bridges--ecology of reasons talk for berlin and leipzig

8/12/2019 Bridges--Ecology of Reasons Talk for Berlin and Leipzig

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The Ecology of Reasons

Auburn, Oslo, Chicago, Potsdam, Berlin, Leipzig, March-July 2013

Jason Bridges

MATERIAL FOR TALKS.PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE.(Parts in red were cut during delivery to save time.)

1. Rational explanationA rational explanation of a persons belief or action explains that belief or action by citing her

reasons for it. Such explanations explain actions and beliefs asexercises of rationality, ofthe capacity to act and think for reasons.

In the recent philosophical debates on rational explanation, two issues have been at the center.The first issue is whether rational explanations are causalwhether they do their explanatory

work by telling us something about what caused a belief or action.The second is whether they are psychologicalwhether do their explaining by citing elementsin the subjects psychology.

It tends to be common ground among parties to these debates that ones views on the twoissues are likely to line up in a particular way. The shared presumption is that if oneregards rational explanations as causal, then one will regard them as psychological, andthat if on the other hand one regards them as non-causal, then one will regard them asnon-psychological.

Theories of rational explanation in the literature thus tend to sort into two camps.To adopt labels used by Eric Marcus and Jonathan Dancy, we have on the one side: views

that endorsepsychologism, according to which a rational explanation is causal, with theexplanation exploiting in particular a causal nexus holding between the belief or actionbeing explained and a set of propositional attitudes on the part of the subject.

And on the other side isanti-psychologism, according to which a rational explanation is notcausal, and instead does its explanatory work by citing a non-causal relationshiptypically conceived in justificatory or normative termsbetween the belief or action beingexplained and a fact, a fact which neednt and typically wont concern matters of thesubjects psychology.

I will push an alternative, which I call ecologism. Ecologism holds that a rational explanation iscausal but not psychological: it appeals to a causal nexus holding between the belief oraction being explained and facts, facts which neednt and characteristically wont have apsychological subject matter.

Broadly speaking, I see two kinds of reasons for favoring ecologism. First, ecologism bestcaptures the significance rational explanations can be seen to have for us in the everydaycontexts in which we produce and consume them. Second, ecologism is needed for asatisfactory conception of how our free exercise of rational capacities integrate into thecausal order of the natural world.


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I will probably have time today only to discuss the first of these points, though I may say a bitabout the other toward the end. If there were still more time, I would try to explain why,ultimately, the two issues are two sides of a single coin. (The second point is discussed insection 8 below.)

2. Explanations and theories of explanationWhen we identify reasons for which a person does something or believes something, we offer

an explanation of why the person does that or believes that. That is what such statementsare in the business of doing: they provide a distinctive kind of explanation of action andbelief.

Suppose my friend Max asks me why a mutual acquaintance of ours thinks hes a bad driver,and I say, Well, I can tell you that Rachelsreasonsfor thinking youre a bad driver arethat you speed and have a tendency toward road rage, but as to whyshe thinks youre abad driver, I have no idea and can say nothing about it.

Such a remark would be absurd. I have, unavoidably, said something about why Rachelthinks youre a bad driver, in giving her reasons for thinking that.

To understand the significance of statements of the reasons for which people think and act,then, is to understand the character of a distinctive class of explanations.

Explanations make available an understanding, to those competent to grasp them, of whythings happen or are so. That is the point of an explanation: to furnish understanding. Anaccount of rational explanations is thus an account of the kind of understanding theyprovide to those who can take them in.

We are all, more or less, competent in the offering and receiving of rational explanations; thepractice of rational explanations belongs, if you like to folk psychology.

It follows that if we wish to understand the significance of statements about the reasons forwhich people think and act, we should be endeavoring to understand the nature of theunderstanding of why people think and act that they furnish to us in the everyday contextsin which they are actually deployed.

Such an account would be, to borrow Hempels term, a theory of explanation. And that iswhat I will understand psychologism, anti-psychologism and ecologism to be: theories ofrational explanation.

This way of framing the issue differs from the usual way, in which we are asked to determinewhat acting or think for a reasonconsistsin, or what it isto act or think for a reason.

I think the difference can matter substantively, in ways brought about by consideration of thenaturalistic project.

But Im going to skip over a discussion of that point for reasons of time. A sense of thesignificance of the framing I favor will emerge, however, in what kinds of considerations Ifocus on in what follows.

On Hempel: Hempel proposed an account of rational explanations in which they tacitlyappeal to the supposed law of nature that human beings do or believe what it is rationalfor them to do or believe in light of their pre-existing attitudes. This enable him to


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assimilate rational explanations to his deductive-nomological model of scientificexplanation, a model whose primary selling point for Hempel was the clarity andplausibility of the story it tells us about the understanding explanations yield of their targetphenomenon:

A [deductive-nomological] explanation answers the question Whydid the

explanandum-phenomenon occur? by showing that the phenomenon resulted fromcertain particular circumstances, specified in C1, C2, , Ck, in accordance with the lawsL1,L2, ,Lr. By pointing this out, the argument shows that, given the particularcircumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be

expected; and it is in this sense that the explanation enables us tounderstand whythephenomenon occurred. (Aspects of Scientific Explanation, 1965, p. 337)

If we can show that the occurrence of a phenomenon follows from the statement of some lawsof nature and some circumstances, then we have shown that this phenomenon wasnecessitatedwith whatever degree or kind of necessity we associate with the idea of anatural lawby those circumstances. And this counts as an explanation of the

phenomenon because it shows that the phenomenon was to be expected, and to see why itwas to be expected is to understand why it occurred.I do not think rational explanations explain actions and beliefs by showing that they were to

be expected. The insight to take from Hempel is just that we need to focus on the questionof how a rational explanation, a statement of a persons reasons for thinking or doing whatshe does, enables uswe consumers of rational explanationsto understand why shethinks or does that.

On the naturalistic project: One of the most notable developments in late 20th-centuryphilosophy was an increasingly rich sense of the range of possibilities for accounts of

essences of phenomenafor accounts of what phenomena consist in, of what constitutestheir nature. In particular, from various quarters the idea emerged that an account of whatconstitutes a kind or property neednt limit itself to conceptual materials present, evenimplicitly, in our ordinary ways of thinking about and understanding the phenomena inquestion. They might draw instead, for example, on specialized scientific knowledge.

This was certainly an important discovery. But it can generate an intellectual context in whichwe may not feel any particular pressure, when endeavoring to say what it is to act orbelieve for a reason, to query the relationship between the stories we tell under that rubricand the significance claims about peoples reasons actually have for us when we deploythem to explain why people are doing what they are doing or thinking what they are

thinking.

We find an extreme example of this disconnect in the work on naturalizing folk psychologythat flourished in the seventies, eighties and nineties. The naturalistic project was intendedas a vindication of folk psychology. Whereas eliminativists regarded folk psychology,including centrally our practice of citing the reasons for which people act and think, as abad theory of human behavior to be superseded by a sophisticated science, naturalizersaimed to vindicate folk psychology, by showing how to reconstruct its central claims and


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concepts out of materials drawn from the natural sciences. Thus one can find in thisliterature accounts of the nature of acting or thinking for a reason in terms of, say,complex claims about the evolutionary functions of various cognitive systems (Millikan)or about the role of operant conditioning in shaping behavioral dispositions (Dretske).

But folk psychology, with its crucial rational, reason-citing component, is above all a way ofexplaining human thought and activity. The producers and consumers of theseexplanations are we ordinary folk psychologists, who may be innocent of theories ofevolution and operant condition and were in any case around long before these theorieswere on the scene.

An account of what it is to act or think for a reason in terms of, say, evolutionary function cannot possibly capture the explanatory significance that claims about peoples reasons havethose who actually deploy them to make sense of the beliefs and actions of other peopleand themselves. And so it cannot tell us what rational explanations are, for the character ofan explanation is to be found in the character of the understanding it yields or purports toyield to those competent to grasp it.

The paradox of the naturalistic project is that folk, or as I would prefer, rational psychologyinvariably escapes the net of naturalizationindeed, that it does so by definition, for if weare not reconstructing folk/rational psychology in terms of concepts that are drawn fromoutside it, then we are not engaged in naturalizing it.

