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Willingness, Deliberation, Choice

In Nicomachean Ethics book III, Aristotle with marvelous clarity, simplicity, and well-rounded good sense discusses what things we are and are not morally responsible for, without ever referring to or needing anything like the “free arbitration” (liberum arbitrium) that came to be widely assumed in the Latin tradition. I will continue to use Joe Sachs’s admirable translation.

“Now since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, and praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity, it is no doubt a necessary thing for those who inquire about virtue to distinguish what is a willing act and what is an unwilling act, and it is a useful thing for lawmakers as well, with a view to honors and punishments. Now it seems that unwilling acts are the ones that happen by force or through ignorance, a forced act being one of which the source is external, and an act is of this sort in which the person acting, or acted upon, contributes nothing, for instance if a wind carries one off somewhere, or people do who are in control. But with respect to those things that are done through fear of greater evils, or for the sake of something beautiful — for instance if a tyrant who was in control of one’s parents and children were to order one to do a shameful thing, and in the case of one’s doing it they would be saved but as a result of one’s not doing it they would be killed — there is some dispute whether they are willing or unwilling” (p. 36).

Aristotle’s positive regard for feeling and his early mention of it in this context are noteworthy, as is his explicit early mention of forgiveness. Equally important is the fact that from the very beginning, he focuses on the difficult cases in which we experience conflict or ambiguity between different values that we recognize. Characteristically, he does not aim to authoritatively lay down rules for every situation, but rather to encourage us to be thoughtful and understanding in our appraisals both of situations and of others’ responses to them.

“Something of this sort happens also in connection with things thrown overboard in a storm, for no one simply throws them away willingly, but all those who have any sense do so for their own safety and that of the rest of the people aboard. Such actions then are mixed, but they are more like willing acts, since at the time when they are done they are preferred, and the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with the occasion. So one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts that are instrumental in such actions is oneself, and anything of which the source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not. So things of this sort are willing acts, though in an unqualified sense they would perhaps be unwilling acts, since no one would choose any such thing for itself” (pp. 36-37).

Even more than Plato, Aristotle addresses “mixed” cases and highlights their importance. Again characteristically, he qualifies what he says about the unqualified sense with a modest “perhaps”.

“Sometimes people are even praised for actions of this sort, when they endure something shameful or painful in return for things that are great and beautiful, and conversely they might be blamed, since enduring things that are exceedingly shameful for no beautiful object, or for one only moderately beautiful, belongs to a person of low moral stature. For some things, while no praise is forthcoming, there is forgiveness, when one does what one ought not to do on account of motives of this sort, when they strain human nature too far, and no one could endure them. Yet some things perhaps it is not possible to be forced to do, but one ought instead to die suffering the most terrible things, for the things that force the Alcmaeon of Euripides to kill his mother seem ridiculous. But it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what sort of thing should be chosen in return for what, and what should be endured for what, and still more difficult for those who have discerned it to abide by what they have chosen, since for the most part the things one anticipates are painful and the things they force one to do are shameful, which is why praise and blame come about according as people are or are not forced” (p. 37).

Again he mentions forgiveness. Again an otherwise more categorical-sounding statement is qualified by a “perhaps”. Again the focus is on difficult cases. A more general and abstract evaluation is called “difficult”. He notes that it is “still more difficult” to abide by what we have chosen.

Sachs’s glossary says for choice (proairesis): “Desire informed by deliberation, or thinking infused with desire, and hence an act of the whole human being, in which neither the rational nor the irrational part is superior. If desire predominates, one merely takes one thing in preference to others, as an animal or small child might, but deliberation allows one to take a course in the light of alternatives not immediately present and of long-term consequences not obvious at the moment…. [T]he only ‘rule’ that can make choice be right is the judgment of a person of good character, whose desires are neither excessive nor corrupted” (pp. 202-203).

This is very clearly not an arbitrary “choice”. It is the Latin tradition’s interpolation of a notion of arbitrary choice into the Aristotelian text that Boulnois rightly objects to.

Back to Aristotle, “So what sort of thing ought one to say is forced? In an unqualified sense, is it not what is done whenever the cause is in external things and the one acting contributes nothing? But with those things that are in themselves unwilling acts, but are chosen in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends, and their source is in the one acting, while they are unwilling acts in themselves, in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends they are willing acts. But they are more like willing acts, since actions are in the particulars, and with respect to these they are willing acts. But it is not easy to give an account of what sort of things one ought to choose in return for what sort of ends, since there are many differences among the particular circumstances” (p. 37).

Up to now, Aristotle has focused on examples that are somewhat extreme. Here he returns to the broader scope of all action.

“Actions are in the particulars”, which is why, once again, “it is not easy to give an account” of the more general case. In general, we cannot adequately say what the sense of an action is — or indeed what action it is — until we take its context appropriately into account.

In the very same way, there is no way we can adequately say, for example, what Kant’s categorical imperative would have us do in an unspecified particular situation x, based on the categorical imperative alone. Applying it only begins to have meaning as the situation begins to be specified.

Boulnois would have us avoid translating proairesis as “choice”, on the ground of the very real concern that the Latin tradition strongly identifies talk about choice with so-called free arbitration. But in the Aristotelian text we see a repeating pattern already, in which Aristotle focuses on difficult situations that require us to make tradeoffs between values that we genuinely accept, and which seem to require us to be unfaithful to one of them. These could hardly be construed as arbitrary choices. It is the sense given to the words rather than the bare words themselves that matters most.

Though Boulnois’s preferred translation of proairesis as “resolution” definitely has points in its favor, as at least possibly capturing the sense of its dependence on deliberation (which “choice” tends to obscure rather than highlight), the case is less compelling here, where the syntax doesn’t line up and it would be necessary to speak instead of a resolution of the tradeoff. We could still say we “resolved upon” one of the alternatives, but that still doesn’t capture the specific sense of making a judgment based on a comparative evaluation of definite alternatives.

As long as we are speaking of a comparison of definite alternatives rather than a decision that is allegedly made ex nihilo, the comparison basically defines the context, and we are clearly speaking of a normative judgment rather than an arbitrary choice.

It is arbitrary choice that has no applicability to the discernment of what would be a right action. Normative judgment (or for that matter, any kind of comparison between definite things), insofar as it has validity, is precisely not arbitrary, but rather — to a degree we can also assess — “right” for the situation.

Aristotle continues, “But if someone claims that things that are pleasant or beautiful are sources of compulsion (for they exert force even while being external), everything would be forced according to that person, since everyone does everything for the sake of these ends. Also, those who act by force and are unwilling act with pain, while those who act on account of what is pleasant and beautiful do so with pleasure. And it is ridiculous to blame external things but not oneself, for being easily caught by such things, and to take credit oneself for beautiful deeds but blame the pleasant things for one’s shameful deeds. So it appears that what is forced is that of which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (pp. 37-38).

