Burge, Tyler - Self and Self-Understanding II: Self and Constitutive Norms

11/09/2012

The Journal of Philosophy, June-July 2011

In this paper author talks about norms, specifically norms of critical reason and those of morality or intentional action. The idea here, as with the previous lecture, is to show how capacities of an individual can be constitutive to creating a self and having self-understanding. For author, self-understanding is constitutive to having a self. In this paper, author focuses on the meta-psychological ability to evaluate psychological states and apply norms of critical reason and morality to them.

Author starts by defining a "norm", which is "teleological", a "standard that governs good or optimal ways of fulfilling some function" (pg316). Norms can be followed without consciousness, or even understanding, even some rational ones like inferences using propositions. Author goes further to define moral norms and norms of critical reason, and then argues that an understanding of 'having reasons' and 'moral wrongness' are constitutive to being a self (pg318). The argument is roughly:
-an individual must be able to instantiate in her psychology objects to which the norms of critical reason and morality apply
-for an individual to apply these norms, she must first (1) understand that she has relevant propositional attitudes in her psychology and (2) understand the norms themselves. (pg318-9)
-the individual must have a meta-psychological ability to apply norms to her own psychological states
-that ability requires self-understanding (pg320)

Author talks about what it means to understand a moral norm: it means the individual can evaluate "psychological motivations", since moral norms are essentially about those (pg319-320). For author, this involves an understanding of oneself "from the inside" (pg321), having proprietary "point of view" access to psychological attitudes that isn't inferential from action or behavior (pg325).

In section II author examines the application of moral norms and critical reason. Author looks into the psychological roots for understanding moral norms: motivation, intention, negligence, should-have-known-better, etc (pg321-323). Critical reason applications come next, and it is here where author divides the individual's psychology into rationally accessible and inaccessible: the areas of the unconscious, self-deception, beliefs hidden by emotion, etc. These are not subject to the application of critical reason in the individual with the same propriety; they "have a fundamentally different status" (pg323-325).

Section III discusses a baseline concept of the "rationally accessible point of view", and adds "apperceptive" to the front of it to indicate that this is first-personal access to psychological states of an individual. The "rationally accessible" excludes the Freudian unconscious, self-deception, and other states that need "extensive priming" to be recognized; in general it is all memory, representational states, psychological events, and conscious sensations, feelings, and beliefs (pg326). The contents of this point of view have a "privileged status" when it comes to applying moral and rational norms: it is here where the individual does so (pg327). This status is the "buck-stopping status" that author uses as a term: it is the end of where an individual applies norms of moral responsibility and rationality (pg327). [This is not to say that once an individual abides by all norms in this point of view that she is perfectly rational or good, but just that's where her evaluations end.] From this privileged point of view is where inferences begin, since the apperceptive rationally accessible point of view is an "immediate, non-inductively accessible" baseline (pg327).

The place where you apply norms is to the psychological antecedents of action, and author argues that accountability to norms depends on having a self-understanding of one's own psychology in a "from the inside" way (pg328-9).

Section IV is a discussion of how self-understanding in the ability to apply norms is constitutive of selves, and in particular relating (again) to memory. This time author turns to diachronic understanding of motivations and the individual's own psychology: a meta-psychological influence. The argument runs roughly as follows:
-selves must be able to make inferences about the contents of propositions (pg330-1)
-selves must be able to apply rational standards (minimally) to the contents of propositions. In effect, this means having privileged access to the contents of their psychology so that beliefs or attitudes can be evaluated and shed (pg331)
-making inferences means an individual must have the capacity to remember (autobiographically, not just storing propositions) (pg332-4)

Section V is a very useful summary of author's position thus far.