10th Meeting of Swiss Graduate Students in Philosophy: "Me, Myself and I"


Christian Budnik, Human Agency, Naturalism, and the First Person

According to a widely influential account of human agency, an agent`s will necessarily has a hierarchical structure: In order to count as a genuine expression of the agent`s will, an action has to be grounded in a desire that the agent wants to act upon. The presence of such second-order volitions is supposed to result in full-blooded actions, or alternatively, in autonomous agency. Since its first formulation in a series of papers by Harry Frankfurt, the hierarchical account has been confronted with several objections. One of them points to the fact that putting the emphasis on the presence of second-order volitions, the hierarchical account fails to do justice to the role of the agent in human agency. According to this objection there is no room for the agent in the hierarchical account. Both Michael Bratman and David Velleman take this failing of Frankfurt`s proposal as their starting point and try to improve the hierarchical account by adding to it the notions of a "self-governing policy" (Bratman) or the "higher-order desire of rationality" (Velleman). As I want to argue, both theories still fail to cast the agent in his proper role. My diagnosis is that this failure is deeply rooted in a supposition these theories share with Frankfurt`s initial account - the idea that actions are events and as such have to be explained within the naturalistic framework of a causally closed world-order. Alternatively, I propose to consider actions from the standpoint of the first-person. Here the focus shifts from the actions` causal origins to the reasons I have in acting. These reasons need not to be conceived of as mental states of any kind, but are better understood as facts that I perceive.

Nora Kreft, Teleosemantics and Self-Knowledge

Fred Dretske has recently proposed a solution to the apparent problem that teleosemantics (or any other externalist theory of the mind, for that matter) cannot account for the intuition that we gain knowledge about our own mental states via introspection.

Teleosemantics, the theory that mental representation can be explained by reference to biological function, usually assumes an historical account of functions: in order for anything to have a particular function it must have a history, it must have evolved or been designed according to certain principles or intentions. This is because it makes no sense to speak of non-historical things, i.e. things that haven't evolved or haven't been designed, as 'malfunctioning'. If something cannot malfunction, however, it cannot function either. So for teleosemanticists, if something is to count as a mental representation it must have evolved or been designed.

But this commitment to historicity raises questions about the ways in which we know our own mental states. It seems that according to teleosemantics, knowledge of my own mental states requires knowledge of my history. If I don't know that I am an evolved or designed creature, I cannot know that my mental states have any content. But that is wholly counterintuitive: usually, introspection is a sufficient method to tell me that I have contentful states, and there is no need for me to know that I have a history.

In his paper 'Representation, Teleosemantics and the Problem of Self-Knowledge' (2006), Dretske suggests a solution to this problem by distinguishing between two components in what we know when we know what we think. One is that we are thinking, the other is what we are thinking. He argues that while introspection yields knowledge of the second, some empirical knowledge might be required for the first. He thinks that this way, teleosemantics can assign epistemological significance to introspection without giving up on the historical account of function.

In my paper, I want to question Dretske's solution. At first sight, it seems that while his distinction could make sense in the case of knowledge about the outside world, it does not work for knowledge about one's own mental states. While it is true that I cannot infer from my knowledge of what it is I am perceiving to the existence of the object of my perception, it is not true (again, at first sight) that I cannot infer from knowledge of what it is I am perceiving to the existence of my perception, or better: to the fact that I am perceiving. These initial doubts shall be looked at and discussed in detail.

Reto Givel, Acting qua me, qua me now, qua one of us? The ontological status of agents

Weakness of the will can be seen as an intergenerational freerider case. The perhaps simplest form of an intergenerational freerider case is one in which each generation can choose between taking a small benefit for oneself and giving a great benefit to indefinitely many future generations. In such cases, it is better for oneself to take the small benefit for oneself (i.e. to freeride) whatever the other chooses. If, however, everybody rather than nobody does what is better for him, it is worse for everybody, because everybody ends up with a small rather than a great benefit.

We can view weakness of the will as an intergenerational freerider case by substituting each generation by a person-stage. Let us take the well-known smoking case for illustration. Each person-stage (me on Monday, me on Tuesday, et cetera) can choose between receiving the small pleasure of smoking and giving the great advantage of a better health perspective to indefinitely many future person-stages. Again, it is better for everybody to take the small benefit, whatever the other chooses; and here, taking the small benefit means to smoke.

According to traditional game theory, it is rational to freeride (in one-shot games), but irrational to be weak-willed. So, how can acting out of weak will and freeriding be one and the same thing? The solution lies in the ontological status of the players. Qua person-stage it is rational to smoke and hence to freeride. Qua person, however, it is irrational to smoke (and we would not even speak of freeriding on that ontological level).

