A Critique of the Classical Model of Rationality

In his novel “Rationality in Action”, Searle attempts to expose the fundamental weaknesses within the dominant theory of reason in the Western tradition while positing an alternative which supports a self as an autonomous agent. This topic has partially been discussed in my post involving Frankfurt’s second order desires. However, Searle’s work would benefit from a more thorough description which contrasts the Classical Model with his revisionist account.

His main points are summarized as follows:
1) The Classical Model, which holds that rational actions are caused by beliefs and desires, fails to account for the experience of the gap between intentional states and the decision itself. We cannot simply sit back and let the causes act upon you. Rather, you must choose a reason upon which to act. What fills the gap? In a Sartrean style he states, “Nothing. Nothing fills the gap”. (p.17) On the contrary, typically only irrational actions contain a set of beliefs and desires which are causally sufficient reasons for acting, such as when a person is in a grip of an addiction.

2) Rationality is not a separate faculty but rather is tantamount to possessing capacities for language, thought, and intentionality. You can only have rationality where there is the possibility of being irrational. Similarly, only a moral agent has the possibility of being immoral. That is, only an agent who had the possibility to do otherwise where is actions were not causally determined. Thus, a clinically insane person is removed from standards of moral assessment precisely because he is no longer in control of his behavior.

3) Weakness of will is a common feature of rationality which cannot be accounted for under the Classical Model where the causes of an action set up sufficient conditions for its completion. This is a feature of the gap which is due to the possibilities open to the agent.

4) Contrary to the Classical Model, there are desire-independent reasons for acting. This is what sets us apart from Chimpanzees. Under the original model, agents must appeal to a desire in their current motivational set for acting. However, this has the absurd consequence that no one can have a reason for acting unless they currently have an intentional state for such action. Thus, in the case of a smoker who has a desire to smoke cigarettes, it is perfectly rational under the Classical Model to do so even with the recognition that the behavior will likely result in early death and such a smoker will not want to suffer this fate. (p.129) In short, the Classical Model cannot account for forward planning and evaluation.

5) Unlike the Classical Model which holds that one must have a set of compatible desires, Searle shows that it is common to have incompatible and conflicting desires and it is in fact the task of practical reason to reconcile. The real difficulty is determining what you really want to do. In contrast, the Classical Model is simply means to ends reasoning. The desires are assumed to be consistent and the task is determining ends for satisfaction.

For Searle, rationality then must require a robust and irreducible notion of the self. He states, “Neither a Humean bundle nor a Strawsonian “person” having both mental and physical properties, nor even a Frankfurt-style person who has second-order desires about his first-order desires is by itself sufficient to account for agency.” (p. 91)

Moreover, the capacity for language is essential as assertives, directives, and commissives (promises) involved in speech acts are necessary for desire- independent reasons for action. Searle argues that inherent to the structure of such speech acts is normativity. This is because nearly all speech acts involve a commitment of some sort and have the possibility of going wrong. He argues, “The world does indeed consist of facts that are largely independent of us, but once you start representing those fact, with either direction of fit, you already have norms, and those norms are binding on the agent. All intentionality has a normative structure.” (p.182) Assertions, such as the statement, “The cat is on the mat” commits the speaker to the truth of the statement and has a propositional content which has conditions of satisfaction in the world. The principle “You ought to tell the truth” is internal to the notion of an assertion; there is no gap between the statement and a commitment to truth. Similarly, the speech act of promising is a commitment to future action. The obligation and normative structure is internal to the speech act itself. Why? An insincere promise is only intelligible in light of the understanding that a promise is binding upon an agent. He states, “Once I have made a promise, it is not open to me to say, “Yes, I made the promise, but I do not see why that places me under an obligation.” Similarly, if I said “It is raining, it is not open to me to say, “Yes, I said that but I do not see why that constitutes making a statement.” (p.179) The importance of this fact is that the Classical Model treats obligation as external from promising, thereby making it impossible for an agent to act under the concept of duty separate from desire. In Searle’s view speech acts such as promises create desire-independent reasons for acting which function as a form of external motivator. In this case, the reason (obligation) acts as the source of the desire, rather than the desire functioning as a cause of action.

How do you get an Ought from an Is?

This question relates to the assignment of normative value in the world. How does such value get attributed in light of only brute facts which are presented to us? That is, how can we derive purpose from a world which exists purely as atomic matter in fields of force? This philosophical dilemma arises between the juxtaposition between the world of science and the human world of meaning, purpose, and morality. Put more succinctly, this conflict creates the problem of deriving an “ought” from a world that “is” (Proposed by Hume). When I view a certain object such as a painting and assign it aesthetic characteristics such as beauty, I have created value it does not possess in virtue of its physicality alone. Such assignment of value is often referred to as observer relative. To illustrate this point, the world of physical matter contains electrons and quarks, gravity and electromagnetism, but nowhere within the realm of existing particles can I find meaning. Within the third person ontology of empirically determined objective reality, there is no room for first person subjectivity which creates such notions as beauty. There is nothing over and above the way in which physical particles interact within what we call a painting which could constitute this phenomenon. There are brute facts of the existence of atoms in a particular arrangement but there is not additionally a scientific fact of aesthetic appeal. Or once again, consider music. How can it be that particular brute sound waves are regarded as pleasing or beautiful to the hearer? This can be illustrated in the same format in which Searle seeks to explain the creation of social reality whereby X counts as Y in particular C. In this case, the brute fact of sound waves counts as the aesthetic fact of music only in light of a human observer.