For now I will skip to the summary of the immediately following part, which concerns unwillingness that is due to ignorance.

“So since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances in which the action takes place, the person who was ignorant of them seems to have acted unwillingly, and especially in the case of the most controlling circumstances; and the most controlling ones seem to be the things in which the action consists and for the sake of which it was done. And if an action is to be called unwilling as a result of this sort of ignorance, it is also necessary that it be painful to the one who does it and held in regret” (p. 39).

Then he summarizes the whole discussion of willingness and unwillingness. We are responsible for our “willing” acts, and are not responsible for unwilling acts.

“Since an unwilling act is one done by force or on account of ignorance, a willing act would seem to be one of which the source is in oneself, when one knows the particular circumstances in which the action takes place. For things done on account of spiritedness or desire are probably not rightly called unwilling acts. In the first place, none of the other animals would any longer do anything willingly, nor would children. And then, of the things that result from desire and spiritedness, do we do none of them willingly, or do we do the beautiful ones willingly and the shameful ones unwillingly? Or is this ridiculous when one thing is responsible for them? And perhaps it is absurd to call things toward which one ought to extend oneself unwilling, and one ought to get angry at some things and to desire some things, such as health and knowledge. And while unwilling acts seem to be painful, those that result from desire seem to be pleasant. Also, what difference does it make to whether things that are wrong are unwilling acts, that they result from reasoning or from spiritedness? Both kinds of error are to be avoided, and irrational feelings seem to be no less human than reasoning is, so that actions that come from spiritedness and desire belong to the human being too. So it is absurd to set those down as unwilling acts” (pp. 39-40, emphasis added).

Feeling and reason are equally human. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not regard all feeling as an impediment, or as necessarily a source of unfreedom.

Next he turns to an explicit discussion of “choice”.

[Chapter 2.] “Now that willing and unwilling acts have been distinguished, it follows next to go through what concerns choice, for this seems to be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s actions do. A choice is obviously something willing, but they are not the same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and the other animals share in willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice. Those who say that choice is desire, or spiritedness, or wishing, or some sort of opinion do not speak rightly. For choice is not shared by irrational beings, while desire and spiritedness are. And a person lacking self-control acts while desiring something but not choosing it, while a person with self-control conversely acts while choosing something but not desiring it. And while desire sets itself against choice, desire does not set itself against desire. And desire is for what is pleasant and painful, while choice is of something neither painful nor pleasant.”

“Still less is it spiritedness, for things done out of spiritedness seem to be the ones least in accord with choice. But surely it is not wishing either, even though that appears a close approximation to it, since there can be no choice of impossible things, and if anyone were to claim to choose something impossible, that person would seem to be foolish; but there is wishing even for impossible things, such as deathlessness. And there is also wishing for things that can in no way be done by oneself, such as for a certain actor to win an award, or for an athlete to win a contest, but no one chooses such things, but only those things one believes could come about by one’s own act. Also, wishing is rather for an end, while choice is of things that are related to the end; for example, we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up to us” (pp. 40-41).

Here he is saying not that choice is the efficient cause of action, as the Latin tradition would have it, but rather that it evaluates and compares possible efficient causes, with respect to how well they would serve as means to realize the ends we wish for.

“So it could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good, while choice is divided into the latter two kinds. Now no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions. And we choose to take or avoid something from among those alternatives, but we have an opinion about what it is or whom it benefits or in what way, while taking or avoiding is not at all what we have as an opinion. And choice is praised for being a choice of what it ought to be, more than for being rightly made, while opinion is praised for being as something truly is. And we choose what we most of all know to be good, but have opinions about things we do not know very well, and it seems not to be the same people who choose best who also have the best opinions, but rather some people seem to have better opinions but to choose what they ought not, on account of vice. And if an opinion comes before a choice or comes along with it, that makes no difference, for we are not considering this, but whether it is the same as any sort of opinion” (pp. 40-41).

Even though Aristotle does not follow Plato’s categorical devaluation of opinion, we can still hear echoes of Plato’s radical contrast between opinion and knowledge.

“What then is choice, or what sort of thing is it, since it is none of the things mentioned? It is obviously something willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen. But might it just be the one that has been deliberated about first? For choice is involved with reason and thinking things through. And even its name [pro-airesis] seems to give a hint that it is something taken before [pro] other things”

In saying here that choice is involved with reason and thinking things through, and in suggesting that it “might just be” the outcome of deliberation, Aristotle anticipates what will be his eventual conclusion. Quite the opposite of being exercised in a vacuum, Aristotelian choice is the rational outcome of deliberation.

[Chapter 3.] “But do people deliberate about all things, and is everything a thing to be deliberated about, or about some things is deliberation not possible? Perhaps one ought to mean by a thing to be deliberated about, not what some fool or insane person might deliberate about, but those things that people with sense would deliberate about. Now no one deliberates about everlasting things, such as the cosmos, or about the diagonal and side of a square, that they are incommensurable; but neither does one deliberate about things that are in motion but always happen according to the same pattern, whether by necessity or else by nature or by means of some other cause, such as solstices and the risings of stars; nor about things that are sometimes one way and sometimes another such as drought and rain; nor about things that are by chance, such as finding a treasure; but not about all human things either, as no Spartan deliberates about how the Scythians should best be governed, for none of these things could happen through us. We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action, and these are the ones that are left. For the causes responsible for things seem to be in nature, necessity, and chance, and also intelligence and everything that is due to a human being. And among human beings, each sort deliberates about the things to be done by its own acts.”

“And there is no deliberation about the precise and self-contained kinds of knowledge, such as about letters (for we are not in doubt about how something ought to be spelled), but as many things as come about by our act, but not always in the same way, about these we do deliberate, for example about the things done by medical skill or skill in business, and more so about piloting a ship than about gymnastic training, to the extent that the former is less precisely formulated, and similarly also about the rest of the skills but more about those that are arts than those that are kinds of knowledge, since we are more in doubt in connection with the former. Deliberating is present in things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but are unclear as to how they will turn out, and in which this is undetermined. And we take others as fellow deliberators for large issues, not trusting that we ourselves are adequate to decide them. We deliberate not about ends but about the things that are related to the ends, for a doctor does not deliberate about whether he will cure someone, nor a rhetorician about whether he will persuade, nor someone holding political office about whether he will produce good order, nor does anyone else deliberate about ends, but having set down the end, they consider in what way and by what means it would be the case.”

“When it appears that the end would come about by more than one means, people examine through which of them it will come about most easily and beautifully, but if the end will be accomplished by only one means, they examine how it will come to be through this means, and this in turn through some other, until they come to the first thing that will be responsible for the end, which is the last thing in the process of discovery” (pp. 40-42, emphasis added).

