Over at Deontologistics Pete has another terrific post up responding to my posts about normativity and politics (here and here). Unfortunately I’m unable to respond in detail right now as I’m busily preparing for the RMMLA in Salt Lake City later this week. However, I did want to briefly clarify a few points.
First, on the issue of whether or not Latour reduces right to might, Pete writes:
The major objection Levi has to my account of Latour is my characterisation of the first of the two moves I identified in his position (although Levi has yet to say much about the second, and I think he’ll find it equally problematic). I described this in two ways:-
1) The collapsing of the distinction between might and right.
2) The reduction of normative force to causal force.
Now, I repeatedly qualified the second way of spelling out the Latourian move because I expected that it would produce problems for Levi. I talked about a ‘loose’ causal force, or a generalised causal force, but was not really clear enough. Luckily, Levi’s objection to this second characterisation lets me make this issue clearer. Levi thinks that although the first of these characterisations is right, they are not equivalent, and Latour does not endorse the second.
If Pete goes back and reads my original post, he will find that I explicitly argued that might does not make right in Latour’s thought. Let us recall that in addition to being a philosopher, Latour is also a sociologist. As a sociologist one of his jobs is to explain why the social field is organized in the way that it is, why humans and nonhumans are grouped in the way they are, why change takes place at this time and in this way rather than in another time and in another way, etc. When Latour speaks of trials of strength (or weakness), he is getting at these sorts of issues. The question is one of what is resistant to change when being acted upon by other actors and what produces differences in other actors when it acts upon them.
read on!
Now note, nothing in this way of talking about social relations undermines something like normative force. Normative force is one kind of force among many other forces. Nor is this force being treated in a causal fashion. Let us take two inductive arguments to illustrate this point:
Most Texans are Evangelical Christians.
Levi lives in Texas.
Therefore Levi is likely to be an Evangelical Christian.
And,
Dieter wears red shoes.
Dieter is from Germany.
Most Germans probably where red shoes.
Nothing from a Latourian perspective prevents us from making the claim that the first argument has more normative force than the second argument. Moreover, the relationship between the premises and the conclusions in these two arguments is not a causal relationship, but a semantic and a syntactic relationship. If the force of the first argument is greater than the force of the second argument, then this is because, even though the conclusion turns out not to be true, nonetheless there is a tighter relationship between the premises and the conclusions in the first argument than in the second argument. In this particular context, force has to do with the relations among propositions which produce a particular gradient of resistance with respect to other lines of reasoning. That’s all. There is no reduction here of the relationship between the premises and conclusions to might, nor is the argument being transformed into “mere rhetoric”.
Now, in another context, the question of relations between forces and gradients of resistance becomes different. Recalling that insofar as Latour is a sociologist and that therefore his job is to explain why the social is organized in the way that it is, we can, just as we treat individual propositions in an argument as actors in relation to one another, also treat entire arguments as actors in relation to other actors. Thus, for example, we can compare forms of communication driven by rhetoric to forms of communication driven by genuine arguments and we can ask which of these actors (rhetoric or argument), does a better job of enlisting other actors (human beings). When we’ve shifted perspective here, we quickly discover that a good deal of this is audience dependent. Thus, for example, in a university math department we find that rhetoric has comparatively less “force” than argument where disputes about mathematical equations are concerned. When we look at presidential campaigns or debates over health care, we discover that rhetoric often has far more force than argument.
There are a couple of points worth noting in this context. First, in pointing out that rhetoric, under certain conditions has more force in enlisting other actors in particular contexts, it has been in no way that somehow rhetoric somehow makes things true or right. The true and the right is an internal structure of a particular type of actor, arguments, and is independent of the issue of whether or not a particular type of actor is effective in enlisting other actors.
Second, when we talk about force in the context of rhetoric or argument, there is nothing causal about this talk. There is nothing analogous in the phenomenon of persuasion to two billiard balls hitting one another. If, for a particular person, a rhetorical analogy such as “Obama is like a lion” is particularly effective in generating support in this person for Obama, one would be speaking in a highly metaphorical or strained sense in suggesting that this relation is causal. Rather, the force of this resonance has to do with intensities, resonances, and echoes within language that produce a certain force within expression. It is an associative relation, not a causal relation.
