Standard Conception of Rationality & Its Problems (John Searle)

there is a certain conception of rationality which is very widespread in our intellectual culture it comes out if you've ever had a course in economics or if you've ever read a book or an article on decision theory it comes out more or less explicitly when I took economics as an undergraduate a long time ago it was it wasn't so much preached as it was taken for granted occasionally they might mention puzzles about it but it was assumed that economic agents were rational and indeed on this conception economics as a discipline presuppose the rationality of the economic agent and what is rationality so conceived well I made a list of some of the features and I naturally I guess being a philosopher my temptation was to list the features I disagreed with but here are the ones that seem to me absolutely common and by the way this widespread in philosophy I think most philosophers have this conception of rationality as well the first is actions are caused by beliefs and desires our old friends Bell and Dez and you might add actions we're rational are caused by beliefs and desires and then it turns out that rationality if you assume that then rationality can be rather easily designed the rational act is the act which maximizes the probability of satisfying your desires given your beliefs so you have a set of beliefs about what kind of car would be best for you and you want a certain kind of car and you have a certain set of resources of how much money you can and then you try to maximize the probability that your desires will be satisfied on given the assumption of your beliefs now if you say that just like that sounds pretty good to me I mean that's a lot of the time what we do and what advertisers try to do is influence your desires and beliefs they try to make such and such a model of car seem more sexy by showing the car is always populated by beautiful women or whatever in the ads and then they have stories about how the car is cheaper you pay less for it etc okay the actions were rational are caused by beliefs and desires now a second principle on this conception of rationality is that if you're gonna be rational you have to follow the rules of rationality and the rules will tell you the rules of Bayesian decision theory will tell you how to calculate your chances of satisfying your desires given your beliefs there are set of rules that will enable you to reason rationally and make decisions rationally now a third a conception a third piece of this conception is that in fact rationality is a separate cognitive capacity indeed we have no less less an authority than Aristotle we have no less an authority than Aristotle to say it is the distinctive cognitive capacity of our species we're defined as rational animals we're defined as animals capable of reasoning and no other animal kind of Reason in the way that we do there is a problem however with this and that is weakness of will is a problem and indeed you remember famously the Greek said that people always do what they believe to be best hence when somebody does something that's not best it can really only be due to ignorance it must have been due to some kind of mistake or lack of knowledge or lack of ignorance and the argument goes look if you're doing something voluntarily intentionally you're not forced to do it nobody's putting a gun at your head you're doing as we say of your own free will then it must be because you think that's the best thing to do but then if that's right then it would be impossible for anybody to do something that ran counter to what they thought was the best thing to do so in cases of apparent weakness of will and the Greek word has become common here in the literature in the cases of apparent arc Rossio it can only be because there was something wrong with the beliefs and the desires as Davidson says in his article on weakness it will he says well this the case where you didn't have an unconditional desire where you acted out a weakness of will if you had an honest - John all-out unconditional desire then you would act on that desire no I have to gasp in disbelief when I read this because I have a crusty ax several times a day and it's not a big deal I think you know I really ought to think about what I'm gonna say in my philosophy 138 lecture yeah but some other there all kinds of other things in the office it seemed kind of interesting to me and then there's a stupid computer over there and all kinds of surfing that could be done on that and if somebody said yes but what do you think is the best thing to do right now the answer is obvious the best thing to do would be to prepare my lecture so what are you doing well I'm goofing or on if in front of the television set maybe this never happens to you this sort of event but I have to say it does happen to me quite frequently I go to the party and I say absolutely no more than one glass of wine at the party well the wine tasted pretty good and they came around with more glasses and if somebody had said to me now what's the best thing for you to do right now I was the best thing to do would be not to have any more wine could I have another glass of the Chardonnay thank you and that happens all the time and as I remarked the other day the picture of weakness of will if somehow other the guy is in a frenzy of lust that's not the way it is with me I don't think I gotta have a Chardonnay and I lunge over and grab the glass off of that tray no it's quite elegant I I never miss a beat in the elegant conversation I'm having with lady frisbee or Sir John I and I simply pick up another glass and begin to sip it as if nothing were happening now I think this is I if you find this story incredible you're very much in comfort with with the philosophical tradition but I think these things happen I'm very common so there's something wrong with this conception of rationality if it says weakness of well literally weakness of will is impossible on tradition they say that apparently occurs but a parent case that weakness will are really something else I'll just I'll take questions second