“What is deliberated about and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation” (p. 43).

Aristotelian choice is the rational and feeling evaluative outcome of a well-rounded and multi-dimensional deliberation, not a power of arbitration or an arbitrary power that would allegedly be superior to reason and human feeling.

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Free Will in Aristotle?

A recent large book by Olivier Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté [Genealogy of Freedom] (2021), provides great detail on the emergence of the notion of free will (liberum arbitrium in Latin). I have previously mentioned his Être et représentation (1999), which gives fascinating documentation of the role of Duns Scotus in the formation of modern notions of representation, and metaphysics as ontology. Boulnois has written extensively on medieval philosophy. Like Alain de Libera, he turns a broadly Foucaultian “archaeological” method in the direction of showing the large and largely unknown role of medieval philosophy in the development of common Western philosophical concepts. This post will focus on a part of his discussion of how Aristotle stands largely apart from later views.

Early on in the present work, Boulnois cites the first sentence of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica:

“It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer” (quoted in Boulnois, p. 34).

Boulnois notes how Latin translations extensively transformed the meanings of Aristotelian concepts.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis…. The concept of proairesis is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics” (Boulnois, p. 133, my translation throughout). “To begin with, must we follow the [12th century Latin] translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really mean free will?” (p. 134).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian node, which connects Aristotle and [the Church Fathers] Nemesius and Damascene in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second origin of proairesis as free will in the 12th century” (p. 137). “Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse)” (p. 139). “With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio)” (p. 141).

Until now I have followed Joe Sachs’s translation in using “choice” myself. Sachs uses the English word with the same root as the French that Boulnois is questioning, but he explains it in terms of Aristotle’s definition just mentioned. But as we will see in an upcoming post, the Latin tradition gave it a voluntaristic coloring that is foreign to Aristotle.

“The most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’…. Resolution introduces logos and time” (p. 140). “The object of our resolution is first of all the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation” (pp. 140-141). “Our moral character depends not on our theoretical attitude but on the ensemble of our resolutions, the repetition of which constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for beautiful actions” (p. 142).

This ensemble of our resolutions sounds like the commitments of which Brandom and other contemporary writers speak.

“Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas [will]. But the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage…. It is only later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage becomes a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to that part of the soul that is capable of speech. It is a form of desire that is enunciable, intelligible…. Boulesis indeed is a wish: a wish does not require the existence of a will; like all desire, it is moved by its object” (p. 143).

“Among our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which deploys itself in language…. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and of thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable; but in distinction from the other living beings, it is through speech that the desirable appears to her…. Resolution bears on action that can be accomplished by us…. There is only a place for deliberation when several lines of action are possible…. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place” (p. 145, emphasis in original).

Here the resolution of deliberation is explicitly grounded in language and thought, and not in an anachronistic non-Aristotelian notion of a faculty of will.

“It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not exactly say that the resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of that resolution…. Aristotle does propose a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free will” (pp. 145-146, emphasis in original).

Unlike Boulnois here, some 20th century writers have used “decision” in the sense that Boulnois gives to “choice”.

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could [also] not be. The metaphysical tradition deduced from this the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free will” (pp. 146-147).

The important point here is that this “metaphysical tradition” does not include Aristotle.

“Nothing obliges us to understand contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle refers to the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not to those that depend on me (here and now)…. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, other things being equal, at a given instant, the capacity to do one thing or its contrary, to act and not to act. ‘What depends on us’ is a generic capacity, proper to humankind, and not to some particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we more often see what the logos presents as desirable” (p. 147, emphasis in original).

“In this context, what is the principle of action?” (p. 150). He quotes Aristotle, “and the principle of resolution is desire and reason…. What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are to desire…. For resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just” (p. 150).

Boulnois summarizes, “Thus the properly human principle of action is resolution, that is to say the conjunction of desire and of logos in the pursuit of an end” (p. 151).

He turns to the background that Aristotle is responding to.

“The sophists affirm that every desire is good; Plato, that we can only truly will the true or absolute good” (ibid). “While the sophists identify freedom with the capacity to do what we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of arriving at the resolution the circumstances require…. The resolution taken by the serious human [substituting Sachs’s “serious” for spudaios in the homme de bien or man of the good in Boulnois] is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (that she discerns). In leaving behind the confrontation between sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of good and its truth” (p. 152).

This Aristotelian idea of a point of coincidence between appearance and truth was later taken up by Hegel.

“Is it necessary to say that resolution is free? Does it consist in a choice?… Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, nor even that of willingness” (p. 153). “Nevertheless, Aristotle knows and uses a concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The Latin translation not withstanding, [the adjective] ‘hekousion’ (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, except in cases of constraint or ignorance. Proairesis does not mean ‘free will’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution… Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle did not envisage” (p. 154).

“It is indeed possible to analyze human action without postulating in the agent a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing her in a physical determinism…. Ethics is indeed thinkable without a theory of will” (p. 155).

As I have noted many times, Plato and Aristotle founded ethics without the later notion of a faculty of will.

“Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which mainly refers to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is indeed thinkable without the doctrine of free will” (ibid).

Here again the emphasis is on something like commitment.

“Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation in the agent: she at least implicitly evaluates the reasons to do x rather than nothing; that which she does is not imposed on her from the outset. That is to say that for her, there are a multitude of options and reasons to act” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Deliberation is concerned with the goodness of reasons.

“A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free will, freedom is ethical in essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the completion of an education in virtue” (ibid).

“All thought about action situates itself in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (p. 156).

“It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics.” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have absolutely accomplished the best action. In the same way in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘best’ (superlative)” (ibid).

Thoughts on Meta-Ethics

When I first set up a category of “general meta-ethics”, it did not reflect a programmatic intent. It was a convenient heading for the broadest and sketchiest of my broad and sketchy notes. I see the whole development here as a sort of expanding spiral. The typical writing has evolved from extremely informal, minimalist fragments to somewhat more substantial pieces responding to some text or other.

At this point, “meta-ethics” very much has acquired a programmatic significance, particularly inspired first by Brandom’s idea of “normativity all the way down”, and then by Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed “axiological” reading of Aristotelian first philosophy, but encompassing all the concerns raised here. This now gives a more particular, more coherent form to my original goal of exploring possible connections between Aristotle and Brandom. It draws important support from the work of Paul Ricoeur, and from readings of Hegel developed by Robert Pippin and H. S. Harris, as well as my own work and that of numerous others on both the first-order history of philosophy and the second-order “historiography” of that history.

Moore’s Meta-Ethics

As part of due diligence for my previous post, I did a quick search to canvas prior uses of the term “meta-ethics” or “metaethics”. The results were somewhat surprising. One source simply called it a branch of analytic philosophy. Another implied that the word was first used by the early analytic philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), but a search of his most famous work Principia Ethica (1903) did not find it there. Before this my closest contact with Moore had been Alasdair Macintyre’s very negative portrayal.

