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.

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.

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.