Rationality, value, and creature-construction: can practical reason and value be constructed by a transcendental argument from the rational structure of action?

H. P. Grice, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A philosophical psychology can be constructed by a method of creature-construction: imagine a Genitor (the creature-constructor) building creatures by adding capacities at successive rungs of a ladder, starting from the simplest survival-capacities and culminating in rationality.1 At each rung, a mental state or capacity is to be admitted only when it does explanatory work — Modified Occam's Razor for entities, not just for senses.

The rational creature — the pirot on the upper rungs — exhibits J-acceptance (judging, alethic) and V-acceptance (willing, volitive). All reasoning statements share a common underlying structure, Acc + ⊢ + r for alethic reasoning and Acc + ! + r for practical reasoning, where Acc is the rationality operator (it is reasonable that) and r is the radical.

The creature's capacity for rationality, having raised the question what the point of its own continued existence is, is itself the resource for answering the question: reason constructs criteria for evaluating ends, and these criteria ground value.2 The IMMANUEL — the manual the rational pirot lives by — captures both the debt to the Kantian project and the constructive character of the result.34

Sources

  1. The creature's rationality will consist in the having of this concern together with a capacity, to this or that degree, to give effect to that concern.
    The Conception of Value, pp. 89–90
  2. We need to consider the second question, since, if the general 'rationality' operator is to signify something like acceptability, then the appearances of mood-operators within its scope will be proper only if they may properly occur within the scope of the psychological verb "accept". The easiest way for me to expound my ideas on the first of these questions is by reference to a schematic table or diagram (see Fig.
    Aspects of Reason, pp. 90–91
  3. But (also much as Kant thought with respect to ideas of pure reason) when it comes to ethics the genitorial programme, in its more colourful form, just may have a role which is not purely heuristic.
    The Conception of Value, pp. 149–150
  4. There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addresses, so the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very intelligent rational pirot, and will thus have generality of form.
    The Conception of Value, pp. 151–152

Where the argument is made

  • Method in Philosophical Psychology (From the Banal to the Bizarre) — Presidential Address to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, 1975 (in The Conception of Value, Oxford 1991)
  • Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness (Chapel Hill colloquium 1976, in Aspects of Reason, Oxford 2001)
  • Aspects of Reason (the John Locke Lectures, delivered Oxford 1979
  • the Immanuel Kant Lectures, Stanford 1977
  • edited by Richard Warner, posthumous, Oxford 2001)
  • The Conception of Value (the Carus Lectures, delivered 1983
  • with introduction by Judith Baker, Clarendon 1991)
  • Probability, Desirability and Mood Operators (mimeograph, 1960s, mostly subsumed into Aspects of Reason)
  • Davidson on 'Weakness of the Will' (with Judith Baker, in Aspects of Reason)

How the argument was received

The late-Grice programme, developed at Berkeley from the early 1970s through the 1983 Carus Lectures, with antecedents in unpublished material going back to the 1960s. Less widely engaged than the meaning and conversation work; the corpus consists of the Locke and Carus lectures (posthumous), the 1975 APA presidential address (in The Conception of Value), and unpublished material in the Bancroft Grice Papers. Richard Warner's critique that personal identity is missing from the account of rationality and happiness remains the standard scholarly worry. Judith Baker's introduction to The Conception of Value frames the transcendental argument for value as a serious philosophical proposal. The programme remains programmatic rather than fully worked out; the planned book Power Structure of the Soul (with Judith Baker) was never completed, and the Reflections on Morals manuscript was not published.