Moore’s work dominated analytic discussions of ethics in the first half of the 20th century. The aspect that later writers have identified as meta-ethical was his strong distinction between the good in itself and things that we merely call good. I cannot help but think of Plato in this context. Moore’s focus on questions of intrinisic worth recalls Aristotle’s discussion of what is sought for its own sake, rather than as a means to some other end. His prime examples of intrinsic worth were beauty and affection between people. He pointed out that in ethical judgements, a whole is not just the sum of its parts.

Moore held that good is undefinable and simple, which again recalls Plato. But contrary to the perspective of the “long detour” associated with Plato’s Republic, he held that good is something we apprehend immediately, in a kind of intuition. I even wonder if this influenced those who claim that Aristotelian “intellect” must be fundamentally intuitive and immediate.

In any case, Moore also held that there is no moral truth, and generally devalued first-order or practical or what some call “normative” ethics. While I do not at all agree with that, I do see philosophical ethics as mainly concerned with broad second-order or “meta” questions.

At the same time, he was principally responsible for highlighting the so-called naturalistic fallacy in utilitarianism and similar doctrines. He also rejected egoism as a moral theory, and identification of the good with will. He held that ethical propositions resemble neither natural laws nor commands. Ethics does not identify absolute duties, but rather makes relative distinctions between alternatives. He held that practical ethical judgements are concerned with means, and therefore involve an element of causal judgment. In general he was much concerned to point out linguistic confusions in ethics, such as the identification of good with a supersensible property. He pointed out the limitations of rule following, and held that the exercise of virtue in the performance of duties is not good in itself.

According to later discussions, Moore laid the ground for the “noncognitive” perspectives on ethics that dominated analytic accounts in the first half of the 20th century. These make practical ethics purely a matter of subjective feeling. That is the basis of Macintyre’s criticism of Moore.

(We saw earlier that Habermas is regarded as working on the “cognitive” side of this divide. I don’t care for this terminology, but on that score my sympathies would have to be with Habermas and his “ideal speech situations”. Habermas acknowledges influence from Gadamer, who saw Platonic dialogue as a model for ethical thought. And Brandom, with his emphasis on Hegelian mutual recognition, is an obvious “cognitivist” who has called Habermas a personal hero.)

Moore speaks of the proper approach to ethics as “scientific”. By science he seems to mean not rational elaboration and interpretation, but a broadly empiricist attitude. I don’t think ethics should strive to be scientific in that sense, but rather “reasonable”, and open and responsive to situations.

Metaphysics or Meta-Ethics?

The work we know as Aristotle’s Metaphysics is at least as deeply interwoven with the Nicomachean Ethics as it is with the Physics.

The title meta ta physika (“after the physics”) is a bit accidental, and definitely not from Aristotle himself. It is attributed to the principal editor of Aristotelian manuscripts, Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE), for whom it very mundanely referred to the placement of those writings sequentially “after” the writings we know as the Physics in his edition, which was apparently the main source of later manuscript traditions of the surviving Greek.

What is at issue in my objections to scholastic, early modern, and Heideggerian notions of “metaphysics” has little or nothing to do with this lexical issue as such, but a common feature of these views is that they neglect the all-important connection of first philosophy to ethics.

In contrast, an implicit view of meta-ethics as second-order ethics, or inquiry into the foundations of ethics, has been seen in historical philosophers as far back as Plato. I would even say that philosophical ethics has always been mostly meta-ethics.

One of the themes I have been developing here is a sort of “general meta-ethics” that would be a legitimate heir of what Aristotle called first philosophy or wisdom, decoupled from speculative astronomy, while offering some lessons of its own. I have also been inspired by Brandom’s idea of “normativity all the way down”, which extends the Kantian thesis of the primacy of “practical” (ethical) reason.

I see Plato and Aristotle as inaugurating a tradition of “rational ethics” that separates ethics from appeals to authority, and emphasizes thoughtful inquiry and dialogue. Although never socially dominant in its purer forms, this philosophical approach to ethics has been historically quite influential.

Even very traditional theologians have often tempered their emphasis on revelation with recognition of at least a relative autonomy of ethics. Some have gone further and explicitly acknowledged that the highest degrees of ethical goodness can arise independent of their own particular faith.

Medieval discussions on “intellect” reflect various fusions, extensions, and decorations of Aristotelian and neoplatonic notions both of the highest good absolutely, and of the more specific highest good for humans. Spinoza entitled his magnum opus simply Ethics, and spoke of a purely philosophical beatitude, as did Averroes before him. Leibniz advocated a “wise charity” that is both gentler and more generous than law, while also reviving and further sharpening Plato’s critique of one-sided emphasis on God’s will, power, and authority. Kant reversed traditional wisdom and argued that ethical reason is more fundamental than modern notions of theoretical reason. Hegel made a fundamental contribution with his meta-ethical idea of mutual recognition, which Brandom and Pippin have importantly expounded in our own time.

Implication Spaces

“Logical vocabularies make reason relations explicit in terms that appeal only to the conceptual resources supplied by the base vocabularies from which they are conservatively elaborated. They are in that sense intrinsic vocabularies for specifying reason relations. Logical vocabularies, however, are not purely metavocabularies, in the sense in which semantic and pragmatic rational vocabularies are. The sequent-calculus vocabularies in which we say how to elaborate arbitrary base vocabularies into logically extended vocabularies with the capacity to codify reason relations are genuine metavocabularies in that sense. Like semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies, they do not extend the base vocabularies for which they are metavocabularies. They are purely metalinguistic, talking about expressions in the base vocabulary, rather than using them” (Brandom in Hlobil and Brandom, Reasons for Logic, pp. 17-18, emphasis in original).

“Logical vocabulary is a hybrid or mongrel kind of metavocabulary. It plays the expressive role of explicitating reason relations: making them explicit, constructing sentences intelligible as saying that relations of implication and incompatibility hold. That is a broadly metalinguistic function. But logical vocabulary performs that explicative expressive function by using the sentences whose reason relation it articulates, rather than by talking about them (mentioning them).”

“These observations raise the question whether there is a purely intrinsic-explicative vocabulary for specifying reason relations that is a rational metavocabulary in the sense of being genuinely and wholly metalinguistic. The answer is ‘yes’…. Our candidate, informed by work due to Dan Kaplan (2022), is an implication-space metavocabulary for specifying both reason relations and the conceptual role sentences play in virtue of standing to one another in such reason relations. Very roughly, where Gentzen’s sequent-calculus metavocabulary treats implications as basic objects in a proof-theoretic formalism, Kaplan’s implication-space metavocabulary treats them as basic objects in a model-theoretic formalism. It represents the current state of the art in inferentialist semantics.”

