Luk Ching Kit. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-134). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Internalism and Externalism --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- An Internalist's Tale and the Theme of this Thesis --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Varieties of Internalism and Externalism --- p.2 / Chapter A. --- Varieties of internalism --- p.3 / Chapter B. --- Varieties of Externalism --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- The Nature of Internalism-Externalism Debate --- p.8 / Chapter 1.4 --- Looking Forward --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- The Rejection of Humean Internalism --- p.14 / Chapter 2.1 --- Humean Internalism and the Humean conception of Normative Reasons --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2 --- Hume's Theory on the Role of Reason and the Justification of Normative Reasons --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- "Williams's Attack on Desire-independent Normative Reasons, Two Arguments for Williams and Their Weaknesses" --- p.22 / Chapter 2.4 --- Two Anti-Humean Arguments on the Justification of Normative Reasons --- p.30 / Chapter A. --- Nagel on Desires and the Justifications of Normative Reasons --- p.30 / Chapter B. --- Scanlon on the Role of Desires in the Justification of Normative Reasons and My Modifications --- p.34 / Chapter 2.5 --- The Strength of Desires and the Mechanism of Decision Making in the Humean and Anti-Humean models --- p.42 / Chapter 2.6 --- The Rejection of Humean Internalism and a Remark --- p.45 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- The Rejection of Pure Ascription Internalism --- p.48 / Chapter 3.1 --- PAI and the Nagelian Motivation Theory --- p.49 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Humean Motivation Theory and the Assessment of the Nagelian Motivation Theory --- p.52 / Chapter 3.3 --- Argument for the Humean Motivation Theory 一 The Direction of Fit --- p.59 / Chapter A. --- "Brief Analysis of Intentional Action, Willing, Goal, Intention and Motivating Reason" --- p.60 / Chapter B. --- Direction of Fit and the Humean Motivation Theory --- p.62 / Chapter 3.4 --- Four Arguments against the Humean Motivation Theory --- p.64 / Chapter A. --- Special Nature of Moral Beliefs --- p.65 / Chapter B. --- The Non-teleological Nature of Moral Actions --- p.70 / Chapter C. --- Argument of Intellectualized Motivation --- p.73 / Chapter D. --- Argument of Irrationality --- p.78 / Chapter 3.5 --- The Rejection of Pure Ascription Internalism --- p.84 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- The Rejection of Rational Internalism --- p.86 / Chapter 4.1 --- Rational Internalism --- p.86 / Chapter 4.2 --- Argument of Incoherence --- p.88 / Chapter A. --- Exposition --- p.88 / Chapter B. --- Criticism --- p.92 / Chapter 4.3 --- Proper-grasp Argument --- p.105 / Chapter 4.4 --- Virtuous Person Argument --- p.110 / Chapter 4.5 --- The Rejection of Rational Internalism --- p.117 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- After the Rejection of Rational Internalism --- p.119 / Chapter 5.1 --- Two Problems of Rational Internalism --- p.120 / Chapter 5.2 --- Rejection of Rational Internalism and Appropriateness of Blame --- p.124 / Chapter 5.3 --- Weak Externalism and Morality --- p.129 / Bibliography --- p.132

In "A Narrow Representationalist Account of Qualitative Content" and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Georges Rey challenges the tradition of combining externalism and representationalism about mental states. Specifically, his challenge takes the form of an internalist representationalist account of states with qualitative content. I examine his account, and find it problematic on the grounds that it fails to appropriately account for the substantiality and determinacy of qualitative content. However, I propose a solution to this problem in the form of an alternative view. This view compromises several aspects of Rey's view, most importantly in virtue of being a weak externalist position rather than internalist one. Yet, in keeping with Rey's project, this alternative view challenges the traditional combination of representationalism and externalism. It is a view on which mental states with qualitative contents are only indirectly individuated by elements in the external world. Mental states are not, as on a standard representationalist account, individuated by elements in the external world that they represent. While I conclude that Rey's view is incorrect, I salvage his project.