Accordingly, we can distinguish between person-stage-rationality and person-rationality (or more traditionally: prudence) merely differing in the ontological status of the players involved. Just as we can think of weakness of the will from the perspective of the person-stage or the entire person, we can think of traditional freerider problems from the perspective of the person or the group. Unsurprisingly, we cannot only distinguish between person-stage-rationality and person-rationality, but also between person-rationality and group-rationality. And just as person-rationality comes close to (or is even identical with) prudence, group-rationality is close to morality or so I provocatively suggest. To act morally is to act qua member of the relevant group.

Julien Dutant, Knowing one's (inexact) knowledge

Williamson's anti-luminosity argument purports to show that principle KK is incompatible with a plausible Margin-for-Error requirement for inexact knowledge. In this paper I advocate an alternative conception of the requirement which blocks the anti-luminosity argument and argue that the revised principle provides a better account of inexact and higher-order knowledge.

Eva Weber-Guskar, Genuine Emotions

It is widely accepted in philosophical discussions that emotions cannot be true and false as judgments. Emotions are not descriptions of the world, there are no conditions of truth for them like there are for rational cognition; we can only define a certain appropriateness of emotions. There is another discussion about real and ficticious emotions: It is sometimes said that emotions regarding fictional objects are not real themselves. This can also be doubted, because we know a lot of real emotions that do not have existing objects: like hope of something to become true etc. In my talk I would like to discuss a theme that is close to these topics but has to be clearly differenciated from them. I want to explore the intuition that in certain cases we have to distinguish between "genuine" emotions and others. The aim of the talk is to give a brief account of how to define and to detect genuine emotions in contrast to other phenomenons that have many of the properties of emotions but lack something to call them genuine.

I roughly take an emotion to be a qualitative intentional phenomenon with representational content. A fictional emotion is an emotion someone only believes to have but in fact does not; it is an error in selfknowledge. A real emotion in contrast simply is one that is actually experienced by a person. What then is a genuine emotion and its counterpart? In my argumentation I will focus on one hypothesis: One possibility for an emotion not to be genuine seems to lie in the question of its origin. One can imagine two "abnormal" ways of development of an emotion, an "external" and an "internal" one: We migth tend to say that all pharmacological induced emotions are not genuine; and we could assume that emotions we ourselves want to have and actively try to have are not genuine. But I argue that none of these criterias necessarily define emotions as genuine or not genuine. I want to show this especially for the second point. Starting from examples I argue that the decisive criteria for genuinity is the question whether an emotion is congruent with the character of the person. This is due to the individual holism of emotions we have to recognize. Emotions are not just free acute reactions to something but always have a history in the life of the person and are linked with other experiences and especially other emotions of that person. A genuine emotion has its place in this net of emotions not only at a certain time but also over the time. This grown and stable but changeable set of emotional disposition can be seen as the character of a person. To see whether an emotion fits the character or not and so to see if it is a genuine one or not, we always have to look at several emotions that a person experiences or used to experience.

With this account of genuine emotions we can also see that emotions tell us something about "who we really are". In other words: what person I really am in terms of what matters to me. But at the same time it warns us that we cannot trust everything that seems to be an emotion but that we always have to observe our emotional life with its different elements and not just a single emotion to get to know something about ourselves.

Christian Seidel, Agential Authority, My Self, and Reasons of My Own

As rational agents, we are able to act for reasons. Some, but not all, of our reason-based actions claim a special status: They are (in an emphatic sense) truly our action, they speak for us as agents and establishing our standpoint. Following Michael Bratman, I take these actions to have "agential authority". If an agent acts on a reason, then a necessary condition for her action to have agential authority is that she acted for reasons of her own; considerations originating from manipulation, blind obedience, or internalization of norms would not count as reasons of her own. Rather, the agent herself has to be the source of the considerations she acts on. But how exactly does the idea of a reason of one's own contribute to confer agential authority to an action?