So here’s the point: There is nothing inconsistent in recognizing both that 1) there are a variety of different forces that produce alliances among actors, many of which are false and wrong, and 2) grounding one’s own claims in a set of normative commitments. Moreover, in grounding one’s claims in a set of normative commitments, there is nothing to suggest that this is somehow a matter of subjectivity, the private, or personal whim. Again, the relationship between the propositions is an relationship among those propositions and how strongly they hold together, not a matter of personal whim. Latour is not making the claim that the proposition “2 + 2 = 4” is a matter of rhetoric. If he hasn’t already, I suggest Pete read The Pasteurization of France or Science in Action to see just how mistaken this characterization of Latour is. Here I think that Pete’s notion of “causality” is, to adopt a Deleuzianism, far too “baggy” and imprecise. The production of effects is not equivalent to causality. For example, there are all sorts of rhetorical effects that language produces, that we find everywhere in poetry, but these effects are not being “caused” by language in any way analogous to natural causation. When I protested Reid’s thesis that “object-oriented ontology is ‘consistent’ with neo-liberalism” I was talking about one such rhetorical effect– a linguistic exchange of properties between on thing and another thing by producing an association between the two. That effect is the result of an associative relation, not a causal relation.
Responding to my charge that the normophiliacs are calling for a transcendent set of norms, Pete writes:
I must now deal with the idea that I am in someway appealing to ‘transcendent’ norms. Levi positions this in terms of an opposition between transcendent ahistorical Platonic style norms (precisely what Latour rejects) and immanent norms that are generated by historical processes. His concern is that in denying the Latourian approaches situation of norms as effective entities that have real power within historical development, I can only then appeal to transcendent norms that are entirely isolated from history, and moreover, that such an appeal betrays a dangerous lack of concern with the real concrete forces that shape our lives.
Now, I want to defend myself in two ways. Firstly, by showing that although I do appeal to some ahistorical norms, these are not thereby transcendent, but rather transcendental. Secondly, by showing that I neither take all norms of action to be transcendental, nor am unconcerned with the kind of detailed analysis of the real structure of the social sphere (and the genesis of normativity that includes) provided by thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Spinoza and Nietzsche. The proviso to all this is that I do not yet have an entirely fully formed political philosophy, I have some initial ideas based on my other philosophical considerations, but I hope that I can be forgiven a lack of completeness in my ideas here.
I really don’t see how this gets Pete off the hook, because the difference between the transcendent and the transcendental (in the sense that Pete is using it) is a difference that makes no difference. Pete will recall that in my second post, I cited three ways in which normativity can be grounded as ahistorical and eternal: The Platonic, the Theistic, and the Kantian. In evoking the transcendental in contrast to the transcendent, all Pete is doing is choosing the third of these alternatives. Kantianism is simply a variant of Platonism that places the forms or the intelligible in the mind of a transcendental subject, rather than in a Platonic heaven or in the mind of God.
As Deleuze’s argues in both Difference and Repetition and more clearly in “Plato and the Simulacrum” (in The Logic of Sense), the drive or inspiration animating Platonism is that of selecting good copies from simulacra. On the one hand, we have the unparticipated or the form itself. On the other hand, you have the participated or the copy. And finally you have the false pretender. Plato’s metaphysics, always based on a myth to ground its foundation, mobilizes the unparticipated as a means of excluding the simulacrum and selecting the good copy. Kant (or Habermas), is simply a variant of this logic of selection where the category now serves the function of the unparticipated and experience becomes the participated. This can be aptly seen in Kant’s metaphors of the tribunal of reason and reason as a legislator (with metaphors and an aim like this, it comes as no surprise that these forms of thought tend to generate a particular form of subjectivity).