The What does acting for a reason consist in? frame threatens to obscure the true characterof our topic even if we not engaged in any explicit project of naturalization. I think we dobetter to think in terms of a theory of explanation, thus keeping front and center in ourminds that our aim is to understand the explanatory significance of a mode of ordinarythought and talk.

When we approach our question this way we will be led to attend to considerations of a ratherdifferent sort than are usually in view in recent work on acting or believing for reasons.

3. Causation and causal explanationA causal explanation explains a happening or circumstance by telling us something about

what caused that happening or circumstance. Since this notion is central to the three-waydispute that is the focus of this talk, I will need to something about causation at the outset.

The first point is that in speaking of causation, I mean what metaphysicians, epistemologistsand philosophers of mind have discussed under that rubric for the last few hundred years:Hume, Kant and Mill, and then onto the flurry of work that came after, especially in the20thcentury. I take there to be a shared topic here, even if vast disagreement over how itsstructure and nature are to be understood.

In the earlier Aristotelian tradition, philosophers distinguished among final causation, efficientcausation, and so on. What I am calling causation, and view as the topic of the modernphilosophical literature I have in mind, corresponds most closely to efficient causation onthis older schematization. I prefer to avoid speaking of efficient causation due todistracting associations that term seems to have accrued. So I will just speak of causation,full stop.


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(But NB: when I speak of different kinds of causation in what follows, I dont mean thedistinction between final and efficient causation. The kinds of causation at issue here areall kinds of (if one wishes to speak this way) efficient causation.)

So what is causation, in the sense of the modern philosophical tradition I have in mind? Even

slight acquaintance with this literature suggests that this a very difficult and rich question.I cannot offer an analysis or account of causation here. As it happens, I dont think such athing is possible. Following Strawson, I think that we make the most philosophicalprogress in thinking about causation by looking at, and endeavoring to develop a richsense of, particular kinds or forms of causation. And in fact, in the second part of my talk,I will begin to offer an account of the kind of causation rational causation is.

But it is consistent with this observation that we can sensibly seek to identify some generalmarks of causation as such. These will be marks shared by all kinds of causation, whichthus serve to unify these kinds into a category. Once we have identified them, we canappeal to these marks when attempting to determining whether given explanations are

causal.My discussion of these marks will be sketchy, but should give us enough to go on in whatfollows.

Features and marks of causation

a) Constitutive independence of cause and effectb) Objectivityc) Temporal directnessd) Derivativenesse) Counterfactuality/Manipulabilityf) Involvement of causal powers

a) The first mark of causation is its non-constitutiveness. That is to say, causal relationshipsare precluded by relationships of constitution or identity. If x causes y, then it cannot bethe case that y is x, or that y consists in x.

For example, one might claim that an objects being gold causes it to be yellow. We think ofbeing gold as having a certain atomic structure, and then offer an explanation of the visiblecolor in terms of processes of photon absorption enabled by that structure, whichapparently in the case of gold requires appeal to special relativistic effects.

On the other hand, if with Kant we hold that it is analytic that gold is yellow, and hence thatto be gold is in part to be yellow, this explanation is not available. That the object is gold,on this understanding of what it is to be gold, is not causally relevant to its being yellow,

rather it (constitutively) implies that the object is yellow. (I once brought tried to bringthis sort of point to bear against various naturalistic theories of content Esp. DoesInformational Semantics Commit Euthyphros Fallacy?)

An analogous point goes for identity. If the queens poisoning of the king was her killing of theking, then her poisoning of the king did not cause her killing of the king. The poisoningcaused the kings death, certainly. But it did not cause the kings killing, for it isthat.


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b) Second, causal relationships are objective: that x causes y does not consist in a personshaving certain judgments or beliefs about, or experiences of, relevant relationshipsbetween x and y. That, for example, a person believes that x causes y does not suffice forxs actually causing y.

The objectivity of the causal relationship obtains even if the x or y in question are themselves

attitudes or experiences on the part of a personeven then, that these items are causallyrelated does not consist in its striking someone that a relation of some kind obtainsbetween them.

The objectivity of causation matters for what I want to say later about the integration offreedom into our picture of the causal order of the natural world.

Hume and subjectivism: It is true that some philosophers in the tradition I earlier referencedhave held, or have been understood to hold, a subjectivist view of causation. Here I amthinking of Hume. In fact, I dont think that a subjectivist reading of him is plausibleincontemporary terms, he is closer to being an error theorist.

Hume took the idea of causation to be derived from an impression or feeling of expectation,

which arises from experience of constant conjunctions of As and Bs. So far as his accountof causation goes (abstracting from his larger metaphysics of the material world, with theirown set of seemingly skeptical or even nihilistic implications), that As and Bs occurtogether such that we will have experience of their conjunction can be a perfectly objectivefact. And for Hume, the fact of this conjunction is the closest one can get to there beingany fact about causation between A and B at all. There is no furthersubjective factabout theobtaining of a causal relationship between them. Rather, there is amistaken beliefon ourpart, born of our confusion about the origin of our idea of causation (which is just a copyof a feeling of expectation), that there is indeed some further causal relationship thatmight obtain, or fail to obtain, between A and B above and beyond their constantconjunction.

And in any case, even if we read him as a subjectivisthe would be an inter-subjectivist. Thepsychological contingency to which his view appeals is a feature of our shared humannature. Even on such a view, no particular persons attitudes and experiences ofconnections suffice for genuine causal connections, and this suffices for a minimal degreeof objectivity.

c) Third, causation is temporally directed. It is difficult to pin down this idea precisely, andthere is a large and confusing literature directed at doing so. The claim that causes alwaysoccurbeforetheir effects is impossible to give a plausible interpretation to. It is better to saythat causes cannot occur after their effects, though it is sticky to develop more preciseconditions that spell out the purport of this claim.

Matters get still stickier with rational causation. The temporal directedness condition stillapplies to rational causation, but only in a particular form: namely the requirement is thattheawarenessof the cause cannot follow the effect. Im not going to have a chance todiscuss this matter during the talk.

d) The temporal directedness of causation is of a piece with what, following Anscombe, wecan call the derivativeness of the effect from the cause. Effects are derived from, come out


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of, arise from their causes, as Anscombe puts it. We might also appeal here to the languageof bringing about, sustaining and preventing.

Of course, we speak of a conclusion deriving from a premise, or of, say, a logical principlepreventing something from being possible. There is no causation at work in these cases. SoAnscombian turns of phrase do not in themselves constitute some kind of non-circular

analysis of the notion of cause.But what we can say is that the kind of bringing about, or deriving, or preventing, or arisingfrom, that iscausalhas an essential temporal dimension. It happens in or at a time. Logicalpreventing and deriving do not.

e) Causal claims are counterfactual supporting. If A caused B then, odd cases ofoverdetermination and such aside, if A hadnt obtained B wouldnt have obtained.

It does not follow that the counterfactual approach to theanalysis of causation is correct.Because counterfactuals can be true in virtue of non-causal relationships (for example,various constitutive relationships), they are best understood, I think, as helps towardtracing out causal relationships rather than as basis for constructing a self-sufficient

analysans.

Themanipulationist approachto causation, recently the object of much discussion, is bestunderstood as a way of trying to isolate which counterfactuals bespeak causal connectionsand which do not. The basic thought is that if A causes B, then manipulating A is a meansof manipulating B. For example, one could prevent B by preventing A. There is muchwork in this literature attempting to isolate appropriate notions of prevention andinterference.

Because the manipulationist approach relies on what looks to be the transparently causalnotion of manipulation, it does not appear capable of providing an analysis of causation.But again, we have here a useful mark of causation: considerations about the prospects forvarious kinds of manipulation can be a guide to discerning causal relations and structure.This thought has become central in recent work on statistical reasoning in areas of thesocial sciences.

f) Finally, Anscombe and Strawson suggest that, at least in our everyday, non-scientificthinking, our primary way of identifying and characterizing instances of causation is withcausative verbs like breaking, lifting, chasing, melting, dissolving, ruining,ending, blowing over etc.

The general term, cause does not appear in the sentence, the explosion blew up the house,or the boulder crushed the garden gnome, but it seems clear nonetheless that what arebeing described are paradigmatic instances of causation. Effects are wrought upon things:a house is left in ashes; a gnome is left in pieces.