A prominent answer goes like this: Agency is characterized by temporally, causally, and semantically overlapping plans, intentions and policies which structure and coordinate actions. These cross-temporal continuities ("Lockean ties") are constitutive of the agent's identity. To distinguish reasons of one's own, a special kind of Lockean tie is referred to: If an agent has a higher-order policy to treat a consideration C as justifying in his practical deliberation, C is a reason of her own. This proposal by Michael Bratman invokes the agent's identity, or her self, in order to explain how a reason of one's own contributes to agential authority: An agent's reason are truly her own if they constitute or support - qua higher-order policy - her Lockean self. In acting on a reason of her own, the action expresses the agent's identity and, hence, has agential authority. A reason of one's own, then, authorizes an action by his Lockean functioning in the agent's practical identity. Or so it seems. In the present paper I argue that Bratman's account is not able to account for the practical first-person-perspective of the agent who is governed by a reason of her own. The argument starts from the fact that in order for a reason to be my own, I must consider it to be my own and treat it as my own. (Otherwise I would be alienated from the consideration that motivates me to act.) But on what grounds will I do so? Well, I will treat a consideration as a reason of my own if I regard it as having a rationally compelling or as rationally necessitating the action. The ground is not that I have a higher-order policy to treat the consideration as justifying in my practical deliberation. From the firstperson-perspective, it the experience of subjective rational force rather than its cross-temporal functioning that warrants the special status of a reason of my own. Surely, it is true that a detached observer will probably base his judgement (about whether I acted from a reason of my own) on the Lockean functioning of the consideration I acted on. And so, from the third-person-perspective, it seems that Bratman's account is correct. But the detached observer lacks the experience of subjective rational force the agent is subjected to - a force whose necessitation is only accessible from the first-person-perspective. By contrast, from the first-person-perspective, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a reason of my own that I have a higher-order policy to treat a consideration as justifying.

I think this line of arguments points to two serious shortcomings in Bratman's account. Nevertheless, we should not abandon his approach completely. As I will argue in the last part of my paper, Bratman is right in appealing to the agent's practical identity to account for the problem of agential authority. He is wrong, however, in regarding psychological states in virtue of their Lockean functioning as constitutive of an agent's practical identity. Rather, as I proceed to show, we should attribute this identity-constitutive role to states associated with a special kind of first-person normative authority: ideals, personal projects, love, friendship, and other things that impose subjective practical necessities upon the agent. These states both constitute the agent's practical identity and determine what she treats as reasons of her own. As it turns out, the cross-temporal Lockean role Bratman emphasizes supervenes on the identity-constituting function of these states - but it is the latter and not the former function which provides the associated reasons with agential authority. More importantly, the proposed account of practical identity avoids the pitfalls concerning the agent's inner point of view. That way we can do justice to both Bratman's insight and the first-person-perspective of the agent.

Ivo Wallimann, Equal Opportunity and Emotions

Emotions should not just play a role in ethics they should also be relevant for managers. Lurie claims that emotions make managers sensitive to the ethical aspects of their decisions.1 In the following discussion, the role of emotions in sensitising managers for the ethical aspects of their decision making processes will be only of marginal interest. Rather, I will show that emotions cause an unsolvable trilemma for managers who claim to guarantee equal opportunity in job allocation. I shall focus on the question of the role that emotions - or more explicitly, sympathy - play in it. This analysis will lead to the conclusion that Fishkin's trilemma which consists of an irreducible tension between equal opportunity and the sphere of personal liberty also occurs in job allocation.2

Consider Paul, manager of a small company, who must choose between two equally qualified candidates. Paul has already met both candidates, Petra and Peter. He feels their qualifications and their potentials for good job performance are equal; yet, he senses more sympathy for Petra. It is therefore clear to him whom he should choose for the job: Petra! However, Paul's company advertises as an employer guaranteeing equal opportunity. Is equal opportunity still ensured if Paul legitimates his decision for Petra on the pro-attitude he senses for her?

In my paper, I shall look more closely at Paul's sample situation. First, I will clarify the concept of equal opportunity. This section of my paper will conclude that emotions evoked by applicants should not be taken into consideration for job allocation. (I) Second, I will discuss how emotions arise during the recruitment process: emotions are a consequence of Paul's interaction with candidates reading their application documents or while having the job interview. Even though emotions should not be regarded as relevant criteria for job allocation, it is legitimate for Paul to have certain emotions towards the applicants during the recruitment process. (II) This will lead to the conclusion that in application procedures emotions provoke Fishkin's trilemma which consists of the conflict between equal opportunity and personal liberty. (III) This is why Lurie's conclusions must be disregarded. Emotions do not just provoke ethical aspects for management decisions. Rather, emotions can bring ethical aspects into management decisions but, not only because they make managers more sensitive for ethical aspects, also because they make management decisions more difficult and sometimes even immoral.