I want to go through these because I'm gonna I'm gonna refute all of these now the whole system works on the assumption that you have a set of primary desires and you bring these primary desires to the decision-making situation rationality will consist in how to satisfy your primary desires and this often typically will consist in selecting and means to achieve your ends that's why this type of reasoning is typically called means-ends reasoning you have these ends and you try to satisfy them by forming secondary desires you had the primary desires but rationality will enable you to perform secondary desires so you go into the travel agent nobody does this anymore it's all done on that net but in the old days you go in the travel agent and you say I want a plane ticket to Paris now notice they don't look at you and say what are you some kind of a ticket fetishist what's this big deal about a ticket you you lusting after tickets no they understand it's a means to an end you have rehearsed the best way to go to Paris is to go by plane if I'm gonna go to plane I have to buy by plane I have to buy a ticket so I form a secondary desire for the ticket somebody says what are you gonna do this afternoon I say well I want to go to my dentist because I I'm due now to have a tooth filled and the guy says what you want to have somebody drilling your teeth well that's not as they say an end in itself that is a means to fulfilling other ends whereas the primary desires are the ends in themselves where I you drink the beer not because it is a means to some other end I need to get fat or I need to improve the stock of of the Budweiser Brewing Company no it's an end in itself I'm not doing that but when I go to the dentist that is a means the secondary desires give you means toward achieving the various ends that you have given by the primary desires furthermore another basic assumption is the whole set of beliefs and desires must be consistent because if you had inconsistent primary desires then it would be impossible to reason you all know that an inconsistent proposition entails any proposition or whatever so you'd get a total breakdown now we could add to this list but it gives you a certain conception of rationality and I want to say I think it's wrong in every detail and I'm going try to offer you another conception of rationality but first let's take questions I had sauce awesome hands up with somebody who had their hand up and I said well did you have your hand up yeah hmm we'll come back to you okay that's the target I want to go through some of these I've already said a few words about this but but if there's an interesting puzzle when I do something in the full knowledge that I don't think it's the best thing for me to do how is that possible how is it possible that I can do something fully cognizant of the fact that that's not the best thing for me to be doing right then and there did you have your hand up no okay but you finally got yours up halfway when I do something on the basis of manat being the best thing to do yes that's the irrational behavior the problem is how is it possible given that actions are caused by beliefs and desires and I did have the belief and the I had the desire to do the best thing and the belief that this was not the best thing and yet I did the thing I thought was not the best thing and did it voluntarily see there are cases where the guy is in a grip of an addiction or a lust or a rage and if he could pause and thinking my thing okay this I shouldn't really be doing this but the problem is not that these cases are rational of course they're irrational the question is how are they possible at all given that all actions are caused by beliefs and desires and that I had the beliefs and the desires the standard account is to say well there was something wrong with your beliefs and desires that's Davidson's account Davidson's account is that and it's hares account also that that when you acted out a weakness of will is because you didn't really have an unconditional desire to do the thing you thought best you only had a conditional a sort of second-rate desire to do the thing that you thought best yeah best means hi that which you value the most and it needn't be it could be moral now hair makes this a criterion for your moral judgment the moral principle says this is our M hair I'm talking about the moral principle is the one that you will act on given all the other considerations you have if you acted this way as opposed to that way then that proves that this was an expression your moral principle so the moral principle is supposed to be the one that you act on and irrationality if actions are caused by beliefs and desires then if you act irrationally as a weakness of will illustrates it must be because there's something wrong with the beliefs in the desires now my problem is very simple and that is I have a beliefs and desires all the time there's nothing wrong my beliefs and desires it's just I don't always act on on what I think is the most desirable thing to do I often do things that are not the most desirable thing to do like have another glass of wine at the party we'll come back to this yes yeah yeah yeah right of course okay no no this is not the problem I didn't state the problem clearly so let me state it again granted that you want granted that you believe that the best thing to do is not to drink the wine and you want to do the best thing granted and that you do want the wine you're certainly acting on your desire when you take the wine but why do you act on that desire when that's not your highest desire your highest desire as you perfectly willing to admit I mean I your spouse points at you should you really be drinking that wine don't you really think it's best not to drink of mine and if you're me you're say quite elegantly yes I'm sure you're right and then you take a glass of wine this that's the puzzle how is it possible that you can act on one desire which you believe to be a lower desire then the other desire which you believe to be the higher desire the thing you desire most and yet you don't do it I'm sure