Is the content of such assignment my free choice, a cultural phenomenon, or universal and innate? As when I might say, “This picture is lovely”, what is it that makes me believe that it is lovely? Once again we are left with a debate as to the nature of man of whether such conveyance of value is truly subjective in the sense that it occurs as a matter of preference to a human observer. This position would hold that mankind develops ideas of meaning freely as they choose; things have value because you value them. We confer meaning on a world which exists purely as brute matter, as an “is”. Alternatively, proponents who argue that there is an inherent meaning or purpose within the universe would posit that normativity is not derived but is given. Is the idea of a “beautiful sunset” already in my mind prior to my birth? This is the position of Plato as man has thoughts which precede his very existence (essence precedes existence) of the “perfect” sense of justice, perfect good, etc. (Theory of Recollection) In this way, the idea of beauty was programmed into my mind and genetic code and when I view a beautiful picture or draw back in horror at the sight of something ghastly I am doing so not because I have assigned by own, subjective sense of what is beautiful or ugly but rather I have an innate, universal sense of beauty and the good. This is not to say the assignment does not require humans, it of course is still observer relative. But rather the value itself is something universal and not a matter of opinion, something ingrained in human nature. This agrees with evolutionary evidence regarding the nature of genetic wiring. Or as Kant argued, we can never be a blank slate because we see the world with the underlying forms of sensibility and understanding which shape our perception. This also seems to accord with experience as although there are differences between personal taste, much of mankind accords to the same ideas of justice, the good, and perhaps even beauty. This affirms a sort of universality and natural law of the ancients over the provincialism and cultural relativism of post-modernism which denies absolute truth.

The Argument from Design

In 1802, theologian William Paley wrote the best known argument for God by design in his “watchmaker analogy”. The treatise, which is still used today by ID proponents, posits that man and the world is too complex, organized and beautiful to have arisen by chance alone. He therefore attributed the appearance of design and fine tuning to God. He states, “suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place… the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other an artificer.” A watch found on a brief jaunt would presuppose a designer in a way that a rock or other natural artifact would not. Biological life, like the watch, appears too intricate to be the product of random causation.

In his 1986 book “The Blind Watchmaker” which I recently completed, Richard Dawkin’s purpose is to illustrate how evolution is better at explaining the existence of complexity in the world than Paley’s attribution of God. This is not to suggest the two are necessarily incompatible, although he does reach that conclusion. In his clear and somewhat acerbic prose, he argues persuasively that Darwinian evolution, like a blind watchmaker creates the illusion of design through cumulative natural selection. Complicated organisms he concedes necessity a special explanation as they have 1) constituent parts that are arranged in a way that is unlikely to have occurred by chance, 2) the appearance of being constructed with qualities specified in advance as if engineered for a purpose. As such, you may combine cells together randomly in billions of different arrangements for a billion years, and would still never reach the organized complexity of biological life. So how is it possible for life to occur?

Darwin states that to reconcile this paradox, we must look to the gradual step by step transformations from “entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance.” (p. 43) That is, each step independently is sufficient to have arisen by chance, but the entire process itself is in fact nonrandom because it is acted upon by natural selection and the theory of the survival of the fittest. Thus, the misconception that evolution is a purely blind process is somewhat of a misunderstanding as the random mutations in the gene pool are acted upon selection which leaves those species best adapted to the given environment and that possess the largest reproductive advantage in nature. The process itself requires countless generations, geological rather than human time in billions of years to occur. The final product of biological life has the appearance of great design because it has had the effects of millions of generations of short-term selection towards simple survival, although this process has no final goal. This is possible due to mutations in the genes determining development. Thus, an eye may be created from no eye if we allow enough simple step transformations to occur in between. “Provided the difference between neighboring intermediates in our series leading to the eye is sufficiently small, the necessary mutations are almost bound to be forthcoming.” (p.79) This is because any degree of sight would confer a survival advantage over creatures with no sight at all.

The process itself is written into the genetic memory and information processing of successive generations. “Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA getting itself transmitted vertically. (passed down through generations)” (p.122) This is due to the horizontal success genetic information confers on bodies, i.e. speed, strength, intelligence, mobility, which creates an arms race between genetic information between species. The basis of evolution is RNA and DNA replication which Dawkins believes must also have arisen through a single step transformation, rather than a deity. There is no unmoved mover because “any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machines itself.” (p. 141) That is, we cannot explain complexity by positing something just as complex as what we seek to reconcile. It leaves unexplained the origin of God. ‘”You have to say something like ‘God was always there.” But if this is the case, we could eliminate a step and state that the process for forming complexity itself was always, or moreover the universe (or multiverse) was always.