Abstract
According to a popular strategy amongst economists and philosophers, in order to solve the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons, we have to look at how ordinary people make such comparisons in everyday life. The most recent attempt to develop this strategy has been put forward by Goldman in his “Simulation and Interpersonal Utility” (Ethics 4:709–726, 1995). Goldman claims, first, that ordinary people make interpersonal comparisons by simulation and, second, that simulation is reliable for making interpersonal comparisons. In this paper, I focus on Goldman’s latter claim. After updating Goldman’s account of how ordinary people make interpersonal comparisons in the light of Goldman’s newest formulation of his simulation theory of mental ascription (Goldman, Simulating Minds. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006), I develop and assess Goldman’s arguments in favour of the reliability of simulation for interpersonal comparisons. I argue that, under certain conditions, there may be room for a scientifically acceptable solution to the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons.
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Notes
Goldman’s approach should immediately resonate for researchers working on the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons, as it presents close affinities with Harsanyi’s ‘extended preference approach’ (Harsanyi 1977, 1982), that is, with one of the most popular solutions to the problem of interpersonal comparisons offered in the literature (and, according to some, e.g. Binmore (2009), the correct solution to this problem). For reasons of space, I cannot discuss the relation between Harsanyi’s and Goldman’s accounts in detail here. It suffices to say that by considering the problem of interpersonal comparisons from the standpoint of philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, Goldman’s approach attempts to provide more solid scientific foundations to Harsanyi’s position.
Simulation theory is not the only account of our mindreading capacity. Its main competitor is the so-called theory–theory of mindreading, according to which ordinary people ascribe mental states to others and to themselves by means of a ‘theory of mind’ that they, more or less tacitly, possess (Fodor 1987; Stich and Nichols 1992; Carruthers 2011). The theory–theory account of mindreading can be used to develop an alternative, non-simulationist explanation of how ordinary people make interpersonal utility comparisons. For reasons of space, I shall not consider such an account in this paper. As one referee has invited me to emphasise, however, it must be kept in mind that the same kind of arguments offered by Goldman in support of his simulationist solution to the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons (discussed in Sect. 5–7) could be used, mutatis mutandis, to defend a theory–theory solution as well. If this is true, then the conclusions of this paper do not apply only to a simulationist solution of interpersonal comparisons, but have a significantly broader scope.
A theory, or a statement, T is determined by a set of observation sentences E if E implies T. A theory, or a statement, T is underdetermined by a set of observation sentences E if T is consistent with, but not determined by E. See (List (2003), p. 232).
The principle according to which, for any proposition \(p\), in order to justifiably believe that \(p\), it is necessary to justifiably believe that one is justified in believing that \(p\), is known as the JJ principle. For a critique of this principle, see Goldman (1979) and Alston (1980). The principle according to which, for any proposition \(p\), in order to know that \(p\), it is necessary to know that one knows that \(p\), is commonly known as the KK principle. For a critique of this principle, see Dretske (1981) and Williamson (2000).
It is worth noticing that this approach remains distinct from the traditional one. Indeed, the focus is no longer on the question of whether there is enough evidence in favour of specific interpersonal comparisons of desire strength, but on the question of whether there is enough evidence in favour of the reliability of the processes by means of which interpersonal comparisons are made.
Goldman contrasts the notion of enactment-imagination (or E-imagination) to the notion of suppositional-imagination (or S-imagination). The main difference is that the former involves enacting, or trying to enact, a particular mental state, whereas this is not necessarily the case for the latter form of imagination.
This contrasts with the account of introspection proposed in Goldman (1995), according to which introspection consists in the detection of experienced mental states (Goldman 1993). The corresponding ST account of mental ascription was based on the idea that the simulator classifies her mental states on the basis of their phenomenology, that is, of ‘what it is like’ to have such mental states in specific circumstances. Against this view, Goldman has argued, in his most recent statement of the ST of mental ascription, that, even if we grant the assumption that all mental states have a phenomenology, there do not seem to be enough distinctive phenomenological properties to sort mental state tokens into different types, each with different specific features. For this reason, Goldman has abandoned this experientialist account and explored the possibility that mental ascription be based on the detection of neural properties. Unfortunately, Goldman does not explicitly say which kind of neural properties might be relevant for mental ascription.