this never happens to you but I have had students who definitely wanted to do their paper on time but somehow or other they were going to decide they're going to the paper this very evening but it got to be midnight and there they were still in front of the television set having finished a six-pack of beer I now that's weakness of will and I think such things happen and of course they're irrational the question is how are they possible if actions are caused by beliefs and desires and this is a case where you had the highest desire now it's one way to answer it is to say well that proves that wasn't really you didn't really believe that was the best thing to do it because you didn't do it I don't think that's right I really did believe it was the best thing to do but I still didn't do it yes you slipped in there as fast as you could and I want to do the best thing to do yeah but I mean that's just clearly not the case okay so this is one one answer to the problem of weakness of will is you didn't really value the thing that you said you you valued but what about the guy who yeah he really does value it as st. Augustine said God give me chastity but not yet he really did desire it but he wanted to stall around for a while I and maybe that's one way to describe the guy at the party I'll be more virtuous at the next party but that's a cop-out I mean I think that the real problem arises because you definitely have a preference schedule and yet you don't act on it now there's some other forms of irrationality that are related to this that I might come to yes yeah yeah no I think you're right that time figures largely in this but that's let's leave it out of this particular decision-making because right now at this particular point I think I should be doing something else other than this I should be not drinking the wine but should be being virtuous right here and now all the same I'm drinking the wine right here and now I think I should be preparing my lecture for philosophy 138 this is an hour or so ago but all the same I'm not I'm doing other things checking my email or other ways that are ways of stalling around instead of doing the thing I really think I ought I most think I ought to be doing now you there is a conflict that's come up here and this is important and that is what about the conflict of duty and desire where desire overcomes duty now part of the classical model is you could only act on your duty if you wanted to because every voluntary action is an expression of a desire to do that action okay now I think that is again a profound mistake but I haven't yet got the resources to tell you let me show you some other difficulties with this account you had your hand up yeah yeah ya-ya-ya-ya-ya okay a weakness of well it tends to correlate with another famous phenomenon self-deception and it's very easy to prove that weakness of will is impossible the proof goes as follows anything you do voluntarily you do because you most want to do that thing but what you most want to do is an expression of what you value then and there I therefore it's impossible for you voluntarily to do something that you don't most about you to do then and there and yet weakness of will happens the argument for self-deception goes' against self-deception goes as follows in order for a to deceive be a has to believe something and want to induce in be the a has to believe that P and want to induce and B the belief that not P but if a and B are identical how would it be possible for me ever to deceive myself because I would have to produce in myself a belief which I did not believe I really believe that we're gonna have rain in the month of November but I will convince myself that we won't have any rain in the month of November how am I supposed to do that if I am identical with the guy who holds both the belief and it's supposed to be the victim are there posed to be the recipient or the other belief the problem is with weakness of will as with self-deception happens all the time self-deception is very common how is it possible I just gave you a proof that both weakness of will and self-deception are impossible but they both happen so our theory of rationality we've got to explain how they happen well let me mention some other difficulties with his famous account when I first read this account as an undergraduate it occurred to me on this account if I value 25 cents a quarter and I value my life I it follows that on this account there are some odds at which I would bet my life against a quarter some odds I wish I'd bet my life against a quarter because precisely rationality consists in estimating the probability of satisfying your desires giving your beliefs now I have a very high desire for my life and a much lower desire for 25 cents but if I desire both if I have some desire for 25 cents if follows mathematically according to decision theory if I'm rational there must be some odds at which I would bet my life against 25 cents and I have to tell you there are no odds at which I would bet my life against 25 cents and if there were I mean if in a reckless moment I wouldn't bet my child's life against 25 cents I'm not risking my child at any odds now here's the funny thing I have argued precisely this point with the most famous decision theorists of the of the last of the 20th century with Isaac leave Lee and what's that get name of that guy in Jimmy Savage in Ann Arbor I argued with Isaac it in Columbia and Jimmy Savage and they're the two best decision theorists and they sadly came to the conclusion you're just irrational I have to say they got a problem on rationality with their theory if their theory says that if you value your life and you value 25 cents there must be some odds at which you would bet your life against 25 cents let me give you one I would take questions about this this I think this whole subjects a lot of fun here's another thing that comes up and it will come up in the next month and it's this it must be irrational to vote why well the chances that you will affect the outcome of the election are almost infinitesimally small let's take a presidential election