Richard Holton

Le cas de Huckleberry Finn a fait l’objet de nombreuses discussions en philosophie morale. Huck est souvent décrit comme présentant une acrasie inverse : il fait ce qui est juste de manière acratique. Je soutiens qu’en réalité les discussions philosophiques actuelles attribuent à Huck une position plus spécifique, que j’appelle la « vision aveugle morale » : quand on agit pour une raison morale alors même qu’on ignore complètement que c’est le cas. En m’appuyant sur les annotations ultérieures de Twain lui-même, je soutiens que la vision aveugle morale donne une image erronée de Huck et je montre pour quelles raisons il est peu probable que quiconque fasse preuve d’une telle vision aveugle. Huck est conscient d’un conflit intérieur, et le conflit particulier qu’il manifeste, entre une conscience peu fiable et l’appel de la sympathie, mérite d’être interrogé plus avant. The case of Huckleberry Finn has been much discussed in moral philosophy. Huck is frequently described as exhibiting inverse akrasia: he akratically does the right thing. I argue that in fact the position ascribed to him in philosophical discussions is more particular than that. It is what I call “moral blindsight”: acting for a moral reason in complete ignorance that that is what one is doing. Drawing on Twain’s own later annotations, I contend that moral blindsight mischaracterises Huck; and that, for a number of reasons, we would not normally expect anyone to display it. Huck is knowingly conflicted, and the particular conflict that he displays, between an unreliable conscience, and the call of sympathy, is one that deserves more investigation.

Trust can be two-place (‘A trusts B’) and three-place (‘A trusts B to φ ’). The philosophical orthodoxy is that it is three-place. This chapter argues otherwise: the two-place form is the basic form of trust. In this respect, trust is like love or friendship; one would not understand Antony’s love for Cleopatra in terms of the three-place ‘Antony loves Cleopatra for her φ ’. So too trust. The two-place relation—our trusting someone—ordinarily grounds instances of relying on them in some way, so it ordinarily grounds three-place trust. But there can be trust when there is no opportunity of reliance. Trust is thus essentially a readiness to hand over control or power to another, which is associated with the reactive attitudes.

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea.

A few philosophers have held that determinism should lead to an attitude of resignation: since what will be will be, there is no point trying to influence the future. That argument has rightly been seen as mistaken. But a plausible parallel argument leads from the thesis of predictability—the thesis that it can be known what will happen—to an attitude of resignation. So if predictability is true, our normal practical attitudes may well be deeply mistaken. Fortunately, while determinism is a plausible doctrine, there is a strong argument against predictability. Determinism and predictability should be kept well apart.

Frege's notion of sense contained many strands; one of them is developed here. Frege's picture of a realm of senses which are grasped by those who think and speak is rejected. In its place it is proposed that propositions and senses can serve to describe people's mental states and linguistic behaviour respectively. Two relations of sameness of sense for words and sentences in public languages are defined, and senses are identified as similarity cycles defined under these relations. Using an argument of Kripke's, it is shown that if these senses are used to describe people's mental states--that is, if they are employed as propositions--they will fail to individuate them as we intuitively do. However, it is suggested that this will be true of any system of propositions we choose to employ. Moreover, senses still have useful application in describing linguistic behavior. Two such applications are developed. The first is in an account of belief and speech ascriptions. Senses are employed in an account of belief ascriptions which has the distinctive feature of being 'gappy': reflecting ordinary usage, the account fails to give truth values to ascriptions that result from Paderewski style cases. Speech ascriptions are handled differently: they are shown not to need the gappy treatment. The second application for senses is in an account of anaphora. It is argued that pronouns anaphoric on singular terms inherit the sense and reference of their antecedents. This account is favourably compared with the bound variable account advocated by Reinhart and Sag, and the predicate converter account advocated by Soames. Two final chapters pursue related themes. In the first a combined theory of E-type pronouns is proposed involving elements both from Evans' original account and the account given by Neale. In the second the interpretation of quantification into belief contexts is discussed. It is argued that consideration of iterated attitudes precludes interpreting this as indicating knowledge which. An alternative interpretation is suggested

Our topic here is uncertainty, especially as this arises in medicine. We are concerned with the uncertainty of diagnosis and of prognosis, and about how this should be communicated and shared between a doctor and patient. We are concerned with the idea that the doctor might rightly take responsibility for some of that uncertainty, in the sense that they may manage it when the patient is unwilling or unable to do so. And we are concerned with the implications that this has for informed consent, for shared decision making, and for other normative dimensions of the doctor–patient relationship. Most centrally we argue that it is best understood, not in terms of informed consent, but in terms of informed trust.