“Inferentialists have long thought that the universe from which semantic interpretants are drawn or from which those interpretants are built — the analogue of the universe of mereologically structured worldly states out of which semantic interpretants (propositions) as pairs of sets of truth-making states and falsifying states are built — should consist of implications (including incompatibilities coded as implications) and sets of them” (p. 18, emphasis in original).

This is vital stuff. At the risk of sounding dogmatic in the Kantian sense myself, I have long thought that the world is made of implications. What this really means is that the determinacy in it is made of implications.

“Kaplan’s (2022) first conceptual innovation was the idea that thoroughgoing inferentialists ought to treat the most basic units being interpreted, no less than the semantic interpretants assigned to them, as being implications, rather than the sentences that make up their premises and conclusions. Only at a second, subsequent stage would semantic interpretation be extended from implications to the sentences they contain. He accordingly begins with a universe of candidate implications, together with a partition of that universe into a distinguished set of good implications — ones whose conclusions really follow from their premises — and the rest. This universe of candidate implications with a distinguished subset is an implication space.” (p. 19).

Note that he speaks of implications containing sentences, rather than of sentences “having” implications. This reflects the implication-first point of view: implications are “the most basic units being interpreted”.

“Any base vocabulary determines such an implication space, since the lexicon of the vocabulary suffices to define the points (candidate implications as ordered pairs of sets of sentences of the lexicon), and the reason relations of the vocabulary suffice to determine the distinguished set of good implications” (ibid).

“We are exploring the idea of understanding meaning to begin with in terms of reasons instead of understanding it in terms of truth. That is to understand meaning in terms of a dyadic relation (between sets of sentences) instead of in terms of a monadic property (of sentences). On the approach that takes truth as basic, one starts with assignments to sentences of a truth value: as true or false, correct or incorrect, good or bad (as a representation). However, although assignments of truth values are the beginning of semantic interpretation on this approach, they are not the end. To get a notion of meaning that corresponds to what one grasps (however imperfectly) when one understands a sentence, one must advance from consideration of truth values to consideration of truth conditions. (One must add to a semantic conception of Fregean Bedeutung of a sentence a semantic concept of its Fregean Sinn.)” (pp. 19-20; see also Brandom on Truth).

When we contrast appeal to reasons with direct appeals to truth, the problem with direct appeals to truth is that there is no good way to separate them from what Kant would call dogmatic assertions.

It seems to me that the truth-first approaches to meaning inevitably end up assuming particular truths. Such assumptions may be entirely innocent and tentative, or not, and there is no way to easily distinguish the innocent ones. On many traditional views, the necessity of such assumptions is simply taken for granted. Here is an alternative to all of that that respects natural language, but can also be made mathematically rigorous. I did not expect such a thing to even be possible.

I think Aristotle and Plato already took a reasons-first approach, but it was purely hermeneutic, without mathematical underpinning, in spite of Plato’s great interest in mathematics.

Ultimately I do more hermeneutics than mathematics myself, but for quite some years I was keenly interested in mathematics. In my day job, I implicitly lean on both constructive mathematics and a kind of hermeneutics on an everyday basis, in doing a kind of logically oriented engineering modeling of “real world” use cases. So whereas records in a database may be taken as expressing sentences that are supposed to be true, I do all my design in terms of the functional dependencies of one thing on another (where the value of one is a simple mathematical function, fully determined by others that can be finitely enumerated and are usually very few). These can be thought of as if-then rules that apply to all practically relevant cases, without claiming to represent universal truth. This applies a kind of lightly formalized inferentialism in the engineering world, which can also be very pragmatic and adaptable to new hypotheses. I do indeed find that these practical judgments (even well outside of the broadly ethical domain that I am mainly concerned with here) have all the characteristics that Brandom talks about. So naturally I found Brandom’s explicit inferentialism very appealing.

“At the extensional semantic ground level, one can say that a sentence is true, and in the reason-based setting one correspondingly can say at the extensional semantic ground level that an implication is good or an incompatibility holds. Given that analogy, the question becomes: what stands to implication (reason relation) values (good/not-good) as truth conditions stand to truth values?”

This is a distinction that Aristotle also makes in his own way. The more elementary stages of inquiry are concerned with a preliminary mapping out that some characterization of something in the domain is at least pragmatically true. The more advanced stages are concerned with why it is true, or what makes it true.

“The idea behind truth conditions (and Fine’s generalization to truth-makers and falsifiers) is that apart from the question of whether a truth-candidate actually is true or false, there is the question of what it would take to make it true — what things would have to be like for it to count as correct in this distinctive semantic sense. The idea behind the first stage of implication-space semantics is that apart from the question of whether a candidate implication actually is good (according to the partition of the space of candidate implications into good and bad determined by the underlying base vocabulary), there is the question of what it would take to make it good. In the special case of reason relations that already do hold, candidate implications that are good, this takes the form of asking about the circumstances under which it would remain good. That is the range of subjunctive robustness of the implication” (p. 20).

This notion of a scale of subjunctive robustness is where the hermeneutics meets the math.

“The range of subjunctive robustness of a candidate implication is its semantic counterpart in the form of its good-makers, as in Fine’s truth-based semantic setting the semantic interpretants are their truth-makers (and falsifiers).

“Grasping ranges of subjunctive robustness in this sense is an essential part of understanding reason relations in ordinary vocabularies” (pp. 20-21).

“The ranges of subjunctive robustness of candidate implications are their ‘goodness’ conditions, as truth conditions are the ‘goodness’ conditions of sentences. For an implication to be good in the reasons-first semantic setting is for its premises to provide reasons for its conclusion (or reasons against, in the case of incompatibilities), while for a sentence to be good in the truth-first semantic setting is for it to be true. The advance from a conception of semantic goodness to a conception of meaning is the advance to consideration of circumstances under which a reason relation or sentence would be good….. In the implication-space setting, the circumstances are additional premises (and, in the fully general multisuccedent case also additional conclusions) that would make or keep the reason relation good. By contrast to the truth-maker setting, in the implication-space setting, those further premises and conclusions are just more sentences of the lexicon of the base vocabulary. That is why implication-space semantics counts as intrinsic” (pp. 21-22, emphasis in original).

“In this way, a model-theoretic inferentialist semantics becomes available that is sound and complete for the aforementioned expressive logic NMMS [NonMonotonic MultiSuccedent logic]. The implication-space semantics shows how to compute the conceptual roles of arbitrary logically complex sentences from the conceptual roles of logically atomic sentences of any base vocabulary — even when the base vocabulary, and so its (conservative) logical extension, are radically substructural, including those that do not satisfy the metainferential structural closure conditions of monotonicity and transitivity. To do this, the implication-space rational metavocabulary must make explicit the conceptual roles played by sentences of all those base vocabularies, as well as their logical extensions. It is universally explicative of sentential conceptual roles. And since implication spaces can be constructed using no resources other than those supplied by the spare specifications of arbitrary, even substructural base vocabularies — just sentences and set-theoretic constructions from them representing their reason relations — the implication-space model-theoretic semantics qualifies as a universal intrinsic-explicative rational metavocabulary” (pp. 22-23, emphasis in original).