whether you know they're gonna be 50 million people voting at least for the winner and the chances that your vote are going to affect the outcome are infinitesimally small in California they're worse than infinitesimally small because the preponderance of democratic registered voters is so overwhelming that it's very hard to imagine a circumstance in which you would cast the deciding vote even for the California electoral vote so but there's some disutility in voting there's some cost to voting now you have to go in the poll booth and the other stand in line and all that kind of stuff but if that's the case then it's always irrational to vote in an election and there are there always these famous anecdotes about the two famous economists who run into each other standing in line at the poll booth and they say well my wife made me come or something like that or my spouse and sisters my civic duty but but just as a piece of rationality it's irrational of you to vote because well it there's a cost and no real probability of a payoff you pay for something with your time and effort but the chances that it's actually gonna make a difference much less than a chance as you would have betting on the lottery now some people said well there is it's kind of rational to vote because it's like a lottery there is an infinitesimally small chance that you will affect the outcome but oh there's some chance they're going to count your vote so it's not totally irrational to vote but you have a feeling that these guys are embarrassed to say that now I think this they have an extremely impoverished conception of rationality if I would want to say in fact the following if you get the result that it's irrational in a Democratic Society to vote then you know you made a mistake and one of the answers they have to me when I debated these guys to say yeah but you might think it's your civic duty it's part of your duty as a system as a citizen since when is a citizen under a duty to behave irrationally after all we've just established that voting is irrational so how can I have a civic duty to do something which is mathematically irrational I have no civic duty to add two plus two and get five and that would be like my civic duty to vote if in if it's just plainly irrational okay I think these are real difficulties with a classical model that it has the effect that there must be some odds at which I would bet my life against 25 cents I the ingenuity that these guys have and meeting that argument I'll tell you about them later they say well you drive to San Francisco Airport don't you right okay you're risking your life driving to San Francisco but yeah in some sense I if I crawled and get in bed and crawled in the covers the chances of being killed or less than they are in the freeway okay now divide your trip to San Francisco Airport into 25 cent units okay now each time you pass one of those units you're betting your life against 25 cents everybody see how the argument goes okay I that tell then they have a more they not only have a nutty conception of rationality they have a nutty conception of the mind and intentionality but we'll get to that later I'll consider this argument in more detail you had your hand up in the back yeah okay here's how it goes let me tell you the argument some detail suppose I offered you a thousand dollars to drive to San Francisco Airport would you take it yeah I could always use the extra thousand bucks I just paid my taxes and I could use it more than ever okay now here's how the argument goes but now the thousand dollars that you're gonna get when you get to San Francisco Airport can be divided into 25 cent units right it's finite finite division and there will be some point on the freeway where you pass this by the freeway and only made 25 cents but by your own admission in passing that part of the freeway you're in you're risking your life so you were betting your life against 25 cents ha we refuel it sir oh okay I don't think that's a good argument but you have to understand saying about intention ality see why it's not a good argument I'll come back to that later right now I'm trying to lay out what some of the issues are okay let's go through these and see how far we get I was gonna get through all of these and I'm not gonna make it but I'll get through a bunch of them okay to begin with it is not the case that actions we're rational are caused by beliefs and desires where if we're talking about causation as giving causally sufficient conditions then the actions that are caused by beliefs and desires are those that are compulsive typically irrational actions that's the guy who has an overwhelming desire to satisfy his urge to take heroin and he has a belief that the stuff in front of him is heroin so he is in the grip of his belief and desire and his action is genuinely caused by beliefs and desires but it's not rational in fact I've said this before and I want to emphasize it now as far as our phenomenology is concerned as far as our experience is concerned in normal rational action you have a sense of alternative possibilities open in the last election I had a choice between two candidates and though I voted for one I considered the possibility of voting for the other and it was a genuine possibility given the causes operating on me I voted for one candidate but I could have voted for the other guy so as far as my decision-making is concerned as we've seen already the beliefs in the desires lead to a prior intention and the prior intention leads to an intention in action and there's a gap there is a perceived gap between the reasons for the action and the decision so far from it being a model of rationality the cases where my beliefs in my desires are causally sufficient to fix my action are typically irrational or compulsive forms of behavior in rational action I have a sense of alternative possibilities open and that is I pointed out to you that gap has a name that's the so called freedom of the will now maybe I'm mistaken maybe my actions are entirely cause my beliefs and desires but that's not part of the definition of rationality on the