Exploring Dickinson Miller's Metaethical Views & Pragmatist Tradition

HEART AND HEAD: ON DICKINSON MILLER S METAETHICS Teemu Toppinen (teemu.toppinen@tuni.fi) Metaphysical Club 2.0 University of Helsinki 31 October 2024

THE PLAN FOR TODAY The aim: to highlight and explain Dickinson Miller s very little known metaethical views from the late 1890s and the early 1900s. These views have anticipated sophisticated, broadly pragmatist, accounts of the meaning of normative (and religious) language, which are usually believed to be much more recent inventions. The structure of the talk: Miller and the pragmatist tradition Metaethics Miller s non-cognitivism (value as a province of Heart, and not Head) Miller s quasi-realism (value as satisfaction not subjectified ) A puzzle: Miller on evaluative judgment and truth

MILLER & THE PRAGMATIST TRADITION

MILLER & THE PRAGMATIST TRADITION Dickinson Miller (1868 1963) studied, e.g., at the University of Pennsylvania, at Harvard (under, for example, William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana), and in Berlin and Halle (an abridged version of the Halle dissertation was published in The Philosophical Review in 1893 as The Meaning of Truth and Error ). He worked at Harvard, Bryn Mawr, and Columbia (with, e.g., John Dewey), and at General Theological Seminary in New York; after retiring from work, Miller spent time also in Europe (attending the meetings of the Vienna Circle, for instance). His academic career appears to have suffered from his mental health problems. Miller is perhaps best known for his influence on William James, who was both influenced by Miller in his development of pragmatism and criticized by the latter (esp. with regard to The Will to Believe ). (James to Miller: I always turn to you inwardly as the completest ideal responder whom I have to any strivings of the spirit in myself and this equally whether the response be agreement or dissent, for you genuinely meet me and others almost always glance side-ways off the surface. ) As for his own writings, Miller may be best known for a paper that he wrote, under the name R. E. Hobart, on the topic of free will and determinism ( Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It , Mind, 1934).

METAETHICS

WHAT IS METAETHICS? Ethics is an attempt to answer questions such as: What is good? How should we live? Why is it good that we have knowledge? Why should we cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions? Metaethics is an attempt to answer a bunch of questions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, etc. The core questions of metaethics include questions such as: What are normative questions about? What kind of property is the property of being wrong, for instance? What does good mean? How is it that we even manage to talk about goodness, oughts, etc.? Metaethics also addresses, e.g., the question regarding why it is that ethical judgments bear such a close relation to motivation (the motivation problem)? Metaethics is that theoretical activity which aims to explain how actual ethical thought and talk and what (if anything) that thought and talk is distinctively about fits into reality (McPherson, T. & D. Plunkett, The Nature and Explanatory Ambitions of Metaethics, in The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, 2018).

EVALUATIVE, NORMATIVE, ETHICAL, ETC. Consider sentences such as: Bombing civilians is wrong. Democracy is valuable in itself We ought to give more support to Ukraine I will call such sentences and the judgments that we make using such sentences evaluative. The distinctions that might be drawn between the evaluative and the normative, the ethical and other realms of the normative or evaluative, etc., are of no consequence here.

COGNITIVISM AND NON-COGNITIVISM The Old-School distinction: COGNITIVISMO-S Evaluative sentences (e.g., Bombing civilians is wrong ) express beliefs and are truth-apt (can be true or false) NON-COGNITIVISMO-S Evaluative sentences express sentiments or desire-like attitudes and aren t truth-apt (cannot be true or false)

COGNITIVISM AND EXPRESSIVISM A better way of distinguishing between cognitivism and expressivism: COGNITIVISM The meaning of evaluative sentences is representational. It is explained by how these sentences represent the world as being. NON-COGNITIVISM The meaning of evaluative sentences is non-representational. It is explained by what states of mind they express. What the theories in this [non-cognitivist] family have in common is the idea that to understand the meaning of moral words like wrong and good , we need to understand that they have an importantly different kind of meaning from ordinary non-moral words, including words like quick , rectangular, and aluminum , and their prospects to help us avoid some of the traditional core questions of metaethics, and to solve the motivation problem. (M. Schroeder, Noncognitivism in Ethics, 2024; see also, e.g., Jamie Dreier s work.)

