Abstract
What conditions are ideally favorable for judgment is itself a normative question. It is a question of when it makes sense to accord authority to normative judgments. What is the substance, say, of this my desk? I say, oakwood. It is made of oak. This is its substance, with a most absolute finality. Of course, you may go on quite legitimately to ask another question, about the substance of oak. Reminding you that I have conclusively answered your first question, I consider now the second. I am slower to answer this one, realizing that the inquiry is pressing into an area unfamiliar to me. I need to consult some literature in biochemistry, and I come out with an answer in terms of Fibers, cellular elements, and structure. Well, you say, What is the stuff, the substance, of the cells, etc., of oakwood? This is your third question, two of which have been answered. Don’,t you for a moment hint or think that I’,ve not yet answered them.
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Notes
This now famous question was first asked by Kripke (1982).
The claim that moral discourse is descriptive has, of course, been hotly disputed by emotivists, projectivists, expressivists, quasi-realists, and other noncognitivists. See, for example, A.J. Ayer (1936), Charles Stevenson (1937), R.M. Hare (1963), Simon Blackburn (1984), and Allan Gibbard (1990).
For example, see John McDowell (1985), David Wiggins (1987), and David Lewis (1989).
Indeed, normal conditions and observers are internally related to the appearance/reality distinction. Things can appear some way other than they are if and only if the observer or her environment is responsible for the failure.
Metaphysical accounts of meaning, morality, possibilia, and so forth are generally silent about epistemological matters. They can be faulted for creating epistemological problems where there are none, but not for failing to solve an epistemological problem that is not of their making. For example, we might fault divine command theories for making it impossible to determine what we in fact can determine: whether certain actions are right or wrong. Such a failure is just the failure to be epistemically serious. But we should not fault such an account for its failure to tell us whether some action is right or wrong.
Cf. J.J.C. Smart (1963 and 1975) and Averill (1992).
The suggestion is inspired by Ruth Millikan (1984, 1989a, and 1990).
This is, of course, the notorious problem of false representation. The list of important work on the problem and surrounding issues includes: Fred Dretske (1986), Jerry Fodor (1987), Millikan (1984), Colin McGinn (1989), and Terrence Tomkow (unpublished).
Allan Gibbard (1990: 183-188) makes a similar point concerning accounts of rationality that appeal to complete information. As Gibbard notes, we have no reason to think that, just because two people are completely informed, they will make the same judgments about which conditions are normal, which actions are moral, and so forth, unless we implicitly assume that they know which conditions are normal, which actions are moral, and so forth. Diana Raffman (1994) suggests that discriminating differences may not even be psychologically prior to discriminating categories. Her suggestion, which she parlays into an ingenious solution to the sorites paradox, is that the two abilities (viz., discriminating differences and recognizing categories) may require separate psychological mechanisms.
Also see Dretske(1986).
Millikan defended this claim in personal conversation.
Let ‘normalN2’, stand for ‘normal with respect to determining which conditions are normal for determining which conditions are normal for seeing colors.’, Then, according to N5, for any condition C, it is constitutive of C’,s being normal for the purpose of determining whether conditions are normal for determining the color of an object that a normal Nin2 judge under normalN2 conditions would accept judgments concerning the normality of conditions for determining the color of an object under C.
Notice, too, that what might force us on here are practical problems, not philosophical problems. We might, for example, come to have reason to worry about whether the conditions we are in are normal for some particular purpose. But the metaphysical work has already been completed. We already have an account of what would make the conditions we are in normal or abnormal. We already know, in other words, the essential features of normality. The only remaining problem, if there is one, is whether some condition has those features. And that problem, as noted above, is not a problem for the metaphysician.
My discussion in §3.1 owes much to David Hilbert’,s (1987: 29-42) excellent discussion of these issues, and anyone wishing a more detailed discussion of these issues should turn there. This aspect of Hilbert’,s work, it seems to me, has been greatly underappreciated.
Interestingly, Berkeley seems to find the same fault with the argument. Consider what he has Philonous say: “Strictly speaking, Hylas, we do not see the same object that we feel; neither is the same object perceived by the microscope, which was by the naked eye” (1713/1975: 194). I thank Jody Graham for drawing this passage to my attention.
For a helpful discussion of this issue see Hacker (1987: 150-9).
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Gibbard, A., Aldrich, V. (2002). A Simple Theory Of Normal Conditions. In: Rediscovering Colors. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0562-3_6
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