If we take this idea seriously, we will see merit in supposing not merely that events can becauses, as mainstream theories insist, but that material objects can be causes as well. Forcrushing is a kind of causing, and it is the boulder that crushes the garden gnome.

This way of thinking about causation is often associated with Aristotelian talk ofcausal powers.


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Not every case of causation involves an exercise of a specific causal power of a particular, apower the exercise of which is predicated with a causal verb. But where there is theexercise of a causal power, of crushing or spilling or chasing and so on, there is causation.

Putting these various thoughts together, we arrive at the following. If we want to know

whether a particular description or statement or narrative depicts causation, we should askourselves whether the connection reported appears non-constitutive and objective. Weshould ask whether what is described is the bringing about or preventing of a happeningor circumstance, over, or at least in, time. We should see whether this bringing about orpreventing can be understood such that the putative effect does not precede the putativecause. We should see whether the statement or narrative supports relevantcounterfactuals, and if those counterfactuals can be glossed in terms of possiblemanipulations or related causal ideas. We should ask ourselves whether particular eventsor objects are characterized as exercising causal powers. Positive answers to some or all ofthese questions will suggest, with varying degrees of decisiveness, that causation is indeedin view.

One final remark on causation: Following Helen Steward and others, I will speak of facts ascauses. (Actually Steward speaks of causally relevant facts, in order to avoid theappearance that she is treating facts as particulars. I will sometimes talk that way too.)

Part of Stewards motivation for this notion is the observation that we often are willing tospeak of causation in cases where there is no ordinary kind of particular, no event orobject, that is a plausible candidate to be the cause.

For example, I might say that the dampness of the basement apartment caused the tenant tobecome ill. The dampness of the basement apartment is not an object or event. But thecausal claim is nonetheless fully intelligible. And all of the aforementioned marks ofcausation (other than perhaps the exercise of a causal power) appear present.

One approach to such cases is to posit special particularstoken states, property instances,tropesas causes. Steward argues, I think convincingly, that we can make no good senseof such supposed items, nor of how positing them is supposed to help us better understandthe causal claims.

The alternative is to accept that the only candidate for a cause we have here is the fact that thebasement apartment was damp. This fact causedor as we might prefer to say, wascausally relevantto the tenants becoming sick.

We can extend the idea even to include cases where an ordinary particular is at work as acause. If the trees falling on the gazebo caused my garden party to end, then we may justas well say that what caused my party to end was that a tree fell on the gazebo. In the firstformulation, we identify an event as the cause; in the second we identify as the cause thefact that such an event occurred.

One value in reframing causal claims in terms of causally relevant facts in this way is that thepoints of contact between our causal talk and thought and related forms of talk andthought often involve sentential constructions.

For example, counterfactuals have propositions as their component parts. The counterfactualwe rely on to underwrite our conviction that the trees falling ending my party is likely tobe: if the tree had not fallen, my party wouldnt have ended when it did.


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Similarly, causal explanations generally have propositions as their component parts. They citefacts. My party ended because a tree landed on the gazebo.

Helping ourselves to the idea of causally relevant facts thus enables a neat characterization ofcausal explanations. A causal explanation is an explanation that does its work by citingfacts causally relevant to what is being explained.

To anticipate, I have one further reason for wanting to regard facts as causes. Rationalcausation, as I will suggest, is causation by reasons,as reasons. It is causation by reasonsas such. And it is facts that are, at bottom, reasons, for it is facts that stand in relationshipsof justification. This is a function of their propositional articulation.

4. Psychologism, anti-psychologism and ecologismSuppose were out on my porch on a late summer afternoon and you go inside to fix iced tea. I

announce my intention to remain outside, watching the squirrels gather nuts. You go in,but just a few moments later I appear in the kitchen. You ask my reason for doing so. I

say:1) My reason for coming inside was that there was a wolf in the yard.

You did not know why I came in. My answer tells you. You understand why I came in, as youdid not before.

Of course, further questions may present themselves. For example, how did a wolf get to be inthe back yard of a Chicagoland apartment building? But it is in the nature of allexplanations that they leave room for further explanatory questions. If it were a conditionon an explanation that it leave no room for further explanatory queries to be pressed,explanation would be impossible. Every explanation has to start somewhere.

Another example. I am sitting with you in my dining room late at night, drinking beer. I getup for a moment and head toward the back of the apartment. I return and say, I believeIm in grave danger.

Startled, you ask why. I say:

2) My reason for believing Im in danger is that there is a sinister man from my paststanding in the yard.

Again, you want to know why I believe Im in danger. I tell you my reasons, and now youunderstand.

One evident feature in both of these explanations is that the cited fact in each case is

represented as a normative reason for me to do what I do or believe, a considerationcounting in favor of my doing or thinking that. This is an essential feature the category ofrational explanation as I understand it. But this observation does not in itself tells us howrational explanations explain.

And that is our question: what it the nature of the understanding conveyed by theseexplanations? How, exactly, do they do their explaining?


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Psychologisms answer is, firstly, that the explanations are causal. They illuminate my actionand belief by telling you what caused them to be undertaken (in the case of the action) orformed and held in place (in the case of the belief).

What causally relevant facts do the explanations cite? According to psychologism, they cite

facts about my psychology. The most obvious candidates here are, respectively, that Ibelieved, at the time I came inside, that there was a wolf in the yard, and that I believe thatthere is a sinister man from my past in the yard.

So we have:

Psychologism about rational explanations

A rational explanation expressible by the form Ss reason for !-ing is/was that p:a) is causal;b) and in particular explains Ss !-ing by identifying the fact that S believes that p

(along with, perhaps, other facts about Ss attitudes) as causally relevant to Ss !-ing.

A few points here.First, as with the other views I will be discussing, psychologism is simply a view about

features that rational explanations have. It is not intended to provide a list of featuressufficientfor an explanations being rational. Obviously one could cite a subjects belief ascausally relevant to something she does or believes without thereby giving a rationalexplanation of it.

Second, one might worry about a seeming failure of fit between what psychologism claims arational explanation to be doing and the explicit content of the claims that express thoseexplanations. For the forms for presenting explanations that we are considering dontexplicitly mention Ss beliefs (except in the peculiar sort of case in which Ss believing

something constitutes the proposition p).But this worry is not decisive. For one thing, all explanations are to some degree or another

elliptical. No explanation is explicit about everything that is relevant to grasping thatexplanation; every explanation relies on context and background knowledge to situatewhat is being conveyed.

More specifically, it seems undeniable the rational explanations imply that S believes the citedfact to obtain: if it were to turn out that I did not believe that there was a wolf in the yard(even if there was), that could not be my reason for coming inside.

And in light of this observation it seems open to hold that the possessive locutionin thiscase, my reason, when one is talking about someone else, a third-person possessivesignals that the explanation is citing something about the subjects own conception of, or

orientation to, the world. And how else to capture a conception or orientation except interms of sets of contentful attitudes?

Third, a specific psychologistic theory may well hold that further attitudes, additional to thebelief that p, factor into a rational explanation. For example, in the case of actions, theymight specify a desire that interlocks with the belief that p (and perhaps affiliated beliefs),and take the force of a rational explanation to be that this structure of attitude yields theaction or belief at issue. (Michael Smith offers a clear instance of this strategy.)


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Again, one might wonder how these attitudes are to be read off the statement of reasons, andthe answer might be that the role of such attitudes in yielding actions or beliefs isconstitutive of rationality, and so their presence is implicitly adverted to by the very factthat it is said to be the subjectsreasonor reasons that accounts for her belief or action.

Fourth, psychologistic accounts face the question of how to understand the nature andstructure of the psychological causality they take rational explanations to reference.One way to frame this question is to ask how exactly we are to construe the items that do the

causing to which rational explanations, psychologistically construed, make reference.Evidently these items are to be identified with, or at least closely associated with, beliefsand other propositional attitudes. But what are they?

