Kyla Ebels-Duggan (Northwestern): The Inarticulate First Person

Sometimes we hold intelligible attitudes on the basis of completely sufficient reasons, while yet being incapable of fully articulating these reasons, and so incapable of fully communicating them to third parties.  Love of a particular person or appreciation of a great work of literature are paradigm examples of attitudes of the relevant kind.  These attitudes constitutively include an affirmation of the value of their object, and this affirmation could be, or fail to be, rationally warranted.  But our access to the reasons for these normative commitments normally depends ineliminably on experience of the value it affirms, experience that cannot be fully captured in propositional terms.  In this paper I argue that neither externalist nor internalist accounts of rational warrant can easily account for this class of attitudes, and I begin to sketch an alternative.  I argue that, to play their constitutive role, the reasons for our attitudes must be accessible to us from the first person standpoint, and the externalist does not account for this.  But we cannot identify this first personal access to our reasons with articulacy about them as the internalist does when she requires the possibility of reasoning to the attitudes in question.  We thus need some alternative way of understanding first personal access to the reasons for our attitudes.

Date & time

Mon 18 Jul 2016, 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location

Coombs Seminar Room A

Event series

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