Joshua Knobe argues that the various moral inflections of our folk psychology are part of “the competencies people use to understand the world” (target article, sect. 4, para. 1), a hypothesis that he contrasts with the claim that “certain additional factors are somehow ‘biasing’ or ‘distorting’ people's cognitive processes and thereby allowing their intuitions to be affected by moral judgments” (sect. 4, para. 1). However, Knobe really never makes clear exactly what makes something “inside” or “outside” a competence. Clearly, both he and his past interlocutors have taken motivated cognition and pragmatic factors to count as “interfering,” rather than as part of the competence. But what can ground such judgments? We worry that any non-stipulative way of answering this question that plausibly excludes motivation and pragmatic considerations, can also be used to insist that moral considerations are “outside of” or “external to” the competence under consideration. We are not disputing the empirical facts that he does muster; rather, our concern is with a further theoretical interpretation he wants to place on those facts, which we argue is unwarranted.
One natural way to circumscribe the boundaries of a competence is bottom-up, by appealing to a fairly literal, physical notion of containment provided by neuroanatomy. But neither Knobe nor his interlocutors muster any such neuroanatomical evidence, so this sort of approach is not a good contender.
A more promising way of approaching questions of competence is to begin with a high-level characterization of the function that a cognitive process is supposed to compute, and on this basis attempt to specify an algorithm for computing that function and to address questions of actual physical implementation (see Mallon Reference Mallon and Sinnott-Armstrong2007). Once we are clear about what task a cognitive process is supposed to execute, constraints or problems in the execution of the task can be identified. According to this top-down approach to competence, then, what allows us to describe something as interfering with a cognitive process is a substantive account of the work the process is supposed to be doing.
The problem with taking this kind of approach here is that there isn't a settled account of what sort of job our folk psychological judgments are supposed to do. What we have are two different models, each of which stipulates what function is supposedly being calculated by our folk psychological judgments, and thus, what is and is not part of our competence with such judgments. On Knobe's model, pragmatics and motivation may indeed properly lie outside the competence. But on his opponent's model, the exact same line of reasoning would apply to the source of the morality effects that Knobe is appealing to. There is no “supposed to” to be found within those sorts of findings, and so where to draw an inside/outside line is, thus far, an empirical free move – stipulated, not discovered.
One can contrast the situation regarding our folk-psychological capacities with the comparatively much better established taxonomy of competences in both language and vision. For example, linguists are used to separating out the semantic, syntactic, phonological, and pragmatic components of our overall linguistic capacities. This division has proved empirically fruitful, and it is grounded in bottom-up considerations as well (such as deficit patterns due to various lesions). In debates about language, then, it makes sense that showing a phenomenon to be a proper part of one member of that partition is thereby a good reason to reject it as part of some other member. Interestingly, we see exactly this dynamic in earlier stages of the debate about the side-effect effect, which for several years was explicitly framed in terms of whether there was a moral dimension to the semantic component of our “intentionally” discourse. And so it made sense, in the context of the debate so construed, to take a pragmatic explanation of the side-effect effect to preempt an explanation of it in semantic terms. The existing framework legitimated ruling pragmatics to be “outside” of semantics. But in this target article, Knobe switches from a debate about semantic competence to a debate about competence in some abstract sense. And we think Knobe has made the right decision to move away from the semantic debate, in part because of some Quinean pessimism about certain forms of conceptual analysis (see Alexander et al. Reference Alexander, Mallon and Weinberg2010). But more importantly, Knobe's own favored account (sect. 5) locates the source of this moral inflection in a mechanism for the allocation of cognitive resources, selecting different alternatives for cognitive attention. He writes, “The basic idea is just that people's intuitions … rely on a comparison between the actual world and certain alternative possibilities. Because people's moral judgments influence the selection of alternative possibilities, these moral judgments end up having a pervasive impact” (sect. 5.1, para. 8). But this influence on cognitive attention would count as part of general cognition, but not part of semantics, in the traditional linguistic taxonomy, and thus would have counted as an “external” causal factor in the old debate.
Given his current choice of hypothesis, this shift away from a specifically semantic framing of the issues to a more generic one makes sense. Unfortunately, in doing so, he has abandoned one set of resources for underwriting an inside/outside distinction without replacing them with something else. The challenge he faces is how to substantiate such a distinction in a way that both (1) isn't merely stipulative and (2) puts pragmatics and motivation on the “outside” and cognitive attention on the “inside.”
We think that, in order to do so, other sorts of evidence will be needed than those that Knobe appeals to in his article. Perhaps an evolutionary or teleological argument could ground a top-down approach here; or perhaps neuroanatomical evidence could ground a bottom-up approach; or perhaps – and where we would place our bets – further re-refinement of the basic question is still in order.