1 Lurie, Yotam: "Humanizing Business through Emotions: On the Role of Emotions in Ethics", in: Journal of Business Ethics, Nr. 49. p. 10

2 See Fishkin, James: Justice, Equal Opportunity, and The Family, New Haven (Yale University Press), 1983, Chap. 2. & 3.

Christian Budnik, Human Agency, Naturalism, and the First Person

According to a widely influential account of human agency, an agent`s will necessarily has a hierarchical structure: In order to count as a genuine expression of the agent`s will, an action has to be grounded in a desire that the agent wants to act upon. The presence of such second-order volitions is supposed to result in full-blooded actions, or alternatively, in autonomous agency. Since its first formulation in a series of papers by Harry Frankfurt, the hierarchical account has been confronted with several objections. One of them points to the fact that putting the emphasis on the presence of second-order volitions, the hierarchical account fails to do justice to the role of the agent in human agency. According to this objection there is no room for the agent in the hierarchical account. Both Michael Bratman and David Velleman take this failing of Frankfurt`s proposal as their starting point and try to improve the hierarchical account by adding to it the notions of a "self-governing policy" (Bratman) or the "higher-order desire of rationality" (Velleman). As I want to argue, both theories still fail to cast the agent in his proper role. My diagnosis is that this failure is deeply rooted in a supposition these theories share with Frankfurt`s initial account - the idea that actions are events and as such have to be explained within the naturalistic framework of a causally closed world-order. Alternatively, I propose to consider actions from the standpoint of the first-person. Here the focus shifts from the actions` causal origins to the reasons I have in acting. These reasons need not to be conceived of as mental states of any kind, but are better understood as facts that I perceive.

Akiko Frischhut, First Person Realism

The talk will be concerned about first personal realism, more specifically it is concerned with Kit Fine's discussion of first personal realism in a paper called 'Tense and Reality'.

The paper will not be concerned with the defence of first personal realism against antirealism though, therefore I will not justify a first personal realist position as such. The issue here is to find out which version of first personal realism is the best, if one is inclined to take this position. Fine is arguing that the best version is a 'non-standard fragmentalist' version. I will consent with a non-standard version of realism, but will argue against Fine for relativism, as a better solution to the realist problem.

First personal realism is the view that first personal facts, such as 'I am sitting' are constitutive parts of reality. A more known analogue to this discussion might be the tense realism discussion, tense realism being the view that tensed facts such as 'It is raining' are equally constitutive of reality as tenseless facts such as 'It is raining at t'.

Both forms of realism believe that reality is aspectual and that there are privileged standpoints to reality, which would be the presence, in the case of tense realism and the self in the case of first personal realism.

For Fine reality is constituted of fundamental facts and first personal realism consists in the view that first personal facts are fundamental facts. Antirealism denies that. The argument illustrated here will assume that it is the case that these facts are fundamental constituents of reality.

When we take realism to be based on four assumptions, then these four assumptions will necessarily lead to a contradiction about the nature of reality constituted by facts:

  • 1)Realism: Reality is constituted (in parts at least) of first personal facts
  • 2)Neutrality: No self is privileged in the constitution of reality
  • 3)Absolutism: The constitution of reality is an absolute matter, independent of my standpoint
  • 4)Coherence: Reality is not constituted by incoherent facts.

The problem is, that the realist, has to give up in one of the other claims (2,3,or 4) because the claims are incompatible. The standard view defends the somewhat drastic theory that the only first personal facts that are real are my first personal facts. It is a fundamental fact that I am sitting, i.e. it is the case in reality that I am sitting. Those first personal facts which apply to other selves are not constitutive of reality. That means that there are no first personal facts, such as 'I am sitting' which verify an I-sentence for you in reality and therefore only my self can be considered as real. It is easily viewed that such a theory leads us into the danger of at least arrogance or worse, to solipsism.

The non-standard realist on the other hand, does not want to privilege one self as opposed to another. This leads to the unfortunate consequence that facts as 'I am sitting' and 'I am not sitting' are both constituents of reality. As first personal realists we find ourselves in the dilemma of being either immodest or incoherent.

There are two alternative ways to deal with the incoherency of facts for the non-standard realist- either he rejects the absolutism claim, or the coherence claim.

Whereas Fine argues for an incoherent reality, I will follow towards non-standard realism, but prefer the relativist solution.

Jan Slaby, Feelings, personhood, and self-understanding

It is almost no exaggeration to call man "the emotional animal". Even personhood is hardly conceivable without taking the affective dimension of human existence into account. In this talk, a sketch of the central role of affectivity (i.e., feelings in the broad sense: emotions, hedonic sensations, moods as well as background feelings) for personhood as such is oulined. This will immediately relate to issues pertaining to notions like selfhood, self-consciousness, and self-understanding. Human feelings are, among other things, ways in which a person relates to herself, consciously and also often pre-consciously. Most interestingly, feelings can function as the manifestations of a person's self-understanding: Concerns, cares, goals and values are, ideally, concretely displayed and thus made effective in one's feelings. This raises several important and problematic issues; among them the peculiar form of self-awareness implicit in feelings and the way conceptual contents enter and shape the contents of affective states.

