I. Reasons: facts or propositions?
Chapter I saw me arguing against the idea that the things that can be reasons (‘q’ in the schematic structure of reason given there) are mental states. This leaves us with two options: reasons are either states of affairs or true propositions.107 The majority opinion in the literature stands more on the side of states of affairs. Dancy writes: “Intuitively it seems to be not so much propositions as states of affairs that are reasons. It is her being ill that gives me reason to send for the doctor, and this is a state of affairs, something that is part of the world, not a proposition.” (Dancy 2000b, 114) And Joseph Raz agrees: “Language and our intuitions lend little support to the idea that all reasons are statements. It does not seem natural to say that the statement it will rain is a reason for me to take an umbrella. It is either the fact that it will rain or my belief that it will which would be cited as the reason.” (Raz 1975, 17) But there are also exceptions. Scanlon explicitly endorses the propositional reading and David Millar and Timothy Williamson does the same in the case of reasons for belief. (Scanlon 1998, 56-7; Millar 1991, 55, 65; Williamson 2000, 194-200)
Strangely, however, in the literature there is not much discussion of which position is right. Nor have I examined the two proposals in Chapter I; here, in part at least, I would like to make good on this omission. In my brief treatment, I discuss two recent objections by Jonathan Dancy, which I think present the best case against the propositional reading.108 Due to the nature
107 In this appendix I don’t distinguish states of affairs from facts or properties. I am aware that this is metaphysically far fetched, but for my purposes no such distinction is needed.
108 The passages quoted from Dancy and Raz may suggest a further objection, namely that intuitions and linguistic considerations support the state of affairs account. This isn’t necessarily the case. Take cases when the reasons concerned are things that can be expressed by sentences. I have in mind claims like:
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of my discussion, I won’t claim to have made a decisive case for the propositional account; at best I will draw attention to the complexity of the issues involved.
II. Dancy’s objections
Dancy’s first objection is this. Propositions, he claims, are not robust enough normatively.
(Dancy 2000b, 115-6) As he puts it: “On either understanding [propositions are either classes of possible worlds or abstract objects modeling the structure of an assertoric sentence], propositions are, as we might say, too thin or insubstantial to be able to make an action wrong. They are the wrong sort of beast.” Were reasons to be propositions, he goes on, “they would subvert their own purpose”, that is to say, they would cease to be normative. And he concludes, “I offer this argument as conclusive against the suggestion that a thing believed, understood as a proposition, is capable of being a normative reason.”
Dancy is one of the originators of the account of normative reason I have presented in Chapter I and employed throughout the dissertation. He holds that what turns a consideration into a reason, i.e. endows it with normativity is that it speaks in favour of action. It is this relation that establishes the link between reason and action and thus grounds reason’s capacity to guide conduct. Accordingly, to refute the propositional reading, Dancy has to provide an argument for the view that a proposition cannot speak in favour of anything. But the latter is not an easy task to accomplish. Both Williamson and Millar argue that epistemic reasons are propositions that evidentially support, i.e. speak in favour of our beliefs. (Williamson 2000, 194-99; Millar 1991,
• “What he said previously was exactly the reason to run and never look back”;
• “His statements clearly voiced the reasons for refusing conscription”.
Since propositions are the kind of things that we say, therefore at least some reasons may turn out to be propositions.
As far as linguistic intuitions are concerned, the claim that reasons are states of affairs is not the only position to hold. In general, I think that language and intuitions are considerations that can be used to back either position, and even if they stand more on the side of the state of affairs reading, they are just not decisive.
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55, 65) I don’t see why this could not be the case with practical reasons as well; and, for one, Dancy provides no argument against the idea. Propositions in this crucial respect are not as
‘insubstantial’ and ‘thin’ as he claims them to be.109
Dancy’s second argument, however, cuts deeper. It goes like this: things that have truth-value are representational; since propositions have truth-truth-value they are representational; reasons are not representational; hence reasons cannot be propositions. (Dancy 2000b, 117) This argument needs a bit more fleshing out. The idea seems to be the following.110 Representational things are transparent: we always look through them to see what they represent. The same happens with reasons. When we look for reasons we don’t stop at propositions, but go directly to the facts they represent. Hence propositions are redundant and therefore fall out during one’s quest for reasons. As Dancy eloquently puts it, there is an ‘ontological gulf’ between things that are capable of being true and things that are capable of being the case. Being instances of the former, propositions cannot serve as normative reasons for anything.
