Expressive Inquiry and Practical Reasoning more

Roberto Frega Expressive inquiry and practical reasoning (This is a pre-print versions of the article. Pagination is different, an minor corrections or changes might have been introduced in the published version. Published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 23, Number 4, 2010, pp. 307-327) Expressive inquiry and practical reasoning Pragmatism, expressivism, and the rational roots of moral experience The aim of this article is to offer a contribution to our understanding of the place and function of reason in human agency, and notably in that specific part of human agency that can be qualified as ‘moral’, and whose main trait is that it presupposes some reference to normativity. In this perspective, through the concept of ‘expressive inquiry’ I would like to propose a theory of how reason enters our moral practices. In line with the pragmatist tradition, I take this theory to be at the same time grounded in effective existing practices and as being a normative description of how agents should resort to reasoning in practical (and notably moral) affairs. My methodological starting point can be devised in what I call ‘epistemology of practice’, a theory of knowledge and rationality whose main sources can be traced back to Dewey’s logical and epistemological writingsi. While having explicitly in mind a pragmatist paradigm of human rationality – as also the term ‘inquiry’ should have made clear – in this article I attempt to extend the pragmatist paradigm integrating it with more recent contributions to moral philosophy. In so doing, I do not intend to take issue in the recent debate over pragmatism and perfectionism, although that last develops around a similar awareness of the necessity to open classical pragmatism to different sources and traditions ii. I rather intend to follow a different path, which consists in developing a notion of moral rationality that is rooted in the deweyan paradigm of rationality as inquiry and that at the same time takes into account those articulative and expressive dimensions that characterize the specifically moral form of inquiry and. In this way, it will become easier to qualify the general notion of situation iii with respect to moral experience. In so doing, we will have reached a better position in order to extend the reach of the notion of inquiry from the general naturalistic dimension of problem solving in problematic situations to the dimension of critical self-reflection and self-transformation which is typical of many moral experiences. In order to develop such a conception, I will rely on two main concepts, that can be traced back both to the pragmatist epistemology of practice and to what, faute de mieux, I will call an expressivist theory of the moral agent iv. These themes, which are both present in each tradition, are identified by the notions of articulation – which denotes a process through which something which is indeterminate becomes determinate – and of transformation, which denotes an active form of relationship of thinking to experience. The concept of inquiry – and so that of expressive inquiry – implies that reasoning should be conceived as being grounded in a set of implicit beliefs, habits and attitudes and that in problematic situations we need to articulate them in order to become aware of them and of their consequences (our inferential commitments). To this extent, articulation and transformation are logically irreducible part of any form of reasoning. But these notions are here considered according to the the expressivist intuition that reflective activity is not merely aimed at representing to others beliefs that would be already given (in order to defend them), but that through their articulation we constantly revise and transform them as a consequence of their further determination. As a consequence, in expressing our moral standing, according to expressivism we not merely represent to others our given and justified set of beliefs, but we rather engage actively in their transformation, so that moral reasoning always has an irreducible transformative dimension. Through reference to the category of expressive inquiry I intend to account for the epistemological implications of this irreducible intertwining of external problem solving with critical self-engagement (and self transformation) of the agentv. In defining expressive inquiry as a form of rational reasoning, the aim of this article is therefore theoretical: it proposes to highlight some of the epistemological requirements of a theory of rationality as inquiry suited for dealing with moral experience. The outcome of this project will be twofold: on one side, the program of a pragmatist epistemology will be remarkably extended and developed; on the other, the rational core of expressivist forms of moral experience will be brought to light. In order to do this, I will first need to outline, although rather sketchily, the epistemological basis of the notion of expressivist inquiry. I will then be in the position to show how the notion of expressive inquiry can account for the expressive and articulative dimensions of moral experience and conclude proposing a pragmatist model for moral reasoning. The pragmatist roots of expression and the logic of judgment of practice The logical structure of moral judgment As the increasing number of studies published in the last twenty years has shown beyond reasonable doubt, pragmatism has greatly contributed to the development of new approaches to human rationality and specifically to rationality as related to questions of agency. Considering rational inquiry as form of activity embedded in a practice but still subjected to normativity, pragmatism has opened a new path for understanding practical reason as the reflecting factor that controls human agency. Such a conception, canonically fixed in the notion of inquiry, brings human rationality far beyond the limitations of an instrumental or technical use, while resisting the idealist temptation at conferring it a transcendental power. As a consequence, normativity is preserved through reference to the regulation of conduct, while this last introduces also the expressive dimension of moral self-understanding, self-transformation, and intersubjective interaction. While this is particularly true for Deweyean pragmatism, which has most thoroughly developed the articulative and the transformative