Skepticism About Deliberation Part 1

Poor Shawn. I think I suggested (OK "promised" might be a better word) that I would say something about equal protection clauses and their import. So Shawn -- a Michigan-trained lawyer -- was sharpening her knives in preparation for shredding what naive things I would say on the topic. Sadly, she won't get to use them on me. I won't be posting on equal protection. Life is short, the law is long, and I have very tender skin. On the other hand, now she has a nice shiny set of razor-sharp blades to use on someone else.

That aside: Here is a perennially interesting thing: deduction. I have long been interested in gaps in thought, in ways our cognitive lives are gappy (in a sense to be explained). Some gaps in our cognitive lives are boring. For example: I zoned out this afternoon while I was "writing" my dissertation. Nothing happened mentally for, like, five minutes. Some gaps, however, are pregnant gaps: gaps that are nonetheless part of our mental lives. These are interesting gaps because you might wonder in what sense such gaps are part of our personal mental lives.

Maybe you'll get the idea when I turn to the topic at hand, inferencing. Here is a sequence of thoughts:

I like aged Gouda.
That is an aged Gouda.
If I like an aged Gouda, I should take it.
I shall take the aged Gouda.

A moment later, after the sequence of thoughts, I took the cheese and split. Zingermann's never knew what hit them. Silly, slow hippies! Now I have 5 pounds of aged Gouda and they don't. Thank you deduction!

I acted for reasons -- my preference for aged Gouda, the availability of aged Gouda -- I also acted on account of having reasoned a certain way -- having reasoned on the basis of my reasons. Part of the explanation/justification for my action is not just that I had certain preferences and made certain judgments, but also that those got together in such a way as to yield a conclusion about what to do. The got together in an inferential way. So if you ask "why did you take the cheese?", one thing I can do to answer your question is note that taking the cheese was the upshot of some reasoning.

But their getting together in an inferential way is a gappy matter: my having inferred is not witnessed in some thought-like occurrence in my mind. My having inferred seems to have been a matter, rather, of transitions between thoughts.

Sometimes (it is true) transitions between thoughts are accompanied by conscious markers of inference-making. I might, for example, have thought So, as a consequence of all of that, I shall take the aged Gouda. But this does not always happen when we draw inferences and anyway, even if it does, my having inferred does not consist in the occurrence of such conscious inference-markers.

On some wacky philosopher's whim, I might decide to free associate about aged Gouda (doesn't matter what thoughts I think so long as they are Gouda-related).

Here is one possible result of that whim:

I like aged Gouda.
That is an aged Gouda.
If I like an aged Gouda, I should take it.
So, as a consequence, I shall take the aged Gouda.

In such a case, I may very well not have performed a deduction. The last thought might merely have been the last in a sequence of Gouda-related thoughts. Any Gouda-related thought would have done as well, for example the negation of the last thought.

What would explain how two intrinsically identical sequences of thought might differ such that one is a chain of reasoning and the other is not?

Hypothesis: different answers to this question will tend to make it difficult to understand how one knows one is reasoning rather than merely entertaining sequences of thought. There are similar worries about rational agency: if rationality rests in the gaps, then how is it me who reasons? It might be most fruitful to pursue these questions via a kind of skeptical worry: maybe I don't have justification for supposing that I've been reasoning! Maybe I never once reasoned in my life! You're no better off, either.

This post might sound like procrastination in action. Indeed, the clock is ticking loudly in my ear and this is not quite my dissertation. But it turns out that there are interesting connections to the theory of perception. One mainstream constraint on theories of perception and perceptual experience is that they provide the basis for a theory of direct perceptual judgment: judgment made solely on the basis of perceptual experience. That a judgment be a direct perceptual judgment is a matter of its being non-inferential. But answers to the primary question (what is it to infer?) are, likely, going to make it hard to maintain the existence of such a category of judgment.

Also, it is my hunch, answers to the question of what counts as an inference will get us into wacky kripkenstenian waters: fraught with rational idealizations, interpretivism, normativity, principles of charity, and the like. Wacky is good, though. So, I conclude, my excitement is justified.

More later.