Philip Pettit

Let folk psychology consist in the network of concepts, and associated beliefs, in terms of which we make sense of minded performance.This paper addresses the question of how we, the folk, come to understand those concepts: this, as distinct from the separate question as to how we come to apply them in the interpretation of particular minds, our own and those of others.The argument is that even though the network of concepts is akin to a set of theoretical, interdefined terms, still it is possible to explain how we, the folk, understand them without suggesting that we are proto-scientists. The understanding required can be based on a sort of know-how: that is, a practical, untheoretical, form of knowledge.

It is a priori on many accounts of colour concepts that something is red if and only if it is such that it would look red to normal observers in normal circumstances: it is such that it would look red, as we can say, under normal conditions of observation. And as this sort of formula is widely applied to colour concepts, so similar schemas are commonly defended in relation to a variety of other concepts too. Not only are colour concepts connected in such a fashion with human responses, so by many accounts are secondary quality concepts in general; aesthetic concepts, moral concepts and evaluative concepts of all kinds; modal concepts that serve to pick out the possible and the necessary; and so on. The fashion for resorting to such formulas should not be surprising. Most of us suppose that whether a given, ostensively introduced term has a certain semantic value – whether, for example, it designates a certain property – ought to show up in people’s tending to use it of things, and only of things, that apparently have that property. The obvious way of expressing this expectation is to require that the use of the ostensive term covary with the presence of the property in conditions that are normal in some sense for detecting that property. Thus there is prima facie reason to hold, and hold as an a priori matter, that for any ostensively introduced term, ‘P’, something is P if and only if it is such that it would seem P – people would be disposed to use ‘P’ to ascribe the corresponding property to it – under normal conditions of observation. The schemas invoked under this motivation may vary in many different ways, of course. First, they may not connect the bare or simple reality of being P with a normalised human response, as Philosophical Studies 96: 21–44, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 22.

The Herald of Free Enterprise, a ferry operating in the English Channel, sank on March 6, 1987, drowning nearly two hundred people. The official inquiry found that the company running the ferry was extremely sloppy, with poor routines of checking and management. “From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.”1 But the courts did not penalize anyone in what might seem to be an appropriate measure, failing to identify individuals in the company or on the ship itself who were seriously enough at fault. As one commentator put it, “The primary requirement of finding an individual who was liable . . . stood in the way of attaching any significance to the organizational sloppiness that had been found by the official inquiry.”2 In a case like this it can make good sense to hold that while the individuals involved may not bear a high degree of personal responsibility, together as a corporate enterprise they should carry full responsibility for what occurred. Although the members may not fully satisfy the conditions for being held personally responsible—although there are mitigating circumstances that excuse them in some mea-.

If non-consequentialists are to embrace the requirement of universalizability, then they will have to adopt a surprisingly relativistic stance. Not only will they say, in familiar vein, that the premises adduced in moral argument may be only agent-relative in force, that is, may involve the use of an indexical – as in the consideration that this or that option would advance my commitments, discharge my duty, or benefit my children – and may provide reasons only for the indexically relevant agent, in this case me. They will also have to construe the consideration adduced in typical moral conclusions to the effect that this or that option is right or ought to be chosen, or whatever, as itself only agent-relative in force. So at any rate I argue.

This paper offers a definition of social holism that makes the doctrine non-trivial but possibly true. According to that definition, the social holist maintains that people depend non-causally on interaction with one another for possession of the capacity to think; the thesis is meant to be a contingent truth but one, like physicalism, that is plausible in the light of some a priori argument and some plausible empirical assumptions. The paper also sketches an argument in support of social holism, which connects with themes in a number of traditions, philosophical and sociological. The key idea is that people depend on socially shared dispositions and responses for the ability to identify - identify fallibly - the properties and other entities that they consider in each individual has to the course of thinking.