This paper falls into three parts. The first looks at wh-constructions, focussing on the so-called factual whs, ‘X knows where… ’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘what’ etc. I suggest, drawing on both linguistic considerations and evidence from developmental psychology, that these constructions take things as their objects, not propositions; and that this may be why they are learned before those taking sentential complements. The second part moves to the case of telling-wh: to constructions such as telling someone who is at the door. This construction brings a very particular set of requirements, not just to tell the truth, but to tell all the relevant truths and nothing but. The third section, in a critical discussion of Katherine Hawley's work, argues that an account of trust and testimony focussing on the telling-wh construction brings better results than one focussed on the blander idea of assertion.

As many studies around the theme of ‘too much medicine’ attest, investigations are being ordered with increasing frequency; similarly the threshold for providing treatment has lowered. Our contention is that trust (or lack of it) is a significant factor in influencing this, and that understanding the relationship between trust and investigations and treatments will help clinicians and policymakers ensure ethical decisions are more consistently made. Drawing on the philosophical literature, we investigate the nature of trust in the patient–doctor relationship, arguing that at its core it involves a transfer of discretion. We show that there is substantial empirical support for the idea that more trust will reduce the problem of too much medicine. We then investigate ways in which trust can be built, concentrating on issues of questioning, of acknowledging uncertainty and of shouldering responsibility for it. We argue that offering investigations or treatments as a way of generating trust may itself be an untrustworthy way of proceeding, and that healthcare systems should provide the institutional support for facilitating continuity, questioning and the entrusting of uncertainty.

Richard Holton provides a unified account of intention, choice, weakness of will, strength of will, temptation, addiction, and freedom of the will. Drawing on recent psychological research, he argues that, rather than being the pinnacle of rationality, the central components of the will are there to compensate for our inability to make or maintain sound judgments. Choice is understood as the capacity to form intentions even in the absence of judgments of what action is best. Weakness of will is understood as the failure to maintain an intention, or more specifically, a resolution, in the face of temptation--where temptation typically involves a shift in judgment as to what is best, or in the case of addiction, a disconnection between what is judged best and what is desired. Strength of will is the corresponding ability to maintain a resolution, an ability that requires the employment of a particular faculty or skill. Finally, the experience of freedom of the will is traced to the experiences of forming intentions, and of maintaining resolutions, both of which require effortful activity from the agent.

Empirical findings suggest that temptation causes agents not only to change their desires, but also to revise their beliefs, in ways that are not necessarily irrational. But if this is so, how can it be rational to maintain a resolution to resist? For in maintaining a resolution it appears that one will be acting against what one now believes to be best. This paper proposes a two-tier account according to which it can be rational neither to reconsider the question of what one is going to do nor the question of what it is best to do; hence in the resolute agent the change in belief is not actual but merely potential. Various reasons are given for thinking that the resulting account is preferable to an alternative given by Bratman.

The orthodox answer to my question is this: in a case of self-deception, the self acts to deceive itself. That is, the self is the author of its own deception. I want to explore an opposing idea here: that the self is rather the subject matter of the deception. That is, I want to explore the idea that self-deception is more concerned with the self’s deception about the self, than with the self’s deception by the self. The expression would thus be semantically comparable to expressions like ‘self-knowledge’ (which involves knowledge about the self) rather than to expressions like ‘self-control’ (which involves control by the self).1 On this approach, what goes wrong, when we are self-deceived, is that we lack self-knowledge; or, more accurately, since one can lack knowledge without falling into error, what goes wrong is that we have false beliefs about ourselves. Not any kind of false belief about oneself; I am not self-deceived when I mistake my shoe size. Rather, self-deception requires false beliefs about the kind of subject matter that, were one to get it right, would constitute self-knowledge. It is an interesting fact about current English that, though we talk freely of self-knowledge, we have no common term to designate its absence. Seventeenth century writers talked of self-ignorance; but the term has fallen from use. I suggest that ‘self-deception’ is the nearest we have