The problem here is that in all three cases (the Platonic, the Theistic, and the Transcendental/Kantian), we erect a myth of some entity that is somehow immune from the laws of genesis or becoming that can then function to regulate the world. In my view, there’s no possible way a transcendental approach such as that advocated by Pete can be consistent with naturalism because it exempts one particular type of entity from the core thesis of naturalism as a philosophy of phusis or becoming. What is required, instead, is a genetic account of normativity that demonstrates how it is brought into existence or produced, not an appeal to some idealist ahistorical and unchanging form of intelligibility that overcodes the world of immanence. Again, however, I really have a very difficult time understanding what all this ruckus about normativity is about. Not being particularly obsessed with issues about normativity myself, I can only speculate that those who are so worked up about the normative are so because they believe that the normative has a particular force or a set of practical consequences in the world. While I certainly want a world where people reason well and for the sake of truth and the good, I can’t see that reasoning in this way has ever had much practical force in the world. Thus, while we want a well grounded politics, I nonetheless cannot help but feel that from the standpoint of practice the focus on normativity is a rather negative distraction that detracts from actually changing the world through an understanding of the concrete organization of social situations.
Larval Subjects . 
October 6, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Hi Levi,
I appologise if I mischaracterised your position on the relation between might and right. I’m happy to retract that attribution. Nonetheless, I’m not sure you’ve really responded much to my main points as much as reiterated your position. You haven’t really handled my claim that normative force is not a matter of the production of effects, as much as reiterated that it is another kind of (effective) force.
Also, I’m afraid that I find this notion of a production of effects that is not causal (even in a loose sense) very problematic. I’d suggest that insofar as the general notion of force you’re taking from Latour involves both causal force (which also needs to be characterised in your account) and non-causal force, that it is this notion which is too “baggy”, rather than the fairly standard notion of causation I am appealing to.
When someone asks me ‘Why did you change your mind about such and such?’ there are two kinds of answers that I can give, one is a matter of justification: ‘Because reason X told against my previous position’, the other is a matter of explanation: ‘Because someone persuaded me otherwise’. It is easy to get them confused, but they are distinct. Moreover, precisely insofar as the latter is a matter of explanation, it is hard to see how we are not dealing with a _loose_ causal explanation (one that we’re happy to accept in the circumstances), rather than a _precise_ explanation given in terms of some different kind of force altogether.
Taking a different tack (which I took in this post here http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/the-plane-of-immanence/) it seems that you’d want to admit that when someone persuades me of something, that our bodies are engaged in genuinely causal interactions. We are engaged in a mutual process whereby we emit sounds and make gestures and these are processes by our nervous systems and grey matter, such that we produce responses to each other. The relevant question is at what point the non-causal interaction emerges out of this?
If I shake hands with someone, our bodies are interacting, but they are interacting in virtue of the fact that our hands are interacting, and they are interacting in virtue of their cells interacting, and so on down the line. It seems as if the interaction through which I am persuaded should be situated within such a set of interactions, lest it come out of nowhere. But if it is situated in such interactions, the question arises as to why we should consider it any less causal than them?
I won’t say anything about Latour’s claims about the inferential relations between propositions or claims as I think Tom at Grundlegung has already nailed that particular criticism.
The final point to make is that you have very quickly assimilated my transcendental position to Kant’s. Kant is of course a strong influence here, but there are very important differences, particularly in to what extent I am willing to allow for the necessity of the analysis of the concrete structure of the political situation, but you haven’t addressed the my presentation of this.
The claim you have made, is that I’m somehow a Platonist insofar as I am a Kantian, and that in appealing to ahistorical norms I am thereby appealing to special entities that play the role of unconditioned conditions.
Firstly, I’ve been quite clear in maintaining that norms, even transcendentally guaranteed ones, do not exist. The normative force they exert is in no way effective or causal. This isn’t to say that these norms aren’t manifest in self-sustaining sets of socialised rational capacities (which are indeed causal), but they are not identical with their manifestation in our practices.
Secondly, insofar as transcendental norms do not produce any kind of effects whatsoever (even though their manifestation does), they do not condition anything. They are unconditional, but they are not unconditioned conditions. They are thus not transcendent in the classic Kantian sense.
As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, for me, normativity is not actually an issue for ontology. Norms have no Being. This isn’t to say that our norm governed and norm instituting behaviour has no Being, just that there is nothing like an abstract ‘norm’ involved anywhere in it.