SOME MORE VIEWS IN METAETHICS SUBJECTIVISM = COGNITIVISM + the view that evaluative judgments represent facts about our psychology REALISM = COGNITIVISM + the view that evaluative judgments represent facts that are objective in that what s right and wrong (etc.) doesn t depend on our attitudes ERROR THEORY = COGNITIVISM + the view that there are no ethical facts for the ethical judgments to represent QUASI-REALISM= NON-COGNITIVISM + the view that there are ethical truths or facts and that these are objective in that what s right and wrong (etc.) doesn t depend on our attitudes HYBRID VIEW = NON-COGNITIVISM + the view that evaluative sentences also express representational beliefs, where the content of these beliefs may vary from one speaker to another

HISTORY OF NON-COGNITIVISM AND QUASI- REALISM: THE STANDARD VIEW Non-cognitivism is often believed to have developed in the 1920s, or so (Ogden & Richards, Ramsey, Carnap, Ayer, etc.). Quasi-realism is standardly taken to be a quite recent invention (developed, in particular, in the work of Simon Blackburn in the 1970s and 1980s). Miller s (if I m right) quasi-realist view developed in the late 19thand early 20th century is, then, an interesting node in the network of views that constitute the non- cognitivist tradition.

MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM

HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM Heart and Head (an essay distributed to Miller s classes at General Theological Seminary in 1915) Miller begins by noting some different uses of the word heart : The word evidently conveys the idea of sympathy and compassion. We speak of tender- hearted or kind-hearted man, a man of heart, a heartless man. Secondly, the heart means also, quite apart from suffering and pity, the power of affection. Thus we speak of a warm-hearted person [ ]. But thirdly, [ ] it is used to signify the power of courage. [ ] Mr. Justice Holmes writes: We have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune a spade and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.

HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM Close to the idea of courage lies a fourth meaning [ ]. Light-hearted , down- hearted , heavy-hearted , a sad heart , these point to a fourth sense which is simply high or low spirits, cheer , or depression of mood And besides, there is a fifth usage, broader but yet distinct and separate, in which heart seems to mean simply feeling. We say, with grateful hearts, with a full heart, heart-felt. Then, sixthly, quite apart from these, the word means the organ of desire, as in the phrases, his heart was set upon it, an object that lay near his heart, the desire of his heart. In the words of Pascal, The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not, the term is used in this sense taken together with the last.

HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM It is worth while to point out, however, that all these meanings have something in common. A compassionate mind cares whether another suffers or not. Another s happiness has a value for such a mind. A heartless man really sets no value on another s freedom from suffering, does not care, as we express it. So with affection. To have a warm heart means that other people have value in our eyes and are not a matter of indifference to us. So it is also, if we look closely, with courage. The man who presses forward against odds has a keener sense of the value of his object or of his duty than of his safety or comfort. [ ] So with feeling in general. It is always the goodness or badness that we feel in something, and this is just what we mean here by value. So most obviously with desire; for desire is exactly the sense of the alluring, the appealing value of its object. Keeping, then, to the natural habits of speech, not departing from any meaning of the word, we may say that while the head deals with the facts, the heart deals with values. The head is the organ of knowledge. The heart is the organ of appreciation. We know facts. We appreciate values.

HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM So, Miller draws a clear distinction between description (Head) and normative or evaluative judgment (Heart): Value is not mere fact. It is a commonplace of philosophy that we can describe the facts in any case leaving none of them out and yet not mention any values; we could tell a story of a murder, the stealthy steps, the leap on the victim, the fatal dagger- stroke, the effusion of blood, the death; omit no circumstance, and yet use no words which implied that the deed was good or evil. That is, we could describe it but not judge it.

HEART & HEAD: MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM Miller is also very clear about the distinction between the idea that evaluative language gives expression to our heart (non-cognitivism), and the idea that it describes our heart (subjectivism): This is equally true of the fact that a man has certain feelings. We can tell all about feelings of love or disgust; but if we are simply playing the psychologist, if we merely say that the mind we are studying felt love or disgust, if we never permit any love or disgust of our own to enter into our language, then we are telling a story of bare fact and not of value. That hatred or desire was felt by somebody is mere fact. That it was a discreditable feeling or a noble one, that is a value.

HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS NON-COGNITIVISM The distinction between non-cognitivism and subjectivism is very clear also in a later paper, Moral Truth, from 1950: A classical story for the young represents a boy as saying of a younger one, But he is such a nice little fellow. And a wise woman comments, That is, you love him. There is the key to the objectivity and the subjectivity of judgments of value. It is good ; That is, you like it. It is morally good ; That is, you feel moral esteem for it. Wherever the one can be sincerely said, with the staple meaning of the term behind it, the other is true. Nevertheless, the purport of the one is not that of the other. The boy was not recognizing that he loved the younger one, he was not thinking of himself or his feelings; his attention and interest as he spoke were upon the small boy.