contrary that is opposed to rationality because those would be compulsive actions so when I make up my mind rationally which of these candidates am I going to vote for I do it on the presupposition that my antecedently existing beliefs and desires are not causally sufficient I have to bridge the gap by making up my mind as they say I have to decide what to do and there's a very peculiar location in English that's going to figure large in our discussion and that is I act on a reason I had different reasons for voting for McCain and different reasons for voting for Obama but I made a specific reason or reasons effective by acting on that reason now what is that I acted on a reason I and well I'm gonna say more about that when we talk about rational decision-making but the important thing is to see that characteristically in rational decision-making I do not sense my antecedent beliefs and desires as setting causally sufficient conditions now there is a problem that comes up and I haven't addressed that but I'm gonna I mention it in passing and that is that typically in hard decision making situations some of my reasons are desire independent I have reasons for doing something even though I may not then and there feel a desire or an inclination to do it and it and I have an apparent paradox I need to resolve the paradox is this all voluntary intentional actions are expressions of a desire to do that action then and there and that's true even for design for actions that are apparently motivated by desire independent reasons yes all the same I wanted to do that in order to keep my promise and right then and there I wanted to keep my promise but if keeping my promise is a desire independent reason and I act on that reason then how can it be the case that my action is the expression of a desire to perform that action if the reason for the action was a desire independent reason and that's an apparent contradiction in my account I have to resolve that I haven't resolved it yet I'm gonna resolve it and I think it's very important about human rationality to see exactly how it can be the case that desire independent reasons can motivate desires even though the motivation for the desire was not another desire one of the problems with this whole classical model that I'm describing here is it assumes that you have an inventory of prior desires before you approach the decision-making situation that is false to human phenomenology I asked the person in a restaurant what you want what would you like and she says I don't know now how can I yeah the Cartesian and all of us says how can you not know what your own desires are everybody must know what their own desires are but that is a common answer the question of what would you like what do you want I don't know I haven't made up my mind and guess what making up your mind is the name of rational decision-making in other words the assumption that you come to the decision-making situation with an inventory of desires and then just decide how to satisfy your desires given your beliefs that's a very artificial conception normally in the decision-making situation you got to figure out what your desires are you get a last question then we'll stop yes yes but the problem is here the pleasure is not separable from the choice of what I eat so I'm trying and way it actually works with me in a restaurant is I try to visualize do I really want a plate full of shrimp or do I want a plate full of stink and then I try to visualize both now it's okay to say yes but they're both pleasurable dining experiences which is more pleasurable and by the way I don't know why all restaurants don't adopt the Japanese method where you get a photograph of the damn thing that you're supposed to eat anyway I bring photographs next time we'll go on with this on Thursday now we're into the second main topic of the course and that is the nature of rationality and there is a standard conception of rationality it's in decision theory it's in any economics textbook probably the best statement of it is in that article assigned in the reader by Gary Becker I know what's it's called the economic approach to behavior or something like that and there it is a classical statement of rationality and I told you some difficulties without just prima facie one is that of value 25 cents I value my life there must be some odds at which I'd bet my life against 25 cents and I want to say there aren't any odds at which I'd make that bet if there were I wouldn't bet my child's life against 25 cents and the answer that we meant somebody mentioned last time too that it's given to me as well you'll do things that are equivalent to that and when you ever you drive to the airport or pick up 25 cents off the street now I want to show that's a bad argument but to do that we have to say more about intention ality so we'll come to that another difficulty with a classical analysis is it on the classical analysis it's irrational to vote for reasons that I said the other day but there are other things that are absurd consequences of the classical analysis here's another one I go to the San Francisco Opera it often happens that on the day of the Opera I think I've God I don't want to drive all the way to San Francisco and then I think how much I paid for the ticket God well and then that gives me an extra reason for going now on the classical model of rationality that's no reason for going to the Opera at all those are what's called sunk costs so on the classical analysis there are two different scenarios one is when you're given a free ticket and on the day of going you just don't feel like going so you don't use the free ticket another same opera same ticket only this time you paid $300 for the ticket and you think well that's a lot of money I better go now on the classical analysis you're being irrational you have exactly the same reason for going with a free ticket as you do with a expensive ticket I think that's another absurd result and I need to say why that's an absurd result i I mean Bob Nozick I put it very well he said suppose you could take a pill that prevented this form of irrationality