Goldman himself seems to leave this possibility open (Goldman 2006, Chap. 10).
When circumstances are not normal, it may be possible for incorrect inputs to reliably lead the simulator to the correct outputs. For instance, this may happen when a mistake at the input level is reliably cancelled out by a mistake at the information-processing level. Similar remarks apply to the two conditions discussed below. I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this point.
This requirement is very close to Harsanyi’s “similarity postulate”, according to which “once proper allowances have been made for the empirically given differences in taste, education, etc., between me and another person, then it is reasonable for me to assume that our basic psychological reactions to any given alternative will be otherwise much the same.” (Harsanyi 1982, p. 50) While formulated in different ways, this requirement is generally recognised as being of fundamental importance for making justified interpersonal comparisons through imaginative empathy.
It is worth noticing that Goldman (1995) does not explicitly consider these requirements in his article.
I thank two anonymous referees for drawing my attention to the different possibilities open to a simulation theorist with respect to the first requirement.
See (Goldman (2006), Chap. 2), on this point.
For instance, in order to assess whether an electron microscope is reliable for detecting a speck on a particular location of a grid, we can compare its results with those of a light microscope (Hacking 1981).
One referee has pointed out to me that economists do not generally regard the vNM utility representation as a procedure for eliciting desire strengths, but rather as a procedure that defines desire strengths in terms of observed choice behaviour. This suggests that, if the correlation between introspective reports and the vNM utility representation does not hold, one is not forced to conclude that introspective reports are unreliable, but simply that introspective reports and the vNM utility representation measure different things; the vNM representation measuring desire strength as choices under conditions of uncertainty, introspective reports being concerned wth phenomenological or neural desire strengths. The view that desire strengths can be defined in terms of (actual or hypothetical) choices is, however, not uncontroversial. For a critique, see Hausman (2012).
Saxe (2005) argues not only that, in some circumstances, our mindreading mechanisms are unreliable, but also that ST is incapable of providing a convincing account of such systematic errors in mental attributions.
Indeed, Harsanyi himself argues that the use of non-empirical assumptions, far from being peculiar to interpersonal comparisons, is part of good scientific practice. “This is so”—according to Harsanyi—“because the empirical facts are always consistent with infinitely many alternative hypotheses, and the only way we can choose among them is by using a priori nonempirical choice criteria, such as simplicity, parsimony, preference for the ‘least arbitrary’ hypothesis, etc.” (Harsanyi 1982, p. 51).
Do these considerations imply that the sceptic will be agnostic about any ascription of mental states, when the latter are conceived phenomenologically? No. Since the sceptic agrees that a hypothesis is justified to the extent that it is part of the best explanation of some observable phenomena, she may recognise that some of our mental attributions will indeed be justified, for ascriptions of mental states, such as desires and beliefs, to other agents do play a significant role in the best explanation of those agents’ behaviour. What the sceptic maintains is that our best explanations will not feature any hypotheses that go beyond the hypothesis of psychological isomorphism. In other words, our best explanation will respect what Palmer has called the ‘isomorphic constraint’ (Palmer 1999).
I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this argument to me.
This seems to corroborate Harsanyi’s claim, quoted by Goldman (1995, p. 724), that “once proper allowances have been made for the empirically given differences in taste, education, etc., between me and another person, then it is reasonable for me to assume that our psychological reactions to any given alternative will be otherwise much the same.” (Harsanyi 1982, p. 50)
Goldman attributes this argument to a then forthcoming article by Sorensen (1998).
I thank two anonymous referees for helping me clarify this argument.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Armin Schulz, Richard Bradley, Matteo Colombo, Jean-Charles Pelland, Christophe Malaterre, Sébastien Menard and three anonymous referees for their very useful comments on previous versions of the paper.
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Rossi, M. Simulation theory and interpersonal utility comparisons reconsidered. Synthese 191, 1185–1210 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0318-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0318-9