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.

The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there is no suggestion that we cannot think in terms of a simpler not explicitly contrastive relation “a knows that p.” Some, for instance Schaffer (2005) and Karjalainen and Morton (2003), have hinted that this stronger possibility may be right. But all that I am arguing now is that facts that are easily expressed in contrastive terms are vital to understanding why we need the concept of knowledge. In a piece that is in some ways a companion to this one ("Contrastivism" in Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker, eds. The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge 2010, 513-522), I give a general survey of theories of contrastive knowledge and the differences between them.

I discuss the possibility that there is no intrinsic unity to the capacities which are bundled under the label "folk psychology". Cooperative skills, attributional skills, and predictive skills may be scattered as parts of other non--psychological capacities. I discuss how some forms of social life bring these different skills together. I end with some remarks on how abilities that are not unified in their essential mechanisms may still form a rough practical unity. (Remark: the paper is conjectural. It describes a possibility to take seriously rather than a conclusion of which I am convinced.).