that prevented you from reasoning about the how you should consider money you've already spent in making your decisions at would you take the pill and the answer is no I wouldn't take the pill I think there's nothing wrong with reasoning but the technical name for that is well that's a sunk cost already spent that money a Becker is a guy who thinks when you get married essentially calculate utilities don't ask yourself such dumb questions as do you love this person because who the hell knows what the marginal utility of that is the thing new is calculate utilities I've often wondered what those guys would say about rationality in a country like Mexico I think the rational thing to do is accept bribes and I don't see how they could avoid that argument and indeed accept bribes anywhere if you have good reason to suppose you can get away with it's just calculating probabilities like any other ok we're going to come back to that but now I'm going step-by-step through the six propositions that I figured were essential to I'd the classical model and the first was that actions are caused by beliefs and desires that is rational actions we're rational are caused and sometimes I say in the right way they're caused in the right way by the beliefs and desires now I want to say if causation here means causally sufficient conditions then in general only irrational actions have beliefs and desires as causally sufficient conditions those are the case where you're in the grip of an obsession or you're in the grip of a lust and you simply can't help yourself those are the cases where your action is caused by your beliefs and desires but they're hardly compulsive behavior is hardly the model of rationality it happens to us but it's not what I would think of as the right way to think of rationality well what's wrong with it well in real life you have this experience that I call the experience of the gap you have a sense of possible options open to you and the name for that gap to repeat is freedom of the will now the fact that you have this experiences don't show that you really have free will the whole thing might be a colossal illusion evolution might have played an enormous practical joke on us by giving us the conviction the experience of free will when it's all an illusion all of our behavior is completely determined it was written in the book of history thirteen billion years ago that at this particular moment in this particular spot Searles left hand would go out and scratch the top of his remaining head okay now that's the picture it's it I it's an elegant picture and and indeed a lot of philosophers have thought well you can't help that picture you couldn't think without that picture Kant said we couldn't reason about reality unless we presupposed total determinism now he also cheated on the side as it's typical he said of course there's another world the world of the nominal and in that world you're free okay but it's in this world where I live I never been a nominal you know I I think it must be somewhere in Kansas but in on the west coast it's all phenomenal and on the phenomenal world according to Kant everything is determined and indeed if it wasn't determined we wouldn't be able wouldn't be able to make sense of it it would be unintelligible to us now you might think well that's an extreme view but something very like it is advanced by philosophers that we all know and respect and I'm thinking of Tom Nagel and Galen Strawson and they argue as follows suppose determinism wasn't true suppose you really did have free will then if you're asked why did you do something and you gave a non-deterministic you wouldn't explain it you say somebody so why did you vote for Obama and you give your reasons for voting for Obama now suppose determinism wasn't true and then says Nagel the explanation of the action would not explain the action because an explanation has to explain why the thing that occurred occurred as opposed to something else that might have occurred but if the explanation you give is deterministic then it's consistent with all sorts of other things occurring you might have voted for the other guy you might not have voted for all so you would not have succeeded in explaining anything does everybody follow this that is unless the story goes and this is advanced both by Strawson that's Galen a Peter by Strawson and by Tom Nagel unless the explanation of human behavior is deterministic it wouldn't explain it would not answer the question we're trying to answer namely why did you do it okay I might I resist the temptation to answer all of these points right now but I but these are promises that I'm making to you we have to answer these points we have to answer the claim that says that an explanation a non-deterministic explanation would simply fail to explain because if what an explanation has to say why the thing that happened happened as opposed to something else that could have happened and if it doesn't answer that question then it doesn't explain Jennifer well the story in Nagle and I think in Strawson as well is goes as follows what do you want from an explanation suppose I I knock of this hat and it falls to the ground and the explanation I wanted an explanation of why it fell to the ground I say it was acted on by the force of gravity and there were no other interfering forces that being the case it had to fall to the ground the explanation gives sufficient conditions given that set up nothing else could have happened it had to fall to the ground but now when I explained why I voted for Obama then it looks like unless determinism is true I don't satisfy that condition because at the end of the story somebody says well okay you thought he'd be better for the economy and you thought wouldn't matter for foreign policy the Republicans and the Democrats are going to have effective of the same foreign policy Obama might do it with better public relations which is what in fact half but the policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is pretty much identical under both Obama I and Bush and would have been the same under McCain so it has to be