Pablo Hubacher Haerle

Can you understand someone with very a different political ideology? Even after extended debate, it might well be that the answer to this question is ‘no’. Between political opponents there appear to be fundamental differences in outlooks, epistemic and ethical values. In contexts of such ‘deep disagreements’, we are unable to understand our political opponents. Yet, according to many political theorists deep political disagreements pose a problem for democratic politics. The aim of this paper is to explore a way in which we can mitigate the challenges posed by deep disagreements with an eye to facilitating mutual understanding. The exploration will start out from an often overlooked place in which Wittgenstein’s later writings have borne fruit: Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonistic pluralism’. I will examine in what exact ways Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism can be seen as Wittgensteinian and explore how Wittgenstein’s thinking can be useful for tackling the political problems posed by deep disagreements.

There is an epistemic limit on rational inquiry. This follows from that fact that inquiries are intentional actions. I argue that it is epistemically irrational to inquire into questions when you cannot rationally believe that you will be successful in your inquiry. Accordingly, I defend a new norm of inquiry: the Success Norm for Inquiry (SUN). An important upshot of the discussion is that there will be cases where epistemic rationality mandates suspense but prevents further inquiry. Sometimes accepting uncertainty, while doing nothing to resolve it, is the only rational option.

It is a prominent idea in the theory of action that if an action is intentional, the agent knows the reason why they’re acting. This idea gets often ascribed to G.E.M. Anscombe and is defended by her contemporary followers. In this essay, I discuss a challenge to this doctrine. Some of our intentional actions are done whilst we’re uncertain about why we’re acting. We can be genuinely agnostic or ignorant of our reasons and yet act intentionally. I discuss various ways of resolving this challenge. I argue they all fail. This shows that we can act intentionally without knowing why we’re acting. Put differently, we can act for reasons we don’t know about.

It is often of moral and political significance that we know why we act. Realizing that one acts out of love, for instance, has the potential to radically alter one’s course of life. Similarly, understanding how one’s own actions are permeated by social norms can be an important step towards addressing the ways in which we contribute to existing patterns of injustice. If those realizations are important, so is the process of getting there. When we come to know our motives, we move from a state of ignorance or uncertainty to a state of self-knowledge. This process is what I call ‘self-inquiry’. Yet, many philosophers subscribe to a model of self-knowledge which gives no substantial role to such self-inquiry into our motives. Either our wills are portrayed as transparent, or intractable. On the one hand, it is a widespread assumption from Descartes to Anscombe that we stand in a special relation to the reasons behind our actions which precludes uncertainty. On the other hand, contemporary empirical approaches often follow Nietzsche in adopting a sceptical outlook and portray the mind as so complex that self-knowledge of motives becomes impossible. In both traditions, there is no real work left for self-inquiry to do; either we already know our motives, or we can’t know them at all. Finding my way between these two extremes, I develop a theory of self-knowledge of motives which leaves room for substantial self-inquiry. Conversely, this has implications for how we think of the metaphysics of agency. A widespread picture has it that only reasons we can rationally endorse and therefore know form part of our true selves as agents. On my view, we ought to decouple practical rationality from conscious awareness. This makes room for the possibility to act on reasons we don’t know about, and therefore carves out space for morally relevant inquiries into our motives. However, I also go on to suggest that there is a limit to rational self-inquiry, and inquiries in general. As important as it is to inquire into ourselves, it is equally crucial to know the limits of self-inquiry so as not to fall into overthinking. Applied to motives that means that even though it often matters to know our motives, we have to recognize when we are in a situation where the only rational option is to embrace uncertainty about why we act.

Many philosophers claim that we have a duty to know our motives. However, prominent theories of the mind suggest that we can’t. Such scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives is based on psychological evidence. I show that this evidence only mandates scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives if we rely on a mistaken assumption which I call ‘the myth of the one true motive’. If we reject this myth, we see that there is space to plausibly interpret the empirical data such that knowledge of one’s motives is difficult, but not impossible.

