Dennett on Normativity

[The post below is a response by Daniel C. Dennett to one of my recent posts; it is published with his permission.--ES]           

In my long lapsed career as a sculptor I once devoted considerable time and energy to conceiving of (but not executing) a series of conceptual art objects that were exemplary Fs or Gs or Hs except for one feature, which made them useless.

• Needle:  a 3-inch-long cylinder of stainless steel, sharpened to a fine point at one end, and pierced with an eye at the other.  Only problem: its diameter is not, say, 1/16 of an inch but 1 inch.  Rather too blunt for use.
• Dice: two pieces of white plastic with all the pips from 1 to 6 properly arranged in opposition: Only problem: instead of being cubes, they’re spheres.
• a length of rope ten feet long and 2 feet in diameter.
• individual Kleenex sealed in plastic sleeves.
• a porcelain hammer
• a soluble anchor

The giant paperclip on my desk is the only concrete result of that bout of fantasy.

Why do I mention this?  Because sometimes the most interesting and important fact about something is that it is almost an F. Norms are ubiquitous; there are good and bad toenails, good and bad skipping stones, good and bad heaps, good and bad stool samples, . . . . Is one optimizing when one sees the faint but improvable resemblance of a piece of driftwood to a horse’s mane? 

When I was teaching at UC Irvine almost fifty years ago,  a rather posh restaurant opened in Corona del Mar, California, called The Five Crowns. It presented itself as an authentic English pub, with dozens of polished horse brasses hanging on the walls,  serving wenches with frilly white décolletage blouses and caps to match, and a red pillar box (post box) and canonical red telephone booth outside. (It still thrives, according to its website.)  When a rather crusty British philosopher came to town to give a few talks in our department I decided it would be a lark to take him to the Five Crowns for dinner. It was not lost on the maître d’ that he had a genuine English pub-frequenter dining that evening, and at the end of the meal he wafted by to ask if the distinguished guest from across  the pond had noted any jarring details that the restaurant might repair. Authenticity was their goal. “Yes, there is one dead giveaway,” said the Brit, and the maître d’s face fell: “The urinals don’t stink.”  A proper English pub would have a loo with an aroma that made one dizzy.

My claim is that analysis, indeed even simple categorization, almost always has room for imagined improvements in  the object under attention, for fallings short of perfection that can be noted—not necessarily deplored, but just noted. Approval or disapproval is not always the point. I don’t see, in short, that on my view, “one cuts oneself off from the natural distinction between explaining and excusing/approving action.” If I say “You were a perfect boor tonight, Fred.  I’ve never seen such a paradigmatic display of oafish disrespect!”   I am not approving or excusing, but I am alluding to a norm.

In “The Evolution of Reasons” (in Bashour and Muller, 2014) I explore the different senses of “why”: how come and what for, and argue that Darwin showed us how to get from the process narratives of how come by gradual steps to the normative, purposive what for.  There is, I claim, no bright line between them. I also distinguish what I call Pittsburgh normativity (after Haugeland and Brandom) from what I call Consumer Reports normativity.  I claim that the Pittsburgh school has never given us the needed Darwinian transformation from the latter to the former.

Following Wilfrid Sellars, Pittsburg philosophers, especially Robert Brandom and  John Haugeland, have stressed that “the space of reasons,” as we find it in the ubiquitous human practice of asking for and criticizing each other’s reasons, is bound by norms.   Wherever there are reasons, there is room for, and a need for, some kind of justification and the possibility of correction.  They are right, but they tend to elide the distinction between two kinds of norms and their modes of correction, which I will call Pittsburgh normativity and Consumer Reports normativity.   The former is concerned with the social norms that arise within the practice of communication and collaboration. Hence Haugeland, 1998, speaks of the “censoriousness” of members of society as the force that does the correcting. The latter, in contrast, is concerned with quality control or efficiency, the norms of engineering, you could say, as revealed by market forces or just by natural failures.  This is nicely highlighted by the distinction between a good deed and a good tool, or, negatively, between naughty and stupid.  People may punish you for being naughty, by their lights, but nature itself may mindlessly punish you for being stupid.  Wherever there are what for reasons why, an implicit norm may be invoked: real reasons are supposed always to be good reasons, reasons which justify the feature in question. No demand for justification is implied by any how come question (beyond the ever-present but usually tacit demand expressed as “and how do you know?”). As we shall see, we need both kinds of norms to create the perspective from which what for reasons are discernible in nature. Reason-appreciation did not co-evolve with reasons the way color-vision co-evolved with color.  Reason-appreciation is a later, more advanced product of evolution than reasons.

Your post, Eric, suggests that I have underestimated the gulf between the norms of the manifest image and the “normative-free” Quinian world of mechanisms. I, on the other hand, think that both Quine and I have seen the need to bridge that gap (see, e.g., Quine’s remark about intentional idioms as a “dramatic idiom”; Sellars saw this too, I think) with something—what else could do the trick but Darwinian thinking?            

Comments

[Jim Balter]

"Only problem: instead of being cubes, they’re spheres."

I have a pair of such dice. They aren't *completely* useless because they are hollow and have a bean inside that eventually settles, but when I included them in a group of six dice for a game of Farkle, they drove my friends crazy and they bought me some "regular" ones.

That aside: There is no one better than Dennett at illustrating a point, presenting a philosophical argument in clear language, or building intellectual bridges.