In my last posting I concluded the reading of the first, introductory, chapter of John Skorupski's The Domain of Reasons. In this posting I am going to look at the first part of the second chapter of the book, which opens the first part of the whole work. The first part of the book is concerned with the structure of normative concepts and the second chapter looks, in particular, at reasons.
Skorupski opens Chapter 2 by distinguishing between three types of reason: epistemic reasons (reasons to believe something), practical reasons (reasons to do something) and evaluative reasons (reasons to feel something). In all these cases a reason is a kind of relation and reasons can vary in degrees of strength. Reasons are generally treated by Skorupski as forms of response and to be "intentional acts" in the sense that they have an intentional content that is linked essentially to their answerability. Reasons can consist in a multiplicity of facts.
In addition to the distinction between types of reason Skorupski also adds a categorisation of reasons of degree which move from specific reasons (particulars) to overall reasons to sufficient reasons. Skorupski also takes sometime arguing that whilst these differences of degree apply to all the types of reason he has distinguished that none of the types of degree is reducible to any of the others.
Having made these opening moves Skorupski next turns to an account that is specific to epistemic reasons and concerns what he terms "epistemic fields". The reason for this move is that Skorupski takes it to be the case that epistemic reasons have to refer to knowable facts. With epistemic reasons there has to be a restriction on the facts that can give me reason to believe that a fact obtains. As Skorupski puts this:
The facts that are knowable by an actor x and can thus be epistemic reasons for x at a time t are limited by what x could at t know of by reflection or by further (physically possible, spatio-temporal) inquiry, or just by 'stumbling across' them. These are the facts that are epistemically accessible to x at t: x could come to know them by skill or by luck. Call them x's epistemic field at t. (42)
Facts in an epistemic field can constitute epistemic reasons for one whether or not one has become aware of them. Skorupski illustrates this point by mentioning how Sherlock Holmes uses clues unobserved by others to deduce matters as indicative of the point that these clues are epistemic reasons for the others to believe something even though they have not noticed them.
Epistemic reasons are, however, relative to the field in question although the field can itself be enlarged over time. Epistemic reasons are also described by Skorupski as "all-things-considered" reasons. We generally, however, speak of specific sub-sets of facts within epistemic fields as constituting epistemic reasons as when we distinguish, as we often do, between factors that support the belief that x as opposed to other factors that support the contrary belief y.
Finally, Skorupski also follows Husserl (though without referring to him) in distinguishing between epistemic reasons and indicators. As in Husserl's First Investigation an "indicator" is a kind of suggestion made by a symbol that something is the case.
It is sometime now since I last blogged on John Skorupski's book The Domain of Reasons. This book, which is presented by some as an alternative to Parfit's On What Matters and which concerns, like Parfit, a general theory of reason, is one whose preliminary account of sentimentalism about practical reason (not morality) I looked at in my last posting on it. In the present posting I want to conclude my review of the introduction to Skorupski's book so that future postings on it can begin the arduous task of going through the major sections of the work.
Skorupski concludes his introduction to the work by discussing morality further and linking his view of morality to his general claims about normativity. With regard to morality Skorupski makes clear that an examination of the "sentiment" of blame is one that he thinks will help us to understand the "categoricity" of morality. By the "categoricity" of morality Skorupski means that morality is categorical in the sense that "it is a priori that if someone has a moral obligation to a he has reason to a" (28). The link of this to the view of blame is that to blame someone for something is to take them to have had a reason not to do the thing that they did. Further, blame (along with a list of other dispositions that Skorupski gives) involves a withdrawal of recognition from the one blamed. This does not mean that the one from whom recognition is withdrawn cannot retrieve the situation though Skorupski is perhaps going too far in claiming that the situation is one that can, as he puts it, "always" be retrieved since I can certainly think of cases (without having to move into serious crime) where it certainly is not possible for someone to recover from this withdrawal.
Skorupski's general view of morality, in addition to aiming to understand its categoricity, also aims at grasping the spontaneity of it as something that is basic to the epistemology of all norms. Skorupski relates this spontaneity to a conception of discussion that seems to suggest a relationship between his view and the Habermasian notion of communicative reason.
