Mason Cash

Kant has recently been hailed as a radical precursor to contemporary feminism, yet one can easily find a deep-seated conservative misogyny in what Kant actually wrote about women. For instance, marriage automatically makes the wife the servant of her husband, and Kant automatically excludes women from active citizenship. One of my aims here is to –as much as is possible– make sense of the tension between the focus on equality, universality, respect for persons and autonomy in Kant’s overall philosophy, and his endorsement of rather misogynistic 18th century Prussian views on women’s place in the family and in society. I contrast others’ attempts to explain this tension, with an alternative: that his particular conclusions result from a metaphysical picture of humankind’s place in the natural world. His deriving these conclusions about women from the Moral Law and the Laws of Nature, becomes somewhat understandable. The question arises, however, as to whether Kant is actively defending his culture’s mores and laws regarding women, or unthinkingly endorsing them. The rather devious logical tactics I show Kant to employ in making these derivations, suggest that Kant is force-fitting these conclusions about women to premises involving the Moral Law and the Laws of Nature, rather than drawing the conclusions that would naturally flow from such premises. Thus we can safely ignore his particular pronouncements about women, while not necessarily rejecting their foundation and its support for certain aspects of feminist thought, since these conclusions should not be drawn from that Kantian foundation.

Here I outline an "embodied action" approach to Cognitive Science, whose central assumption is that human beings are essentially embodied, embedded in a world and situated in a social context. I present a naturalized account of intentionality from this perspective. ;I give a normative account of language-use, as the performance of speech acts as moves within shared norm-governed practices. I then show how the normative practice of giving reasons for actions licenses us to attribute intentional states to people as reasons for their actions, and licenses us to expect people to be committed to acting in certain ways, based on the intentional states that they recognize are appropriately attributed to them. ;I also argue against a reduction of intentional states to the neurological mechanisms. My view is that the intentionality is institutional, and is conferred on actions that count as moves within norm-governed practices. It is only derivatively on internal neurological states. This, like the intentionality that we attribute to linguistic expressions, is abstracted from the kinds of actions they enable the agent possessing them to perform, and derived from the norm-governed practices in which such actions have their life. ;I conclude with a naturalistic account of the norms and practices within which human actions count as having content . I do not give a naturalistic justification for these norms, but a naturalistic explanation for how normativity in general arises . I appeal to forces of natural selection operating on groups, and practices as shared and enforced ways of acting that enabled different practices and the groups that practice them, to survive and prosper. This feeds into the crucial step in explaining intentionality naturalistically: explaining how the ability to attribute intentional states to others evolved alongside, and made possible, human linguistic interactions. It also evolved alongside the ability to attribute to oneself the intentional states that others are licensed to attribute to you, and the disposition to live up to this "self-conception" as someone with those beliefs, goals, and desires

Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (1) If content is constituted by others' normative judgments, how can content be causally efficacious? (2) This account appears to make having contentful thoughts a matter of people having contentful thoughts about your thoughts. That appears to be viciously circular and so can't be naturalistic.

The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC)—that many cognitive processes are carried out by a hybrid coalition of neural, bodily and environmental factors—entails that the intentional states that are reasons for action might best be ascribed to wider entities of which individual persons are only parts. I look at different kinds of extended cognition and agency, exploring their consequences for concerns about the moral agency and personal responsibility of such extended entities. Can extended entities be moral agents and bear responsibility for actions, in addition to or in place of the individuals typically held responsible? What does it mean to be autonomous when one’s cognition is influenced and supported by a milieu of environmental factors? To answer these questions, I explore strong parallels between HEC’s critique of individualism in cognition, and feminist critiques of individualist accounts of self, agency, and autonomy. This relational and social conception of autonomous agency, as scaffolded and supported (or undermined and impaired) by a milieu of social, relational, and normative factors, has important lessons for HEC. Drawing together these two visions of distributed and decentralized aspects of personhood highlights how cognition, action, and responsibility are inextricably linked. It also encourages a reconceptualization of all cognition and all concerns about responsibility for actions, not simply as sometimes extended around individuals, but as fundamentally communal, social, and normative, with individual cognition and individual moral responsibility being derivative special cases, not the paradigm examples. Individuals are merely one of many possible loci of cognition, action, and responsibility

Representation is a pivotal concept in cognitive science, yet there is a serious obstacle to a naturalistic account of representations’ semantic content and intentionality. A representation having a determinate semantic content distinguishes correct from incorrect representation. But such correctness is a normative matter. Explaining how such norms can be part of a naturalistic cognitive science is what I call the normativity problem. Teleosemantics attempts to naturalize such norms by showing that evolution by natural selection establishes neural mechanisms’ functions, and such functions provide the normativity requisite for a determinate semantic content. I argue that such attempts fail, because when specifying functions, and thus semantic contents, that are determinate enough to enable misrepresentation, they must tacitly appeal to human normative practices, especially the practice of giving intentional states as reasons for actions. I present a different tactic: using evolution by natural selection to avoid rather than solve the normativity problem. Representations’ semantic contents and their intentional targets are irreducibly normative. Semantics and intentionality are constituted within human normative practices. However, evolution by natural selection can be used to naturalistically explain the transition from a world without human beings and human normative practices — and thus without any distinction between thoughts that may be called “correct” or “incorrect” — to a world in which such human practices and distinctions are commonplace

Since people can often successfully interpret utterances that flout or ignore conventions, Davidson concludes that shared conventions are neither necessary nor sufficient for linguistic interpretation. This conclusion is based on an overly narrow conception of what it is to know, and to share, a language. Rather than, as Davidson argues, simply interpreting the meaning the speaker intends their words to be interpreted as having (and their words’ truth conditions), successful interpretation requires interpreting the illocutionary act the speaker intends to be interpreted as performing (and the act’s felicity conditions). This change in focus highlights the need for many types of shared conventions, beyond the conventional meanings of words that Davidson considers and dismisses as unnecessary. When any one convention is ignored or flouted, interpretation is possible because the apparently unconventional utterance nonetheless conforms to a host of other shared conventions. Conventions are necessary for linguistic interpretation.

Kant has recently been hailed as a radical precursor to contemporary feminism , yet onecan easily find a deep-seated conservative misogyny in what Kant actually wrote about women. For instance,marriage automatically makes the wife the servant of her husband, and Kant automatically excludes women fromactive citizenship. One of my aims here is to –as much as is possible– make sense of the tension between the focuson equality, universality, respect for persons and autonomy in Kant’s overall philosophy, and his endorsement ofrather misogynistic 18th century Prussian views on women’s place in the family and in society.I contrast others’ attempts to explain this tension, with an alternative: that his particular conclusions result from ametaphysical picture of humankind’s place in the natural world. His deriving these conclusionsabout women from the Moral Law and the Laws of Nature , becomes somewhat understandable.The question arises, however, as to whether Kant is actively defending his culture’s mores and laws regardingwomen, or unthinkingly endorsing them. The rather devious logical tactics I show Kant to employ in making thesederivations, suggest that Kant is force-fitting these conclusions about women to premises involvingthe Moral Law and the Laws of Nature, rather than drawing the conclusions that would naturally flow from suchpremises.Thus we can safely ignore his particular pronouncements about women, while not necessarily rejecting their foundation and its support for certain aspects of feminist thought, since these conclusions should not be drawn fromthat Kantian foundation