should bear in mind that the verbal elaborations of her intentional attitudes are actions, too, the subject is responsible for as a rational being.27 That the correctness-conditions of avowals of this kind in this way partly can change retrospectively, depending on the subject’s further behaviour, credits for the authority of agential self-knowledge That the correctness-conditions likewise depend on the rules governing the correct application of sensation- and intentionality-language grants for the normativity of agentially knowing oneself and thereby for the first of two collective elements entailed in self-evaluation Inasmuch as endorsing intentional attitudes means having answered a question to a certain issue for oneself, they can be explicated In the self-ascribing explication of her intentional attitudes a subject follows the rules governing the use of intentionality-language if she avails herself of language in a meaningful manner rather than uttering meaningless sounds It is debatable whether content-externalism with regard to self-knowledge is reconcilable with first-personal authority at all, but failure to give accurate self-ascriptions in that a subject’s avowals and behaviour diverge must be accounted for when expressive utterances are to count as articulations of self-knowledge at all Self- and other-deception aside, which both are (more or less) voluntary activities initiated by the subject herself, the failure entailed in giving wrong statements about one’s state of mind lies either in the subject’s inability to use the right concepts (the mistake lies in the articulation of one’s self-awareness) or in a lack of coherence throughout her psychological system The failure here arises on the basis of entertaining conflicting attitudes, whereby the attitudes articulated by the subject are not efficacious for her acting Due to the intrinsic relation holding between one’s intentional attitudes and one’s agential self-knowledge it is logically impossible to be mistaken about one’s intentionality although the contents of one’s knowledge is determined by the intentional attitudes one actually endorses and although one’s articulate self-ascriptions not necessarily correspond with one’s attitudes.28 Agential self-knowledge bears a normative quality in 27 Cf McGeer (1996, 509); Searle (1983) some cases, our action-awareness can be mistaken, though, due to external influences – e.g paralysed people can have action-awareness of a movement they cannot perform: That we are 28 In 14 Where Individuals Meet Society: The Collective Dimensions of Self-Evaluation 267 the sense that, although a subject’s failure to avow her intentional states does not compromise her first-personal epistemic authority, she nevertheless can be wrong in her self-ascriptions and thereby undermine the credibility of her avowals That the content of first-personal utterances underlies subject-independent correctness conditions should prevent us from interpreting the constitution of one’s mind as allowing for self-interpretation to be self-fulfilling The constitution of a person’s mind is not entirely up to her, but hallmarked by her engagement with her situational context and the commitments deriving from doing so.29 Until now, I have characterised agential self-knowledge in contrast to theoretical self-knowledge as genuinely first-personal in quality, internally related to the intentional attitudes a subject obtains in making up her mind regarding the states of affairs she is concerned with I have argued that holding intentional attitudes amounts to having settled a question for oneself, bringing about the subject’s ability to express her intentional attitudes verbally as avowals entailing the rational commitment to act in the light of her self-ascriptions This account of agential self-knowledge therefore provides for the asymmetry between the relation a subject holds to her own mind and those relations she stands in with the intentionality of others, characterised by a special authority of constituting her mind on the one hand and a normative requirement to bring her – tacit or public – self-ascriptions in agreement with her behaviour Failure to so can result in questioning the subject in her first-personal authority and gives the subject an incline for disapproving self-evaluative attitudes, such as shame or guilt, as I will argue in the following.30 14.7 Self-Regulation by Evaluating Oneself From the discussion of agential self-knowledge three results have direct impact on the understanding of self-evaluation that I will elaborate in the following: its first-personal character manifested in its immediacy and the subject’s authority, the subject’s active role in making up her mind as response to the world and the normativity of holding intentional attitudes If we conceive of intentional attitudes as constituents of their subject’s perspective, from which she gets involved with the world, that themselves entail the subject’s response to a certain state of affairs, we are able to understand the regulative function of self-evaluation for the situational adjustment and refinement of this class of mental states I have closed the last section by characterising the commitment entailed in holding intentional attitudes as a commitment to act in the light of one’s self-ascriptions which are embodied in holding nonetheless entitled to self-knowledge is argued for by Christopher Peacocke (1996) and Tyler Burge (1996) 29 For a comprehensive discussion of self-interpretative views as held by Charles Taylor, Paul Ricœur and others (most of them subsequent to Sartre’s views as elaborated in Being and Nothingness) and a clear-cut dissociation from them, cf Taylor (1985) and Moran (2001, chaps and 4) 30 Cf McGeer (1996, 508ff.) 268 U Schmid intentional attitudes Here, self-evaluation comes into play as that mental activity by which one monitors one’s own bodily behaviour, one’s dispositions and mental activity bringing to light discrepancies between one’s intentional attitudes and one’s behaviour or within one’s rational commitments In self-evaluation, one provides oneself with reasons for adjusting them actively or taking alternative measures to avoid incoherence.31 Exerting control over the constitution of one’s mind can, in principle, take three forms One can acquire new or modify one’s existing dispositions in order to be subsequently caused to act in the right way – this, however, does not have impact on one’s deliberatively generated attitudes One’s deliberative stance is open to direct control by reconsidering the grounds of the attitudes one obtains and thereby re-constituting or altering one’s commitments One can, however, exert indirect rational influence over one’s own attitudes – for example, by bringing oneself into a situation in which one is likely to respond in the desired way.32 The proper kind of adjustment depends on whether the inconsistencies among the subject’s attitudes obtain between her rational commitments and her dispositions or among her intentional attitudes viz the corresponding rational commitments If the subject’s intentional attitudes conflict with dispositions she holds, she will have reason to improve herself in the light of her commitments – she will have reason to take measures to alter her dispositions in order to meet up with the rational requirements originating from her commitments This adjustment can be undertaken without actually changing one’s mind for one can succeed just by manipulating oneself on a sub-rational level If on the other hand the subject has discovered inconsistencies among her intentional attitudes, she is provided with a reason to actively revise the constitution of her own mind She will so by reconsidering the questions answered by the intentional attitudes at stake and if necessary by additionally exerting manipulative influence upon them in order to change them according to her purpose.33 This is for example the case when instrumental actions not succeed in realising the goal they are directed at so that the subject has to modify either, her goal-directed behaviour or the goal itself, or if she has committed herself to several incompatible goals The requirements to engage in self-evaluation on a minimal level include knowing one’s mind in terms of agential self-knowledge and additionally taking a reflexive stance towards oneself, i.e a stance from which one directs one’s intentional 31 Alternatives can include self-deception, ignorance towards or repression of the mismatch Which method is applied by the subject presumably depends to some extent on the relevance of the incoherence in question, to some other on the method she is prone to pursue given her mental constitution At any rate, since holding intentional attitudes implies that the subject knows that she employs them, she is accountable for the way she handles situations of incoherence 32 The two ways of controlling the constitution of one’s set of intentional attitudes are presented in detail by Hieronymi (2009) Exercising rational influence over oneself parallels rational influence over other people to a certain extent (cf Rovane 1998), its success still hinging on an exertion of direct rational control, the endorsement of the response in question 33 Cf Hieronymi (2009, 1) 14 Where Individuals Meet Society: The Collective Dimensions of Self-Evaluation 269 activity to one’s own deliberative stance without entirely distancing oneself from it Although self-evaluation can be performed analogously to the evaluation of others and in this case basically consists in a theoretical process of comparing one’s self-ascriptions with one’s behaviour or other standards, the conclusions of evaluative self-reflection not per se give the subject sufficient reason to change her behaviour.34 It is conceivable that the outcome of self-reflection consists in a practical Moore-situation, i.e a situation in which I believe that I ought to do, feel or think p, but still do, feel or think the contrary An appeal to rationality alone will not help to make the subject act according to the conclusion she arrived at For this to be the case, the conclusion has to be commissive for the evaluating subject – which is the case if she endorses it as integral part of her deliberative stance Rather than being a reflective process that remains in the domain of theoretical reasoning, I propose to conceive of self-evaluation as reflexive form of control the subject intentionally, but not necessarily consciously exercises over her intentional attitudes Understanding self-evaluation as a kind of intentional activity however does not imply that the subject engages in some form of practical reasoning whilst forming, monitoring and revising her mental agency, if practical reasoning is understood Kantianwise to contain the subject’s representation of its object as cause of its conclusion In contrast, self-evaluation