Skorupski's overall conception is one he terms the "Normative view" and he intends this to be the basis of a new form of "Critical" philosophy. As with previous forms of "Critical" philosophy Skorupski accepts a basic duality between spontaneity and receptivity but assumes that the epistemology of reasons requires that there are purely spontaneous responses with regards to norms. Reason relations, whilst irreal for Skorupski, are objective and form the "unconditioned condition" on which he will account for the possibility of knowledge and freedom. The account of the relationship between reason relations, normativity and morality will be central to the basic arguments of The Domain of Reasons and must constitute the main basis for assessing the success of the work.
I opened last year with a summary of the best postings from each month of the year that had just closed and have decided to open this year's postings the same way. Amongst other things it enables a sense to emerge of how the blog develops over 12 months, in terms of trends of interest at different times of year and an indication of which topics have attracted or should have attracted wider engagement.
January:
A month that lacked any clear focus in postings last year but which did include a report on the Netroots conference I attended and which attracted some considerable interest from others who were present so I'd like to recommend this posting to anyone who wasn't there who might like an indication of what the conference concerned.
February:
A quiet month in terms of postings but included a detailed description and response to the announcement of the philosophy panel in the so-called "research excellence framework". This posting provides important details on those involved in the panel and is worth consulting by anyone in the UK who is likely to have their work judged in due course.
March:
This was the busiest month of the year in terms of postings, which ranged in focus from discussions of the original version of John Rawls' notion of the "original position" to reports on campaigns to keep philosophy alive at Greenwich and Keele universities. Perhaps the most philosophically interesting posting, however, was the first of two that responded to an early Rawls paper on distributive justice.
April:
A fall-off in quantity of postings followed the height of March, partly due to a difficult personal situation during this period. During the course of this month I began blogging my way through Rawls' Theory of Justice, something far from finished by year-end! One of the early postings on this topic that emerged this month is the first one on Rawls' view of utilitarianism which I would recommend.
May:
A small number of postings, mainly focused again on Rawls but, towards the end of the month, I also laid out a sustained defence of the notion of open access publishing and journals which, I think, merits perusal.
June:
A month with a large number of postings on a variety of topics from a response to the New College of Humanities to the beginning of a series of postings on Derek Parfit's new book On What Matters, responses which are on-going on this blog. However, despite the beginning of the responses to Parfit occurring during the course of this month, I think the more important posting during the month concerned Rawls again with a piece on what is involved in constructing the original position that is, I think, one of the best of the year by far.
July:
Postings during this month divided between responses to Rawls and Parfit with, however, the opening of some on Kant's Groundwork. One of the postings of this month succeeded however in attracting a fair amount of attention and this was my response to Simon Blackburn's review of Parfit's book which you can find here.
August:
This was a month with a lot of postings on a very varied range of subjects ranging from a reply to Nelson Potter's reading of the first part of Kant's Groundwork to some opening discussion of John Skorupski's book The Domain of Reasons. The most visited posting of the year was posted this month on the topic of the wrongness of prostitution but I would prefer it if readers looked instead at the first of two postings that respond to Skorupski and his conception of "Critical philosophy".
September:
A slight fall-off in the number of postings after the output of August. Postings again focused on topics as disparate as the annual report on the UK Kant Society conference and a response to the exhibition on Ford Madox Brown held in Manchester. However the response I set out to a profile of Derek Parfit in the New Yorker both served to informed readers of what that profile says and to indicate some additional sides to Parfit himself.
October:
Postings during the course of this month included further replies to Nelson Potter's reading of Kant's Groundwork and a posting on a conference I attended in Romania on cosmopolitics. The month ended with a posting on the account Derek Parfit gives to treating persons as ends during his 2002 Tanner lectures.
November:
A month in which the number of postings increased significantly again and ranged from the beginning of a series of postings on Henry Allison's new book on Kant's Groundwork to some new postings on Rawls. Perhaps the highlight of the month though was a report on Barbara Herman's account of moral worth in Kant.
December:
Final month of the year involved responses to Allison's book on the Groundwork and Parfit's work. Of the Parfit postings the second on his account of treating persons as ends looks at how this developed in his early version of On What Matters which he called Climbing the Mountain.
Over at the Notre Dame Philosophical Review there has appeared a response to John Skorupski's The Domain of Reasons, a book about which I posted a few comments myself, the most recent of which is here. The review, by Hallvard Lillehammer, is well worth consulting.