October 6, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Hi Pete,
Thanks for the response. You write:
The portion I have boldfaced here is precisely the distinction I’m drawing. When I claim that the relationship between premises and conclusions is not a causal relationship, the point I’m making is that it belongs to the order of reasons, not causality. The supporting premises do not “cause” the conclusion, but are reasons for the conclusion. It seems to me that you are eliding this difference and treating them as different. It is also important to note that reasons also belong to the realm of persuasion. When Aristotle talks about rhetoric or persuasion, he argues that it involves pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos refers to persuasion by means of the emotion, ethos refers to the credibility and charisma of the speaker, and logos refers to the order of reasons. All of these elements are involved in persuasion. The point is that when persuasion takes place by either pathos or logos we are not talking about a causal relationship such as the relationship between the sun shining and a stone growing warm. Where logos is used were talking about the order of reasons rather than causes. These reasons can range from a very low degree of supportive force to a very high degree of supportive force. Similarly, with pathos we are not talking about a relation such as the one between the stone and the sun, but a relation between elements of language and their emotive force.
Yes, there are all sorts of causal relations involved, but these causal relations are secondary to the structure of persuasion. A key point here is the substrate neutrality of language that can occur in a variety of different media.
This is a fairly standard transcendental move. The central thesis of transcendental philosophies is to claim that the conditions they outline do not exist. First, I think Meillassoux has shown pretty compellingly in After Finitude that the transcendental philosopher is unable to consistently maintain this position, but is always implicitly making references to the groundedness of the transcendental in human bodies. Second, in many respects this makes my point. One reason one advances the thesis that the transcendental does not exist is to maintain the distinction between the is and the ought. Insofar as the ought or domain of the transcendental is treated as not existing, it is thereby immune to what does exist. From the standpoint of political theory, then, such a transcendental approach entitles us to ignore the concrete structuration of situations (which are) because they couldn’t possibly have anything to contribute to the domain of norms. From a Marxist perspective, this looks suspiciously like ideology and idealism. For the transcendentalist, for example, the emergence of a new technology has no bearing on normative issues. The relationship can go from these ideal norms to the evaluation of technology, but the transcendentalist cannot imagine a relation running from technology to new norms. This is precisely because norms are said to fall outside of existence. Consequently, we apply norms to concrete situations (what you call “norm instituting behavior”), but norms do not themselves change as a result of changes in concrete organizations of the world. At best, this cultivates a form of thought that is blind to the manner in which its thought is conditioned by the concrete structure of situations. At worst, this approach functions as an ideological device designed to prevent emancipation where new forms of life are now available and possible as a result of changes in collectives. Here I think Deleuze’s account of sense is far more appealing then the sort of transcendentalism you propose here. For Deleuze sense is produced by bodies but nonetheless distinct from these bodies. As a consequence we can generate an account of how norms are produced from bodies, without falling into the sort of ideological trap that haunts idealistic transcendental accounts.
Here I think we encounter a difference between our respective conceptions of ontology. For you ontology seems to signify the branch of philosophy that investigates being qua existence. For me ontology is the branch of philosophy that signifies being qua being. Existence is only a mode of being, not exhaustive of being as such. From the standpoint of my ontology the thesis that norms have no being is strictly speaking incoherent because it is equivalent to the claim that norms make no difference. But if they make no difference then they are not. By contrast, I hold that norms are they just are not being like rocks or stars. Again, I take it that the thesis that norms do not exist is more of a dodge than anything else. It is a strategy designed to exempt norms from the world so as to maintain them at all costs. In this regard it is structurally equivalent to the Platonic gesture of dividing the world into the world of appearances and the world of reality so as to preserve rational forms at all costs. It just dresses itself up in new clothes such as the difference between compassionate conservativism and traditional conservativism.
October 7, 2009 at 7:52 am
LS: “The portion I have boldfaced here is precisely the distinction I’m drawing. When I claim that the relationship between premises and conclusions is not a causal relationship, the point I’m making is that it belongs to the order of reasons, not causality. The supporting premises do not “cause” the conclusion, but are reasons for the conclusion.”
Of course they not not cause the conclusion, this is the point I’ve been making about normative force. But the conclusion is not an ‘effect’ of them either. This is why justification is different from explanation. Explanation is about the production of effects, about asking ‘why’ such effects come about, rather than ‘why’ a certain conclusion is a good one. Reasons do of course belong to the realm of persuasion. A good way to persuade someone (to produce a certain effect in them) is to give good reasons for something. However, persuasion and the force of reasons pull apart precisely insofar as one can potentially be effective when giving bad reasons. Assessing the effectiveness of the giving of reasons and the force of reasons are two different things.
