Positive illusion and the normativity of substantive and structural rationality

ABSTRACT

To explain why we should be structurally rational – or mentally coherent – is notoriously difficult. Some philosophers argue that the normativity of structural rationality can be explained in terms of substantive rationality, which is a matter of correct response to reason. I argue that the psychological phenomena – positive illusions – are counterexamples to the substantivist approach. Substantivists dismiss the relevance of positive illusions because they accept evidentialism that reason for belief must be evidence. I argue that their evidentialist stance would imply that we are caught in unsolvable dilemmas arising from positive illusions.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural rationality
• substantive rationality
• positive illusion
• reason for belief
• evidentialism
• pragmatism

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the helpful feedback from Huei-Rong Li and the reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The idea of linking rationality to interpretability can be traced back to Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett (1987).

2 See Daoust (forthcoming) for a coherence-based, rather than requirement-based, account of structural rationality.

3 For different objections to the substantivist approach, see Daoust (2020) and Worsnip (2021b). Daoust focuses specifically on epistemic rationality, but the substantivist approach here is broader, concerning substantive and structural in general (see note. 6). Worsnip argues that substantive rationality does not exhaust the normativity of structural rationality. Coherence per se offers its own reason. My paper is silent on whether structural rationality is truly normative.

4 Substantivists may respond that, given evidentialism (see the next section), it is impossible to consciously believe that p and believe that p lacks evidential support, which is from the so-called internalist argument for evidentialism (Shah 2006; Way 2016). Likewise, critics of the substantivist approach (Worsnip 2018; Lee 2020) argue that one cannot violate coherence requirement consciously; thus, if my description of the cases is true, it suggests that the evidential requirement is not a genuine structural requirement. But I cannot respond to those issues here because the phenomena of positive illusions could also be counterexamples to evidentialism. If so, then we can reject the substantivist approach and discard that the evidential requirement. However, as I explain below, I do not want to turn this paper into another objection to evidentialism (for my objections, see Ho 2018, 2021).

5 It is tempted to think that substantivists would distinguish between epistemic rationality and practical rationality and maintain that structural requirements about beliefs are epistemic and thus respond only to evidence; accordingly, substantivists could happily acknowledge positive illusions as being practically rational, but epistemically irrational. However, this misconstrues the substantivist approach. As presented in section 2, substantivists hold Normativism, which is a thesis about what one ought to do, not merely what one epistemically (or practically) ought to do. Substantivists such as Kiesewetter (2017, 11–13) and Lord (2017, 1126) explicitly state that only evidence is reason for belief (rather than merely epistemic reason for belief). See Lee (2021) and Worsnip (2021b) for the same interpretation that the substantivist approach presumes evidentialism. If they retreat to the revised and weaker view, then the substantivist approach only explains why we are epistemically ought to remove positive illusion, but not why we ought to do so. The normativity of structural rationality still receives no explanation. More importantly, this interpretation would still face dilemmas similar to the ones discussed in this section.

6 In the literature, philosophers who deny pragmatic reason as reason for belief often draw the distinction between object-given reason (the right kind of reason; reason concerning whether the content of a state fits that state) and state-given reason (the wrong kind of reason; reason concerning the benefit of having a state) (Olson 2004; Hieronymi 2005; Parfit 2011; Way 2012).

7 Evidentialists might reply that I have misconstrued their view about the pragmatic requirement. Their view is that pragmatic considerations require us only to want or take action to maintain the illusions, without successfully maintaining the illusion. But this response gets the fact wrong. Without successfully maintaining positive illusions, we cannot enjoy the benefits. What the pragmatic considerations require must be that we take action in order to successfully maintain the illusions, not merely want or take action to maintain them.

8 Particularly, Berker (2018) defends evidentialism on the grounds that evidence and pragmatic considerations cannot be weighed together.

Additional information

Funding

The research is funded by the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan (110-2410-H-194-081-MY3).

Notes on contributors

Tsung-Hsing Ho

Tsung-Hsing Ho is a professor at National Chung Cheng University. He received his PhD at the University of Southampton. He is a philosopher of normativity and has published in several areas, including normative ethics, the normativity of mental states (beliefs in particular), AI ethics, Chinese Philosophy, and the philosophy of Kant and John McDowell.