One option is to suppose that attitudes are events, or if that seems too implausible, that thereare events closely associated with attitudes (such as events of the formation of attitudes),and thus that the causation at stake in rational explanation fits into the familiarDavidsonian template. Another option is to posit a distinctive category of particular, suchas that of token states, and to suppose that attitudes are items in this category and as such

fit to serve as causes.Another alternative open to the proponent of psychologism is to hold that rationalexplanations belong to that class of causal explanations to which Steward drawsattentionin which the explanations do not operate by citing any particulars as causes.Such an explanation is causalit operates by citing a causally relevant factbut insofaras we insist on identifying some item as the cause identified by that fact, there is no othercandidate but the fact itself. This is Stewards own view of how to understand the causalcharacter propositional-attitude explanations: that a person has a given such attitude maybe a fact causally relevant to her doing or thinking what she does, and thus may be cited incausal explanation of her doing or thinking that.

I have formulated psychologism in such a way as to remain neutral among these alternatives,and the debate amongst them does not matter directly for my purposes.

Fifth, psychologism has to offer some explanation of the feature of rational explanations Imentioned above: that they represent the cited facts as normative reasons. In what waydoes this bear on the explanatory force of the explanation on a psychologistic picture?There are various answers a proponent of psychologism might provide here. One is thatthe normativity doesnotbear on the explanatory work the explanation is doing. On thisview, a statement of reasons for which people act or think simply does two separate things.This view is implausible.

What matters for my purposes today is that a psychologistic view of rational explanations is amechanisticview of rational explanations.

Our causal explanations of what macroscopic, material objects do, or of what changes theyundergo, tend to come in two flavors. On the one hand, we may cite facts about what is so,or is going on, in an objects surroundings. For example, we might cite the effects uponthat object of another object that is in some way in contact with it: The tree is downbecause a bear knocked it over.


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On the other hand, we may cite facts about how things stand with an object itselffactsabout its states or partsto causally explain what it does or what changes it undergoes (orfails to undergo).

For example, there may be a question about why the bear was able to knock this tree downwhen it had failed to fell others in the area. And to answer that question we might cite a

state of the tree as causally relevant to its downfall: The tree fell because it was brittle anddiseased. Here we are citing a state of the tree as the causally relevant factor, rather thanthe causal work done by elements in the trees surroundings.

This suggests a contrast between two kinds of causal explanations of the things that materialobjects do or that befall them.

Amechanistic explanationof Os !-ing explains Os !-ing by citing causally relevantfacts about Os states or parts.Anecological explanationof Os !-ing explains Os !-ing by citing causally relevant factsabout what is going on, or is so, in Os surroundings.

These terms are not ideal, but they are not unmotivated. The point of the ecological label isthat explanations of this sort concern the objects causal transactions with its environment.The point of the mechanical label is that explanations of this sort treat an object as acausal system, with states or parts that bear causally on each other or on the activity of thesystem as a whole.

As the case of the tree suggests, we tend to assume that causal explanations of both sorts areavailable for the things that macroscopic material objects do, or that befall them. And ofcourse, we might seek explanations of both sorts at once.

But it is also true that our explanatory focus can shift. We may sometimes offer a mechanicalexplanation of something an object does or that happens to it, and not concern ourselveswith more distal causes. Or we may provide an ecological explanation of something an

object does or that happens to it, and not concern ourselves with the states of the object, orthe processes internal to it, in virtue of which the environment has the impact upon theobject that it does.

According to psychologism, rational explanations are mechanistic explanations of the attitudesand actions of human beings. They causally explain a persons actions or beliefs by citingfacts about the states of that person. They look to how things stand with the person, ratherthan the world the person confronts, to account for what she does or thinks.

Of course, it is perfectly consistent with psychologism that we might, in virtue of an interest inachieving a richer understanding of a given thought or action, look outward to a personssurroundings and attempt to causally relate what we find there to what the person thinks

or does. Psychologism certainly does not deny this possibility. The point is rather thatwhen we do look outward, we are no longer engaged in rational explanation. Rationalexplanation looks not outward but inwardthat is to say, to relationships among thepersons states or parts, in particular to such relationships as obtain within her psychology.

According to anti-psychologism, rational explanations are neither mechanistic nor ecological.For they are not causal at all.


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Anti-psychologism about rational explanations:A rational explanation expressible by the

form Ss reason for !-ing is/was that p:a) appeals to a non-causal relationship R;b) and in particular explains Ss !-ing by identifying the fact thatpas R-relevant to

Ss !-ing.

According to anti-psychologism, when I say that my reason for coming inside was that therewas a wolf outside, I am not explaining my action by saying anything about what led to itor occasioned it or brought it about. The fact that there was a wolf outside explains mycoming in, but it does not do so in virtue of any causal relevance it may have, to mycoming in. Rather, it bears some other kind of relationship to my coming in, and therational explanation accomplishes its work by adverting to that relationship.

What relationship? Answering that question is a central task for a proponent of anti-psychologism. Typically, anti-psychologists have taken as their starting point the thoughtthat the fact represented as the rational explanandum of an action or belief justifies theaction being rationally explained.

Indeed, we can see anti-psychologism as motivated in part by an important insight about howrational explanations work, namely that rational explanations are better explanations inproportion to the degree that the facts they cite actually justify or favor the belief or actionat issue.

If you ask why I left your party early even though I knew you planned to make an importantannouncement to make at midnight, and I say, My reason for leaving then was that thebabysitter called to tell me my son had gotten hurt, that is likely to strike you as a moresatisfactory explanation, as making better sense of my action, than if I had said, Myreason for leaving then was that someone showed up wearing a bolo tie. That latterexplanation is likely to seem unhelpful to youto fail to explain to your satisfaction why I

left. And the reason is that, at least until you are apprised of some further, evidentlypeculiar, background circumstances, that someone showed up to a party in a bolo tie doesnot seem agoodreason, or indeed any kind of reason, to leave before a friends importantannouncement.

We might call this thenormativity constraint on rational explanations.

The normativity condition (roughly formulated)

The explanatory power of a rational explanation of Ss !-ing depends upon whether,and to what extent, the facts cited in the explanation are genuine (normative) reasons

for S to !.

On the other hand, the relationship R cannotsimplybe the relationship of justification: as

Davidson pointed out, this view runs afoul of the evident possibility of having reasons todo something or think something that are not the reasons for which one does or thinksthem.

So the anti-psychologistic project will be to offer some story about the relationship R thatincorporates the element of justification without being exhausted by it.

Finally, ecologism:


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Ecologism about rational explanations:A rational explanation expressible by the form Ss

reason for !-ing is/was that p (excepting a class of rational explanations of actions tobe discussed later):a) is causal;b) and in particular explains Ss !-ing by identifying the fact thatpas causally

relevant to Ss !-ing.

Ecologism shares with anti-psychologism the thought that it is the fact that p, and not a

psychological attitude toward p, that is cited in the explanation of Ss !-ing. But unlikeanti-psychologism, it supposes that the explanatory relevance of this fact consists in itscausal relevance.

Ecologism shares with psychologism the view that rational explanations are causal. But itdisagrees with psychologism over where, as it were, the causally relevant fact cited by arational explanation must be located. For psychologism, the causally relevant fact must bea fact about Ss psychological states: the explanation is always mechanistic.

But ecologism is consistent with the existence of rational explanations that are ecological,

explanations where the causally relevant facts concern how things stand in Sssurroundings.

Ecologism does not imply that all rational explanations are ecological. It is perfectlyconsistent with ecologism that a rational explanation be mechanistic as I have definedthose categories. That would be its verdict, for example, in a Dancy-style case of a personwhose reason for going to the psychiatrist is that he believes that he can fly.

But one way of bringing out what is distinctive about ecologism is that it does allow forrational explanations that are ecological in the simple sense I just defined. Consideration ofthese caseson ecological rational explanationswill help to make clear the motivationfor the view.

Ecologism does not apply to all rational explanations of actions. As we will see, this is a virtue,not a defect. Ecologism is a necessary component of an account of the explanation ofexercises of practical rationality that makes room for both agency and receptivity.

5. Ecological explanations of animal states and actionsAs I have mentioned and as is anyway obvious, we often seek to give causal explanations of

the states and doings of material objects in terms of what is so, or is going on, in theirsurroundings. We see the world of middle-sized, earthbound objects and events asinvolving constant causal traffic, with objects acting on each other and being in turn actedupon.

