Alexander Prescott-Couch

A number of philosophers have argued that citizens have an interest in “being understood” by others in the political community (Hannon 2019, Prescott-Couch 2021). However, it is not obvious what kind of understanding this is, and why it should matter in the political context. In this paper, I argue that there are two importantly different epistemic achievements that should go under the heading “political understanding.” One kind of understanding, which I label rational political understanding, concerns a grasp of the rational support structure of others’ social and political opinions, analogous to the kind of understanding we might have of an argument or a theory. The other, which Il call empathetic political understanding, concerns an affect-laden grasp of their emotions and lived experience. These two kinds of understanding are politically relevant for different reasons. Rational understanding is crucial for ensuring that citizens’ views are effectively taken into account in public deliberation, while empathetic understanding is crucial for facilitating identification with others in one’s political community, thereby promoting civic friendship. This distinction is helpful to clarifying normative questions about political understanding—for citizens may be owed rational consideration of their viewpoint without being owed identification. Moreover, attention to it is important for appreciating crucial distinctions between different kinds of projects in journalism and the social sciences aiming to provide “understanding” of other citizens.

This paper explores how Nietzschean ‘deconstructive genealogies’ challenge core elements of philosophical methodology and social thought. Deconstructive genealogies reveal fragmentation and internal conflict within domains often presumed to be unified, such as our moral judgements. They thereby challenge projects of 'systematizing conservativism' that aim to impose coherence and systematicity on these domains through methods like conceptual analysis, functional explication, and reflective equilibrium. Moreover, inappropriate imposition of systematicity can likewise be a problem in social theory. The upshot is that such genealogies are often employed for ‘counter-reconciliatory’ projects in philosophy and ‘anti-noetic’ approaches in social theory.

Much social scientific work employs thick exemplary narratives—detailed stories of particular individuals that are supposed to exemplify broader social processes. However, a number of recent critics have argued that such narratives are a poor means of achieving social-scientific aims. Exemplary narratives provide high-resolution detail about particular cases, but such high-resolution detail is irrelevant and distracting if our aim is to understand more general causal dynamics in the social world. This paper defends the use of thick exemplary narratives by providing an account of how high-resolution details of individual stories (i) serve social scientific aims besides description and causal explanation and (ii) enable readers to better “grasp” causal-explanatory claims, even when those details are not themselves parts of the broader causal processes that are of interest to social scientists. Moreover, objections to exemplary narratives in social science can be generalized to the use of exemplars in other domains, so understanding how to address them in this context offers guidance for responding to similar objections in other contexts, such as moral philosophy.

Much work in history, anthropology, sociology, and political science has a narrative form — the events described are emplotted into stories. A number of recent critics of narrative have argued that the story form is a poor vehicle for social scientific explanation, as it often misleads us about the causal structure of the social world. Defenders of narrative typically claim that such criticisms miss the point of narrative. Even if narrative is not the best means for providing us with causal information, it can provide us with information about something else of importance such as the events' “meanings” or others' experiences. I reject such defenses of narrative, but I then offer a novel defense in their place. On the view I defend, narratives increase our understanding of the social world not by giving us some kind of special information about the social world but rather by cuing certain kinds of responses to it. I tie this conception of the epistemic function of narrative to the political role that narrative can play in correcting failures of interpersonal recognition and promoting structural change.

How is Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality relevant to his revaluation of values? I consider and reject three accounts: contingency accounts, pedigree accounts, and unmasking accounts. I then propose an alternative account. On this view, Nietzsche provides a ‘deconstructive genealogy’ that indicates whether and where we should expect to find unity in our current moral practices. Moreover, Nietzsche’s history contributes to a critique of contemporary morality because it reveals that morality is unlikely to have the kind of unity required by many of its defenders. After explaining and defending this account of genealogical critique in GM, I show how it can be generalized to domains besides morality.

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (GM) is often interpreted as providing a debunking argument of some kind. I consider different versions of such arguments and suggest that they face important challenges. Moving beyond debunking interpretations of GM, I consider Nietzsche’s claim that his genealogy should be used to assess the “value” of moral values. After explaining how to understand this claim, I consider different ways that history might be used to assess the value of beliefs, practices, and institutions. The upshot is a general account of genealogy beyond debunking.

I argue that manipulationist theories of causation fail as accounts of causal structure, and thereby as theories of “actual causation” and causal explanation. I focus on two kinds of problem cases, which I call “Perceived Abnormality Cases” and “Ontological Dependence Cases.” The cases illustrate that basic facts about social systems—that individuals are sensitive to perceived abnormal conditions and that certain actions metaphysically depend on institutional rules—pose a challenge for manipulationist theories and for counterfactual theories more generally. I then show how law-based accounts of causal structure can answer such challenges. The moral of the story is that the basic manipulationist idea that our interest in causal structure is driven by our interest in manipulating our environment faces decisive problems in a central domain of application, the social sciences.

ABSTRACT In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche sets out to answer the question of the value of morality by looking at the conditions under which it developed. However, there is a puzzle about why historical investigation should be required for assessing our moral practices, especially if the defining features of those practices have changed over time. The puzzle is that if morality is “historical,” then the features that will be revealed by historical investigation are ones that—ex hypothesi—are unlikely to characterize it now. And if these features do not characterize morality now, then why should a critique of morality need to take them into account? I argue that the solution to the puzzle is that history reveals that morality is a particular kind of entity, which I call a “historical individual.” I then provide an account of why it should matter for our evaluation of morality that it is an entity of this kind.

There has been much recent work in philosophy of science on idealization – the way inaccurate representations can be used to understand a target system. My dissertation concerns a particular sort of idealization that is familiar but often overlooked: rational reconstruction. Rational reconstructions are “cleaned-up” – more coherent and accurate – versions of an individual’s or a group’s attitudes. They are the kind of idealized model that facilitates a crucial aim of the interpretive sciences, the understanding of another’s point of view. I provide an account of rational reconstruction and argue that such an account can help us make sense of many intellectual projects in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. I then argue that this account can also be used to resolve a problem in democratic theory: how deliberative institutions can facilitate understanding and discursive engagement with “inchoate” points of view. A theory of rational reconstruction thus elucidates an important way that the humanities and interpretive social sciences can be politically significant.

It is a truism that our current common sense morality is the product of a complicated historical development. Whether and in what way classic questions of moral philosophy need to be informed by this history is, however, a matter of controversy.Some recent work in meta-ethics has taken the broad contours of morality’s history as important for answering questions about the existence of moral facts and the justifications of our beliefs about such facts. For instance, moral diversity and the history of moral disagreement have been cited as reasons to believe there are no objective moral facts. The absence of moral facts is—according to such arguments—the best explanation of the intractability of such disagreement.1 ..

ABSTRACT In this article, I consider how Nietzsche's history of morality in On the Genealogy of Morality is relevant to his critique of morality. I argue that, on Nietzsche's view, morality's history is a guide to whether and where we should expect to find coherence in our current moral practice. It helps us “structure our interpretation” of morality. History is relevant to critique because it reveals that morality is unlikely to have the kind of coherence required by many of its defenders. After defending this account of how Nietzsche's historical claims are relevant to his critique, I use the account to explain why Nietzsche's genealogy mixes fact and fiction.