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Many of our ordinary beliefs about the world around us are a result of inference from more fundamental beliefs. Foundationalists in epistemology have thought that, if these ordinary beliefs are to be rationally justified, the chain of inferential justification must terminate in a belief that is justified noninferentially. Foundationalists, of the internalist variety, have thought that the most plausible candidates for ending the regress of empirical justification are experiential states, the justifying features of which the believing subject is aware. The Sellarsian dilemma, taking its name from philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, has been a persistent argument against foundationalist theories of epistemic justification. There have been various formulations of the dilemma over the years, but in its most general form it says that for any construal of an experiential state where the experiential state provides justification, the experiential state (or the apprehension thereof) will need further justification. Sellars thought that an experience, all by itself, cannot provide justification unless we apply concepts to the experience. However, the application of concepts is judgmental and conceptual judgments, like beliefs, require further justification. So, the experiential state construed this way would perpetuate the regress it was designed to terminate. On the other hand, if the experiential state is construed such that it is not in need of justification, then it cannot itself provide justification. Both options are devastating to a foundationalist epistemology. My thesis is that a solution to all forms of the Sellarsian dilemma is to require for foundational justification direct awareness of (what I call) the fit between one's conceptual judgment and the justifying experiential state. I concede that one must conceptualize one's experiential states for these states to play an epistemic role. However, I argue that conceptual judgments of this sort are the foundations. The importance of this solution is that it not only terminates the regress of justification but it also captures the primary intuitions that motivate internalism and foundationalism. This is to say that although I have framed my account as a response to the Sellarsian dilemma, it is not merely an ad hoc patch that avoids what stood as a serious problem. Instead, it is a return to what has motivated and what I take to be most persuasive about internalist foundationalism.

Constitutivism is a kind of metaethical theory according to which one can explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. Any constitutivist theory makes three basic claims: (1) that some feature is constitutive of agency, (2) that one can explain reasons or normativity in its terms, and (3) that doing so has plausible first-order normative implications. I consider the paradigmatic constitutivist theories of Christine Korsgaard and J. David Velleman and the more recent variant developed by Michael Smith, and I argue that each fails adequately to justify at least two of the three basic constitutivist claims. I then argue that a constitutivist strategy can nevertheless be adapted to explain the necessary connection between normative judgment and motivation. More specifically, I argue that practical deliberation has two constitutive features. First, it aims at proceeding in a rational way from premises to conclusions. Second, it has an internal connection with motivation: barring weakness of will, people are motivated to act in accordance with their deliberative conclusions. Because a person's normative beliefs guide the course of her deliberation, and her deliberation motivates her action, a person will be motivated to act in ways that correspond to her normative beliefs, which her sincere normative judgments express. This account provides a cognitivist explanation for a phenomenon often taken to be the most important evidence for non-cognitivism or expressivism.

