From Intuition to Solidarity
For a pragmatic version of morality
I
It is impossible to specify criteria which necessarily force someone to change their views. Quine is right, I think, when he argues that theories are fundamentally underdetermined.(Quine, 2013, cf. p. 77) Quine means by underdetermination that the available sensory evidence does not uniquely determine theory choice. This amounts to saying that criteria for acceptance are themselves contextual, conditioned by our prior history and beliefs and sensitive to idiosyncratic purposes. That theories are not uniquely determined by sensory evidence is the same problem as attempting to find context-transcendent criteria. We do not have context-transcendent criteria for the decision between theories.1 And if we have contextual criteria, they can only be (trivially) meaningfully applied to this specific context. It’s not about evidence alone, but about what the evidence is thought to be and which criteria are accepted to be salient in specific contexts for specific purposes.
The view that theories are always underdetermined entails two important conclusions:
Any view, proposition or image can be held true come what may
No view, proposition or image is immune to revision
I’ll provide you with the whole quote by Quine:
Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. […] Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics ; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?(Quine, 1961, p. 43)
You may suspect where this leads. There is currently an ongoing discussion on Substack about intuitions. I’m with people like Lance S. Bush, that intuitions do not convey in the slightest that the thing which is intuitively thought to be true is so by necessity because it is known by intuition. I’m skeptical of such posited cognitive faculties as being a perception-like device which dis-covers in an unconditioned self-evident way independent facts.2 I’m skeptical because the idea of such epistemological devices rests on some kind of correspondence theory which I think is trivial. Just to be clear: the idea that something is intuitively true and therefore objective is only meaningful if we presuppose epistemologically a correspondence theory and metaphysically a realist stance. If we think this the other way around it’s even clearer: there are objective things (posited) and one device of knowing those objective things is intuition. You could do away with correspondence theory and become a critical realist, but this would not change the triviality at all.3
I believe that its more fruitful to take the stance of intuitions being more akin to acquired, developing and dynamic patterns of spontaneous verbal behavior, which may or may not be proven to hold. Intuitions are not devices which grasp in an unconditioned manner something how it is independently just being there by itself, but historically developed, idiosyncratic responses to events. If you do not like what is written here and write a mean comment, my first intuition would maybe (100% sure) be that I’m wrong as a human being. This verbal spontaneous behavior grew out of my upbringing and development until now and I do not have to keep thinking that way.4 While, of course, it can be a little bit seductive to think of the convergence of intuitions with other people as justification that those intuitions must be true, we must not get high-spirited. I think that sometimes we just converge and that’s it. The truth of an intuition is something that has to be examined and is also matter of revision.
II
Let’s turn to the moral realist claiming that there are objective moral truths or facts. One way to go is to claim that we indeed possess a cognitive faculty of intuition which allows us to grasp moral facts. In my experience many moral realists make an invalid inference out of the subjective state of being utterly convinced to the conclusion that there needs to be something outside themselves corresponding to their internal state if their view is true. In order to make this point, they take metaphysical realism and correspondence theories for granted. The epistemological access to verifying this correspondence is therefore claimed to be in the faculty of intuition.
We could also reverse the direction of the argument and claim that the condition of there being an intuition about morality presupposes as its cause the moral fact. The moral fact is the necessary cause for me intuiting it. This begs the question, because the presupposition of there being objective facts is the axiom on which all further beliefs, as the claim that intuition is a device for detecting evidence of those entities or correspondence theories as such, hinge and this is not explained but presupposed. I think this is superfluous, wrong, and we should drop this way of talking. I do not think that the claim of intuition as such a cognitive faculty is the root problem, as this view must somehow be already embedded in an epistemological framework which takes independent entities for granted, but that correspondence theories are trivial, and therefore the moral realist is always in the need of presupposing what people like me reject.
Donald Davidson, while leaning on the »slingshot« argument, rejects correspondence theories because correspondence theories have neither explanatory power nor can those theories specify with which slice of reality a proposition corresponds.(Davidson, 1990, cf. p. 303) While I think that the slingshot argument has its advantages, the point can be made a little bit easier. For the sake of completeness this is roughly the Fregeian version of the slingshot.
In a little Essay called “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” Frege draws the distinction between sense and reference.5 The famous example of the evening star and the morning star exemplifies this: both have the same reference but differ in sense. For cases of proper names like »morning star«, Frege holds that the meaning is the thing itself. Therefore, proper names do not have truth values.(Frege, 2019, cf. p. 24) Only sentences have truth values, and for sentences their reference is their truth value, while the sense is the thought.6 The point Frege drives home is that if the meaning of a sentence is its truth value, then all true sentences reference the same thing, the »True«.
If our assumption is correct, that the meaning of a sentence is its truth value, then the truth value must remain unchanged if a part of the sentence is replaced by an expression with the same meaning but with a different sense. […] If the truth value of a sentence is its meaning, then all true sentences have the same meaning and all wrong sentences have the same meaning.(Frege, 2019, pp. 35 (my translation))
As correspondence theories are concerned with the truth of sentences, Freges view, if we accept it, completely trivializes correspondence theories. Correspondence theories can’t specify the parts of the world to which true sentences should correspond to. As long as correspondence theorists cannot specify in any non-circular, question begging or non-trivial way to what their true sentences correspond, then correspondence claims are completely deflationary without any explanatory power whatsoever. A correspondence theorist can add “corresponds to the world” to any claim they believe or may justly justify, but it is neither providing criteria why something should be accepted, or explaining something nor does it provide additional evidence. “Corresponds to the world” takes on the same role as “Because god made it so”.