“But surely if it's not irrational, it can’t be OCD!” my friend exclaimed, when I told them about the paper Carolina Flores and Brent Kious provided their excellent comments for. In all fairness, my friend is not working in philosophy, or psychiatry, or in psychology. Still, I take their sentiment to be expressive of a widely held view: if you have a certain mental illness, then you must be irrational. Conversely, rationality guarantees mental health; the sane life is the rational life. In my paper, I attempted to complicate this picture. My main line of thought was that if the sane life is the rational life, we do not have a good conception of rationality yet. For, our best theories of rationality fail to capture what is going wrong in some cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Addressing the criticisms raised by my commentators will allow me to clear up some misunderstandings and sketch avenues for further work.

Delusions have traditionally been considered the hallmark of mental illness, and their conception, diagnosis and treatment raise many of the fundamental conceptual and practical questions of psychopathology. One of these fundamental questions is whether delusions are understandable. In this paper, we propose to consider the question of understandability of delusions from a philosophy of language perspective. For this purpose, we frame the question of how delusions can be understood as a question about the meaning of delusional utterances. Accordingly, we ask: “what meaning(s) can delusional utterances possibly have?”. We argue that in the current literature, there is a standard approach to the meaning of delusional utterances, namely the descriptive account which assumes that a delusional utterance “p” means that p is the case. Drawing on Speech Act Theory, we argue that solely relying on the descriptive account disregards essential ways of how linguistic meaning is constituted. Further, we show that Speech Act Theory can prove a helpful addition to the theoretical and clinical “toolbox” used for attempting to understand delusional utterances. This, we believe, may address some of the theoretical and clinical shortcomings of using only the currently predominant descriptive account.

It’s a common assumption in psychiatry and psychotherapy that mental health conditions are marked out by some form of epistemic irrationality. With respect to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the mainstream view is that OCD causes irrational beliefs. Recently, however, this ‘doxastic view’ has been criticized from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Instead a more promising ‘zetetic view’ has been proposed which locates the epistemic irrationality of OCD not in irrational beliefs, but in the senseless inquiries it prompts. Yet, in this paper I present a special class of cases—sexual obsessive-compulsive disorder (S-OCD)—which cannot be explained by existing doxastic and zetetic accounts of the epistemic irrationality of OCD. In addition, some people with S-OCD appear to be adhering too well to a plausible set of norms for inquiry. Their suffering seems to be partially caused by an excess of rationality, and not a lack thereof. They seem, if anything, too rational. This shows firstly that it’s unlikely that there is one form of epistemic irrationality common to all persons living with OCD. Secondly, it should lead us to rethink the epistemic categories we use in classifying mental health conditions such as OCD.

How should civil society deal with radical actors such as populists? Should democrats engage in an open dialogue or avoid confrontation? Should they listen to them, let them speak and try to expose them argumentatively, or should they deny them any kind of public platform? Rather than providing a normative answer to these questions, this article analyzes and systematizes responses that are already circulating in public discourse. In particular, we focus on reactions to the invitations of the AfD politicians Alice Weidel and Marc Jongen to the Oxford Union (2018), the Zurich Theater Gessnerallee as well as the Hannah Arendt Center in New York (both 2017). We will show that the debates gave excessive weight to fundamental questions of democratic theory while marginalizing the specific context factors of the events. Because of this, the populists eventually gained the moral victory.

What happens when we are uncertain about what we want, feel or whish for? How should we understand uncertainty in introspection? This paper reconstructs and critically assess two answers to this question frequently found in the secondary literature on Wittgenstein: indecision and self-deception (Hacker 1990, 2012; Glock 1995, 1996). Such approaches seek to explain uncertainty in introspection in a way which is completely distinct from uncertainty about the ‘outer world’. I argue that in doing so these readings fail to account for the substantial role the intellect seems to play in the process of resolving such uncertainties. I then attempt to show that Wittgenstein’s remarks connecting psychological vocabulary, behaviour and public criteria (e. g. PI 2009: 580) provide alternative ways for thinking about uncertainty in introspection which allow for a substantial role of the intellect.