Abstract
Social constructionist explanations of human thought and behavior hold that our representations (e.g. of race, or gender, or mental illness, or emotion) produce and regulate the categories, thoughts, and behaviors of those they represent. Performative versions of constructionist accounts explain these thoughts and behaviors as part of an intentional, strategic performance that is elicited and regulated by our representations of ourselves. This paper has four aims. First, I sketch a causal model of performative social constructionist claims. Second, I articulate a puzzling feature of performative claims that makes them seem especially implausible: the puzzle of intention and ignorance. Like other constructionists, performative constructionists are especially interested in explaining thoughts and behaviors that are widely but mistakenly believed to be the unintentional consequences of membership in a natural kind. But why doesn’t the intentional performance of a category undermine this ignorance? My third aim is to resolve this puzzle. I suggest that a plausible understanding can be found in the failure to locate one’s mental states in a causal explanation of one’s thoughts and actions. Finally, I argue that this model implies that the sorts of theories we (as a community or as a culture) offer of particular behaviors can create or destroy agency and responsibility with regard to those behaviors.
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Notes
Hacking later discusses the role of a medical diagnosis that secured release for nineteenth fugueurs (1998, Chp. 4).
Despite the centrality of intentional action under a description to his understanding of “making up people” (Hacking 1986, 1995a), Hacking expresses doubts about the sufficiency of conscious, intentional action to account for the phenomena of MPD or other “interactive kinds” (e.g. Hacking 1995b, 368; 1999, 115). The discussion here assumes only that performative accounts treat it as necessary. Relatedly, understanding multiple personality disorder as a performance should be distinguished from the claim that multiple personality disorder is a sort of malingering. Multiples may perform symptoms while at the same time belonging to some (perhaps natural kind of) human category that explains their propensity to perform.
Lewis (1969) introduced of common knowledge. “Common knowledge” is a technical term; propositions that are common knowledge need not be true.
Such social roles can also exist even where there are real natural kinds raising the possibility of partial or mixed constructions. I ignore these complications here.
The intentional domain may be much broader than this, encompassing behaviors that are not “normal” or “rational.” Certainly, we attribute intention in some such cases (e.g. cases of akrasia). For present purposes, I will not be concerned with this broader domain.
Because conscious intentional processes are resource intensive, drawing on finite resources like attention and willpower, this sort of shift from conscious and proximally intentional to unconscious and automatic is plausibly interpreted as a mechanism by which humans ontogenetically adapt to recurring environmental problems.
“Natural” here should be treated simply as stipulatively picking out the complement of what is socially constructed rather than picking out some metaphysically fundamental feature of things.
This terminology is adapted from Griffiths (1997, p. 145).
Griffiths calls it the “problem of sincerity” that confronts what he calls “disclaimed actions.”
Conversely, see Robbins’s (2006) discussion of successful introspective knowledge as involving detection and identification of one’s psychological states.
See Griffiths (1997, pp. 151ff). Cf. Nichols and Stich (2003), Doris (2009). Because theorists often do not distinguish between detection, identification and what I call location, it is not always clear what is intended. An admirable exception is Doris (2009) though he is clear that his primary concern is with detection (2009, p. 80, endnote 16). Though he doesn’t draw this distinction Nahmias (2007) is, like me, clearly concerned about failures of location.
This aspect of Nisbett and Wilson’s account is substantively distinct from those implied by the contemporary dual process accounts that are its most obvious descendents, even though Nisbett and Wilson’s work is typically presented as a seemless predecessor to contemporary dual process accounts (E.g. Haidt 2001), including by Wilson himself (Wilson 2002).
According to the General SS at the University of Chicago, marital infidelity rates over several decades suggest that the rate is about 12 % for men, 7 % for women every year (Castleman 2009).
MacKinnon’s account suggests something more: that the selection of this explanation is motivated by the subject’s preference that the explanation be true. While MacKinnon offers no evidence for her account, there is extensive literature on motivated cognition (Kunda 1999), and she may well be right. Our model is compatible with such motivated cognition, but silent as to its extent.
We must be careful. If MacKinnon is right, it is likely that the success of this failure of location can itself be helpful in enacting “receptivity” that enables someone to avoid violence. In the actual world, successful location may not be a good thing for an actor, all things considered.
Fischer and Ravizza’s account of “taking responsibility” has been criticized for implying subjectivism about the conditions of responsibility (Ginet 2006; Eshleman 2001; McKenna 2000). In contrast to the cases that concern these critics, the agents in constructionist examples have appropriately internalized the norms for what counts as a fair target of the reactive attitudes in their communities. One could worry that this is still insufficiently objective, but requiring more seems to require abandoning a Strawsonian approach to responsibility.
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Acknowledgments
Research and writing of this paper was supported by the Princeton University Center for Human Values and the American Council of Learned Societies. I am grateful to Chrisoula Andreou, John Doris, Anne Eaton, Aaron Meskin, Shaun Nichols, Philip Pettit, Anya Plutynksi, and Stephen Stich, and audiences at Arizona, Arizona State, Duke, Houston, Princeton, Tulane, Washington University in St. Louis and Western Michigan for helpful discussion or comments on earlier drafts.
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Mallon, R. Performance, self-explanation, and agency. Philos Stud 172, 2777–2798 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0444-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0444-y