BOTH HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS HYBRID VIEW The Relations of Ought and Is (International Journal of Ethics, 1893): What is the most conspicuous fact of my mental state when I am insisting that a certain deed ought to be done? First, there is the notion of a system, more or less complex, which needs the deed in question to be perfect. If this particular deed is not in place, is out of line, is not performed, the system is broken. [ ] There is always, I assert with some confidence, a reference to what may loosely be called a system, when the word ought is used [ ]. You ought not to think of such things, I quickly and perhaps vaguely picture a certain consistent purity of mind upon which such thoughts are a blot. You ought to lift your hat, I see in a flash an orderly and polite world, or some dim fragment thereof, uniformly uncovering its head at the proper moment; and so on to the end of the chapter. [ ] We may then interpret the proposition, A. ought to tell the truth, thus: only by telling the truth can A. perform his part in the true system of the world.

BOTH HEART AND HEAD: MILLERS HYBRID VIEW Miller continues: The true system ; at this objectors will not be slow to protest. How true, and why true? Which system is true? [ ] Instead of the true system, I might have written the system, that is, the system which is dominant and undisputed in the subject s mind [ ]. The system that is dominant in the subject s mind is the one that they desire to be instantiated or approve of. So, Miller here seems to advocate a hybrid view, according to which A ought to tell the truth expresses, roughly: approval of actions that have some property K, and a representational belief that X s performing A has that property, K, whatever it is. This looks a lot like the kind of ecumenical or relational expressivism defended, e.g., by M. Ridge (Impassioned Belief, OUP, 2014) and myself ( Believing in Expressivism, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 2013).

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM Having distinguished between non-cognitivism and subjectivism, and emphasized how our focus in ethical thought is not on ourselves ( Life calls upon us to take the front view, not to turn round upon ourselves ), Miller writes (in Moral Truth ): At last, however, it becomes advisable, for the best understanding and steering of life, to turn round upon ourselves. Eventually man discovers himself, just as the boy (with aid) discovered himself. Man discovers that value has its seat in his feelings, that the stuff of which the idea of value is composed is his reaction, that there is no such thing as intrinsic value in the object of his thought.

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM Miller emphasizes, though, that our ethical practice doesn t commit us to any error or mistake. He continues: This does not mean that he catches himself in an illusion, a superstition, which consists in an objectifying of what is a mere feeling. Mr. Santayana wrote in an early book that beauty is objectified pleasure. In the same vein it might be said that all value is objectified satisfaction or appreciation. This would be to say that, so far as its apparent objectivity is concerned, it is an illusion. But all he need have said, I think, was that beauty is pleasure not subjectified, not turned upon and classified as a state of mind, not subjected to psychology, but taken as it comes before us in experience, a glow, as it were, in which the object is bathed. There is no objectification and in that respect no illusion. There does not have to be. There is simple experience. We cannot begin by projecting our feelings out of the mind because we have never classed them as in the mind or as feelings at all. In the experience of value we have no call or occasion to do so. So long as the experience is not subjectified it appears as simply as the object appears, it goes with the object, it is not in any wise sundered from it.

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM Miller then makes a somewhat cryptic comment that seems to indicate that he s aware of the possibility of adopting an error theory, but that he rejects the view: There is a possible thought here that might mislead us; namely, that the feeling remains in fact a mere feeling, whereas a judgment of truth refers beyond the mind to some independent object, so that the feeling unless falsely objectified, cannot serve as the meaning of a term in a proposition. But there is surely no such thing as consciously referring any mental content whatever beyond the mind in the moment of experiencing or conceiving it, hence the supposed difference and discrepancy doesn t exist.

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM Yet the objectivity of values is not to be understood in the wrong way: Philosophically we must go on and recognize that the favorable status does not attach to the object as a matter of course; they can be disjoined; it is not an intrinsic attribute of the object. Some philosophers, Miller thought, fail to understand this ( At a large philosophical meeting in England some years ago, a British journal reported, most of the speakers took this view ). Of their view, he writes: [ ] it is evident that their doctrine is thinkable [ ]. To think it we have only to stop where the everyday mind stops in forming judgments of good and evil, right and wrong. We have only to leave the favorable or unfavorable moral status of the object-matter as it appears, not psychologized, not superseded, not taken up into a naturalistic world [ ] Their thought is definite, clear, and self-consistent. But is it true?