something a domestic and if somebody then says to me okay that's why you voted for Obama but you mean given all that you had to vote for him no I could have voted for a guy in fact there were moments when I thought God if all these politically correct people think Obama's okay there must be something terribly wrong with him that I'm not seeing you know but in any case I give an explanation and according to Nagel and other philosophers whom I respect like Galen Strawson if the explanation wasn't deterministic it wouldn't explain it wouldn't explain why I did what I did as opposed to something else I might have done it's not enough to say well there was this reason in favor of doing it you've got to give an explanation that says this is what had to happen this is a given the way things were set up just like this this is what had to happen now why do we know that Nagle's wrong we know these wrong because in our own case I know why I did something I know that the explanation I know without observation that the explanation is a valid I know that's the reason I acted on of course it might be self-deception or all kinds of other cases but leaving them out leaving aside various forms of psychological aberrations I know why I did what I did even though the answer that I give to the question why did you do it is not a deterministic answer now how can that be the case how can it be the case that I can give reasons for action which are valid reasons and they're not deterministic and if somebody said well how do you know they're valid and the answer is they're valid for me I can tell you what I what reason how my reasoning process went and what reason I acted on now of course there's always self-deception pathologies of various kind the various kinds of psychotic behavior but we're leaving them out we're assuming this is not case for a psychoanalyst it's a case for a philosopher analyzing a rational decision-making okay I don't know if that answers your question but I'm gonna come back to these issues later other questions at this point because we're yeah yeah yeah okay well another story goes as follows we ought to think of decision-making as like a vector of forces in a matrix and I don't know if you ever had to do these questions in high school physics I did where you got a force operating that way and another force operating this way and this force a bit stronger than that force so you wind up going that way or something like that now why isn't it like that well the answer is it isn't like that there's no way I can vote for a guy in the middle right if this one over here is Obama and this is McCain I can't think well I got these forces working that way and that fourth that way so I'll calculate and vote for this guy in the middle there was no guy in the middle you have to I well it may have been other third party candidates but I don't remember even who they were I didn't take him seriously at the time I but you're right though that all of these things on the account that I've been giving you exist within a network and exist against a background of possibilities and it's only given the network in the background that I can make rational decisions at all that I can have any intentionality yes yeah well that's right I mean I think you're right there that you have all these influences operating on you but here's what's remarkable I want you to always pay close attention to how we describe these things in ordinary language I had various reasons for voting for Obama various reasons for voting for the other guy various readings voting for and against but all the same this is why I voted the way I did now watch this I made this reason effective there are all these other reasons but they weren't effective I made this reason effective by acting on this reason there was a guy who was the president of the United States once and I voted for him when he got elected I but then he came up another time and it turned out he had done something in college he went to the same university I did and he did something that I regard is absolutely outrageous when he was a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford unforgivable so I did not vote against Bill Clinton the second time around why he didn't take his exams ya have to take the damn exams now I admit I'm probably the only guy in the whole country that voted against Clinton on the grounds that he never took schools the rest of us dressed up in these dumb outfits you look like a penguin I the girls have to wear all black so we will not be distracted even their stockings have to be black the guys dressed in dark suits with a white bow tie and a black gown and everybody sits at a separate desk that's got your name printed on it for God's sake it's this whole thing is scary and you have to take the exam Clinton didn't do it he had his money he'd met he done what he wanted to do in Oxford which was make a lot of connections which he later used well forget it that's when I found out he didn't take his exams that was it I had a I don't tell me well maybe that's not the real reason you voted against Clinton that was the reason I acted on that I think he was otherwise a better candidate probably so but I didn't give a damn you don't take schools you don't get my vote yes yeah often you don't know why you did it all right you just did it and often you see it often happens to me that in conversations I say things I never planned on saying I didn't write I mean people who do this you always think now he said this so I'm gonna say that there's a technical name for them they're called bores as if it's very boring for the guy who always thinks what should I say now and most of us just talk spontaneously but there are forms of rational behavior that involved what I call recognition or rationality where you don't have to do a whole lot of reasons from your various desires the truck is coming down on me bearing down on me and I don't think now if I get out of the way I will avoid being hit and if I don't get out of the way I'll be hit and on balance it's better to avoid being hit because if I do get hit there'll be all kinds of consequent