Abstract
Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason for that action out of a different set of alternatives.
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Notes
In this paper I’ll be concerned with pro tanto or contributory reasons, rather than with what there is all things considered, or on balance, reason for an agent to do. As I think of the distinction, the pro tanto reasons contribute to what there is all things considered reason to do.
See Snedegar (msb) as well as Ross (2006), Ch. 9.
This argument is adapted from one in Schaffer (2007), p. 396. Schaffer argues first that ‘knows-wh’ ascriptions are contrastive, and uses this argument to help make the case that ‘knows that’ ascriptions are also contrastive, since we want a unified semantics for ‘knows’.
Ben Lennertz, Shyam Nair, Mark Schroeder, and Evan Tiffany have all suggested this kind of analysis to me in conversation.
An anonymous referee suggested this analysis.
‘Rather than’ as used in preference ascriptions may seem to better fit with RT-1 and RT-2: ‘I prefer cake rather than pie’ might seem to mean that I like cake more than I like pie. But I think a better analysis here is the following: I would choose cake and not choose pie, when those are the alternatives. In ordinary cases, I would make this choice because I like cake more than I like pie, but this need not be part of the analysis of the ‘rather than’ ascription.
This also plausibly follows on RT-1, since if r is a stronger reason for A than it is for B, it is surely a reason for A. As an anonymous referee points out, this does not follow on RT-2. But, as I argued in Sect. 1, RT-2 (as well as RT-1) relies on an idiosyncratic treatment of ‘rather than’ in reason ascriptions.
See Dancy (1993), p. 62 for discussion.
See Schroeder (2007), for example.
For discussion of objectives providing reasons, see Moore (1912) (though he talked about rightness rather than reasons), Nagel (1970), Anderson (1993), Scanlon (1998), Finlay (2001, 2006), Schroeder (2007), Wedgwood (2009), and Parfit (2011). For analyses of reasons in terms of explanation, see Toulmin (1950), Finlay (2001, 2006), Searle (2001), Broome (2004), and Schroeder (2007). In Snedegar (msa) I discuss this idea further and argue that the idea that (at least many) reasons involve the promotion of certain kinds of objectives itself provides independent support for contrastivism.
To illustrate this, consider Schroeder’s (2007) Hypotheticalism. He holds that r is a reason for s to A iff r explains why A-ing would promote p, where p is the object of one of s’s desires, and where promoting p is just making p more probable. But it would be strange to think that r could explain both why A-ing would make p more probable, and why not A-ing would also make p more probable. Similarly, it doesn’t seem that one fact could explain both why A-ing would respect, say, the demands of justice, and why not A-ing would also respect the demands of justice.
I’m ignoring agents here.
The set of alternatives might be larger than just two members, but since I’ve been dealing with ‘rather than’ ascriptions here, I’ll limit my discussion to two-member sets.
We might develop a theory on which it’s provided instead by the context of assessment, or perhaps by some features of the agent’s situation (though to count as a contrastivist theory, it should not always simply be the set of alternatives which it is possible for the agent to perform). Sinnott-Armstrong (2004, 2006, 2008) defends a view on which there’s no saying which set is relevant for evaluating any particular bare reason ascription, which leads him to adopt Pyrrhonian skepticism, and thus to refuse to evaluate any bare ascription as either true or false.
One common contrastivist idea is that intonational stress can help fix the set of alternatives. If I say ‘You have a reason to buy some milk’, that suggests a set of alternatives like {buy milk, buy juice}, whereas if I say ‘You have a reason to buy some milk’, that suggests a set of alternatives like {buy milk, steal milk}. See Dretske (1970), Rooth (1992), and Schaffer (2005b, 2008) for discussion of stress and the role of alternatives.
Note that ‘in context c’ doesn’t show up on the right-hand side of the biconditional. That’s because, as I said, explicit ascriptions are not context-sensitive.
If we can think of reasons against an option A simply as reason for doing not-A, then this clause is just a special case of Bare Ascriptions. I agree that this is an attractive view, though things are slightly more complicated for the contrastivist, since not-A will not necessarily be in a set of alternatives whenever A is—sets of alternatives need not be exhaustive in this sense. And it’s not clear how to make sense of a reason to not-A out of a set of alternatives that doesn’t contain not-A. But going into more detail about this here would be distracting; see Snedegar (msa). Further, some philosophers have recently given accounts on which reasons against A cannot simply be thought of as reasons for not-A. See Greenspan (2005), for example.
Again, RT-2 does not validate this inference, which is an advantage of that proposal. But it does rely on a problematic treatment of ‘rather than’ in reason ascriptions.
This shows that my view does respect the fact that ‘rather than’ means something like ‘and not’: relative to the set of alternatives {A, B}, when ‘r is a reason to A rather than B’ is true, r is a reason to A and a reason not to B.
What is the status of Restricted Exclusivity? It’s a non-contrastivist principle, so I need to reject it. But I relied on it in my argument against the non-contrastivist. I claim that the non-contrastivist is committed to this principle, which is why the case I presented in Sect. 2 is problematic for her. The contrastivist should replace Restricted Exclusivity with a contrastive version, which says that one and the same objective can’t explain why one and the same fact is a reason to do and not to do one and the same action relative to one and the same set of alternatives.
See Snedegar (msb) and Ross (2006), Chap. 9.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Fabrizio Cariani, Stephen Finlay, Ben Lennertz, Shyam Nair, Indrek Reiland, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Julia Staffel, Evan Tiffany, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on this paper. Thanks most of all to Mark Schroeder, for many rounds of comments and discussion. My work on this paper was supported by the USC Oakley Fellowship.
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Snedegar, J. Reason claims and contrastivism about reasons. Philos Stud 166, 231–242 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0035-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0035-0