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM Is there a problem here for my non-cognitivist interpretation of Miller s views? The British philosophers realism involves an error. And it may sound like their view just is what we all are committed to in our evaluative practices, the na ve view that hasn t been subjected to proper philosophical analysis. But if that s right, then our practice does involve an error, after all. This doesn t seem correct. Miller emphasizes that our practice of making value judgments involves no illusions it s just expressions of satisfaction not subjectified. Miller s idea rather is that our belief in objective evaluative truths, if taken philosophically as a finality (as it is taken in the case of the British philosophers), is not true. The mistake is to think of a value judgment as something that refers beyond the mind to some independent object. This kind of realist construal of our value judgments is mistaken. If we understand value judgments as the realist would understand them, then they involve an error and are mistaken. But this is not how the meaning of our value judgments should be understood.

A PUZZLE: MILLER ON EVALUATIVE JUDGMENT AND TRUTH

MILLER ON TRUTHS OF VALUE Despite ethical judgments issuing from Heart rather than Head, despite their being, roughly, expressions of our feelings or desires, there are, according to Miller, ethical truths. In Heart and Head, he writes: As there is a truth of fact, so there is a truth of value. As there is a just understanding, so there is a just appreciation. We know how in our awakened moments we meet what is good in every day, the fresh air in our faces as we leave the house, the sunlight as it streams into the room, the humour, the beauty, the striking traits about us, the refreshing individuality of things. About the ancient Greek, stoic, ideals of self-sufficiency: There we have a classic product of Greek intelligence never surpassed or equalled in later times. But it is a false view of life. It did not know the keys that open new worlds of value. Upon the scene of this philosophy came the Gospel.

MILLER ON TRUTHS OF VALUE In the 1950 paper: Is there then no such thing as moral truth? It is completely obvious that there is moral truth. Life forces the perception upon us. There is something strangely frivolous and shallow in the frame of mind that can deny it.

MILLER ON TRUTHS OF VALUE Curiously, though, Miller writes: In proportion as they are in agreement, in proportion as the moral sentiments are fundamentally shared, the simple objective statement of moral value has a true meaning. [ ] Moral truth is based on the potential and inevitable ultimate agreement of reaction [ ].

MILLER ON TRUTHS OF VALUE And: When brothers and sisters speak of Father or Mother, or even of the house, the dining room, the front door, their words would not tell a stranger to what persons or abode they referred. But within the family the reference is clear; they all stand in the same relation to what is spoken of. So when they say, Well, we shall have to, or That wouldn t do, of course, or That would be the very thing, they may be speaking in relation to the family aims or interests, which they share and hence can all take for granted. And this is the situation for the human family. There is moral truth for them because they can say, We are of one blood, you and I.

MILLER ON TRUTHS OF VALUE In a similar context, in the earlier paper (1893), Miller writes about the force and significance of ought-judgments: In its own sphere, the personal sphere, the ought has force and is no illusion. Where we know that others cherish the same ultimate ends as we, it has force between different persons. Where we are assured that the ultimate likes and dislikes of another are irreconcilably diverse from our own, the ought still has significance to ourselves as describing for us the other s proper conduct; as addressed to him, except for impressive purposes it is a mere flatus vocis.

MILLER ON TRUTHS OF VALUE Why should moral truth be based on agreement of reaction? Non-cognitivists usually do not say this. Usually, non-cognitivists have either denied that evaluative judgments are apt for evaluation in terms of truth or falsity, or adopted a minimalist view, according to which claims about what s true, in the evaluative sphere, just are evaluative claims they just are claims about what is to be done, about what to feel, etc.

MILLERS QUASI-REALISM A possible suggestion: According to Miller, evaluative judgments (e.g., of the form X ought to perform A ) express something like: approval of actions that have some property K, and a belief that X s performing A has that property, K, whatever it is. Miller might think that, strictly speaking, only the belief component can be true or false. He also might simply mean that in order for there to be moral truth in the sense that we could agree on what the truth is in order for there to be moral truth for us, as it were, and not just for you, or for me there has to be agreement in reaction.

CONCLUSION I have suggested that Miller s metaethical writings may present a very early instance of a non-cognitivist view a very early instance of a hybrid view a very early defense of a quasi-realist view If this is correct, Miller s views seem to offer us a very interesting node in the web of the ideas that constitute the non-cognitivist tradition in metaethics, and raise questions meriting further study about the views of other philosophers in his intellectual surroundings (e.g., his teachers, colleagues, and students). (There may be unpublished work by Miller that would be very interesting to look at.)

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