After outlining his general view of "Critical Philosophy" the next stage of the introduction to Skorupski's The Domain of Reasons concerns practical rather than theoretical claims. In making this practical turn, however, Skorupski remains in contact with Kantian themes, beginning with an account of the place of autonomy in his view of reason.
Skorupski's conception of practical agency requires a correlate to the epistemic notion of self-audit and is found in the view of an agent grasping, from a first-person insight, grounds for action. Skorupski also relates epistemic self-audit to recognition of what Parfit pictures as intentional objectivity regarding some form of such recognition as part of what provides us with a warranted reason for action. Skorupski puts this by saying that what one has reason to believe depends on the set of facts one apperceives.
If knowledge of such apperceiving of facts takes place at all then there must be a similar warranted apperception of norms. This latter gives Skorupski his picture of practical autonomy but what distinguishes it from the view of autonomy that is central to Kant is that it is not pictured primarily in relation to moral norms but practical norms of any kind (hence taking hypothetical imperatives to have the same relation to autonomy as categorical ones).
Skorupski's general conception of reason allows for evaluative reasons to be distinct from epistemic ones but he does not join Kant in picturing reason as a general ability. One of the bases of Skorupski's departure from Kant here is that he is committed to a radical kind of pluralism about the different kinds of reason though he still thinks that reason relations have an epistemic and ontological unity which arises from our autonomous capacities. Given this latter point it is not that clear why Skorupski denies validity to a general claim about "reason".
When it comes to practical reason in general Skorupski builds out from the notion of "warrant" indicating that norms give warranted reasons for action only when combined with warranted beliefs about one's desires. In making this claim Skorupski builds in a kind of sentimentalism which is part of what he means by referring to "evaluative" reasons. On Skorupski's view what there is reason to do can depend on what there is reason to feel, something that invokes his idea of the "Bridge principle" which is stated by him as follows:
Bridge says that there is reason for x to do what the affective responses that there is reason for x to feel would characteristically dispose x to do (24).
Part of the point of this is apparently to reduce the "gap" between reason and sentiment that Kant introduces though a lot here depends on the nature of the feelings invoked. Kant is far from outlawing reference to feeling in practical evaluation despite the popular picture (one encouraged to a degree by the argument of Groundwork I). But feeling is nonetheless distinguished for Kant between practical and pathological, a distinction that can also be understood to refer to a difference between justified action by reference to feeling and unjustified action by reference to feeling (with the latter requiring the subordination of reason to "passion"). It remains to be seen whether anything like this distinction can be built into Skorupski's account of practical reason.
Skorupski distinguishes between two distinct kinds of sentimentalism making clear that he is not a sentimentalist with regard to practical reason as this would entail that the Bridge principle was the only principle of practical reason. A basic reason why Skorupski is not a sentimentalist with regard to practical reason is that he admits an important place for appeals to impartiality. Skorupski also understands the agent-neutrality that is involved in universalist forms of morality (including Kant's) as requiring a form of impartiality. However, whilst Skorupski thinks that the need for some kind of appeal to impartiality is a requirement for a full theory of practical reason he departs from Kant in terms of not taking the categorical imperative to be the foundation (or "supreme principle") of morality. In assuming that universalism is effectively the same as impartiality Skorupski also makes a large step towards equating the Kantian view of universality with a consequentalist one.
Skorupski's sentimentalism is partially justified by his account of blame where blame is understood as a sentiment that it is right to feel. So Skorupski, whilst denying sentimentalism concerning practical reason adopts it with regard to morality. Again this is partly due to his view that the type of impartial appraisal he wishes to allow for concerns a relation to the Good (rather than the Right).
Skorupski's departures from Kant in the area of practical reason thus are partly due to a failure on Skorupski's part to see the place of feeling in Kant's view of practical reason and partly due to a simple conflation of universalisation with impartiality (and of the latter with an implicit consequentialism). But it is also true that Skorupski wishes to motivate a conception of feelings as having an immanent rationality that is specific to them, a rationality that is part of the sense of them as having an internal intentional objectivity. So Skorupski wishes to extend the area of spontaneity so that it encompasses feeling but doesn't see that so doing requires an internal relation of feeling to reason as he thinks of reason as always immanent to the area in question.