“Metainferences of various kinds can be defined precisely, systematic combinations of them recursively constructed, and the effects of those combinations computed. The result is a principled botanization of constellations of metainference that offers revealing characterizations of a number of logics that have been the subject of intense interest among logicians and philosophers of logic over the past few decades…. In treating metainferential relations among conceptual roles as objects that can be combined and manipulated, this calculus stands to conceptual roles as the sequent calculus stands to the sentences that are the relata of the implication relations it codifies as sequents. This intrinsic rational metavocabulary, built on top of the implication-space inferentialist model-theoretic semantics for conceptual roles, provides the expressive power to make explicit a hitherto unexplored level of metainferential reason relations among those roles, and thereby offers an illuminating new semantic perspective on the relations among a variety of well-studied logics.”

“The implication-space metavocabulary provides a model-theoretic semantics for the conceptual roles sentences play in virtue of standing to one another in reason relations of implication and incompatibility. It is a reason-based inferentialist semantics, rather than a truth-based representational semantics like truth-maker semantics. By contrast to the proof-theoretic treatment of reason relations by the sequent calculus, the implication-space metavocabulary assigns sets of implications as the semantic interpretants of sentences, and set-theoretic constructions out of those sets as the semantic interpretants of sentences, and then operates on and manipulates those semantic interpretants to codify reason relations and conceptual roles. In fact, it does so in a way that can be shown to be isomorphic to truth-maker model-theoretic semantics…. In both cases, the universe is taken to be structured by a commutative monoid (fusion of states and a corresponding operation combining candidate implications according to their ranges of subjunctive robustness). Nonetheless, the implication-space metavocabulary provides an intrinsic semantics, since it appeals to nothing that is not made available by the base vocabulary to which it is applied: sets of sentences and their reason relations. Implication-space semantics is something like the intrinsification of truth-maker semantics — in a way formally analogous to, but expressively more powerful than, Fine’s use of intrinsic ‘canonical models'” (pp. 23-24).

The abstract algebraic notion of a monoid is also ubiquitous in contemporary functional programming. Per Wikipedia, a monoid is a set equipped with an associative binary operation and an identity element. One easy example is the set of positive integers with addition as the associative operation and 0 as the identity element, but there are a great many others as well.

“When this structural isomorphism of implication-space and truth-maker semantics — which holds between the universes from which semantic interpretants are drawn, the interpretants themselves, and the way reason relations of consequence and incompatibility are determined for sentences in terms of their semantic interpretants — is appreciated in detail, and considered in context with the orthogonal isomorphism at the level of reason relations between the truth-maker alethic modal semantic metavocabulary and the deontic normative bilateral pragmatic metavocabulary, it becomes clear that the implication-space semantics makes explicit the abstract rational forms common to those two extrinsic-explanatory metavocabularies of meaning and use. Those rational forms are just the conceptual roles the implication-space semantics characterizes” (p. 24).

Epilogues to this series: Anaphora and Reason Relations; All the Way Down

Reason Relations

“The construction gestured at so far foreshadows an argument for understanding reason relations of consequence and incompatibility as constituting a structure common to representational meaning and to practical use, to truth-making and to justificatory practices, to the objective world talked about and to the activities of talking about it, to what is represented and to the representing of it. That these same reason relations show up from the two otherwise disparate perspectives afforded by (the right kind of) semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies offers some reason to think of those relations as central to language or discourse as such” (Brandom in Hlobil and Brandom, p. 11).

Hlobil and Brandom’s Reasons for Logic presents major new results. In the technical part, Hlobil presents not just one but two very detailed new isomorphisms that unexpectedly seem to unify previously disparate areas of research in a convincing way. I will barely skim the surface of all that is afoot here. My goal is just to work through a few more pages of the motivational part, which also briefly summarizes the whole.

This notion of reason relations is already quite fascinating.

“Such an approach is unusual, and so perhaps surprising in how it discerns rational forms amphibious between these different dimensions” (p. 12).

It is the “amphibious” or hylomorphic character of what is going on here that is so amazing. This is not just something on the horizon offered to aim at as a goal, but an actual concrete accomplishment. This could make it possible to specify in detail what the substantiality of reason will amount to in particular cases. Brandom’s work has clearly taken on a life of its own, and is now being carried forward by others in new ways.

One of the many ideas afoot here is a suggestion that relations come before “things” in the order of explanation. This has been one of my favorite themes throughout the years. It even appears that this amphibious character of reason relations could enable us to say what constitutes objectivity in particular cases, and not merely gesture at it. If so this is huge, from the point of view of perennial human deficits and conflicts. It could be as big a leap for talking animals as the introduction of Platonic dialogue. Of course, we should anticipate that people will still find things to argue about.

Earlier, it was Brandom who convinced me to take Kant and Hegel seriously, and to take analytic philosophy seriously as actual philosophy and not just a technical endeavor. This greatly elevated appraisal, especially of Kant and Hegel, naturally led me to direct attention to Kant and Hegel themselves. In this context, I almost came to think of Brandom primarily as a very innovative expositor of their work. The products of this collaboration in the Research Group on Logical Expressivism that are reported here leave no doubt that there is much more to Brandom’s work than that.

“One important criterion of adequacy for both semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies as we understand them is that they offer expressive resources sufficient to provide explanations of the reason relations of arbitrary base vocabularies. They are able to say, each in their own distinctive idiom, both what it means for some sentences to stand to others in relations of implication or incompatibility and why they do…. Our preferred version of semantics offers, in effect, truth-makers for the claims that Γ#A (Γ is incompatible with A) and Γ|~A (Γ implies A) in alethic modal terms of the impossibility of fusions of truth-making states of A, and truth-making states Γ with falsifying states of A, respectively — that is, in terms of how the sentences of Γ and A represent the world to be. Our preferred version of pragmatics specifies how one must use sentences in order thereby to count as practically taking or treating them as standing in relations of implication or incompatibility. It does that in deontic normative terms of constellations of commitments to accept and reject the claimables they express being improper, inappropriate, or ‘out of bounds’ ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Because both of these kinds of metavocabulary appeal to conceptual resources beyond those intrinsic to the base vocabularies of which they are the metavocabularies, and do so in service not just of characterizing the reason relations of those base vocabularies but of explaining them, the sorts of semantic and pragmatic metavocabulary we consider can be denominated ‘extrinsic-explanatory’ rational metavocabularies” (pp. 12-13).