I take it your defense of your position on the relation between causal and non-causal interactions is that the non-causal interactions (such as ones of linguistic persuasion) are multiply realisable? This is a point I tackled in the post on the Plane of Immanence. It is perfectly possible for the general form of interactions to be irreducible to the general form of the interactions that occur in a given substrate. But this is not the issue. The issue is whether each given interaction can be situated in relation to the specific interactions occurring in its substrate.
So we might have two different cases: spoken language being used to persuade X to do something, and the same language in writing being used to persuade Y to do the same thing. The chains of causal interaction that the producion and consumption of the symbolic tokens consists in in each case is different, so the general characterisation ‘using argument Z to persuade someone’ cannot be interpreted in terms of some general set of relation between the parts of the linguistic agents. However, the question at hand is whether in each case the supposedly non-causal interaction of persuasion can be situated in relation to the specific chain of causes between the two actors (not some general form).
Is it such that we can think up counterfactuals? If the letter had been lost in the mail then Y would not have been persuaded. If X had recently lost a family member to Israeli rocket fire, he would have been unswayed by the call for a peaceful settlement. If Y had not had a neurotransmitter deficit at the time, then he would have made a series of neuronal connections that would have resulted in him rejecting the argument, etc.
With regard to my position on norms, I think you are being slightly uncharitable. It is one thing to say that transcendental positions have been refuted by Meillassoux (which I don’t think they have per se – only certain kinds of transcendental position have be undermined), but another to say that it entitles us to “such a transcendental approach entitles us to ignore the concrete structuration of situations”. The later part of my post, which you have nowhere mentioned, tried to defend against precisely this kind of objection. However, I’ll provide a very short counterpoint here: What if transcendental norms demand that we take into account the concrete structuration of situations? This would be a very un-Kantian position, but not thereby a non-transcendental one.
With regard to Being and Existence, I recall us having exactly the opposite exchange. You said that you interpreted Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being as dealing with existence, whereas I maintained that it deals with Being as distinct from existence, which is an aspect of Being. My position has not changed here. Existence is an aspect of Being, but this does not mean that there are things which don’t exist.
As for my fundamental norms of rationality being equivalent to a Platonic realm, I have to disagree. The interesting thing about Platonism is that it indexes what is, in terms of its very essence or form, to what ought to be. My position is that the fundamental oughts have no direct effect on what is. They say nothing about what anything that is essentially is. The only thing they could be taken to define the ‘essence’ of are things like ‘reasons’, ‘norms’, ‘propositions’, or ‘rationality’ and ‘normativity’. But these thing aren’t. They don’t exist. They are not part of what is. There are no ideas here providing the structure of the world as it is in itself.
October 7, 2009 at 8:39 am
Pete,
I’m no longer sure of what we’re arguing about regarding the causality issue. You seem to be attributing claims to me that I’m not making. For example, I did not claim that conclusions are “effects” of premises. That’s a claim you attributed to me. Similarly, I don’t think you’re quite right in your distinction between arguments and explanations. An explanation strives to provide the cause of a phenomenon. But this doesn’t entail that the explanation is itself producing an effect.
Additionally, I think issues about the order of reasons are distinct from issues about neurons firing. I already pointed out why I believe this is the case with respect to the substrate neutrality of things like reasons. Although it is very likely that there can be no thought without some substrate that involves causality, it doesn’t follow from this that thought is identical to that causality. Rather, there’s a formal distinction between thought and its causal substrate. Just as color cannot exist independent of shape while nonetheless shape and color are distinct, it is likely that thought must have some sort of material embodiment while nonetheless being formally distinct from that embodiment. If this is the case, then talk of neurons firing when talking of thought is a sort of category error similar to the sort of error that would take place were we to talk about shape when trying to talk about color. Second, I think you’re using the term “causality” in a very fast and loose sense when you talk about persuasion. To repeat again, there’s nothing analogous between persuasion and the sun causing a rock to warm. Putting the matter crudely, persuasion is either about the space of reasons or associative logics pertain to the passions. The person that sent the letter does not make the person receiving the letter assent in the way the sun makes the rock warm. The latter is a necessary consequence of the interaction, the former is not, but requires the person entertain the reasons to arrive at the conclusion.