In my last posting on this topic I addressed the characterisation that Skorupski gives of the Kantian project of Critical Philosophy. I mentioned in that posting, however, that Skorupski also has a historical conception of the notion of "Critical Philosophy" that ensures that he sees the Kantian form of it as only a specially important version but not as identical with the idea of "Critical Philosophy". In this posting I will look at some of the implications of his broader conception of "Critical Philosophy" both in terms of how it leads him to respond to some trends within 20th-century philosophy and how it further elucidates the understanding of the rationale for viewing Skorupski's own project as being a form of "Critical Philosophy".
In viewing this wider sense of "Critical Philosophy" it is useful to look first at how Skorupski understands some tendencies of 20th-century thinking to belong under this heading. With regard to this area Skorupski views the projects of Wittgenstein and Carnap as representing forms of "Critical Philosophy". However the initial discussion of the view that these latter forms of thinking are versions of "Critical Philosophy" focuses much more on the Vienna Circle than on the work of Wittgenstein.
Skorupski in characterising the Vienna Circle engages in some understandable broad generalisations. The Circle is correctly pictured as being an empiricist school of thinking but, whilst admitting that there is a sense in which the adoption of global realism can arise as a result of empiricism, Skorupski wishes to deny that this is what happened in the case of the Vienna Circle.
Rather than taking the view that forms of intuitions and categories of the understanding are central to cognition the Vienna Circle argue instead for a form of conventionalism, a standpoint that allows them to concede a certain variation to what is required for cognition. Conventionalism also has the advantage, from Skorupski's point of view, of not requiring a 'joint-product' approach to objectivity since the conventions can define both the nature of objects and how they are understood to operate thus removing the alleged need to appeal to noumena.
However the Vienna Circle also escaped the Platonism of Frege by denying that "thoughts" in Frege's sense exist. This is the basis, indeed, of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy. On its basis it appeared that philosophy could be subsumed into a general project of logical syntactics or grammar (something that suggests a point not commented upon by Skorupski, namely, a relation to Leibniz, something explicit in the earlier work of Russell). So the basis of viewing the Circle as a form of "Critical Philosophy" is that it denies the cognition-independence of facts, one of the two key component parts of global realism.
The Circle's position, on Skorupski's characterisation, does not require the rejection of factualism but does involve a radical reinterpretation of it that views it very much in deflationary terms. Given the Circle's commitment to a form of scientism, however, it tended to non-cognitivism about a wide array of important areas, including aesthetics and ethics. Skorupski sketches reasons for why this need not have been the outcome of the view and traces the real problem with its conception in its commitment to verificationism. The verificationist view arises, allegedly like Kant's 'joint-product theory', from too strong a denial of cognition-independence of facts.
Due to this claim that the problem in both cases arises from too strong a denial of cognition-independence of facts it becomes evident that Skorupski's own form of "Critical Philosophy" will be aiming to do more to represent this feature of common cognitive claims than the earlier versions of the project of criticism were able to do. This is due to him being committed to the view that cognition-independence is rooted in common cognition in a way that he does not think factualism to be. The reason for this asymmetry is that Skorupski thinks that the contrast between factual and normative is central to common cognition and thus that factualism is a deeply revisionist response to it.
The crippling scientism of the Vienna view is thus taken to reside precisely in its scientistic disinclination to take normativity seriously as something radically distinct from description and, in having this disinclination, the Vienna view departed from common cognition. Skorupski's general attempt now emerges as one that will, unlike the classic critical moves of Kant and Vienna, attempt to retain a sense of cognition-independence whilst denying factualism. This is what Skorupski terms, simply enough, the "Normative view".
On the "Normative view" some wholly normative propositions are a priori and no wholly normative propositions are factual. However Skorupski wishes to distinguish this view from an intuitionist one that ascribes the special property of normative propositions to some special kinds of facts thus again stating an opposition to an alternative view on the grounds of its implicit factualism (intuitionist factualism thus joining noumenal factualism). Similarly, and more obviously, there is a concern to deny reductive realism concerning normative propositions such as arises in contemporary naturalism.