dimensions of human rationality – such an account is nevertheless compatible with a broader pragmatist program. This framework constitutes a suitable epistemological basis for understanding the rationality of moral experience in a way that consciously overcomes the opposition between cognitivist moral theories on one hand and emotivist and expressivitst moral theories on the other. Such a conception of inquiry is strictly related to the idea that moral reasoning is, like any other form of human reasoning, activated by the felt perception of a problem which engenders doubt and forces the agent to thinkvi. Contrary to some reductive reading, even within the pragmatist traditionvii, in order to extend the reach of the notion of inquiry to moral experience, the concept of situation is understood as encompassing also cultural, political, social, and moral aspects of experience. The whole field of morality, therefore, can be included in the notion of situation, so that moral experiences such as moral dilemmas and disagreement fit perfectly the pragmatist idea of problematic situations that the agent faces through the resources of inquiry. This of course presupposes that morality is conceived following the pragmatist deconstruction of the dualism of interiority and exteriority, so that moral life is not reduced to internal subjective reflections but invests the moral agent embedded in his environing natural, social, and cultural situation. The holistic understanding of the situation as a complex whole that includes the agent, his reflections, and his deeds is epistemologically grounded in the refusal of a purely representative conception of moral judgmentviii in favor of a transformative conception of inquiry as being itself part of the situation it is supposed to settle. Since it is the utterance of an agent, judgment is part of his agency, and this not merely in the sense popularized by the speech-act theory, but because the activity of making inferences and stating judgments is the distinctively human way of dealing with the environment, of facing the situations in which a self is engaged. This holds true not only for questions of instrumental control of external problems but also for puzzles and disagreements that characterize moral life. Judgment is a logical act, therefore subjected to epistemic constraints, and at the same time an expression of the self’s identity, therefore characterized by expressivist properties ix. These two attributes meet in the assignment to judgment of a functional status as a means for the settlement of the problematic situation, as the agent is at one and the same time the source of transformation and a possible object of transformation himself. The existential consequences Dewey attributes to judgment (LW 12: 124), in fact, do not refer only to practical changes in states of affairs, but also to transformations in the agent’s set of beliefs and habits. Settlement of the problematic situation, in fact, can be reached both directly through agency and indirectly through a change in the agent’s set of beliefs and attitudes towards the problem which originated the process of inquiry. Judgment has, in this sense, both a self-expressive and a self-transformative dimension: through its utterance, an agent expresses (make explicit) his self and at the same time transforms it through the critical self-reflection on the consequences of his judgments and actions. Inquiry, experience, and situation are the poles around which a pragmatist account of moral reasoning develops. In particular, it is the notion of situation that offers the most interesting insight into the idea of expressive inquiry. If we keep at Dewey’s conception, the notion of situation has a double standing in inquiry. First, it denotes the qualitative whole which activates thought. In this perspective, a situation is not a cognitive object waiting for conceptual analysis but a fact of experience: situation is a pre-reflective entity that identifies what is initially present to thought in an inarticulate way. In his theory of judgment, Dewey says that “a situation is a whole in virtue of its immediately pervasive quality. […] The pervasively qualitative is not only that which binds all constituents into a whole but it is also unique; it constitutes in each situation an individual situation, indivisible and unduplicable. Distinctions and relations are instituted within a situation; they are recurrent and repeatable in different situations” (LW 12: 73-74). Secondly, it defines the final object of thought, since the aim of judgment is precisely its settlement. The first dimension of judgment consists, therefore, in this articulative process needed in order to fix the conceptual determinations through which the situation can be grasped and dealt with. The identification of the conceptual traits of a situation is driven by this first unarticulated grasp of a qualitative trait. “The underlying unity of qualitativeness regulates pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and relation; it guides selection and rejection and the manner of utilization of all explicit terms” (LW 5: 247-248). Such a quality, being implicit, is not directly apprehended through perception and analysis but is reached through this reflective process that Dewey calls ‘articulation’. With reference to moral reasoning, moral experience activates reflection by way of an indeterminacy that troubles agency. This happens, for example, when an agent is torn beyond two incompatible aims, or when two agents disagree concerning how to deal with a joint situation. Indeterminacy so conceived denotes some troubling trait that the agent has not explicitly articulated yet (he knows that something is wrong but does not know exactly why). Whereas the notion of situation implies direct reference to the agent of inquiry, indeterminacy can be referred both to the situation and to the self. This understanding of rationality as the exercise of judgment with reference to a qualitatively undetermined apprehension explains why in Dewey’s epistemology reasoning cannot be accounted for merely in terms of the canonical forms of analysis and synthesis but has an articulative naturex. This articulative dimension of reasoning derives from the fact that the initial situation is not present to thought in the form of something conceptually given but in that of an immediate and unarticulated experience dominated by a qualitative