I don’t believe I’m being uncharitable at all in my characterization of your take on norms. I genuinely don’t see logically how you can claim, based on your model, that we can have a transcendental account that requires us to attend to the concrete structuration of situations as the whole point of the move you’re making is to create a firewall between the dimension of the normative and existence. While there’s nothing in your position that prohibits you from talking about how norms get instantiated in concrete situations, things can’t work in the opposite direction for you, where norms are being generated out of concrete situations.
With regard to our prior exchange, I’m a realist not a materialist precisely because I do not ground all being in material existence. In other words, for me “what is” and “physical existence” are not synonyms. This is what our previous dispute was about and why I was able to say, without blushing, that fictional entities are while fully agreeing that they are not physical existences. You wanted to make the claim that only material differences make a difference and to elide difference into “causation”, whereas I hold that causation is only one way in which differences are made. I hold that material existence is only one species of being with many other types of differences besides.
I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m claiming when I attribute Platonism to you. I, of course, understand that you do not advocate the doctrine of the forms or a division of the world into the world of appearances and the world of reality. When I claim that you’re a Platonist, I mean exactly the same thing as when I claim that Kant is a Platonist or that Habermas is a Platonist. Kant is a Platonist in the sense that he places the forms in the mind as a priori categories that then model all other experience. Habermas is a Platonist insofar as he places forms as norms governing discourse that then model all other discourse. The defining feature of Platonism is not the two world ontology, nor the idea that forms structure the world, but rather the relation between model and copy that excludes simulacra. This is a structure that repeats in Kant and Habermas, though in a very different way (I confess that I find it startling to see a Deleuzian siding with Habermas, so it will be interesting to see how that project evolves… Talk about neoliberalism!). As I said in my last post, your thesis that norms are not just strikes me as a sophistry designed to protect norms from existence at all costs. Even within your own ontology it simply is not true that “norms are not”. Norms are not physical existents, sure, but physical existence is not the only way of being. In treating norms in this way it seems to me that you contradict your thesis that being is broader than physical existence.
Apologies for the brevity of my response. I’m going to have very limited access to the net until Sunday so perhaps we should let the discussion settle here for the time being.
October 7, 2009 at 10:58 am
Hi Levi,
I understand if you want to leave the debate here for now, but I will attempt to respond to the comments in your last post before signing off.
“An explanation strives to provide the cause of a phenomenon. But this doesn’t entail that the explanation is itself producing an effect. ”
I didn’t say anything about explanations producing effects. Now, I think they can, but that is a different matter altogether. What puzzles me here is what exactly you take an explanation to be. Here you say it is a matter of providing the cause of a phenomenon (or an effect). But, you also maintain that there is non-causal production of effects. These are both kinds of force. My question really is whether explanations can involve appeals to non-causal forces.
If they can’t, then it’s really hard to see what the point of the introduction of this general notion of force, which includes non-causal force, gets us. However, I’d suggest that the Latourian answer is precisely that they can be deployed within explanations. I think this is probably the position you hold, despite claiming that explanation is a matter of providing a ’cause’ here. My problem is still with how we are to make sense of this generalised notion of explanation which extends beyond causation.
Issues about the order of reasons (or the space of reasons) are distinct from issues of explanation (even if explanations are a matter of giving reasons) insofar as they are matters of justification (giving reasons) rather than providing causes (which is a distinct type of reason-giving).
The problem here is that you keep slipping between talk of supposedly non-causal things like reasons not producing effects and producing effects (such as _actually_ persuading me, as distinct from the fact that they _should_ persuade me). It’s certain that whatever something like persuasion is for you, it’s not a causal matter. The question is, whether it is still a matter of the production of an effect, and if so the question is still how we are to think this kind of production of effects in relation to the causal production of effects that it seems to subsist in.
“To repeat again, there’s nothing analogous between persuasion and the sun causing a rock to warm. Putting the matter crudely, persuasion is either about the space of reasons or associative logics pertain to the passions. The person that sent the letter does not make the person receiving the letter assent in the way the sun makes the rock warm. The latter is a necessary consequence of the interaction, the former is not, but requires the person entertain the reasons to arrive at the conclusion.”