Yesterday I started to look at Skorupski's new book The Domain of Reasons and lay out some considerations indicating the main view the book is arguing for and how it connects to the architectonic divisions of the work. In this posting I want to begin to address the ways that Skorupski introduces the distinction between his meta-normative view, 'cognitivist irrealism' and the standpoint of Critical Philosophy. As it turns out there is a complication in doing this as Skorupski has an historical conception of what "Critical Philosophy" consists in and, on this conception, the Kantian view of it is only one variant (albeit not just "any" one since it is due to Kant we have the very idea of "Critical Philosophy"). One problem with this historical conception is that it invites an evident reductive view of the scope and importance of Kant's achievement. In this posting I'm not going to address the wider elements of Skorupski's conception of "Critical Philosophy" but will leave that for a future posting. Here I am just going to concentrate on how Skorupski sets out, in his general introduction to the volume, his understanding of Kant's philosophy and thus differentiates himself from Kant.
Initially Skorupski follows the lead of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in viewing "Critical Philosophy" as arising as kind of via media between dogmatism and scepticism. Interestingly, and of importance for subsequent discussion in Skorupski's book, the nature of the distinction between these three positions is presented as concerned with the "warrants for belief". In relation to this question Skorupski also identifies an important component of Critical Philosophy being its "descriptive" relation to common sense conceptions of cognition (thus implicitly following Strawson's distinction between "descriptive" and "revisionary" forms of metaphysics).
Due to thinking of Critical Philosophy in this way Skorupski identifies an immediate problem with there being such a thing as "critical metaphysics" since the critical attitude emerges as one that should be deflationary. This indicates again that Skorupski tends to follow a form of analytical view of critical procedure that sees it as being required to provide transcendental arguments in favour of established conceptions.
Whilst these elements of Skorupski's reading are inherited from previous analytical readings of Kant he does go on to provide an interesting independent reading of Kant's philosophy as a response to what is generally termed "transcendental realism" but which Skorupski identifies rather as "global realism". This notion of "global realism" is meant to capture in more general terms some sense of the pre-philosophical commitments that lead to "transcendental realism" and thus to capture in a way that is more intuitive for common sense what the clash between "transcendental realism" and "transcendental idealism" really amounts to.
Skorupski thus distinguishes "global realism" into two distinguishable claims. On the one hand there is "factualism" which involves the claim that asserting some proposition is equivalent to saying that a fact obtains and, on the other hand, there is "cognition independence" which is to state that facts are not dependent on cognition. Critical Philosophy is characterised, on Skorupski's view, by the statement that it is the combination of these two theses that renders knowledge impossible but it is also required, on this account, that the combination which is involved in global realism is not required for the claims of common cognition.
In order for the claims of global realism to be understood it is first necessary, however, to have some clarity about what could be meant by "facts" since both parts of the global realist view state a view about "facts". Skorupski follows the early modern tradition in philosophy here by distinguishing between nominal and substantial senses of fact taking the nominal sense as stating that a 'fact' is a true proposition and thus upholders of the nominal sense are Deflationists in the most general sense. It doesn't exactly follow from this as Skorupski seems to think that "no substantial notion of fact is being deployed" unless you think that there is a notion of fact that is credibly distinguishable from it which is what a full-blown Deflationist theory can deny.
The "substantial" notion of "fact" on Skorupski's view takes facts to be something different from propositions and he takes it to be the case that a "global realist" is committed to such a distinction which does seem to be required. It is due to this distinction being held that "factualism" can state a metaphysical view in the bold sense whereas the "factualist" statement would otherwise seem to assert a thin notion that best leads to Deflationism. Whilst the substantial notion of 'factualism' does not require commitment to a correspondence theory of truth, however, it is pretty clear it is not consistent with Deflationism but could, on Skorupski's view, fit any other theory of truth.
Cognition independence, by contrast to factualism, implies a clear form of cognitivism but not necessarily a realist commitment as factualism seems to indicate is naturally required. Cognition independence, in being in principle capable of being divorced from factualism might thus be thought to be the basis of Skorupski's cognitivism. Part of the point of commitment to cognition independence is also to ensure that Critical Philosophy is a form of descriptive rather than revisionary metaphysics.
Having set out this conception of "global realism" Skorupski begins his historical story of Critical Philosophy and opens it with his first pass at a characterisation of Kant's philosophy. After citing the passages from the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason often used to maintain the claim about Kant's alleged "Copernican revolution" Skorupski uses them to point to Kant indicating a problem with a simple commitment to cognition independence. It follows from the claim that objects have to conform to our intuition that the cognition of objects is not, in the most manifestly "realist" sense, one that is "independent" of cognition. Further, if factualism is understood to require commitment to things-in-themselves being the basis of cognition then Kant also rejects factualism.