For example:

3) The garden gnome is on its side because the wind blew it over.4) The garden gnome is broken because a wayward boulder smashed into it.

These sentences offer causal explanations of certain states of the garden gnome. In particular,they appeal to the causal powers of an event and object respectively.


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Now, animals are among the material objects whose doings and states we are often interestedto explain. Animals are special in various ways, some of which I will shortly mention. Buttheir specialness does not consist in their being somehow aloof from participation in thecausal to-ing and fro-ing we discern amongst earthbound middle-sized objects and events.They do not pass unscathed through the fray, as if they were ghosts. On the contrary, they

are full participants. And as with any other object, their participation has two aspects.They both cause things, and are affected by things.

Consider 5):

5) The gnome is gone because I threw it in the trash.6) The squirrel ran onto the roof because a wolf came into the yard.7) I came inside because there was a wolf in the yard.

Suppose we have been sitting on your back porch on a late summer afternoon. You go insideto fix some iced tea. You come back and your prized garden gnome is no longer at itsperch by the gazebo. What happened to the gnome, you ask. I answer with 5).

I have offered an explanation of the disappearance of your gnome, in terms of the activity ofan animalme. There is no question but that this explanation is causal. I am telling youwhat brought about the gnomes disappearance. My explanation cites a particularexercising a causal power. If I hadnt have thrown the gnome away, it wouldnt have beenin the trash. You could have presented the gnome from being in the trash from preventingme from acting. All the marks are present.

Now suppose we had been sitting out on the porch watching the antics of a squirrel gatheringnuts and burying them in your yard. You go inside to make some iced tea, come out, andsee that the squirrel is gone and that I look a bit shaken. What happened to the squirrel?you ask, and I say 6).

Here the activity of an animal is not just what does the explaining, but what is explained. Butthere is, I think, no denying that the explanation is causal. I am telling you what causedthe squirrel to run onto the roof. Again, all of the marks of causation we have noted arepresent.

There is an aspect to the structure of this case that was not present with the gnome. For thewolf to scare the squirrel away, the squirrel had to flee from the wolf, and for it to fleefrom the wolf, it had to be aware of the wolf. So awareness played a role here (whereas thegnome was aware of nothing). That means that the fact that the squirrel was aware of thewolfthat it, say, saw the wolfis a fact causally relevant to the squirrels running on theroof, and so might be cited in a causal explanation of its doing so.

But the availability of this causal explanation does not preclude the availability of anecological explanation framed in terms of the wolfs appearance.To the contrary. The role of awareness here is precisely not to screen off the surrounding

environment from having an impact on what the squirrel does. Rather, it is to enable thesurroundings to have particular kinds of effects on the squirrel. For example, it enables thepresence of a wolf to occasion flight. This point is essential for any sensible conception ofthe role of perception in enabling an animal to competently inhabit its environment. I willreturn to it.


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Everything that goes for 6) are goes for 7).7) can be used to frame a causal explanation of my coming inside. So understood, it says what

caused me to come in. There is an objective, non-constitutive connection at work here.There is derivativeness in time. The relevant counterfactual and interventionist criteria

are satisfied. We can even conceive the case in terms of the exercise of powers on the partof the cause: the wolf chased me off, drove me inside.And again, my perceptual awareness of the wolf does not prevent its presence itself from

having an effect upon me. To the contrary.

Or consider cases where the effects are not actions:

8) The squirrel is afraid because there is a wolf in the yard.9) I believe Im in danger because there is a sinister man from the past in my yard.

These are explanations of states of animals, not of things animals do. Once again, however, itis clear that they are naturally and intelligibly taken as causal. The wolf frightens the

squirrel. Etc.In the case of 9) the presence of the man in the yard led to my belief. If there had been no manthere would have been no belief. Etc.

6. Rational ecological explanationsI have argued, or perhaps better, worked to remind you of something that is anyway entirely

obvious: that 7) and 9) can be used to articulate causal explanations, and indeed inordinary contexts for their deployment it is natural to so construe them.

However, as many philosophers have observed, it is also true that 7) and 9) can be used to

couch rational explanations. Go back to 1) and 2). Instead of uttering those sentences inthose contexts, I might just have said 7) and 9). What are you doing here, you ask, and Imight say, I came in because there was a wolf outside, thereby providing, and beingunderstood to provide, my reason for coming inside.

As Hornsby and Hyman and others have pointed out, S !-ed because p is one form a

rational explanation can take, in which the reason for which S !s is said to be that p.And it is natural for you to so take it. It would be highly peculiar for you to follow up my

response by asking, But what was your reason for coming in, as it should be evident toyou I have just given it.

So our situation, then, is that 7) (to focus on that for a moment) can express an ecological

explanation of my coming inside, or a rational explanation, and indeed that both areextremely natural and plausible readings of 7) when it is uttered in just the sort of contextwe are now considering.

Now, according to both anti-psychologism and psychologism, rational explanations are neverecological explanations. So we must suppose that claims like 7) and 9) are, in the contextsin which they are typically given, open to a systematic ambiguity.


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When one is presented with such explanations, one will then need to resolve the followingquestion: Was that explanation meant to tell me what in the subjects environment causedher holding that belief or performing that action? Or was it meant to tell me the reason forwhich the subject has that belief or performed that action?

Presumably we will sometimes know which is meant and sometimes we will not, in any given

case. But our grasping the explanation offered will always depend upon coming down onone side or the other. We must adopt the ecological reading or the rational reading if weare to understand the intended explanation with which we have been provided. For eithermight be meant on an ordinary occasion for uttering 7) or 9), and they are not the same.

But in fact it seems clear that there is no such systematic ambiguity. We do not find ourselvesasking, when we hear an explanation like 7) or 9), how the explanation is to be taken. Youwould not ask yourself, when I utter 7) or 9) in the scenarios weve been discussing: Is heidentifying the presence of the wolf or man as the cause of his belief or action, or as thereason for it?

And that is because, I suggest, there is no such question. There are no alternatives here from

which you suppose you must choose. You take me as giving both the cause of, and myreason for, what I believe or do, and rightly so. The explanation is both rational andecological.

The following sort of reaction would be very puzzling on your part. You ask me why I camein so abruptly. I say, Because there was a wolf in the yard. You say, Sorry, just toclarifyare you saying that what caused you to come in was the presence of a wolf in theyard? I say, Yes, of course. Then you, say, I apologize; I should have been clearer: Iwanted to know what your reason was for coming in. Is it safe to assume that it is also thecase that your reason was that there was a wolf in the yard? Here I will just be baffled.You are attempting to hold apart two readings of my remark between which we do notrecognize a difference.

It is with respect to these kinds of cases an observation of William Dray has a particulardegree of force:

Is there no important difference, then, between saying of the action of a rational agent,As reason for doingxwasy, and saying The cause of As doingxwasy? Thedifference, I think, is one of approach, or point of view, or kind of inquiry. To say thefirst sort of thing isto adopt the point of view of an agent. To say the second is toadopt the point of view of a manipulatoralthough of one well aware that he isdealing with agents who act on rational considerations. (Dray, Laws and Explanation in

History, 1959, pp. 154-155)

Drays underlying thought here is that, if we take it that As reason for doing x was y, then tospeak of y as the cause of As doing x is not to change the subject; it is not to shift to adifferent kind of explanation. Rather, it is just because we suppose the reason to be thecause that identification of the reasonof the rational consideration on which A actsopens the door for various forms of causal reflection, such as, as we have mentionedbefore, the prospect of manipulation.


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Of the three views we have discussed, only ecologism can accommodate the points we havenoticed about this kind of case. Ecologism allows rational explanations to be ecological.

According to ecologism, in citing the reason for which S !s, we explain her !-ing by aciting a fact causally relevant to it. If then, her reason concerns what is happening, or is so,in her environment, then the resultant rational explanation will be ecological: it will be a

causal explanation that hones in on exogenous, environmentally situated factors in thecausal background to Ss !-ing.

I have formulated this argument in terms of the implausibility of discerning a certain kind ofambiguity in certain explanations of the form, S !ed or !s because p, an ambiguity thatwould have to exist if psychologism or anti-psychologism were correct.

