Interpretation, irrationality, and psychological norms.

Abstract

This dissertation is centered around issues concerning the norms of rationality that ground our ordinary practice of reason-giving explanation. First, I demonstrate a procedure for extracting these norms by asking what considerations we would invoke from the point of view of the practice to justify attributing to our subject certain mental states. Armed with a list of norms that are extracted in this way, we will be able to learn, I claim, not only about the practice itself, but also about the content-bearing states that are attributed within it. Second, I am interested in what prompts diagnoses of irrationality and argue that extreme cases are possible, and that such diagnoses are made when the explanatory power of the practice is, or seems to be, increased by selectively overriding some or other norm. In this discussion I attempt to cash out the metaphor of a "divided mind". Next, I consider the nature of the norms. Is it useful to attribute them as contents of judgments to the person whose mind we are attempting to model? Using Davidson's discussion of the Principle of Continence as backround, I argue that doing so is neither necessary nor sufficient for characterizing irrationality, nor for explaining a person's ability to act rationally. Instead, the norms ought to be conceived, like the principle of charity, as constitutive principles of interpretation. Finally, I criticize recent works in self-knowledge that tend to make a mystery out of a person's ability to self-ascribe. No matter what the phenomenological facts, self-ascription ought to be construed as subject to many of the same norms as third-person interpretation.