The social dimension of practical assent

Ordinarily, we consider ourselves agents and authors of our own thinking. We experience and conceive of thinking as an activity rather than a process occurring to us that happens to be located in our mind. Furthermore, we consider such activity as autonomous, generated by our own intellectual powers, rather than occasioned by the external environment or hetero-directed. What grounds can we offer to support the claim that we are “practical selves”—that is, the origin and authors of our thinking? Our claims cannot rest solely on agential awareness because there can be activity without an agent, “a deed without a doer” (Gomes 2024, 66). This is Lichtenberg's problem, which Anil Gomes sets out to solve in The Practical Self. The problem arises for epistemological theories such as Descartes's and Kant's, insofar as they endorse what Gomes calls the “isolationist methodology,” recommending that one start by characterizing thinking as a self-conscious activity to understand what thinking really is (Gomes 2024, 2, 68). As Gomes remarks, the isolationist methodology should not be seen as a sign of confidence but as a way to highlight the centrality of self-reflecting capacities in grounding knowledge of the world. By centering on agential awareness, this methodology brings to the fore the deliberative and first-personal aspect of thinking (Gomes 2024, 73). Thinking is doing—something more akin to action than to an event happening in our mind. Further tightly connected claims follow from this characterization. Firstly, to the extent that thinking is an activity in which we engage, thoughts are deliberations held first-personally: we can assess them in a variety of ways and exercise first-person authority over them.1 Because we stand in a relation of first-person authority with our thoughts, our assessment of them directly impacts the way we keep, revise, or discard them.2 If we see no reason to believe that it is going to rain tonight, we should also think that recurrent thoughts that it is going to rain ought to be discounted and discarded. If we have previously asserted that it was about to rain, then we should stand corrected, take back the assertion, and acknowledge it as false. It is a sign of irrationality to resist one's own authority—and a kind of irrationality more akin to self-alienation than to incoherence. Failing to follow up our own thoughts that some belief should be discarded or revised radically differs from (reasonably or unreasonably) failing to concur with somebody else's view that we should do so. In contrast, we have no such authority over others' states of mind. While we can exercise some (epistemic, moral) authority on others, for instance, by correcting them, showing them that they are mistaken, or corroborating their thoughts with proof, such authority is indirect and may not have any effect on them. Correspondingly, we can resist the authority of others and reject what we provide as evidence: sometimes we do so reasonably, with good reason, and other times unreasonably (e.g., out of arrogance). Nonetheless, rejecting others' (epistemic or moral) authority is never straightforwardly a matter of irrationality. Secondly, and relatedly, insofar as thinking is an activity produced by our mind rather than an impersonal process that takes place in it, we are in charge of our own thinking. We can claim and take responsibility and be held accountable for what we think. Expressing thoughts in the form of an assertion or declaration makes us responsive to the normative standards and expectations associated with asserting and declaring: if asserting and declaring constitutively aim at truth, in asserting and declaring falsities, we fail to reach this target. However, asserting and declaring falsities is also something we do to others, and there are normative expectations relative to truth-telling as a moral duty.3 First-person authority also means that as agents of our thoughts, we have the responsibility to check that they are attuned to reality. This is a responsibility we bear toward others and is directly connected to the ways we make ourselves accountable to them. The salience of this communicative, expressive, and even performative aspect of thinking, with its normative and evaluative entailments, introduces a third claim that to be conscious of oneself, one must also recognize oneself as situated in a world of distinct objects. It is a condition of self-consciousness that we are related to an objective world. All these claims are at least implicit—if not reflectively endorsed—in ordinary epistemic practices. We ordinarily consider ourselves in charge of our thoughts and assess such thoughts in various ways. In discussing the weather as much as political opinions, we claim responsibility for what we think; correspondingly, we attribute to others the responsibility for thinking what they think. We also ordinarily think that what we think matters not only to us but also to others in that they are affected by our thoughts—that is, by their contents and the way they are communicated and expressed. These problems are vivid to agents who represent themselves as situated in an objective world, and engage with other subjects who are similarly positioned. Nonetheless, to provide a philosophical foundation for these ordinary attitudes and practices proves difficult. The connection between agential awareness and objectivity seems especially elusive: Descartes and Kant offer different a priori arguments for linking self-consciousness to the objective world. Descartes's argument appeals to God's beneficence; Kant's argument is that recognizing something as an object requires understanding that it exists independently of one's subjective perceptions, which, in turn, allows the subject to understand oneself as one among many other subjects in the same world. Self-consciousness requires a unified awareness of oneself over time. The process of unification required for self-conscious judgment is carried out by the subject, but for such unity to exist, there must be a stable framework of external objects that are perceived as existing independently of one's mind. Lacking an objective world, it would be impossible to form a coherent sense of self out of a bundle of disconnected perceptions. Gomes aligns with most contemporary philosophers in finding these strategies untenable (Gomes 