“In addition to extrinsic-explanatory rational metavocabularies, there are also intrinsic-explicative ones. This latter kind of metavocabulary for reason relations restricts itself to the conceptual resources supplied by the base vocabularies whose reason relations it characterizes, and is used to make explicit those reason relations and the conceptual contents they articulate, rather than to explain why they are as they are, or what it is for them to be what they are. The principal phenomenon we initially seek to understand in these terms is logic. The first way logical vocabulary differs from the semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies considered so far is that it is an intrinsic, rather than an extrinsic metavocabulary for codifying reason relations. The rules by which logical vocabulary is introduced to extend any arbitrary nonlogical base vocabulary appeal to nothing more than the reason relations sentences of the base vocabulary stand in to one another” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

“Gentzen’s basic innovation was to treat reason relations, paradigmatically implications, as objects, called ‘sequents’, that can be referred to and manipulated, and their metainferential relations made explicit in a mathematical metavocabulary. The sequent-calculus metavocabulary can be thought of as applying to an arbitrary nonlogical base vocabulary…. This sequent-calculus metavocabulary allows for efficient expression of the reason relations that hold in any base vocabulary, including metainferential relations. But it is essentially just a notation, requiring no substantial additional conceptual resources beyond what is provided by the base vocabulary whose nonlogical implications and incompatibilities it specifies explicitly.”

“Perhaps surprisingly, the spare sequent-calculus notation… turns out to be sufficient to formulate rules for adding logical vocabulary to any arbitrary base vocabulary, and (most importantly), computing the reason relations of the extended vocabulary from those of the base…. The idea is first to extend the lexicon of the base vocabulary, by syntactic rules that specify that the base lexicon is included in the logically extended lexicon, and that if A and B are sentences in the extended lexicon, then so are [A implies B, A and B, and A or B]…. The complete logically extended vocabulary… can then be computed from the base vocabulary. We say that a corresponding logically extended vocabulary can be elaborated from any arbitrary base vocabulary. Implications and incompatibilities (and metainferences involving them) that hold in every logical extension of a base vocabulary, no matter what base vocabulary it is elaborated from, can then be said to hold in virtue of logic alone” (pp. 13-14).

“The sequent-calculus vocabulary is accordingly a rational metavocabulary — a vocabulary for specifying the reason relations of some other vocabulary — that has the special feature that it permits the elaboration of arbitrary base vocabularies over lexicons that extend the lexicons of the base vocabularies by adding logically complex sentences formed by combining the sentences of the base vocabulary with logical operators. Rules for those operators formulated in the sequent-calculus vocabulary conservatively extend the reason relations of the base vocabulary, in the sense that the implications and incompatibilties that hold among logically atomic sentences in the logically extended vocabulary are just those that already held among them in the base vocabulary. And the connective rules formulated in the sequent-calculus vocabulary do this while appealing to no resources outside of those provided already by the reason relations of the base vocabularies” (p. 15, emphasis added).

“”That is, sequent-calculus metavocabularies are intrinsic rational metavocabularies…. And they elaborate all the reason relations of the extended vocabulary solely from the reason relations of the base vocabulary…. When the reason relations of the logically extended vocabulary are suitably elaborated from those of a base vocabulary, it becomes possible for the first time to say explicitly, in the extended vocabulary, what implications and incompatibilities hold in that base, and also in its logical extension” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The constellation of the sequent calculus metavocabulary and the logical vocabulary it introduces stands in an intrinsic-explicative relation to the reason relations of any base vocabulary whatsoever…. The rules of the logics we propose can be shown to be expressively complete in a strong sense…. [A]lmost all extant logics either presuppose that the base vocabularies they extend satisfy strong global structural constraints — paradigmatically the monotonicity and transitivity at the core of traditional understandings of specifically logical consequence as a kind of closure operator — or retroactively impose some such global structure, thereby failing to be conservative over some substructural base vocabularies. While we believe that specifically logical consequence does have a global closure structure (and that logical consistency is monotonic), we argue that this is not in general true of nonlogical reason relations” (p. 16, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Implication Spaces

Quick Note on Proof Theory

I read Aristotelian demonstration as more a making explicit than a proof of truths. The logical expressivism of the author of Making It Explicit (Robert Brandom) does something similar with modern logic. Nonetheless it would be very wrong to conclude that proof theory has no philosophical relevance.

To begin with, proof theory is itself not concerned with proving this or that truth. It is the study of proofs, the beginning of which is to recognize that proofs and proof calculi are themselves mathematical objects. Proofs are functions from premises to conclusions. This has profound consequences.

At an utterly simple level, one small piece of a far larger result is that the notion of an implication A => B is at a certain level formally interchangeable with the notion of a mathematical function A => B. Frege very explicitly treats logical predication as a function as well.

Category theory builds all of mathematics on such morphisms, starting from a single basic operation of composition of arrows. Homotopy type theory suggests that we think of the arrows as paths through spaces. All this is an elaboration and abstraction of the utterly simple but crucial notion of “follows from”, or what Brandom calls subjunctive robustness.

Then an Aristotelian syllogism can be seen on the model of the composition of two predications or functions or morphisms or arrows or paths A => B and B => C around a common type or middle term B that is the output of one and the input of the other. This is not intended to capture a sophisticated result like a mathematical theorem, but rather to express sound reasoning in the simplest, most perspicuous, and most universal way possible.

Next in this series: Reason Relations

An Isomorphism

“The present point is that if the claim that it is possible to identify a rational structure common to what is expressed in pragmatic and semantic metavocabularies could be made out in detail, it would cast light on issues of much wider philosophical significance. For we can look at the relations between what is expressed in normative pragmatic and representational semantic metavocabularies in another way: as articulating the relations between the activities of talking and thinking, and what is being talked or thought about. This is the intentional nexus between subjects and objects, between mind and the world, knowers and the known.” (Brandom in Hlobil and Brandom, Reasons for Logic, p. 8).

Brandom uses the term intentionality in a non-psychological sense that he elsewhere attributes to Kant. We are implicitly in what I think of as Aristotelian-Hegelian territory, where a Cartesian-style division into Subject and Object is not assumed. Brandom’s low-key summary of what to me are the rather dramatic stakes in this issue focuses on the American pragmatists, whom he discussed in the recent Pragmatism and Idealism lectures.

“The American Pragmatists inherited from the German Idealists — who in turn inherited it from Romantic critics of the Enlightenment — the idea that the Cartesian tradition failed structurally, making itself a patsy for skepticism, by attempting to define subjects and objects independently of one another, and then later on facing the problem of how to bolt together things understood as having wholly disparate natures…. The better strategy, they thought, was to start with a conception of intentionality as successful cognition (and action)…. One way to work out such a strategy begins with the thought that there is a kind of structure common to what normative pragmatic metavocabularies make it possible to say about the practices of discursive subjects using declarative sentences to manifest practical attitudes and undertake commitments, on the one hand, and what representational semantic metavocabularies make it possible to say about the modal relations among matter-of-factual states of the world those sentences come to represent by being so used, on the other” (ibid).