But of course ecologism implies that however one formulates a rational explanation, it iscausal, and that goes in particular for rational explanations framed using the canonicalforms. Thus if you ask me what my reason was for coming inside, and I say, My reasonfor coming in was that there was a wolf in the yard, then ecologism tells us that I havegiven a causal explanation of my coming inside, in particular presenting as causally

relevant to my action the fact that there was a wolf outside.And I think we are now in a position to see the plausibility of that gloss on my remark. In

identifying the presence of the wolf as my reason for coming in, I tell you what caused meto do so.

I have formulated the cases I discuss first-personally, in which the subject offering theexplanation is the one whose action or belief is being explained. But everything I say heretranslates smoothly to third-personal cases. We can imagine a third person on the scene,who is the one who comes in from the outside. I, watching the scene through the window,am in a position to site the wolfs presence in the yard in explanation. And so on.

Once we see the point of the examples I have given, I think we can see that structurallyanalogous cases are exceedingly common.I came because you called me. Your face was so downcast I thought something terrible had

happened. Because the morning was very cold I thought you wouldnt come. Nora tookLakeshore because 94 was jammed. Rachel took in the lawn chairs when it started to rain.I stopped bidding on the chest when the price got over $500. The bar was crowded so weleft.

In ordinary contexts for their use, each of these statements is aptly understood to provide acausal explanation of beliefs and actions. And each is aptly understood to provide arational explanation. And there is no choice to be made between these interpretations.

The p, so S !-ed construction provides for particularly stark instances of this. We might callsentences that exploit this construction to the purpose of rational explanation Hemingwaysentences, after their greatest, or at least most fervent, practitioner. I include someexamples on the handout, all drawn fromA Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway sentences.I got up and stood at the door to see if it was raining in but it wasn't, so I left the dooropen.


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We were supposed to attack, but they had not brought up any new troops so hethought that was off too.When it was dark there was no use watching any more, so I went over to Piani.

I thought Catherine would come by but she did not come, so I hung the papers backon the rack, paid for my beer and went up the street to look for her.

No one answered so I turned the handle and went in.The nurse did not come out, so after a while I went to the door and opened it verysoftly and looked in.The men stood around but no one was leaving, so they went out. I drank anotherbeer.

Hemingway wrote essentially nothing but causal narratives: this caused this caused this andthen I died, or she died. The end. But one generally needs to throw in information aboutpeoples reasons when writing a novel, and Hemingway sentences provide a way of doingso while maintaining the hectic pace of the one-thing-after-another narrative. A

Hemingway sentence tells us that p was the cause of Ss !-ing. But it also conveys that the

fact that p was Ss reason for !-ing. It seems evident that these are not two disconnectedpieces of information.

7. Reasons as causesEcologism as I have formulated it, like psychologism and anti-psychologism, just states some

features rational explanations have. It does not imply that those features are sufficient foran explanations being rational.

To begin to fill out the picture, I want to briefly discuss a further condition that I think anyplausible development of ecologism must accept.

The further condition is this.The principle of rational causation:When the fact that p is Ss reason for !-ing, the fact

that p is causally relevant to Ss !-ing because it is a (normative) reason for S to !.(Exception must be made for cases exemplified by (12).)

When I cite the fact that you had a downcast expression as my reason for believing thatsomething terrible had happened, I am saying not merely that your downcast expressioncaused my belief. I am saying that it caused my belief because your having such anexpression was a reason for me to believe thatbecause it was a consideration speaking infavor of that belief. Here the relevant notion of reason is normative as some philosopherslike to say: a reason is a justifier, favorer.

The reasonsfor whichwe believe what we do and act as we do causethose beliefs and actions invirtue of being reasonsforthem.

Neither psychologism nor anti-psychologism can accept the principle of rational causation.

According to anti-psychologism, that a fact is ones reason for !-ing does not imply that the

fact was causally relevant to your !-ing. And if it were, its causal relevance would be in


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competition with its rational relevance for purposes of explanation. In citing one form ofrelevance, we are not thereby citing the other.

According to psychologism, rational explanations do cite facts as causes. But the facts that arecauses are not the facts that are reasons: according to psychologism, it is the fact that S

believes that p, and not the fact that p, that is portrayed as causally relevant by the claimthat S !-ed for the reason that p. There is thus no rational causing here in the sense of ourprinciple. There is no fact that is causally relevant in virtue of being a reason for what iscaused.

A proponent of psychologism might attempt to make room for the fact that p to itself havecausal relevance by supposing that the fact that p might cause the belief that p. We wouldhave effect have a two-part story of the causation of Ss !-ing: the fact that p causes S to

believe that p, which in turn causes S to !.But crucially, psychologism cannot allow that the first of these two causal relations is itself

rational. For psychologism the causally relevant fact in a rational explanation is alwayspsychological, always a matter of an attitude on the part of the thinker. Psychologism

cannot accommodate the principle of rational causation: the rational causal relationshipnever reaches out beyond our psychology to the worldly facts that are actually ourreasons.

The because in the principle of rational causation is not itself a causal because.

Nor is the force of the principle that the causal relevance of a reason for which S !s consists

in its being a (normative) reason for S to !. That would entirely miss one of the mainpoints of this talk: such a reductive analysis of causal relevance cannot accommodate themarks of causation I have been insisting on.

The force of the principle is rather this: that we can achieve an understanding of why a given

fact should be a rational cause of Ss !-ing only by recognizing that it is a reason for S to!. The facts having that normative status matters crucially for its doing that particularcausal work.

Rational causation is, if you like, causation by reasonsasreasons,asnormatively freighteditems. This is the kind or form of causation that rational causation is. Or to put the mattera bit differently, the principle spells out the kind of sensitivity or responsiveness exhibitedby a being whose states and doings are rationally explicable: it is a sensitivity to reasons assuch.

I am going to say a bit to attempt to illuminate the character of this responsiveness and situateit in a larger conception of the relevant form of life. But I am going to simplify my

treatment rather drastically by setting aside human beings and focusing on other animals.In human beings, the exercise of rationality is essentially self-conscious, and that point iscrucial in accounting for the import of explanations of human thought and activity thatrepresent them as exercises of rationality.

But there are features of human rationality that arguably carry over to the case of otheranimals, and so there is arguably a point to supposing such animals act, and perhaps eventhink, for reasons. It is in fact easier to see the kind of basic structures I want to bring outin that case.


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Consider an animal like a squirrel. On what we might call our ordinary conception of animallife, we regard animals like squirrels as, first, in perceptual contact with theirsurroundings, and second, as acting in the pursuit of goals.

Let us first focus on the second of these elements of the ordinary conception.Squirrels act to avoid danger and acquire sustenance, to engage in reproduction, to ensure thesurvival of their young. And they have various subsidiary goals in virtue of the particularmeans that it in is in their nature to deploy when pursuing the ground floor goals ofsurvival and reproduction. For example, squirrels bury nuts to ensure that they areadequately fed during the winter.

The theory of evolution by natural selection provides enormous insight into why animals havethe ground-floor goals of survival and reproduction, and of why particular species shouldhave come to possess the various strategies they do for pursuing those goals.

But it is worth noting that people conceived squirrels as goal-pursuers before the theory ofevolution came on the scene, and that people ignorant of evolution these days, such as

young children, regard squirrels as goal-pursuers. Our ordinary conception of animal lifeis a fundamental and central component of our basic scheme for conceiving the worldaround us, one that may be supplemented by and improved upon by various kinds ofscientific theorizing, but that is not grounded in such theorizing.

Because we conceive squirrels as goal-pursuers, we can say things like this:

10) The squirrel ran onto the roof to escape the wolf.

And I think there is no decisive objection to reformulating that claim this way:

11) The squirrels reason for running onto the roof was to escape the wolf.

To allow this transition is to suppose that having a goal can justify, speak in favor, of doingsomething that would achieve that goal, and to suppose that it does so in this case.

Since to act for reasons is to have the capacity of rationality, to speak this way is to allow thatsquirrels possess a kind of rationality.

Now, we might reformulate 11) using a that-clause to specify the squirrels reason:

12) The squirrels reason for running onto the roof was that he was escaping from thewolf.

