Ichthus77

Epistemological issue: (1) “What constitutes truth? best opinion or the way things stand in physical reality?”
Moral and socio-political issue: (2) “What is constitutionally just? a Supreme Court verdict or those standards of right conduct that properly apply in matters of collective human concern?”

Enter Euthyphro and Socrates and the set-piece exercise.

According to Norris, the RD (Crispin Wright) reading of the Dialogue with Euthyphro goes like this: Euthyphro (“best opinion” anti-realist) says the gods are optimally qualified to determine the good (the standard), whereas Socrates (“the realist”) says the gods are optimally qualified (or “cognitively responsive”) to recognize the good when they see it; they don’t determine the standard.

[ Aside: The Euthyphro dilemma is actually solved by God being the standard, by willing in accordance with his good nature. That he is the good, is not its justification (that would commit the is-ought fallacy) but if he is not the good, to claim there is a real good, a fulfilled standard, would commit the fallacy of reification. ]

The Dummettian anti-realist will appeal to accepted rules, and the Kripkensteinian skeptic will respond with the skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox (last section). The RD theorist attempts to avoid the skeptical dilemma by mediating between Euthyphro and Socrates with the duly provisoed biconditional (last section). The best opinion (Euthyphro) is cognitively responsive (Socrates).

This dilemma brings into sharp focus the question of “just how far…best opinion must be taken as constitutive of truth, or truth-claims subject to qualification through the various kinds of RD proviso that assert their dependence on normalized human (rather than godlike) perceptual capacities,” (etc.). So, it turns “on the realist’s claim that truth is in principle recognition-transcendent, as against the anti-realist’s claim that it cannot make sense to conceive of truth in this way since we should then be incapable of acquiring or manifesting any kind of knowledge.”

As mentioned in the last section, RD theory’s emphasis is on what comes after “if and only if,” to “privilege issues of perceptual response or judgements arrived under normal (suitably provisoed) epistemic conditions.” This has “the result that more predicates can be treated as requiring specification in terms of normalized (or optimized) human response.”

For example, Peter Railton and Ralph Wedgwood criticize the tendency for an RD approach to ethical issues to “maximize the role of those distinctively human responses to the point where any argument concerning, say, the wrongness of … will be thought of as primarily a matter of our normal inclination to judge such actions wrong … which precludes the possibility that certain kinds of action are intrinsically and objectively wrong whatever the deliverance of best human judgement or the state of (maybe community-wide) consensus opinion.” They see this as running dangerously close to Hamlet’s “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and to the highest constitutional authority determining what constitutes “valid judgement in matters of moral, judicial and socio-political concern,” (a reference back to the 2000 election).

The Euthyphronist would counter that someone with “best judgment” will arrive infallibly at the same class of pious acts as the objectivist about moral values. However, Norris points out that humans are not infallible. To reply that “‘best moral judgement just is what comes out right by all the morally relevant criteria’…reduces to something very like a straightforward tautology,” and so the RD theorist can take a stronger Euthyphronic line and assert that moral attributes or predicates are response-dependent in a way that involves substantively specified human dispositions, priorities, concepts of social good, political justice, human or animal welfare, etc.,” but realists then object that truth is recognition-transcendent.

These issues may seem to be strictly insoluble, but they “mostly take rise from a regular confusion between ontological and epistemological issues which cannot but lead to some skeptical outcome.”

Response-dependence (RD) has its roots in Locke’s discussion of secondary qualities (like color, taste and odor) as distinguished from primary qualities (objective attributes like shape and size). The secondary qualities depend on a respondent, and some RD theorists expand this to other areas of debate as an alternative to hard-line realism on the one hand, and hard-line anti-realism on the other.

“The chief purpose is to specify these various provisos with maximum precision and thereby establish a class of perceptions and judgments which, although they lack objective (observer-independent) truth conditions, can nonetheless be treated as subject to normative standards of veridical warrant. By doing so, its advocates believe, one can make a strong start in heading off those skeptical arguments that have often traded—at least since Locke—on the subjectivity of color-perception and other such secondary qualities.” It also provides a way to distinguish between areas where this approach is adequate, and areas where, “according to the realist, our statements must be taken as possessing an objective truth-value quite aside from the vagaries of human perceptual response or the scope and limits of epistemic warrant.”

RD theorists take issue with Kripke’s “skeptical solution” to Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox. Kripke accepts Wittgenstein’s anti-foundationalist claim that standards of correctness for any rule-following depend on communal warrant. When a person produces an outcome different than the outcome we would produce when following accepted rules, s/he either hasn’t understood the rules, or s/he is following different rules. However, Kripke argues that if s/he produces the outcome that we would produce, that doesn’t guarantee s/he has understood accepted rules—s/he could have arrived at the same outcome via different rules. He says this conclusion follows from “the twin Wittgenstein considerations” that 1) the meaning given to the signs we use to communicate the rules—that meaning is not a “fact” and 2) every rule has a rule for its correct application, creating an infinite regress of rules, and no objective bedrock. So, Kripke says the only possible ‘solution’ is to take “a lesson from Wittgenstein in viewing our communal practices, procedures or shared ‘forms of life’ as the furthest we can get by way of justification for maintaining” our rules against the other’s “idea of what counts as properly or correctly following a rule.”

Crispin Wright’s “chief motive for adopting an RD approach is the hope of finding some alternative to ‘Kripkensteinian’ skepticism that would register the force of such arguments while yet making room for a realist-compatible conception of those areas of discourse where, intuitively, truth cannot be just a matter of conformity with accepted practices and norms.” BUT—Wright still has issues with the objectivist idea of arithmetical rules being true before we’ve grasped them (like Fermat’s Last Theorem before Andrew Wiles’ proof)—the same idea of which Alex Miller’s “humanized Platonism” stops short.

This is because RD theory’s emphasis is on what comes after “if and only if,” to “privilege issues of perceptual response or judgements arrived under normal (suitably provisoed) epistemic conditions over issues of objective truth or those that might more aptly be addressed by the methods of the physical sciences.”