The propositional theorist has two responses open to him. One is to give up the idea of factual propositions. This would be something like a Fregean position, which takes a proposition to be an object of thought that has no truth-maker, no fact independent of the proposition standing in the correspondence relation to it. This does not mean that these propositions cannot be true or false, the idea is only that we can do without a robust truth-maker. Recently, John Skorupski has advanced a theory - he called it ‘irrealist cognitivism’- that uses this idea. (Skorupski 2000,
109 To be fair, Dancy has a response open to him. Already in Dancy (2000b), pp. 1 and later in (2003a), pp. 101, 106-7 and in (2004), Chapter 2 he makes a distinction between the favouring relation that connects the reason to the action and the making-it-the-case relation that connects the reason to the oughtness of the action. On this ground he further claims, in personal communication, that we need to avoid any serious dislocation between what we say about favourers and what we say about ought-makers. Hence reasons should be things that are suitable for both relations, but propositions are not like that: it is difficult to see how they can make it the case that one ought to act. The reason why I don’t mention this objection in the text is that, as I briefly discuss in note 22 of Chapter I, it is not at all obvious that we should make Dancy’s distinction.
110 I owe this suggestion to János Kis.
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8; 2002, 133-8; 2006) But this solution also has its price. There is first the question whether all propositions are non-representational or only some of them. Skorupski, for instance, leaves it open whether the things that can be reasons are factual propositions or not, but insists that the favouring relation is the object of non-representational propositions. The question is how one can reconcile these two things without giving up both. Moreover, there is the well-known epistemological challenge to views of this kind. It is hard to see how one can give a proper epistemological account of our knowledge of non-representational propositions. Since on this view there are no truth-makers, it is anything but obvious how we can come to know these propositions.111
The second response appeals to our conception of the role reasons play in human deliberation. It seems to me that the correct view on the role of reasons is the following: they are the kinds of things that figure in our practical deliberation, elements that we are responsive to when making decisions. It is obvious that what prompts us to act, or rather, to consider different ways of acting are states of affairs. But what we consider, weigh, entertain and face up to in practical reasoning are the propositions that represent these states of affairs. We just don’t have a direct connection to states of affairs in the world; we can only get acquainted with them through the propositions that represent them. Therefore there is no way we can do without propositions;
although propositions are representational they do not fall out in our quest for reasons – for they are exactly the kind of things we are looking for. To this, however, one can say that I confuse two things: the objects of our thoughts (these are states of affairs) and what expresses the content of our thoughts (these are propositions). It is the former and not the latter that we weigh up,
111 Skorupski’s response, which centers on Kant’s distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, is illuminative but far from complete. See for instance the problems Dancy mentions in Dancy (2000a). In fairness, however, it must be noted that Skorupski has since then developed the idea further in Skorupski (2002) and (2006). My decision to avoid detailed discussion of his position is therefore more a result of his often stressed claim that the things that can be reasons are (or, at least, can be) states of affairs and reported by factual propositions.
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consider, and accept or reject in reasoning, hence reasons are states of affairs and not propositions.112 I don’t find this claim obviously true. I think we agree that reasons constitute the content of our reasoning; what we differ on is whether this content is given by the objects or by the content of our thoughts. And there is as much to be said in favour of one reading as of the other.113
112 Joseph Raz made me confront this point. The idea also appears in Searle (2001), pp. 36 as well. In addition to the response in the text, one might also try to say that propositions provide not only the contents of beliefs but can also be their objects. This idea appears in Sillins (ms). His argument is this. We can have true or false beliefs;
propositions are typically the kinds of things that can be true or false; hence, it seems reasonable to say that a true belief is a belief in a true proposition, whereas a false belief is a belief in a false proposition. Since I find this argument indecisive, I don’t mention it in the text.
113 In addition to the negative defense of the propositional reading presented in the text, a positive argument may suggest itself. It might be claimed that the construal of reasons as states of affairs has a hard time with the individuation of reasons. Take the following example. There are plenty of split personalities in cartoons about superheroes. Just think of characters like Spiderman, Superman or Batman. What can we say about the reasons we have in connection to these people? We may want to claim that the reasons connected to the different personalities locked in the same body are different. The reason to save Superman when he is in trouble is different from the reason to save Clark Kent when he is in trouble. However, another intuition of ours tells that people with split personalities constitute one state of affairs. Superman is Clark Kent: he is the same particular with the same, physical and psychological, properties. As a result, on the states of affairs reading we should have to say that the reasons in our examples are the same, which is not the case. The propositional understanding of reasons, on the other hand, is committed to no such view. The reason that Superman is in trouble is different from the reason that Clark Kent is in trouble. Although these propositions may entail each other, they don’t use the same concepts; the same fact is reported by different propositions. For this view of the individuation of propositions see Schick (1991), pp. 72-8.
Hence, on the propositional but not on the state of affairs reading, reasons are easily separable. The problem with this argument, a version of which appears in Sillins (ms) as applied to reasons for belief, is that it operates with a very simple-minded account of the individuation of states of affairs. Therefore, in order for the argument to succeed, more refined theories should also be considered and defeated. I thank János Kis and Krister Bykvist for pointing out this complication to me.
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