Here he references the classic pragmatist emphasis on “successful” thought and action. But especially since he is about to explicitly invoke an Aristotelian (and Scholastic) connection on the next page, this suggests to me that even a very elementary mainstream notion of pragmatism could be recast as evincing a kind of Aristotelian teleological concern with ends and that-for-the-sake-of-which, but in language that hides this angle and is suited to survive in the climate of uncomprehending modern antipathy to Aristotle. The main difference is that Aristotle says much more clearly that the ends that matter are those that are sought for their own sake, and not as means to other ends.

I used to think that logical and linguistic pragmatics as a field of study had nothing in particular to do with pragmatism as a view of the world. Brandom’s recent writings provocatively suggest that there is indeed a connection.

The emphasis on structure is also significant. Although Brandom does not identify with it as I did especially in my youth, French so-called structuralism and poststructuralism represent another major strand of non-Cartesian, non-subject-centered thought in the 20th century. Brandom’s usage seems closer to mathematical structuralism, and perhaps to the structural functionalism of the sociologist Talcott Parsons and the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget that attracted Jürgen Habermas, whom Brandom has called a personal hero.

“For the worldly version of the relations that articulate the structure we are calling ‘conceptual’ are relations of necessity and impossibility whose existence owes nothing to the activities of discursive practitioners. They are objective relations, specified in the alethic modal vocabulary used to state laws of nature, and more generally to specify subjunctively robust relations” (pp. 8-9).

Brandom has consistently highlighted the significance of modality and modal logic for formulating what he likes to call subjunctive robustness. Next he invokes non-Cartesian strands within analytic philosophy.

“We take the view we develop to be a way of understanding what Frege means when he says ‘A fact is a thought that is true’. It is also one way of understanding the Tractarian [early Wittgenstein] claim that the world is the totality of facts…. John McDowell (1996) explores the same sort of conceptual realist view in Mind and World under the slogan ‘The conceptual has no outer boundary’.”

While I am highly sympathetic to the non-Cartesian ambitions here, I think that facts alone are too shallow a basis to constitute a world. I am not a Wittgenstein scholar, but I think he later moved away from this attempt to ground everything on atomic facts. But what else is needed is something like the subjunctive robustness or modal aspect of things that Brandom dwells upon. This emerges naturally as we move from world-as-totality-of-fact to the idea of a world constituted from implications and distinctions (the latter being my preferred way of thinking about what Brandom calls incompatibilities).

“These are deep waters. These pronouncements by great philosophers are mentioned to indicate that the stakes are high for the enterprise of explicating any form of conceptual realism. Here is a sketch of how we go about it. One of the key arguments we appeal to in filling in this neo-Aristotelian metalinguistic bimodal conceptual realism is a technical result…. Greg Restall and David Ripley have worked out what they call a ‘bilateral’ normative pragmatic understanding of the turnstile that marks implication relations in multisuccedent sequent calculi [which looks approximately like |~ and means that if all formulae on the left (often represented as a context capital gamma Γ) are true, then at least one formula on the right is true.]…. The Restall-Ripley bilateral normative pragmatic metavocabulary turns out to be related in surprising ways to what we take to be the most sophisticated contemporary heir of Tarskian model theory and later intensional semantics in terms of possible worlds (Lewis, out of Kripke, out of Carnap), namely Kit Fine’s truth-maker semantic framework…. The representational content of declarative sentences is then understood in terms of assignments to them of sets of states as truth-makers and falsifiers. Global structural conditions on modally partitioned state spaces (for instance requiring that all the mereological parts of possible states be possible) interact with conditions on assignments of truth-makers and falsifiers (for instance forbidding the truth-makers and falsifiers of logically atomic sentences to be overlapping sets).”

Sequent calculi are proof-theoretic notations due to Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. They generalize Gentzen’s system of natural deduction. In sequent calculi, every line is a conditional or sequent, rather than an unconditional assertion. In effect, the primitive terms are implications. This is a formal analogue of Brandom’s idea that the common structure of the world and of thought is at root constituted out of implications (and distinctions) rather than simple facts. Hlobil and Brandom’s book shows that it is general enough to support radically nonmonotonic and nontransitive cases.

“We show below that if one defines semantic consequence in just the right way, a powerful, fruitful, and detailed isomorphism can be constructed relating truth-maker modal semantic metavocabularies and bilateral normative pragmatic vocabularies” (pp. 9-10).

Serious logicians mainly study the properties of different logical systems, or logics, and develop new ones. Alternate logics have hugely proliferated since the first half of the 20th century. He is alluding to the fact that many differently detailed notions of logical consequence have been proposed. What is the “right” one depends in part on its conditions of use.

An isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping that works bidirectionally. The existence of an isomorphism — like the one mentioned further below between algebra and geometry, or the one Brandom is talking about immediately below, between semantics and pragmatics — is an extremely nonrandom, rare occurrence, and therefore is often taken to be deeply significant.

“Assertion and denial line up with truth and falsity, combinations of commitments (to accept and reject) in a position line up with fusion of truth-making and falsifying states, and normative out-of-boundness (preclusion of entitlement to the commitments incurred by those assertions and denials) of a compound practical position lines up with the modal impossibility of such a fusion state.”

“When Spinoza looked back on the relations between algebraic equations and geometric shapes on which Descartes modeled mind-world relations, he saw that the key feature distinguishing that new, more abstract notion of representation from earlier atomistic resemblance-based conceptions is the existence of a global isomorphism between the algebraic and geometrical vocabularies. Spinoza’s slogan for the holistic insight that animated the representational revolution was ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (Spinoza, Ethics II, Prop. vii). The isomorphism between normative pragmatic and alethic representational metavocabularies turns out to make possible in our setting a precise, tractable, and productive specification of that shared rational ‘order and connection’. We think this is a good way to rationally reconstruct some central aspects of Aristotelian (and Scholastic) intelligible forms. This isomorphism is the core of our version of bimodal (deontic/alethic) metalinguistic conceptual realism” (p. 11).

Brandom has been a consistent critic of standard versions of representationalism, but he has always been careful not to reject too much. The more affirmative reference to representation and Tarskian model theory here specifically involves not just any representation but an inferentialist semantics that undoes many conventional assumptions. Apparently there is a formal result to the effect that inferentialist semantics can be expressed not only in terms derived from Gentzen’s proof theory, but also in terms of an evolved variant of Tarski’s model theory in which the things represented are implications.

Next in this series: Quick Note on Proof Theory