While I do think that chopping away the notion of this kind of realist-epistemological intuition is correct because correspondence theories are trivial and correspondence theorist neither really showed how we could demonstrate an actual correspondence nor how correspondence would make a difference to practice7, I do think that this is just chopping away a few branches of the tree. The disagreement lies in either accepting or rejecting fundamentalist metaphysics and epistemology.
III
If we accept Quine’s underdetermination, we still can give good reasons why we should rather not use a fundamentalist vocabulary, why we should drop talk about self-evidency, about intuitions, correspondence etc. but forcewise this will always stay a proposal. Accepting vocabularies as a proposal for how to speak, we are never better off than a moral realist. It stays a proposal because we cannot specify context-transcendent criteria necessarily agreed upon, and this is not changed by a historical description that the thing we tried to do never actually worked out, the collection of evidence how people actually think or ideas in the same line that correspondence adds nothing to a claim as such or that correspondence is trivial. Moral realists can always adjust other parameters of their thinking in order to not expel the thought of objective facts as something beyond oneself justifying one’s own beliefs with certainty. They can, if they want, die on this hill.8 They can always retreat to saying that one has to be a moral realist deep down, even if the interlocutor doesn’t know they are or are claiming they are not.
The point is, here happens something different from discussion, giving and asking for reasons, fulfilling criteria. Changing such views is more akin to a conversion experience. I consider the gestalt switch of a basic figure of one’s thought as arational.9
Rorty, in the same vein, says approximately the same thing:
[…] we could say that the reason some people cannot just walk away from philosophy is the same reason some people cannot just walk away from their parents […] If you were raised on philosophy – raised on the distinctions between soul and body, essence and accident, real and apparent, empirical and transcendental – you may not be able to just walk away from your upbringing without losing touch with yourself. (Rorty, 2010, p. 344)
Does this mean we should just stop arguing for dropping this way of talking because it is arational? I don’t think so, but it yields awareness that you and me are not better off either. My personal judgment that the way I think about some things is, I guess at least, roughly the right way to think about things, is the same for someone believing that moral realism is right. Nobody can transcend this »proposal stage« and I believe that this can never be done, because we cannot specify context-transcendent criteria which force you by necessity to accept one way of talking compared to another. I wouldn’t know how and history never really showed, if you know please call me asap.
I think of morality, but not only morality, as something that cannot be reduced to rationality, while rationality – I just mean plainly the praxis of speech – is surely a part of it. Furthermore, I believe it is more fruitful to think of morality as a practical-linguistic sensitivity to the suffering and pain of others, which we extend and transform through discussion and experiences. We do not need objective moral facts for that. I believe that we not only need the claim of objective facts, but that presupposing that those exist is more often than we realize resulting in extreme conflicts, where groups oppose each other with force claiming that they have the only objective, unchangeable »right« view. I do not need to be context-transcendentally justified in order to believe that I want to live in a world which condemns the suffering of children. I may be too big of a fanboy of Rorty, but I cannot write better than him:
In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or ’There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?”(Rorty, 1990, p. XVI)
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References
Davidson, D. (1990). The Structure and Content of Truth. Journal of Philosophy, 87(6), 279–328. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026863
Frege, G. (2019). Über Sinn und Bedeutung: Reclam Great Papers Philosophie (U. Voigt, Ed.; 1. Auflage). Reclam Verlag.
Quine, W. V. (1961). From a logical point of view: 9 logico-philosophical essays (2. ed., rev., 14. print). Harper & Row.
Quine, W. V. (2013). Word and Object. MIT Press.
Rorty, R. (1990). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge university press.
Rorty, R. (2010). Truth and Progress. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511625404
Footnotes
This is what Kuhn means by »incommensurability«. Maybe this would be a nice further essay?
Sorry, I could not evade the Heideggerian urge of the magic »-«.
Just a little hint: critical realism can be thought of in an epistemological perspective as dropping the demand of positive confirmation of any proposition and leaning onto falsification as a criterion for truth. A critical realist can therefore still be convinced that in every iteration of falsification we come »closer« to reality, while never being actually »there«. A critical realist can be a metaphysical realist without being an epistemological realist. She can doubt that we will ever have the epistemic capabilities of positively affirming the actual truth of any proposition, while retaining a metaphysical realistic stance.
What a grace that I think of my intuitions as contingent so that I do not have to believe that they correspond to objective states of affairs.
In German the words “Sinn” and “Bedeutung” are used. This is critical here because reference and sense do not map 100% onto those two. Just a little important thing to keep in the back of your mind.
Frege is not explicit what he means by thought. But he characterizes it as something that remains constant through substitutions of words with the same meaning but different sense and distinct from reference of a sentence. I think we would not make Frege angry if we think of the thought as an expression which establishes a relationship between basic entities.↩︎
A difference to practice would be e.g. a new criterion or method which we have to consider. In studying how pain works in the last decades the concept of pain transformed from a mere mechanistic description of pain (something is defect in your physiology) to the bio-psycho-sociological model of pain. This shifting results in a difference to practice as it allows treating pain as co-constituted by psychological factors. This enables us to treat pain in different ways, e.g. additional psychological interventions, which results in treating pain in a more successful manner than just relying on a mechanistic interpretation. What correspondence and realism would add to our explanations, I’m totally skeptical of.
As I may would to with my view right now, but then I’m just a sad, unflexible human being and I just should stop writing and thinking altogether.
Just to clarify, this does not mean stupid or wrong. It just means that we do not have any rational way of invoking such a gestalt switch with necessity.