Joshua Knobe argues that the various moral inflections of our folk psychology are part of “the competencies people use to understand the world” (target article, sect. 4, para. 1), a hypothesis that he contrasts with the claim that “certain additional factors are somehow ‘biasing’ or ‘distorting’ people's cognitive processes and thereby allowing their intuitions to be affected by moral judgments” (sect. 4, para. 1). However, Knobe really never makes clear exactly what makes something “inside” or “outside” a competence. Clearly, both he and his past interlocutors have taken motivated cognition and pragmatic factors to count as “interfering,” rather than as part of the competence. But what can ground such judgments? We worry that any non-stipulative way of answering this question that plausibly excludes motivation and pragmatic considerations, can also be used to insist that moral considerations are “outside of” or “external to” the competence under consideration. We are not disputing the empirical facts that he does muster; rather, our concern is with a further theoretical interpretation he wants to place on those facts, which we argue is unwarranted.
One natural way to circumscribe the boundaries of a competence is bottom-up, by appealing to a fairly literal, physical notion of containment provided by neuroanatomy. But neither Knobe nor his interlocutors muster any such neuroanatomical evidence, so this sort of approach is not a good contender.
A more promising way of approaching questions of competence is to begin with a high-level characterization of the function that a cognitive process is supposed to compute, and on this basis attempt to specify an algorithm for computing that function and to address questions of actual physical implementation (see Mallon Reference Mallon and Sinnott-Armstrong2007). Once we are clear about what task a cognitive process is supposed to execute, constraints or problems in the execution of the task can be identified. According to this top-down approach to competence, then, what allows us to describe something as interfering with a cognitive process is a substantive account of the work the process is supposed to be doing.
The problem with taking this kind of approach here is that there isn't a settled account of what sort of job our folk psychological judgments are supposed to do. What we have are two different models, each of which stipulates what function is supposedly being calculated by our folk psychological judgments, and thus, what is and is not part of our competence with such judgments. On Knobe's model, pragmatics and motivation may indeed properly lie outside the competence. But on his opponent's model, the exact same line of reasoning would apply to the source of the morality effects that Knobe is appealing to. There is no “supposed to” to be found within those sorts of findings, and so where to draw an inside/outside line is, thus far, an empirical free move – stipulated, not discovered.
One can contrast the situation regarding our folk-psychological capacities with the comparatively much better established taxonomy of competences in both language and vision. For example, linguists are used to separating out the semantic, syntactic, phonological, and pragmatic components of our overall linguistic capacities. This division has proved empirically fruitful, and it is grounded in bottom-up considerations as well (such as deficit patterns due to various lesions). In debates about language, then, it makes sense that showing a phenomenon to be a proper part of one member of that partition is thereby a good reason to reject it as part of some other member. Interestingly, we see exactly this dynamic in earlier stages of the debate about the side-effect effect, which for several years was explicitly framed in terms of whether there was a moral dimension to the semantic component of our “intentionally” discourse. And so it made sense, in the context of the debate so construed, to take a pragmatic explanation of the side-effect effect to preempt an explanation of it in semantic terms. The existing framework legitimated ruling pragmatics to be “outside” of semantics. But in this target article, Knobe switches from a debate about semantic competence to a debate about competence in some abstract sense. And we think Knobe has made the right decision to move away from the semantic debate, in part because of some Quinean pessimism about certain forms of conceptual analysis (see Alexander et al. Reference Alexander, Mallon and Weinberg2010). But more importantly, Knobe's own favored account (sect. 5) locates the source of this moral inflection in a mechanism for the allocation of cognitive resources, selecting different alternatives for cognitive attention. He writes, “The basic idea is just that people's intuitions … rely on a comparison between the actual world and certain alternative possibilities. Because people's moral judgments influence the selection of alternative possibilities, these moral judgments end up having a pervasive impact” (sect. 5.1, para. 8). But this influence on cognitive attention would count as part of general cognition, but not part of semantics, in the traditional linguistic taxonomy, and thus would have counted as an “external” causal factor in the old debate.
Given his current choice of hypothesis, this shift away from a specifically semantic framing of the issues to a more generic one makes sense. Unfortunately, in doing so, he has abandoned one set of resources for underwriting an inside/outside distinction without replacing them with something else. The challenge he faces is how to substantiate such a distinction in a way that both (1) isn't merely stipulative and (2) puts pragmatics and motivation on the “outside” and cognitive attention on the “inside.”
We think that, in order to do so, other sorts of evidence will be needed than those that Knobe appeals to in his article. Perhaps an evolutionary or teleological argument could ground a top-down approach here; or perhaps neuroanatomical evidence could ground a bottom-up approach; or perhaps – and where we would place our bets – further re-refinement of the basic question is still in order.