Luis Rosa (University of Cologne), "Ambiguous Statements about Akrasia"

Journal of Philosophy, 2022

By Luis Rosa

It is more or less clear that not all problems of philosophy stem from the imperfections of human language and communication. Yet, it is still the case that some of the disputes we have in this area (as much as elsewhere) are due to the fact that we talk past each other. What one person means to affirm is not the same as what the other one means to deny. In ‘Ambiguous statements about akrasia’ I have explored what I take to be an instance of this more general phenomenon.

Akrasia is a kind of cognitive dissonance. It takes place, for example, when the agent holds a certain attitude while at the same time making a negative assessment of that very attitude. To illustrate, consider an agent who intends to tell a lie, though they think they shouldn’t do that. There seems to be a conflict in that agent’s mind, in that they do not approve of their own intention to perform some specific act. In epistemology, philosophers also discuss cases where the disavowed attitude is an attitude of belief. The subject believes that there are intelligent aliens, say, while at the same time believing that it is irrational for them to believe that. There seems to be a conflict between the subject’s attitudes in this case, too. In the paper, I concentrate on the type of akrasia that takes the form of a subject believing a proposition while at the same time believing that their evidence does not confer support upon that proposition. The paper’s points generalize to other kinds of akrasia—though I have left that to be explored in future work. 

Some epistemologists say that it can be rational for us to be in such akratic states, others deny it. The paper shows how they are not necessarily contradicting each other when they say those things. At bottom, the reason is that their uses of ‘their evidence’ might differ in such a way that their respective utterances of ‘their evidence blah-blah-blah’ express different contents. When one party says ‘It is rational for the subject to believe that her evidence doesn’t support global warming’, that party expresses one proposition, and when the other party says ‘It is not rational for the subject to believe that her evidence doesn’t support global warming’, the latter expresses the denial of a different proposition (different from the former one). As a result, their verdicts about the possibility of rational akrasia are also such that what one affirms is not the same as what the other one denies.

If that is right, then those epistemologists do not have to act as if they disagree with each other anymore—at least not about that. They can dedicate their energy to other tasks in philosophical inquiry.

The paper features a bit of formal work to show how phrases such as ‘my evidence’, ‘his evidence’, ‘her evidence’, etc. team up with context to make their semantic contributions to the sentences where they occur. There is also an Appendix that deploys the framework of possible worlds semantics to reconstruct the thoughts of those who claim that akrasia is rational and those who claim that it is irrational, respectively. The reconstruction makes it clear that they can both be reasoning soundly—validly and from true premises—despite the fact that they seem to contradict each other. Just like others in the field, I take such efforts at model-building and formalization seriously in philosophy. If what we take to be an idea is not formalizable, then it is not an idea.

I want to use the opportunity to thank the editorial team at the Journal of Philosophy for their professionalism and effectiveness in handling submitted manuscripts.