Traditional accounts of justification can be characterized as trying to analyze justification in such a way that having a justified belief brings with it assurance of truth. The internalist offers a demanding requirement on justification: one's having a justified belief requires that one see what the belief has going for it. Externalists worry that the internalist's narrow conception of justification will lead to unacceptably radical and implausible skepticism. According to the externalist, one need not know what a belief has going for it in order for that belief to be justified. Externalism, though, comes with its own problems. Ernest Sosa has attempted to bridge the divide between internalism and externalism by pairing the strengths of internalism (assurance) with the strengths of externalism (an answer to skepticism). Sosa distinguishes two kinds of knowledge: animal knowledge that is essentially externalist in character and reflective knowledge that is intended to capture our best intellectual procedure in regards to knowledge. On Sosa's view, one gains reflective knowledge by building upon (by adding further epistemic components to) animal knowledge. As a result, Sosa's view seems to illustrate a bottom-up approach to the analysis of knowledge (or justification): reflective knowledge is the result of animal knowledge and some other epistemic factor. My project, in contrast to Sosa's, is to argue that one should start with an account of ideal justification (justification that is paradigmatically internalist) and then proceed by loosening the standards on ideal justification in an effort to develop the possibility of non- ideal kinds of justification. The view that I will develop will adopt Sosa's strategy of distinguishing kinds of knowledge (or justification), but will result in a top-down approach to the analysis of justification. Instead of starting with an undemanding standard and layer levels on top, I will start with an ideal standard and strip layers away. I will also argue that my view has some important advantages over Sosa's. Not only does Sosa's view seem to run into many of the problems that threaten externalism, but his view is incapable of offering the kind of assurance that the internalist is after. The view I develop will maintain the internalist's interest in assurance while also providing a response to some of the skeptical problems that have plagued internalists. If my project is successful, then, even if the justification that results in many of the cases I will be exploring is (admittedly) not ideal, we can use these conceptions of justification to help explicate how one might have justified beliefs about a great number of things. The essentially internalist account that I have offered will not only illustrate a serious approach to dealing with skepticism, but it will also capture how many of our commonsensically justified beliefs are in fact justified (albeit in a less than ideal sense).

In this dissertation, I argue for a set of interpretations regarding the relationship between moral obligation and reasons for acting in the theories of Hobbes, Hutcheson, and Hume. Several commentators have noted affinities between these naturalist moral theories and contemporary ethical internalism. I argue that attempts to locate internalist theses in these figures are not entirely successful in any clear way. I follow Stephen Darwall's suggestion that addressing the question “why be moral?” is one of the fundamental problems of modern moral philosophy. Since, as some have argued, there is a tension between accepting internalism and providing an adequate response to the “why be moral” question, I argue that each figure maintains a distinctive response to this question given the sort of internalism, if any, he would accept. In the introduction, I provide the key distinctions that arise from contemporary discussions of ethical internalism, and I motivate my project of looking for insight into the relationship between internalism and amoralism in the British Moralists. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the moral theory Hobbes who, I argue, would accept a version of constitutive existence internalism because he holds that there is a necessary connection between one's being contractually obligated and one's being in certain rationally motivating states. I then present the fool's objection as an objection to the assumption of a relevant similarity between divine obligation and contractual obligation. I argue that, irrespective of this dissimilarity, the fool has some rational motive to keep his covenants in virtue of the fact that making covenants changes one's decision situation in such a way that it becomes reasonable to treat covenants as if they imposed categorical constraints on behavior. I claim that Hobbes's response to the fool is, at least in part, that the fool fails to understand what moral obligation consists in. In the remainder of the dissertation I turn my attention to two classical sentimentalist moral theories. I examine the theories of Hutcheson and Hume because it is not clear what resources moral sentimentalism has available to it in order to address questions about the reasonableness of moral action. In chapters 3 and 4, I develop an interpretation of Hutcheson who, because he distinguishes between exciting and justifying reasons, is able to say there is some non-derivative sense in which moral actions are reasonable. I argue that he develops a theory whereby moral obligation is to be understood in terms of the non-motivating states of approval of moral spectators, and I do not think, contrary to Darwall, that there is anything puzzling about his doing so. I argue that Hutcheson does not accept a version of motive internalism, but that he shares much in common with internalist views: he claims that there is a very strong, if contingent, connection between our states of approval and our motivational states. I offer an explanation of how Hutcheson could respond to the amoalist, which holds that we ought to be moral because, in part, we all already have the motives for and the interests in doing the sorts of things of which moral spectators approve. In chapters 5 and 6, I turn my attention to Hume who, because he makes no distinction between motivating and justifying reasons, does not seem to have anything to say about the non-derivative reasonableness of moral action. I argue that a textually grounded interpretation of Hume's theory of the passions provides us with more reason to favor an (appraiser motive) internalist reading over an externalist reading of his moral theory. Much of my argument depends on an interpretation of Hume's claim that it is possible for agents to be moved to act from a sense of duty alone. When we ask what Hume can say to the question “why be moral,” some of the options that Hutcheson pursues are initially open to him. However, I argue that Hume thinks philosophical theorizing must give way to the operations of psychological mechanisms that are causally responsible for inspiring agents to act morally by giving rise in them to particular kinds of affections. I conclude with some general remarks about the problems surrounding Darwall's interpretation of Hume's theory of justice, and use this discussion to lend further support to the claim that the actual theories of Hobbes, Hutcheson, and Hume do not neatly fit into the taxonomies that Darwall seems to think they do.