I would not wish to endorse an ecologistic reading of 12). In the example, 12) is true onlyinsofar as it is a way of stating 11), and the infinitival clause in 11) should not be

understood as speaking of a fact that is causally relevant, in the sense at stake in this talk,to the squirrels running onto the roof. The independence condition is not satisfied. Thesquirrels running onto the roof is his escaping from the wolf, or at any rate a part of it.The latter is not a cause of the former.

We might wish to call the squirrels escaping the wolf the final cause of the squirrels runningonto the roof, but then, again, we would need to be careful to speak of efficient causationwhere I have just been speaking of causation.


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When I noted that there is a class of rational explanations of action to which ecologism doesnot apply, I meant cases such as these, cases in which talk of reasons captures in-order-torelations. These explanations appeal to teleological structures.

This is not to say that there is no causation, in the sense I have been concerned with,described

in 11).If we take seriously the idea of a causal power, then we will want to say that the squirrelsrunning onto the roof is a case of its causing something. What does it cause? One answeris that it causes itself to be on the roofits being on the roof is the result of its exercisingits causal power of running.

We might think that an action is, just as such, a causing. We might then enlist the action inexplanation of things that it causes. We can, for example, causally explain why the squirrelis on the roof by citing its running up there (just as we can causally explain why thegarden gnome is in the trash by citing my tossing it there).

An explanation like 11) teleologically relates two such causal powers exercised in the action.That is evidently one form the rational explanations of actions can take. Philosophers of

action in recent years have had insightful things to say about this form of rationalexplanation of actions.

But it is not the only form.Recall the first of the two elements of our ordinary conception of animal life: the animals

perceptual awareness of its environment.A squirrel, for example, might be aware of a wolf in its vicinity. Some philosophers wish to

say that a squirrel can be aware thata wolf, or least a potential predator or threat, isnearby.

And of course, it is because the wolf is nearby, and the squirrel is aware of its presence, that itruns away.

Recognizing the causal and teleological structure within the action of the squirrels runningonto the roof should not blind us to the causation that comes from outside that action. It isthe wolfs presence that sets the whole escapade off to begin with, and that may continueto shape what the squirrel does as it proceeds with its flight.

The idea of an animal as a goal-pursuer goes hand-in-hand with the idea of an animal as aperceiver. Perception furnishes awareness of circumstances that bear on the animalspursuit of its goals. And it responds to those circumstances, if all goes well, in ways thatfacilitate its pursuit of those goals.

These thoughts make it reasonable to say that in light of the squirrels goals, the circumstancesof which it is aware constitute reasons to do particular things, and furthermore, that it isbecause the circumstances constitute those reasons that it responds to them by doing whatit does.

And so we might say:

13) The squirrels reason for running onto the roof was that there was a wolf in theyard.


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This claim is a counterpart to 11), and not in competition with it. 11) and 13) record tworelated but distinct aspects of the full story of the squirrels agency. 11) concerns theteleological structure of the squirrels action. 13) concerns the aspects of the squirrelsenvironment to which its action is a response. Both kinds of claim make the sense they dofor us in light of our conception of the animal as pursuing goals and shaping its pursuit

given its awareness of what is going on around it. We may choose, in our explanation ofwhat the squirrel is up to on a given occasion, to focus on one or the other of these aspects.This generates the prospect of two kinds of rational explanation of action. One kind iscausal; the other is, if you like, final causal.

Note that in the case of states like belief and fear, for which there can be reasons, we haveonly the one side of this causal story to tell. Believing and fearing lack an internalteleological structure akin to that possessed by an action. If we to find rationality doingwork here, it can be only in determining the impacts of the world upon the animal. Hereecologism rules the field.

In the case of the squirrel or other un-self-conscious animal, the best case for discerningrationality of this form will lie with causal explanations exemplified by 14):

14) The squirrels reason for being afraid is that there is a wolf in the yard.

The basic thought at which we have arrived is simple. Psychologism and anti-psychologismalike miss the significance and structure of our ordinary conception of animal life,according to which animals respond to, and so are causally affected by, environmentalcircumstances in certain waysbecausetheir goals give them reason to respond to thosecircumstances in those ways. Rational explanations of animal activity are explanations interms of that conception. Hence they are at once both normative (as both psychologismand anti-psychologism try to acknowledge) and ecological (as both psychologism and anti-

psychologism, in their differing ways, must deny).

As I noted, in focusing on what is common to squirrels and human beings, I am leavingimportant things out about the latter case. In particular, the role of self-consciousness. Inthe case of a human being acting or believing for a reason, facts are causes not merelybecause they are reasons for what they cause, but because the human being takes them tobe such reasons for her. Rational thought and activity in a human being, a person,essentially involves the personsacknowledgementof the normative connections among causeand caused. This is not by any stretch a small difference between animals that are personsand animals that arent. It constitutes the personal form of mindedness. 20th-centuryphilosophy of mind used to realize this, before the ascendancy of cognitive science led

philosophers of mind to blur or ignore distinctions that were once recognized asphilosophically fundamental. (Among other things, the self-consciousness of humanrationality bears crucially on the issue of freedom and causality.)

Those familiar with McDowells talk of responsiveness to reasons as such should thus note a(perhaps only terminological) difference with what I say here. A squirrel, I want to say,can be responsive to reasons as such. McDowell says that a squirrel is responsive toreasons, but not as such (Conceptual Capacities in Perception). The difference is that he


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assumes that responsiveness to reasons as such must involverecognitionon the part of theanimal of a reason as a reason. Whereas I want to speak of responsiveness to reasons assuch wherever we can view an animal as responding to circumstances by doing certainthings because those circumstances give it reason to do those things. We do not need tosuppose that the animal itself conceptualizes these circumstances as reasons to make sense

of this possibility, just as we do not need to suppose it recognizes itself as a goal-pursuer tointelligibly credit it with goals.

8. Reasons and reality8.1 Subjectivity and Marcus account of believing for a reason

In this final section, I turn to the other set of reasons for favoring ecologism I mentioned at theoutset, having to do with the challenge of integrating the free exercise of rationalcapacities into our conception of the causal order of the natural world. I will only make astart here on cashing out those reasons, by focusing on how an anti-psychologistic accountof rational explanation falls short in just this respect.

As I noted earlier, a fundamental challenge for anti-psychologistic accounts of rationalexplanation is to say enough about the nature of the relationship R so as to make itplausible that there really is room for an alternative here to a causal view of theexplanatory force of claims about the reasons for which people act and think.

Once we are clear that at least some of the cases in which S !s for the reason that p will be

cases in which the fact that p is causally relevant to Ss !-ing, and so that there already isan explanatorily significant relationship obtaining between the fact in question and the !-ing in question, this challenge becomes still greater. For even if we should succeed in

isolating some further relationship between the fact and the !-ing, the question will arisewhy we care so much, in our ordinary thought and reflection, about that relationship,when there is already an immensely important and explanatorily fundamental connectionin play.

The force of this worry is not obvious in the abstract, so it will help to consider a particularversion of anti-psychologism. Here I will put the objectivity condition to work.

Marcus in his recent book offers IMO the richest and most fully worked out version of anti-psychologism to date (see my blurb on the back!). His guiding thought is that while arational explanation is does not appeal to efficient causation, it is nonetheless a non-constitutive explanation of why the would is the way it is such that understanding theexplanation amounts to knowledge of a real connection between facts (p. 162). This

suffices for it to count as causal in a suitably relaxed sense.A causal explanation isa non-constitutive explanation of why the world is the way itis such that understanding the explanation amounts to knowledge of a real connectionbetween facts. (Marcus,Rational Causation, 2012, p. 162)

As evinced by this quote, Marcus thinks that we ought to extend the idea of causalexplanation to include any explanation that meets this criterion. He wants to reserve theterm efficient causation for a causal explanation that specifically does the work of


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showing why the world is as it is by saying something about what, as he puts it, brought itabout or sustains it. In his view, rational explanations, although causal, do not do thatwork.

Marcus takes it as definitional of efficient causation that efficient causal relationships aresubsumed by laws of nature, with such laws understood to pick out patterns that obtain

with natural necessity. I did not list this as a mark of causation in my sense: indeed, it isperhaps the only important idea about causation in the tradition that I regard as entirelymisconceived. So that might suggest Marcuss broader notion of causation can beassimilated to my notion of causation.