2024, 28). The pars destruens of his essay is devoted to showing that both the experiential and conceptual foundations of our understanding of ourselves as agents of thinking fail to explain the practical self: “our status as agents does not show up in our experience of the world. And there is nothing conceptually incoherent about the idea that we might be the mere passive recipients of all our thoughts” (Gomes 2024, 80). Nonetheless, Gomes thinks that Lichtenberg's challenge can be successfully addressed by seeking “an alternative route from self-consciousness to objectivity, from isolation back to the world” (Gomes 2024, 79). His pars construens combines two strategies. The first builds upon Kant's account of rational assent and aims to demonstrate that the grounds of the agential awareness of thinking are practical rather than epistemic (Gomes 2024, 80–81). Like the existence of God, being the agent of one's thinking admits of no empirical or conceptual proof and is thus theoretically uncertain. However, there are practical reasons for according our assent to both of these claims. The philosophical task is to show that having faith in ourselves as agents of our thinking is a requirement of practical rationality. The second strategy is invoked to secure the connection between this faith and objectivity. To this purpose, Gomes turns to practices and institutions, drawing selectively from Kant's account of religion and Strawson's view of reactive attitudes. In a way, this is an odd pair. On Kant's account, self-consciousness is the route to responsibility as well as to the objective world. For Gomes, one step is missing. Kant's transcendental argument rests on the unwarranted claim that the awareness of intellectual activity suffices to ensure awareness of oneself engaging in that activity (Gomes 2024, 83). Gomes proposes that the gap be bridged by refocusing on practices; in this context, he relies on Kant's account of religious institutions and practices. However, differently than for Strawson, for Kant, social practices do not provide objectivity of any interesting kind, they help sustain moral commitment. The emphasis on institutions and practices serves to highlight the social dimension of practical assent, thereby placing the centrality of social modes of negotiating the boundaries between the self and the world, and the self and others, into sharp focus. This represents a promising avenue for overcoming the limitations of the isolationist approach to thinking. I concur with Gomes that the social dimension of practical assent is crucial to establishing the connection between agential self-awareness and objectivity, but I have some reservations about the viability of his proposal. Ultimately, my worry concerns the role that practices and institutions play in his argument. Gomes's first strategy builds on an argument that is central to Kant's practical philosophy and is receiving growing attention in epistemology. Kant's practical assent argument responds to a problem regarding the capacity to assent to the possibility of some ends. It exploits the distinction between choice and wish: to will an end, one has to think that the end is attainable. We are morally required to set the highest good as an end, and the argument for the existence of God is based on the presumption that rational agents are rationally committed to the pursuit of moral ends. Gomes's strategy consists in arguing that the claim about agential awareness is analogous to claims such as the existence of God. Although they lack epistemic support, these claims are not groundless. The absence of empirical or conceptual grounds prevents us from believing in the existence of God as a matter of epistemic certainty but there are—or, more precisely, we have—reasons to believe in it on practical grounds. The fact that no appeal to experience can be grounding can be seen as a point of convergence with Kant and Lichtenberg; the idea is that the receptive nature of experience, which undermines the autonomy of awareness, undercuts the explanation of thinking as a spontaneous activity.4 Gomes deploys an analogous strategy to respond to Lichtenberg's challenge: making the postulate of the self as an agent of thinking a practical requirement (Gomes 2024, 86–88). Practical postulates are claims to which we are rationally entitled to assent (Gomes 2024, 87). What kind of practical attitudes does practical assent license? Gomes focuses on faith and takes the existence of God as the paradigmatic example of an object of practical assent, on which to model the argument for the practical self. However, Kant also identifies hope as a key practical attitude for practical assent. These attitudes are often used interchangeably, and scholars have put forward different ways of understanding their offices.5 I propose that we consider faith and hope as distinct concepts in relation to different intentional objects to clearly identify the two different kinds of agency that they promote.6 When directed at God, faith allows individuals to rationally commit to moral principles under a specific kind of uncertainty, that is, in the absence of empirical proof of the ultimate compensation of their striving for the moral ideal and the attainment of the highest good. Its object is thus an ultimate order of reality, in which happiness and virtue are harmonized. Rational faith does not entail confidence in God's existence or assistance (R 6:68) but is directed to and ensures the coherence of moral and natural goods, virtue, and happiness. By contrast, hope is directed to and serves moral perfection (R 6:62) and points to the real possibility rather than the mere conceivability of human moral achievement independently of divine external assistance. To effectively engage in the moral struggle requires hope in humanity (R The human being be to hope by of their own they will to the that in that For they ought to good human cannot be morally on the of what can be to them as by (R is directed to the of an on human in the pursuit of the moral ideal (R In that hope can be from faith directed at God. to both attitudes of practical assent is crucial to that from the limitations to their and social they can also the of practical as the key to their Kant often takes for the of hope and but for there is a in them based on their intentional objects. 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