There seem to be two lines of
criticism of arguments from reason. One is to argue, a la Moore and Anscombe,
that causal antecedents of belief are irrelevant to rationality, because
reasons are not causes. The other is to argue that, along the lines of Haldane
and Churchland, that mechanistic causation and rational inference are
compatible, explaining the confluence in terms of Darwinian survival advantage.
The former line of critique denies that reasons are causes, the other claims
that reasons are causes, but are a species of ordinary physical causation.
2 comments:
VR:
"One is to argue, a la Moore and Anscombe, that causal antecedents of belief are irrelevant to rationality, because reasons are not causes."
There is a variety of this which I sometimes favor, which is to say that there are two independent causal chains that are in synchrony when a physically based thing/book/person/computer/etc. is functioning in a way that is rational: a physical causal chain and a rational causal chain. These come apart: a book be written incorrectly. a computer have a bug, or the person can be in error, and at that time the thing may still have its physical causal chain intact (the page is not torn, the computer is running), but will have fault in its rational (reasons-based) causal structure.
VR:
"the other claims that reasons are causes, but are a species of ordinary physical causation"
This is incorrect in my view. The two causal chains are not connected because they are both physical. They are however superimposed in spacetime. In the case of the text with a rational argument printed, an intentional design will have structured the physical so as to have a rational causal chain run within its physical states, as seen by the subjective observer.
The proper evolutionary-origins claim would in the second case could then be that physical causes originally started the rational causal chains that people see in their reasoning, sort of as an emergent property dualism? I am not sure how that jump works.
"One is to argue, a la Moore and Anscombe, that causal antecedents of belief are irrelevant to rationality, because reasons are not causes. "
What's your response to that?
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