This is an essay about reasons for action. It begins with two rather ordinary observations. The first is that these two uses of the term ‘reason’ roughly correspond with the two main roles that a reason can play: the role of favoring a prospective course of action, and the role of explaining action. Each of these roles seems crucial to a philosophical account of reasons, and it is not obvious that either has claim to priority. The second observation is that accommodating each of these roles seems to place restrictions on what we can say about reasons for action, and those who lean toward giving priority to one role rather than the other tend also to give priority to the corresponding set of restrictions. They take that set as given, and then focus their efforts on finding a way to meet the other set if they can. Accommodating the explanatory role has seemed to many to require that a reason bear some relation to the motivations of the agent for whom it is reason. One might wonder: what sense could there be in calling something a reason for me to act if it were not in any way capable of explaining my being moved to act? I argue, however, that accepting this sort of internalist condition on something’s being a reason to act precludes accepting a condition of objectivity that is imposed on us if we wish to accommodate the favoring role: sometimes, at least, when we have a reason to act, we could not cease to have that reason simply by having a (perhaps radically) different set of attitudes. I then consider whether the reverse might be true of externalist theories. Does taking the favoring role as one’s starting point preclude a full account of the explanatory role of reasons? I argue that it does not. I show that an Anscombean conception of intentional action allows for a fairly clean solution to a pair of puzzles that motivate this worry. This approach relieves much of the pressure to think of reasons as being tied to motivational attitudes. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 26, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Our beliefs utilize various sources: perception, memory, induction, etc. We trust these sources to provide reliable information about the world around us. My dissertation investigates how this trust could be justified. Chapter one introduces background material. I argue that justification rather than knowledge is of primary epistemological importance, discuss the internalism/externalism debate(s), and introduce an evidentialist thesis that provides a starting point/framework for epistemological theorizing. Chapter two introduces a puzzle concerning justification. Can a belief source provide justification absent prior justification for believing it's reliable? Any answer appears to either make justifying the reliability of a source intellectually unsatisfying or all together impossible. Chapter three considers and rejects a plethora of proposed solutions to our puzzle. Investigating these solutions illustrates the need to further investigate evidence, evidence possession, and evidential support. Chapter four discusses the metaphysics of evidence. I argue that evidence always consists of a set of facts and that fact-proposition pairs stand in confirmation relations isomorphic to those holding between pairs of propositions. Chapter five argues that justification requires what I call actually connected possession of supporting evidence: a subject must be aware of supporting evidence and of the support relation itself. Chapter six argues that the relation constitutive of a set of facts being justificatory evidence is a sui generis and irreducible relation that is knowable a priori. Chapter seven begins by showing how Richard Fumerton's acquaintance theory meets the constraints on a theory of justification laid down in previous chapters. I modify the theory so as to: (i) make room for fallible foundational justification, and (ii) allow inferential justification absent higher-order beliefs about evidential connections. Chapter eight applies the developed theory of justification to our initial puzzle. I show how my modified acquaintance theory is in a unique position to vindicate the idea that necessarily a source provides a person with justification only if she is aware of evidence for the reliability of that source. However, this awareness of evidence for a source's reliability falls short of a justified belief and thereby avoids impalement from our dilemma's skeptical horn.