Here I think we have a certain confusion about the relation between causation and necessity. Here’s an example: I set my alarm clock regularly, and most of the time it wakes me up, but sometimes it does not. Does the fact that sometimes it does not mean that in those cases where it does, it is not doing so causally? I can give an argument to a lot of different people, and sometimes it will persuade them and sometimes it won’t, this doesn’t mean that when I do persuade them that it wasn’t my act of giving the argument that made them change their mind.
Obviously, what is going on in each case is that there is a bunch of additional factors other than the purported cause (the ringing of the alarm, the act of making an argument) that is involved in producing the effect. This doesn’t mean that in either case the issue is not a causal one, it is simply that it demands further explanation, i.e., an attempt to analyse and assess the various contributions of those additional factors. Counterfactual reasoning is important for doing this (e.g., an informative claim might be “if I hadn’t been up the night before drinking my alarm would have woken me up”).
The issue here is as follows. It seems as if what it is for something to be a genuinely causal explanation is for it to underwrite this kind of counterfactual reasoning. There are kinds of explanation that fall short of this, not necessarily because they don’t underwrite any counterfactual analysis, but because they can’t be extended beyond certain casual counterfactual scenarios. We’re often happy with such explanations because they are practically useful. However, we should not take these kinds of explanations to be describing a different kind of force to causal force. We should simply take them to be what they are – useful shorthand indications of what’s going on that don’t necessarily get at the real details of the matter.
This is the issue that eliminative materialism in psychology has with folk-psychological description. It seems like the claim “I went to the shops because I believed we were out of milk, I believed I could get milk there, and I wanted us to have milk” is a good explanation of a certain event. And it is, in practical day to day affairs. However, the terms deployed in this kind of explanation don’t stand up to the more detailed kinds of counterfactual scenarios we can conjure up now we have access to MRIs and the like. Questions like “Would you have still gone to the shops if your serotonin levels had dropped by 12%?” seem to pull apart from folk-psychological explanation, because we seem to have no way of relating such factors as serotonin levels to beliefs or desires.
That certain kinds of explanation seem like acceptable one’s does not thereby mean we should reify them and the entities they refer to, because it produces problems when we try to integrate them with our wider (naturalistic) understanding of the different ways the world can vary. I might have to put up a post on this to explain it in more detail.
Since I’ve taken so long on the first point, I’ll deal with the latter three rather quickly.
1. Really the issue about the genesis of norms is a matter of what you’re looking for in that genesis. As I’ve said, I don’t think all norms governing action are transcendental. For instance, laws are a kind of norm, and they are a kind of norm that we institute and that thereby becoming binding within a certain society, given certain conditions. These are norms that are generated within history. I’m also happy to say that the norms of collective action that we should institute should be sensitive to the new concrete situations that emerge in the world. Were there questions about how we should regulate genetic engineering before there was genetic engineering? No, there was not. This is similarly the case for new forms of social structures that have emerged (such as philosophical blogging communities). The question is, does the emergence of these phenomena coincide with the emergence of norms governing how we should deal with them? No.
We have to go through the difficult task of analysing the structures of society and the new conditions that are brought about within it in order to work out what specific norms we should institute, but that we should do this, and how we should go about doing this, are themselves given in part by transcendental norms which are not instituted historically. There are no norms which are simply generated by the situation itself.
2. I wasn’t talking about physical or material existence at that point, but real existence. Now, I happen to think that real existents are material existents, but that is neither here nor there. My description of the relation between Being and existence is independent of any commitment to materialism.
3. When you talk about Being as ‘broader’ than physical/material existence, it seems that what you’re saying is that there are other kinds of existence than physical/material existence. This isn’t what I mean when I say Being is not existence, or even Being is not real existence. But this might just be a problem of our divergent terminology. Let me try and be clear. Norms are pseudo-beings, they have no Being in the sense that they are not part of ‘what is objectively the case’, or the Real. We can still talk about them, and they can still have force as reasons within our talk, but this talk is not about anything which is objective.
As an aside, I’m really not sure what the distinction between the idea that Platonism is about ‘modelling’ and about providing the structure of ‘what is’ in some way. For instance, the idea that Habermasian norms ‘model’ discourse seems to be that they determine what discourse ‘is’. My point is my transcendental norms do not determine what anything ‘is’, at least not what anything ‘real’ is.