However, Skorupski obviously also has to accept that there is a sense in which Kant accepts cognition independence since the whole point of the Critical endeavour is to demonstrate the objectivity of cognition. In order to understand how Kant is able to make this move whilst apparently rejecting both parts of "global realism" Skorupski refers to the transcendental distinction between phenomena and noumena but also understands this distinction as based upon what he terms a "joint-product theory" characterised in the following way:
"the phenomenal facts are joint products of the forms of our sensibility and things as they really are, with the former structuring the input received from the latter" (11).
This claim that transcendental idealism is a "joint-product theory" is not strictly speaking one that is without some support in The Critique of Pure Reason but it would be fair to say that there are few Kantians who accept that it is what Kant is really claiming. In committing Kant to this theory Skorupski is automatically rejecting the more deflationary views of transcendental idealism such as are held by Henry Allison and Graham Bird. Whilst there are certainly problems with these forms of transcendental idealism it is hardly fair to simply reject them out of hand and starkly require that transcendental idealism be understood to have to be committed to the "joint-product theory".
It is because Skorupski takes Kant to be committed to the 'joint-product theory' that he thinks there is a need to restate Critical Philosophy in a way that need not require the distinction between phenomena and noumena although it is not at all obvious that the transcendental distinction requires the view of affection that Skorupski ties it to. So Skorupski wishes to state a form of Critical Philosophy that does not require the transcendental distinction because he relates this distinction to the 'joint-product theory' although the two are logically distinct.
After having described his first way of distancing himself from Kant Skorupski goes on to look at another side of Kant's view, the side that emphasises reason as something distinct from sensibility. This element of Kant's view requires, states Skorupski, a firm rejection of factualism for a different reason than the 'joint-product theory'. One of the grounds for the claim that this emphasis on reason does not require the 'joint-product theory' is then adduced in an interpretation of the 'fact of reason' claim Kant makes in the Critique of Practical Reason. Skorupski understands the 'fact of reason' to be mandated, as a view that requires not "knowledge" of our noumenal nature but rather a view of the basis of the claim that requirements of reason apply to us.
On this view of the "fact of reason" it is not that imperatives apply to us as due to something being true (some "fact") but rather that requirements of practical reason apply to us as part of the cognition independence of reason's requirements understood in some other sense. Skorupski is not here clear in what other sense cognition independence of reason is meant to be understood but he next goes on to look at Kant's claim concerning the spontaneity of reason. This claim is grasped as requiring that there are pure judgments that are not grounded on any further facts (thus do not commit Kant to a form of "noumenal factualism").
Skorupski's version of Kantian Critical Philosophy thus sees it as combining two moves that enable it to resist global realism. On the one hand Kant is thought to embrace the 'joint-product theory' as a way of allowing for theoretical cognitivism but at the cost of embracing here a form of noumenal factualism. However the cost of Kant's commitment to the latter can be mitigated by seeing a parallel emphasis in Kant's accounts of theoretical and practical reason on an autonomous quality of reason that does not require even a noumenal form of factualism. It is the latter that Skorupski's form of Critical Philosophy will rescue from the grip of the former.
Due to the postings on this blog concerning Derek Parfit's magnum opus On What Matters being distributed on Twitter I was contacted by Constantine Sandis who suggested an alternative work to Parfit's that deals, in some respects, with similar questions. This alternative is provided by John Skorupski in his book The Domain of Reasons. It has to be said that whilst Skorupski's book is not as lengthy as Parfit's it is almost certainly as dense. In this posting I will only lay out the basic points made in the Introduction to Skorupski's book about the content of the claims he will make and how they relate to the structure of the work.
Skorupski opens the introduction by describing the book's concern as being to do with normativity and reasons, two topics of wide contemporary currency but also states that by the work's conclusion we will come to see it as ultimately addressing themes concerning the relations between self, thought, and world. Since the latter appear, at least plausibly, as metaphysical topics whilst the former appear, rather, parts of a theory of practical reason, it would seem that the work intends a kind of integration of theoretical and practical concerns with reason. The fourth part of the book, which is headed "normativity", is apparently where all this is meant to come together.
The project of the book, like that of Parfit's, is very ambitious and perhaps hard to imagine being achieved. So Skorupski, more modestly, indicates that his work hopes only to give a comprehensive solution "to which at least some people can give serious and settled assent". Even this may be rather too ambitious.
