Adam Morton

(1945 - 2020)

Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like states, by contrast, are digital representations. I argue that the gravest problem-objectivity-is not insurmountable. /// [Adam Morton] It is accuracy rather than truth itself that is valuable. Emotional truth is a dubious though attractive notion, but emotional accuracy is much easier to make sense of. My approach to accuracy goes via an account of what makes a story accurate. Stories can be accurate but not true, and emotions can be accurate whether or not they are true. The capacity for emotional accuracy, for emotions that fit a person's situation, is an aspect of emotional intelligence, which is as important an aspect of rational human agency as the intelligent formation of beliefs and desires.

Amélie Rorty has put together a wonderfully varied collection of writings, with a range in time of three thousand years and a range of style from sacred writings to fiction to analytical philosophy. There is nothing like it in print, and it will be an invaluable source for many of us. The writings she has collected are all about—well, I’m not sure that there is something that they are all about. The title suggests that the collection is about a phenomenon called Evil that has many faces: one underlying factor in human life, which can manifest itself in varied forms. In fact, the writings are about uncooperative behavior, sin, cruelty, lust, vice, impiety, indifference, and cynicism, among other things. All of these are bad; they impact on human life in many different deleterious ways. Some of the writings, for example the selection from the book of Genesis and the excerpt from Jean Hampton, assume that all immorality is of a kind and may be treated together. Others, for example the selections from Theophrastus and from Nietzsche, are trying to persuade us to see differences before disapproval clouds our vision.

A vegetarian argument: We should avoid meat not because we think that animals are like us but because most animals are very different from humans. Most animals are not persons: they think and feel but do not have thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings. With persons the obligation to prevent suffering, and indeed the obligation to preserve life, can be over-ridden by mutual agreement. I'll risk my life and welfare to protect your children if you do the same for mine. And even when the agreement is not explicit a person is capable of understanding what might have been part of a necessary trade-off. But this is not possible with non-persons: their lives are not held together by anticipations of future experiences and understanding of past ones. There are no social contracts, no deals. So a modern agricultural economy in which meat is produced cheaply at the expense of suffering for animals cannot be justified by any benefits to us, or to the animals. Their suffering is simply suffering; it can't be balanced away.

Hesse and Pettit present somewhat different reconstructions of Rorty’s suggestions about the discipline that might survive the collapse of foundationalistic epistemology. They both treat Rorty’s argument very respectfully, as opening the way to an interesting new possibility. I think that they are both too charitable to him; I think that there are a lot of bad arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and a quantity of simple silliness. This is not to say that the openings up of the subject that Hesse and Pettit derive from Rorty are not genuinely attractive. What I would challenge is the suggestion that they are forced upon us by the collapse of the rest of the subject. I see no reason to believe this.

This is a very selective survey of developments in epistemology, concentrating on work from the past twenty years that is of interest to philosophers of science. The selection is organized around interesting connections between distinct themes. I first connect issues about skepticism to issues about the reliability of belief-acquiring processes. Next I connect discussions of the defeasibility of reasons for belief to accounts of the theory-independence of evidence. Then I connect doubts about Bayesian epistemology to issues about the content of perception. The last detailed connection is between considerations of the finiteness of cognition and epistemic virtues. To connect the connections I end by briefly discussing the pressure that consideration of social roles in the transmission of belief puts on the purposes of epistemology

We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent's incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course-graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that an agent can have an attitude to p rather than q but not to r rather than q , where r is a logical consequence of p . We relate these ideas to some general issues about thought, such as the question of whether all possibilities that can be distinguished in emotion can be distinguished in belief.