SITUATED COGNITION Situated Imagining and the Holy Grail of Moral Philosophy Luke Roelofs EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Plan of this talk: Section 1: Questing for the Holy Grail Section 2: The Person-Insensitivity Diagnosis Section 3: Situated Imagining Section 4: Playing with Others Section 5: Immorality as Unrecognised solipsism EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 1: Questing for the Holy Grail Many philosophers have looked for a justification of morality that appeals to epistemic, rather than moral, standards: “…the holy grail of moral philosophy [is] the knock-down argument that people who are nasty and unpleasant and motivated by the wrong things… are reasoning badly, or out of touch with the facts.” (Blackburn 1984, p.222) “The Holy Grail in secular metaethics would be… a philosophical account that clearly explained… exactly what… an agent’s mistake would consist in, when he or she contemplated the suffering of others and saw it as counting for nothing.” (Street 2016, p.165) EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 1: Questing for the Holy Grail One problem: it seems like rational people can be immoral . Someone might disregard, or even seek out, the suffering of others, while being: • Fully consistent in their beliefs and intentions; • Factually well-informed; • Reliably able to select the best means towards their ends. This makes it easy to think that questions of morality are like questions of aesthetic preference or emotional temperament. EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 1: Questing for the Holy Grail Obviously this doesn’t hold for all (or most) immoral people. Most immoral people have some concern for morality, but also exhibit hypocrisy, inconsistency, self-deception, and rationalisation. But it seems possible for someone to be fully rational, even to an idealised degree, and yet utterly heartless. It is this idealised immoral agent that is at issue: must even they be making some sort of epistemic mistake? EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 2: The Person-insensitivity Diagnosis A response I like is the ‘ person-insensitivity diagnosis ’: The mistake involved in immorality is a failure to recognise other people as genuinely real. This might be framed in various ways, e.g. • that a lack of compassion constitutes a failure to be ‘ in touch with ’ another’s suffering (Marshall 2018), • that empathy is needed to understand ‘ what it is like ’ to be another (Smith 2017), • that the face-to-face encounter with the Other reveals essential dimensions of your own subjectivity (Levinas 1969) EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 2: The Person-insensitivity Diagnosis The person-insensitivity diagnosis faces three obvious challenges: • Bad people can be just as good as anyone else at predicting and describing others’ mental states and behaviour. • Bad people can be emotionally invested in , and powerfully motivated by , other’s mental states. • Bad people can be in other regards just as rational and self-aware as anyone else, so why wouldn’t they notice such a glaring error? To defend the person-insensitivity diagnosis, I need to explain how ‘person-insensitivity’ is compatible with: • adept social interaction, • emotional investment in other minds, • general rationality in other areas. I aim to do this by appeal to situated imagining . EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 3: Situated Imagining What do I mean by ‘situated imagining’? Different imaginings may be alike in content and attitude , but differ in how they are ‘ situated ’: their functional engagement or disengagement with other mental states and external objects. Genuine cognition of others involves imagining their perspectives in the mode of simulation : this form of situatedness carries ontological commitment to the reality of what is simulated. Immoral action is enabled by imagining others’ perspectives in the mode of pretence : this form of situatedness carries no ontological commitments. EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 3: Situated Imagining ‘Imagination’: a general-purpose recreative faculty, that creates perception-like, belief-like, desire-like, etc. states. An imaginative state is ‘ off-line ’: “disengaged… from its natural output systems” (Gordon 1986, p.170), and more broadly “detached from its normal function” (Nichols et al. 1996, p.42). This disengagement is an aspect of their situatedness, but they can then be re-engaged in various ways: • Projected into environmental space • Engaged with particular other imaginings to form a consistent ‘imagined world’ (a ‘fiction’) • Engaged with external objects and actions according to individually or collectively chosen rules (a ‘pretence’) • Used to model an aspect of reality that it appropriately resembles (a ‘simulation’) EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 4: Playing with Others The best way to illustrate these ideas is by looking at cognition of fictional characters , especially those we can interact with, as in computer games. The player has to predict the characters’ actions, and in a suitably-designed game can often do so by looking at things ‘from the character’s perspective’ . Moreover, the player can easily get emotionally invested in the characters, as though they were real. Tokugawa is annoyed with you EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 4: Playing with Others Even though taking the character’s perspective is both predictively useful and emotionally engaging, the player does not believe in the character’s perspective. The character is a bit like the ‘ evolutionary designer ’: we know there is no designer who wants organisms to be well-adapted, but taking that perspective is sometimes useful for predicting real-world facts. EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 4: Playing with Others What makes the difference between: • Perspective-taking in the mode of pretence (which does not carry ontological commitments), and • Perspective-taking in the mode of simulation (which does)? One difference is in explicit second-order beliefs . I deny this is the main difference: second-order representation of the simulation-pretence distinction recognises but does not establish that distinction. EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 4: Playing with Others The difference is in their situatedness : • in pretence we engage the imagining with our feelings and desires in a way that is conditional on serving our desires and thus optional. • in simulation we treat this engagement as dictated by reality and thus non-optional. My taking a game character’s perspective not to be real is expressed in my treating the decision whether to indulge or quash the feelings and motivations it generates as a free choice , with no wrong answer. I might sometimes do one (e.g. when it’s fun) and sometimes do the other (e.g. when it stops being fun), without thereby contradicting myself. This freedom to switch at will reflects it being pretence . EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 5: Immorality as Unrecognised Solipsism Disregard for the interests of has the situatedness characteristic of pretence: whether I am moved by my perspective-taking is up to me , and if I would like to disregard it, I will. The moral attitude is the opposite: I have to be moved by your perspective whether I like it or not . Fully consistent immorality amounts to treating others like characters in a game: taking their perspectives when it is useful or entertaining, but modulating that engagement according to my own desires. This makes it a form of pretence , regardless of my explicit second-order beliefs. EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
Section 5: Immorality as Unrecognised Solipsism I infer that consistently immoral agents do not really believe in other minds, despite thinking they do. • Since others’ perspectives are real, this constitutes a massive falsehood in their worldview. • Since there is good evidence for the reality of others’ perspectives, this constitutes a massive irrationality in their thinking. Yet it is one which otherwise rational people might fall into, and fail to recognise, because of the subtlety of the simulation- pretence distinction. EVALUATION LICHTENBERG-PROFESSORSHIP SITUATED COGNITION - DEC. 5, 2018
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