as well as making up one’s mind by positioning oneself to certain questions seem to belong to neither practical nor theoretical reasoning inasmuch as their results, i.e intentional or self-evaluative attitudes, immediately have normative impact on the subject’s behaviour, but are not represented or otherwise considered by the subject in advance.35 Self-evaluation itself presents us with a complex exercise of mental agency involving two different aspects under which the subject engages with the intentional attitudes constituting her mind: Whilst self-evaluation contributes to forming the subject’s intentional attitudes and in this respect evidently proceeds from the subject’s deliberative stance, the question she is settling here is concerned with the appropriateness of her own intentional attitudes Self-evaluation now appears as a process bringing the subject into some distance to her deliberative stance without separating from it by lapsing into theoretical reasoning about herself To understand this properly, I would like to recall that the attitudes one is concerned with in evaluating oneself are known by the subject agentially, that is they primarily are transparent features of the stance from which she approaches the world, and internally bear a commitment to accord with them The most basic version of evaluating oneself consists in complying with the variety of commitments entailed in the subject’s intentional attitudes by responding to changes in the grounds of the attitudes with changing the subject’s mind and thereby adjusting her commitments Contributing to making up the subject’s mind, the entire process of evaluating herself in its most basic form remains transparent to the subject insofar as her attention in doing so is directed “outward” to the question at issue 34 Thanks 35 Cf to Anita Konzelmann Ziv for helping me to clarify this point Hieronymi (2009, 12 (footnotes)) and Moran (2001, chap 3.3) 270 U Schmid 14.8 Self-Evaluation as Response to One’s Responsive Stance However, this thin notion of evaluating oneself does not provide sufficient explanatory grounds either for the self-reflexive processes giving rise to self-evaluative attitudes, or for their explicit normative dimension To account for these, we must develop a fuller notion of self-evaluation referring to the subject’s responsibility for her attitudes entailed in the notion of commitment I elaborated above The commissive character of intentional attitudes includes the subject’s responsibility not only for having generated them, but also for taking them into consideration in my further behaviour Whenever I engage in settling a question, the attitudes I employ provide the framework from which I depart in my deliberation However, in the light of my considerations of the situation I am concerned with the attitudes I previously held might turn out to be incomplete, inappropriate or simply obsolete with regard to what is appropriate to do, think or feel in the respective situation Typically, the role of self-evaluation in a rich sense is that of a negative feedback mechanism: it serves the purpose of finding out whether there actually is a mismatch between my intentional attitudes or my behaviour and the requirements set up by my situational or social context and thereby provides me with reasons for refining, adjusting or giving up parts of my intentional attitudes Metaphorically speaking, in self-evaluation I will “bring [my attitudes] out of the frame and install them within the scope of the problem itself, on the negotiating table and there my relation to them is unlike anyone else’s [ .] they cannot enter into my thinking as the fixed beliefs and desires of some person or other, who happens to be me.”36 The downside of the authority over my own intentional attitudes, which I am conceptually endowed with by standing in a first-person relation with my beliefs, desires and emotions, is that I am accountable for taking measures such that my actions make sense in the light of the assertions I previously made about my mental states.37 Misrepresenting my own intentionality in a significant number of cases affects my scope of acting as well as my status as rational and authoritative agent, in extreme cases with the result that I cannot cope any longer with the requirements of my situation or that I have to suffer from social forms of disregard The effect presents the subject’s conversion from an agent into a patient having lost authority and control over her own mind whilst having lost the capacity of engaging in self-evaluation or at least, taking its results seriously enough.38 I have mentioned above that the rational and conceptual requirements implied by knowing oneself agentially accompanied by self-evaluative processes account for one of two collective roots of self-evaluation The second one eventually shifts the perspective of the investigation to considering the morally relevant dimension of self-evaluation focusing on self-evaluative attitudes Self-evaluative attitudes 36 Moran (2001, 164) that it is not necessary for my argument that these claims be made in public It is sufficient to have taken a stance and thereby be able to avow one’s intentionality 38 Cf McGeer (1996, 509) 37 Remember 14 Where Individuals Meet Society: The Collective Dimensions of Self-Evaluation 271 resulting from self-evaluative deliberation, such as shame or guilt, are special in two respects: first, employing them