Philosophy

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Start date: 1990End date: 1999

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    INTERNALIST AND EXTERNALIST THEORIES: THE DIVERSITY OF REASONS FOR ACTING
    (1990) Paul, Linda Marie; Slote, Michael; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
    Although common-sense moral theories tend to hold that everyone has reason to act morally, Bernard Williams argues in "Internal and External Reasons" that an agent has no reason to act if the act in question fails to Promote any desire or project of hers. Williams considers this a logical property of reasons for acting and refers to this position as "internalism." After critically examining Williams' specific arguments, I use a heterogeneous group of arguments to show that internalism oversimplifies the logic of reasons. There are various ways in which reasons can be attributed to an agent without first examining her motives or Projects: (1) some ways of undertaking obligations give rise to reasons for acting due to rational requirements on consistency of intention; (2) Thomas Nagel's arguments that prudential reasons are best described in terms of the agent's metaphysical conception of herself allow us to attribute reasons for acting to an agent without checking her desires first; and (3) John McDowell's account of agents ''perceiving" reasons explains how an agent's conception of the facts will give rise to a reason and a motive for acting. It also appears that internalism's appeal relies in part on our prejudices in favor of self-interest theories of rationality and our tendency to view agents as more separate and independent than they actually are. As a result, internalism suffers from too narrow a value focus. The emphasis on a shared form of life that originates in the Wittgensteinian notion of a practice allows us to attribute reasons for acting to agents without considering their individual projects in each case and better suits the process of judging and understanding reasons for acting than a view which focuses as heavily on the individual as internalism does. Finally, because agents are sometimes perverse, reasons themselves do not always motivate and motivation cannot logically be part of having a reason. In conclusion, reasons for acting are significantly more diverse than internalism allows and the theory should therefore be rejected.
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    Thinking in Language?: Evolution and a Modularist Possibility
    (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Carruthers, Peter
    This chapter argues that our language faculty can both be a peripheral module of the mind and be crucially implicated in a variety of central cognitive functions, including conscious propositional thinking and reasoning. I also sketch arguments for the view that natural language representations (e.g. of Chomsky’s Logical Form, or LF) might serve as a lingua franca for interactions (both conscious and non-conscious) between a number of quasi-modular central systems. The ideas presented are compared and contrasted with the evolutionary proposals made by Derek Bickerton (1990, 1995), who has also argued for the involvement of language in thought. Finally, I propose that it was the evolution of a mechanism responsible for pretend play, circa 40,000 years ago, which led to the explosion of creative culture visible in the fossil record from that time onwards.
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    Autism as Mind-Blindness: An Elaboration and Partial Defence
    (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Carruthers, Peter
    In this chapter I shall be defending the mind-blindness theory of autism, by showing how it can accommodate data which might otherwise appear problematic for it. Specifically, I shall show how it can explain the fact that autistic children rarely engage in spontaneous pretend-play, and also how it can explain the executive-function deficits which are characteristic of the syndrome. I shall do this by emphasising what I take to be an entailment of the mind-blindness theory, that autistic subjects have difficulties of access to their own mental states, as well as to the mental states of other people.
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    Simulation and Self-knowledge
    (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Carruthers, Peter
    In this chapter I shall be attempting to curb the pretensions of simulationism. I shall argue that it is, at best, an epistemological doctrine of limited scope. It may explain how we go about attributing beliefs and desires to others, and perhaps to ourselves, in some cases. But simulation cannot provide the fundamental basis of our conception of, or knowledge of, minded agency.
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    Sympathy and Subjectivity
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 1999-12) Carruthers, Peter
    This paper shows that even if the mental states of non-human animals lack phenomenological properties, as some accounts of mental-state consciousness imply, this need not prevent those states from being appropriate objects of sympathy and moral concern. The paper argues that the most basic form of mental (as opposed to biological) harm lies in the existence of thwarted agency, or thwarted desire, rather than in anything phenomenological.
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    Conscious Thinking: Language or Elimination?
    (Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 1998-12) Carruthers, Peter
    Do we conduct our conscious propositional thinking in natural language? Or is such language only peripherally related to human conscious thought-processes? In this paper I shall present a partial defence of the former view, by arguing that the only real alternative is eliminativism about conscious propositional thinking. Following some introductory remarks, I shall state the argument for this conclusion, and show how that conclusion can be true. Thereafter I shall defend each of the three main premises in turn.