Íngrid VENDRELL FERRAN, Emotion and Imagination: Reality and Authenticity of Emotions

The aim of my talk is to trace some conceptual distinctions between different emotional phenomena in which the imagination plays an important role. These phenomena concern the reality and authenticity of the emotions. In current literature, both characteristics appear very often to be mixed up and confused. In order to present my own account of the distinction between Reality and Authenticity of the emotions (Vendrell Ferran 2003, 2006, 2007, forthc. 2008) and to put some clarity in the current debate, I will take as a point of departure some indications that can be found in early phenomenological works and I shall compare them with some theses on inauthentic emotions in the current debate. The first distinction is the distinction between "real emotions" and "fictive emotions". In this point my work shall consist firstly in developing the criteria to identify Reality as a property of emotions. Secondly and in accordance with the criteria for real emotions, I shall describe fictive emotions as a very special product of the imagination. The second distinction that I want to deal with is the distinction between "authentic emotions" and "inauthentic emotions". In contrast to most current accounts of inauthentic emotions, that interpret these as cases of self-deception, I shall present an alternative account according to which it is necessary for authenticity that there be internal coherence of different psychic elements and that this coherence be accompanied by a felt quality.

Juliette Gloor, Collective Intentionality and Non-Reductionism about Moral Reasons

I think that there is something deeply insightful about claiming that moral reasons are irreducible in the sense that they are essentially a matter of what has sometimes been called "the reasons we can share". Such an understanding of moral reasons 'solves' the problem of how your reason can be(come) my reason by rejecting the very existence of some such gap between your reason and my reason. For to speak of such a gap no longer makes any sense if we merely recognise such a thing as our reason that cannot be reduced to my reason and your reason respectively. Be that as it may, since I am foremost interested in the irreducibility claim as such, I think it will suffice in a first step to briefly look at the paradigmatic case of friendship and critically assess the relevant arguments expressed by those defending non-reductionism about relationship-dependent reasons. I shall then in a second step put forward the hypothesis that the plausibility of the underlying irreducibility claim with regard to moral reasons crucially depends on our assumptions with respect to the sources of those reasons' sharedness (as irreducibility). To put it differently, I shall ask what exactly it is to share a moral reason. For that matter I shall in a third step introduce the notion of collective intentionality and its underlying claims as to the sources of the collectiveness (or sharedness, if you like) of collective intentional states. But why is such an analogy - granted there is one - indeed informative for our way of making good sense of the idea of non-reductionism about moral reasons? It makes salient the ways in which normative relations form an integral part of both collective intentions and the reasons we share, or so I shall argue.

Sabine A. Döring, Can weakness of will be rational?

It is a common assumption that acting against one's all-things-considered judgement is necessarily irrational. Recently however, a growing number of philosophers have claimed that akrasia, or weakness of will, is sometimes (not always) rational. More precisely, the claim is that weakness of will can be rational if it is caused by emotion. This claim is backed up by recent empirical research suggesting that, when it comes to a conflict between an emotion and an agent's all-things-considered judgement, it need not be the emotion which gets things wrong; it may equally be the judgement. I reject the claim that emotional weakness of will can be rational. It hides an important insight, which is that, as rational agents, we must sometimes accept conflicts between emotion and judgement. Conflicts between emotion and judgement, although they do not involve contradictions, are rational conflicts and can be productive. In 'productive conflicts', as I call them, our emotions can teach our judgements better, since our emotions are capable of providing us with information about the world and are sometimes superior to judgements in doing so. This is so whenever the emotion is epistemically appropriate, whilst the judgement is epistemically inappropriate or wrong. To claim that weakness of will can be rational is to confuse epistemic appropriateness with the guidance and control by reasons which the rational agent exerts over his emotions and the actions they motivate. At the same time, it is to obscure the fact that rational agency amounts to more than rational guidance and control. A rational agent must first come to see and to gain knowledge of what he has reason to do, and herein his emotions sometimes (not always) do him a better service than his judgements.

Gianfranco Soldati, Problems of Self-Conciousness

I oppose self-knowledge to self-consciousness, the latter concerning the epistemic relation we have to our own conscious life. I wish to clarify some issues related to the possibility of one being self-consciously mistaken about the very nature of one's own conscious states.