you know I don't do it I just jump out of the way that's what I call recognition or rationality and that's important because that avoids an infinite regress well but we'll get to those and we talk about the actual structure of rationality so there are all kinds of things you do that are not the result of processes of deliberation and then there are we've seen things you do that are not the result of processes of rational deliberation where you really do act on your beliefs and desires but those are pathological those are cases of weakness of will or compulsion and sometimes you deliberate and make up your mind and then you don't do the thing you thought was the best thing to do that's the example of drinking the extra Chardonnay from last time remember I gave that example how you decide you don't want to drink too much but all the same you find you do drink more than you should now standard models of decision-making rationality make that impossible I want to say not only is it possible it happens all the time so we ought to have a conception of rationality that shows how it's possible and I forget about the philosophical tradition and ask yourself what actually happened when I watch television long after I thought I should be watching television when I really thought I should be doing my homework and I think we as philosophers we ought to be able to answer that question without looking over our shoulder at what Aristotle would have said just think about what it's like in your own case and so I want to answer that as well okay well some of these questions I might answer right now in the case of how is it possible that an explanation can explain if it does not give a deterministic explanation I think the logical form is different the form of the actual logical form of the explanation is different the form of the explanation why I say this object fell because it was acted on by gravity that explanation is deterministic in the very form of the explanation because what it says is that the causes operating on it were sufficient to determine that it would fall and indeed the force of the logical sufficiency there is given by the fact that you'd actually you can actually logically deduce that it's going to fall given a description of the initial conditions together with a statement of the law of gravity together with a statement of the gravitational forces acting on it I that is the claim of sufficiency is cashed out by saying that a full statement of the causes will be sufficient to entail they will logically imply that that event was going to occur so you get a logically sufficient I get a causally set of sufficient conditions because the statement of the conditions will give you a set of premises which are logically sufficient to entail that the event is going to happen this you can actually derive that this is going to happen now a lot of people have said yes but that's not an oddball case that's the model for all explanations and as I mentioned to you briefly this is the deductive nomological model of explanation you describe the initial conditions you give a statement of the law and you deduce and it's called deductive normal logical because you can actually deduce what's going to happen and it's noma logical noma logical just means law like you can deduce from the statement of the law together with the description of the initial conditions the deduction will entail that that event is going to happen now that doesn't happen when we give ordinary descriptions of human behavior I voted for Clinton I voted for Obama because I thought he'd have a better domestic policy than McCain it isn't like that it's a different logical form well then how do we answer the skepticism that says unless it's like that you didn't really explain it you didn't explain it because you didn't say why you had to vote for Obama why that occurred as opposed to something else occurring that might have occurred and I'm now going to give you the answer to that question there must be an answer to it because I know in my own case that that explains my behavior I know that's why I did it and if somebody comes in a deductive nomological way and they say look Searle we've done a study and it turns out that middle class university professors of your socioeconomic status with your education are overwhelmingly likely to vote for the Democratic candidate in an election like that we have a law with nearly 100 percent a probability that that's what you how you're going to vote so we can deduce it's a deductive noma logical explanation so that's why you voted for Obama because you instantiate the middle class professor law voting behavior and I want to say well there may be such a law but that's not why I voted that's not why I voted the way I did the statistics you have about people with that my kind of background and my sort of education and my sort of economic a socioeconomic status and and my income tax bracket all the factors you want that doesn't give you the reason that I've that gives you correlations and they might be kind of interesting but the actual reason that functioned in my voting was not the fact that I tend to wear dark gray flannel trousers and that the overwhelming majority of people who wear pants like that vote Democratic let's suppose there is such a generalization that's not why I vote it doesn't matter what pants I had on they could be red polka dots all the same I can tell you the reason that I voted for Obama and this is not the right model what is the right model well it's an intentional istic explanation but now we have to meet the challenge the challenge is how can I did explain if it's not deductive normal logical if it doesn't explain why what had to occur

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 7,582

Rating: 4.8626609 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, Determinism, Weakness of Will, Rationality, John Searle, Free Will, Instrumental Reason, Instrumental Rationality, Psychology, Reason, Self-Deception, Ethics, Akrasia, Decision Theory

Id: HtIgBRZwyGA

Length: 59min 3sec (3543 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019