The first section of the introduction sets out a general picture of the project of the whole work and in it Skorupski indicates that "normative" is intended primarily as a contrastive term to "descriptive" and that this is why investigation of it extends to epistemology as much as ethics and aesthetics. The basic concept of the work, as indicated in its title, is, however, the idea of a "reason" and thus in this respect its overall concern appears to mesh with the first part of On What Matters. Skorupski even suggests that thinking in general is no more than "sensitivity to reasons", a claim that ensures that the whole region of conceptuality is at issue for him in addressing reasons.
This basic claim stakes a view of the 'pervasiveness' of reasons but, least it be assumed that it commits Skorupski to an intellectualist conception, he is quick to include sentiments under the heading of reasons (thus implicitly demarcating his conception from a Humean one). If the pervasiveness claim is bought partly at the cost of apparently diluting what is specific to the notion of a "reason" it is also coupled with a claim concerning the 'primitiveness' of reasons to the effect that "a reason" is the basic normative concept. This primitiveness claim is what Skorupski terms the "Reasons thesis".
The "Reasons thesis" itself can be taken in stronger and weaker senses but the stronger sense - leading to the view that normative predicates can be reduced to reasons predicates - is not ultimately going to be supported by Skorupski. Rather, the weaker form of the thesis is what he will be supporting, the claim, basically, that the concept of a reason is the sole normative ingredient in any normative concept.
Added to the pervasiveness thesis and the primitiveness thesis there is also a constitutive claim to the effect that what enables us to say that thought is occurring is that response to reasons is taking place. This includes the view of thinking that suggests a kind of apperceptive feature in thought or, as Skorupski puts it, that there is a capacity for epistemic self-audit.
If these are the three major claims about reasons that Skorupski wishes to advance the question next concerns how the structure of the work supports them and the points involved in assuming that the argument concerning them leads us finally to views about the relations between self, thought, and world. The first part of the book concerns the "structure of normative concepts" and it is here that Skorupski promises the arguments concerning the "Reasons thesis" or the weak form of the primitiveness claim. The way I understand Skorupski's subsequent claims about the structure of the work is that the second and third parts of the book (concerning epistemic and evaluative and practical reasons) aim to show the case for the pervasiveness claim and that the fourth part (on the normative view) then concludes with an argument for the constitutive view.
Given that this is the overall structure of the book it follows that it is not Skorupski's primary purpose to advance theses in normative ethics (or normative epistemology either) so that any specific claims that the book contains about these areas will only be of second-order importance. However, despite this being apparently true, the third part of the book will present a number of substantive claims about the normative structure of practical reason. In this respect the third part of Skorupski's book is likely to contribute to controversies within the area of normative ethics in a way that the second part is unlikely to in the area of normative epistemology.
One of the reasons Skorupski gives for this difference between ethics and epistemology is that in the former area there is less agreement about the basic structure of reasons. Skorupski indicates early that he takes there to be an heterogeneity of sources of practical reasons.
The concluding fourth part is meant to take us into the terrain of the broadest account of the metaphysics of reasons. This circles on the question of epistemic norms and reasons for taking epistemology to be a normative subject.
Skorupski's general project is set up, in some respects like Parfit's, in opposition to non-cognitivism but, despite this, and unlike the case with Parfit, Skorupski does not wish to endorse realism. Cognitivism minus realism is a combination that already suggests a connection between Skorupski's project and the Kantian one and I'll explore more of the introductory ways in which Skorupski distinguishes his account from Kant's in future postings.
The basic ground for Skorupski not being a realist is his simple commitment to the view that normative propositions do not represent states of affairs or, otherwise put, that they are starkly different from anything descriptive. So if this is so then propositions which concern reasons do not concern the world (which appears to reinstate a kind of Humean view despite the earlier claim that sentiments belong under the heading of reasons being non-Humean).
Skorupski's ultimate position of cognitive irrealism is what he terms a "meta-normative" view and the support for it is provided in the fourth part of the volume. It is not directly entailed by the normative views provided earlier so it is in principle possible to accept the claims of pervasiveness and primitiveness without agreeing with the constitutive claim. The second part of the introduction begins to lay out the meta-normative claim's relation to the Kantian view and I will turn to this in the next posting on Skorupski.
