Stereoscopic Vision: Persons, Freedom, and Two Spaces of Material Inference

Lance, Mark; White, H. Heath

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Stereoscopic Vision: Persons, Freedom, and Two Spaces of Material Inference

Mark Lance; H. Heath White

May 2007, Volume 7, No. 4, pp. 1-21

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0007.004

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Abstract

We discuss first a "stance" methodology toward the problem of personhood. This is to ask first, what it is to take something to be a person, and then to move via a notion of appropriateness to an answer to what it is to be a person. We argue that the distinctions between persons and non-persons, between agents and patients, and between subjects and mere objects are deeply connected. All three distinctions are themselves traced to a fundamental distinction within the space of reasons -- between, that is, two sorts of material inferential propriety. These two structures of inference are made explicit by indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Tracing personhood to the fundamentally stereoscopic structure of material inference sheds light not only on notions of freedom, agency, and personhood, but on the nature of modal judgments, on the conceptual space of causation, and on the semantics of the explicitating conditionals. We conclude with a pragmatic argument for belief in persons.

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We suggest that this way of thinking about things neatly sidesteps traditional disputes about the apparent conflict of free will and determinism. On this view, taking someone to be free is not taking them to fall under a description but adopting a practical stance, taking up a strategy of interaction with them. Since what it is to take up that interactive strategy is understood simply in terms of a propensity to deliberate about and with the other in a particular manner, there is no incompatibility with determinism. One can imagine as brutely mechanistic a picture of the world as one likes, say, that all the critters are rule-governed automatons. But so long as the wiring diagram of the critters causes their behavior to follow, to a reasonably close approximation, the stereoscopic normative structure of evidential and subjunctive updating, and so long as they update in more or less proper ways via CIIP and CSIP, we will be able to take them, and they will be taking each other, to be free. (Approximation and more or less allow for some divergence from the ideal, but not so much that interpretation fails.) And if it is appropriate to take such creatures to be subjects believers and thinkers then, since this is inconceivable in abstraction from an assumption of agency, it will as well be appropriate to take them to be free, which, according to our stance approach, is what it is to be free.

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