Alejandro Vesga

Our sense of self is distinctively social. It deeply matters to who we take ourselves to be that others recognize the claims we make on them and that we recognize the claims they make on us. Significant work on ideology and oppression characterizes how oppressive ideologies deny this kind of second-personal recognition. Yet, not enough attention has been given to the disturbing possibility that, even when successful, the personhood-constituting role of second-personal recognition can serve oppressive ideologies. Here I characterize such a mechanism. Some second-personal claims, I argue, are virulent. Their recognition coopts their target’s agency, as their success presupposes her own endorsement of her subordinated position with respect to the agent who issues these claims. At the same time, however, failure to recognize these claims deeply hurts the issuing agent, as their failure amounts to denying and rejecting a social standing that he deeply values. Crucially, this double binding profile of virulent claims illuminates a distinctive way in which ideology preserves itself—not only by shaping what we believe or what we do, but also by shaping who we are.

Children exhibit sophisticated explanatory judgments: they expect, value, and judge explanations of salient facts. Do children also believe that everything must have an explanation? If so, they would exhibit a metaphysical explanatory judgment conforming to what philosophers have called the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). In this study, 6–9-year-old children (N = 80, Mage = 7.92, SDage = 1.21) were shown statements across domains (Psychology, Biology, Nature, Physics, Religion, and Supernatural). For each statement, children were asked if they agree with a person who says there must be an explanation, even if we do not know it, or with a person who says there may not be an explanation. As a comparison, children were also asked about coincidences, which should not necessitate an explanation under the PSR. Results suggest that indeed children conform to the PSR: children of all ages believed that the statements must have an explanation. Notably, 7–9-year-olds thought coincidences do not have to have an explanation, while 6-year-olds did not differ between the statements and coincidences. This is the first step at uncovering a developmental change in our metaphysical explanatory judgments.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), according to which if x is a fact, x must have an explanation, has been a venerable idea in metaphysics since the presocratic era. Recent research indicates that there is a PSR correlate in ordinary thought. Children and adults judge that facts across a wide variety of domains must have an explanation, independently of whether that explanation can be attainable or whether it would be valuable to attain it. Here, we develop a chained paradigm of explanation-giving to explore whether PSR-conforming judgments—i.e., judgments concerning whether facts must have an explanation—extend to the realm of value. Do people judge, for instance, that value claims (e.g., “murder is wrong” or “snowcapped mountains are magnificent”) must have an explanation to the same degree as paradigmatically descriptive claims (e.g., “most parks have roads”)? Across four studies, we find that adults are indeed less willing to judge that moral and aesthetic claims must have an explanation, compared to plainly descriptive, prudential, and tautological claims. Moreover, we find that explanatory judgments about moral and aesthetic value diverge from explanatory judgments about affective responses concerning the same objects.

People routinely appeal to ‘beliefs’ in explaining behavior; psychologists do so as well (for instance, in explaining belief polarization and learning). Across three studies (N = 1,843, U.S-based adults), we challenge the assumption that ‘belief’ picks out a single construct in people’s theory of mind. Instead, laypeople attribute different kinds of beliefs depending on whether the beliefs play predominantly epistemic roles (such as truth-tracking) or non-epistemic roles (such as social signaling). We demonstrate that epistemic and non-epistemic beliefs are attributed under different circumstances (Study 1) and support different predictions about the believer’s values (Study 2) and behavior (Study 3). This differentiation emerges reliably across three distinct signatures of attributed belief, and even when the believed content and attributed level of certainty about that content are held constant across cases. Our findings call for a more fine-grained characterization of theory of mind and provide indirect support for the hypothesis that human cognition itself features multiple varieties of belief.

I argue for the Cooperative Warrant Thesis (CWT), according to which the determinants of testimonial contents in communication are given by the practical requirements of cooperative action. This thesis distances itself from conventionalist views, according to which testimony must be strictly bounded by conventions of speech. CWT proves explanatorily better than conventionalism on several accounts. It offers a principled and accurate criterion to distinguish between testimonial and non-testimonial communication. In being goal-sensitive, this criterion captures the role of weak and robust cooperation in determining the contents to which speakers testify or fail to testify. And, finally, it yields a principled explanation of why testimony entails the epistemic commitments that distinguish it as an epistemic source.