amounts to taking a stance with regard to my own behaviour whilst maintaining the commitments in question as I explained in the last section; and second, they open the way into a social dimension by grounding in the respective systems of norms, rules and values I observe as participant in the according collectives That we respond to our own wrong-doing with feelings of shame or guilt rather than with anger or disapprobation, which are typical emotions caused by the misbehaviour of others, corresponds to the first-personal relation we stand in with our own behaviour Shame or guilt will be due results from a self-evaluating process in the course of which one has found a mismatch between the attitudes one holds or the actions one performed and what one finds one ought to have done in the according situation Although one here takes up a somewhat distanced selfreflexive perspective similar to a spectator’s stance, one’s self-approach towards one’s inappropriate conduct remains personal, it is not entirely detached In contrast to theoretical evaluative judgments, one’s self-response is affective and so closer to anger or disapproval that one equally feels towards one’s own and the moral failures of others Self-referential evaluative attitudes engage with the subject’s conduct from her first-personal, evaluative stance, based on the subject’s agential knowledge of the misplaced behaviour and her knowledge about the rational relations holding among her commitments The affective nature of these responses as well as the adjustments of one’s mental and bodily activity subsequent to self-evaluation make plausible that these are best characterised analogously to the kinds of influence and manipulation we can exercise over others In self-evaluation, we take a second-person stance towards ourselves that is characterised by our own perspectival stance – including our endorsement of both, the standards by which we evaluate ourselves and the evaluated behaviour I have taken the notion “situational appropriateness” for granted as reliable standard by which a subject’s behaviour can be judged right and wrong However, what counts as adequate way of feeling, desiring and also of believing in a certain situation is determined by the conventions, norms and values forming the background conditions from which the subject approaches the world together with the subject’s bodily and mental dispositions In the course of evaluating my behaviour, I primarily take into account what would be adequate behaviour according to the normative principles I have learned to comply with when becoming a member of a certain community before I develop my own system of behaviour-relevant norms in critical reflection on the common sense.39 Inasmuch as this entails that I take 39 That we first adopt the norms of our immediate social environment without questioning their objectivity is captured in Heidegger’s notion of everydayness The self-concept developed in social interaction first and foremost sets the usual way of life as normative standard It is only after the individual has recognised her own possibilities and talents that she is able to detach her self-view from a non-individual oneself Still, she cannot entirely leave the conventions and language of her social context behind because they constitute the means by which she performs changes in her normative system Cf Heidegger (2008 [1927]) 272 U Schmid responsibility for my behaviour and position myself towards it when evaluating myself, self-evaluation understood as responsive activity constitutes a practice regarding the ways I settle the questions posed by the outer world as well as by my own behaviour For the correctness-conditions of my self-ascriptions as well as the standards I observe when judging the adequacy of my actions, beliefs and emotions are of genuinely social origin My capacity to be ashamed for my misbehaviour and to feel guilty when I wronged somebody else is acquired by internalising rules and values just as it is influenced by my emotional sensitivity The phenomenon of generating self-evaluative attitudes is so to speak the place where an individual meets the social 14.9 Conclusion Whenever I engage with a problem I apply techniques of problem-solving Whenever I engage in settling a question I apply techniques of responding by forming and employing intentional attitudes The way I make up my mind observes certain standards of correctness in a conceptual as well as in a moral dimension, both being constituted by the values, norms and rules obtaining in my social environment I have argued that the process generating self-referential evaluative attitudes comprises both collective elements and likewise rests on the subject’s first-personal relation to her mind bringing about the special authority and responsibility she holds over them The activity of self-evaluation thus conceived usually is performed without the subject being conscious of it; however, she knows of it agentially by endorsing the evaluative attitudes constituting her response to herself The account of self-evaluation I propose thus regards it as vitally influenced by both, the evaluator and her collective environment.40 References Anscombe, G E M 1950 Intention Oxford: Blackwell Burge, T 1996 “Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96:91–116 Gertler, B 2008 Self-Knowledge The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 edition), edited by E N Zalta, URL =