But it cannot, for several reasons. I will focus on one: as exemplified by his own theory,Marcus does not require causal relationships to be objective.

Marcuss basic thought is that to believe or do something for a reason is to, as he puts it,represent a certain connection to obtain between the reason and the action or belief.

To focus first on the case of belief, Marcus suggests that to believe that q for the reason that p

is to represent q as to be believed as a consequence of the to-be-believedness of p.To believe p for reason q consists in the thinkers representing p to herself as . (Rational Causation, p.32)

To believe that p for the reasons that q is to represent a certain connection to obtain betweenthe belief that p and q, namely that the belief that p is in some way sanctioned by the factthat believing q is itself sanctioned. Marcus tells us that to represent this connection is torecognize a binding obligation to believe that p, and that to recognize the bindingobligation is to self-consciously believe in conformity to it (p. 32).

Marcus, as quoted above, wants his account to represent rational causation as a realconnection between facts. But just how real is the connection he identifies?

One important strand in the history of philosophical reflection on reality concerns objectivity.There are many dimensions to objectivity. Arguably the most fundamental lies in thedistinction between how things are and how things seem. An objective subject matter, inthis sense, is one in which how things are and how things seem can come apart. Asubjective subject matter would thus be one in which that is not so.

Tightening this up a bit yields:

A property P issubjectiveif xs having P consists in a subjects (or subjects)

experiencing or believing x to have P (or properties suitably related to P).A relation R issubjectiveif xs bearing R to y consists in a subjects (or subjects)experiencing or believing R (or suitably related relationships) to obtain between x andy.

Four observations about these definitions.First I mean talk of believing to be proxy for talk of doxastic attitudes in general, attitudes

that consist in things striking one or seeming to one to be a certain way.


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Second, the definition allows (to take the case of properties for simplicity) for the properties xis believed or experienced to posses to differ from the property P whose presence issecured by those very beliefs and experiences.

For example, there is a view of color according to which being red, say, consists in being

disposed to produce a perception of red in normal observers in normal conditions. But thetwo occurrences of red in this formulation are to be understood to speak of differentproperties: the property that one perceives is not the same as the property that an objecthas in virtue of being disposed to produce that perceptioneven though we use the wordred in both cases. At the same time, the two properties picked out by red areunderstood to be closely related to each other, such that both count as, albeit in differentways, color properties.

(How exactly to decide what the relationship between the properties ought to be, such thatthe experience of the one could intelligibly be understood to constitute the presence of theother, is one of the major challenges facing their proponents. On the other hand, it is oftensupposed that one of the main advantages of such a view is its avoidance of circularity or

regress, such as might appear to beset a view which takes the presence of P to beconstituted by the perception of the very property P.)Stroud discusses a view like this at length in his book on color, and, correctly I think, treats it

as a canonical form of subjectivism. For on such a view, an objects having a color isconstitutively a matter of how it strikes people color-wiseof what color experiences orjudgments it occasions. And it is just the question of whether a state of affairs bears thisconstitutive dependence on how things strike people that is at stake in the manifolddebates about subjectivism in metaphysics and ethics.

Third, the definitions leaves open whichpeople have the beliefs and experiences, and whentheydo (once, habitually, etc.) Different ways of fixing these variables will yield differentdegrees of subjectivity. At one extreme, we may take the presence of a certain property tobe a function of a normal tendency toward certain beliefs or experiences under normalconditions. This yields a robustly intersubjective and dispositional form of subjectivity. Atthe other extreme, we may suppose that a single one-off belief or experience suffices forthe presence of the propertycertain ways of developing this approach yield radical formsof relativistic subjectivity.

Fourth, that a person has a particular experience or belief does not automatically count as asubjective property or state of that person. It would be such only on the view that oneshaving an experience or belief consists in ones (or at least someones) believing orexperiencing oneself to have that belief, or to have properties in some way intelligiblyrelated to having that that belief. For example, the (peculiar) view that believing that pconsists in believing that one believes that p would count as a subjectivist account of belief.But one certainly need not hold such a view. (The weaker and more plausible view thatbelieving that p implies believing that one believes that p does not entail that believing thatp is a subjective property by our definition.)

This reflects the fact that the notion of subjectivity at stake here is tied to the seems/isdistinction. It would be a large error to confuse this notion of subjectivity with the notionof subjectivity according to which a state or configuration that is essentially a state or


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configuration of a subject is just as such a subjective state or configuration. These aredifferent notions; my concern is with the former.

Having noted these points, consider the view that to believe that p for the reason that q is tobelieve that the proposition that p is to be believed in virtue of the to-be-believedness of q.

This is a very strongly subjectivist account of believing for a reason. It takes believing pfor the reason that q to consist in a persons (in fact, the very person whose believing for areason is at issue) believing a certain relationship to obtain between the fact that q and thebelief that p. The relationship is one of doxastic normativity: it is one of justifying orobligating belief. The thrust of the view is that relationships of believing for a reason areconstituted by perceptions of relationships of doxastic normativity among the relevantitems.

Whether Marcuss view of believing for a reason counts as subjectivist in this way dependsupon whether the representing he speaks of is best understood as believing, or at least assome kind of doxastic attitude or stance. I take it that it is, for two reasons.

First, there are three possible answers to the question of what kind of representationalattitude or stance might play the role Marcuss account identifies. Either therepresentational stance is some variety of doxastic stance, or it is some variety ofintentional or agential stance, or it is some third kind of stance. Marcus does not do thework necessary to bring a version of the third answer into view: indeed, he says almostnothing about what kind of representational stance he has in mind. The second answer isabsurd: the idea cannot be that to believe p for reason q is, say, to intend to bring it aboutthat p is to be believed as a consequence of the to-be-believedness of q (perhaps byarranging the world so that q indeed counts as evidence that p). This leaves the firstoption: the attitude is believing, or judging, or being of the view, or having some otherstance that is a matter of how things strike one.

Second, insofar as Marcus says anything to indicate what kind of representational stance hehas in mind, he does so by using turns of phrase that fix the stance as doxastic. Forexample, he speaks of regarding or viewing p as to be believed as a consequence of theto-be-believedness of q.

The upshot is that Marcuss theory of the rational causation of belief is indeed subjectivist: itholds that there is nothing more to such causation than someones believing or regarding acertain doxastic-normative relationship to obtain between the reason and the belief itcauses.

I suggest that this, contrary to Marcuss intentions, renders rational causation quite a bit lessreal than we should want to understand it to be for purposes of integrating rationalityinto our conception of the natural world.

Before I try to say something about why that is so, let us look briefly at Marcuss account ofrational causation of action, of acting for a reason. Here the issues are a bit morecomplicated. But the complication helps to isolate just what is at issue in the question ofwhether it is desirable to make sense of rational causation as objective.

8.2 Subjectivity and Marcus account of acting for a reason


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the work to bring into view a third alternative. So again, our choice is between doxasticand intentional/agential representation.

And, though, this may seem surprising on its face, we must once again suppose that therepresenting is doxastic. That is because the content of the representation is, Marcusinsists, normative. That !-ing is to be done, if it is, is a normative fact about !-ing, akin to

its being the case that one ought to !. And so if the representation were an intention, itwould be the intention to bring about or make so the normative circumstance that !-ing isto be done. An intention of this form is conceivable: I might endeavor to make it the case

that !-ing is to be done by, say, promising someone that I will !. But that is surely not

what Marcus has in mind. Intending to !cannot consist in an intention to arrange the

world so as to make it the case that one ought to !.

The only alternative left is that Marcus equates intending to !with (evidently a special kind

of) belief or judgment that !-ing is to be done.

Views of intention of broadly this character are in fact common in (otherwise highlyadmirable) recent work emanating from or associated with Pittsburgh. I think such viewsare unacceptable, in virtue of failing to respect the crucial Anscombian/Aristotelianprinciple that practical reasoning is not reasoning to the truth of a proposition (normativeor otherwise). One symptom of this failure is that these views run into the same kinds ofdifficulties as do expressivist theories of practical-reasoning talk (such as Gibbards),despite the otherwise large differences in the orientation and commitments of theirproponents from those who go in for expressivist theoriz

bridges--ecology of reasons talk for berlin and leipzig

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