trait which is conceptually underdetermined. This articulative process in moral inquiry has a double focus: the situation as the environing context and the self as the moral agent engaged in the situation. Therefore, moral inquiry addresses itself at one and the same time to the situation and to the agent, because the agent is a constitutive part of the situation – and therefore shows no privilege with respect to inquiry – and because the situation is structurally part of the agents’ identity, as it calls for actions whose constitutive function is explicitly part of Dewey’s anthropology and epistemologyxi. According to Deweyan epistemology, therefore, rationality can be defined as a) the process of inquiry b)taking place in a problematic situation, c) issuing in a judgment of practice, d) operating in an articulative way and e) aiming at a transformative result. To articulate (the immediate experience of a situation) and to transform (a problematic situation into a settled one) are two necessary and distinctive forms of activity which characterize human reasoning. As a consequence, any adequate account of moral reasoning should take them into account. Articulation and transformation The importance of articulation in moral inquiry derives from the fact that the conventional logical processes of analysis and synthesis and therefore of deduction and induction presuppose the existence of determinate objects of appraisal upon which to operate. The relationship between the situation and its objects xii is determined by the fact that “in actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world – a situation. The singular object stands out conspicuously because of its especially focal and crucial position at a given time in determination of some problem of use or enjoyment which the total complex environment presents” (LW 12: 72-3). This holds true not only with reference to natural but also to moral facts: an action, a belief, a motivation, or a cause for acting stands to the agent’s experience as the object stands to the situation: it becomes visible through the process of articulation. It is important to emphasize that this passage from an initially felt situation to the determinate traits that articulate it, making it intelligible, is an irreducible part of moral reasoning. This epistemic priority of experience over thought and of situations over objects is the driving force which lays behind a conception of reasoning as starting from an unanalyzed complex – experience, self or situation – which is given through an immediate apprehension – feeling, perception, or judgment – and which becomes the object of a progressive determination: “All thought in every subject begins with just such an unanalyzed whole. […] The problem is had or experienced before it can be stated or set forth; but it is had as an immediate quality of the whole situation” (LW 5: 249). In such an epistemology, the concept of “given” does not refer to immediate simple objects or qualities liable of simple apprehension, but to complex wholes which can only be grasped through a form of apprehension which is originally confused and indeterminate, and which consequently needs to be further determined through a reflective process that Dewey calls “articulation”. Accordingly, “what is ‘given’ is not an object by itself nor a term having a meaning of its own. The ‘given’, that is to say the existent, is precisely an undetermined and dominant complex quality” (LW 5: 253). The second aspect of inquiry that Dewey’s epistemology emphasizes is that of the transformative aim associated to his the conception of judgment as a form of action xiii. Dewey defines the transformation operated by judgment as the “existential transformation and reconstruction of the material with which it deals; the result of the transformation, when it is grounded, being conversion of an indeterminate problematic situation into a determinate resolved one” (LW 12: 161). This has two distinct meanings. The first is that the proper function of judgment is the control of processes of transformation. The second is that the process of inquiry is in itself transformative, so that inquiry is an active factor of the concrete transformations effected. Judgment is, in this sense, the result of previous activities, a form of activity itself, and the origin of further activities, thus defining an intricate web of relationships between judgment and practice. With reference to the moral domain, the transformation operated by judgment should be considered as taking place both at the specific level of the problematic moral situation and as a retroactive modification of our system of beliefs and habits – i.e. at the level of the agent itself. At the first level, judgment as the outcome of inquiry is the formulation of a hypothetical course of action aimed at resolving the doubt which has prompted inquiry and at restoring viable conditions for agency. This happens, for example, when a moral disagreement is overcome through identification of a shared course of action, or when the agent becomes aware of some faults in his moral beliefs and revises them. In scientific, legal, political, moral, artistic, etc. forms of agency, judgment is said to be transformative precisely because it modifies the conditions of action, both external (the situation) and internal (the agent’s set of beliefs, habits and attitudes). The scope of the notion of transformation is of course much broader and more complex than any idea of instrumental manipulation of the natural or social environment, as it takes into consideration the whole field of the agent’s experience. The epistemological relevance of the concept of transformation is related to the fact that reasoning is entered into (arguments are sought, experience is examined, observations, measurements and other kinds of epistemic acts are accomplished) in order to settle the problem at hand. In this perspective, the transformative dimension has the same epistemic function Peirce assigned to the dialectic of doubt-belief: the inquiry into a particular problematic situation has an impact on generalities through the transformation of habits and beliefs of the agents involved. It is in this epistemically grounded sense, therefore, that the transformative theme should be understood as one of the key notions of a pragmatist epistemology. But the concept of transformation also has an ethical relevance, as it engages selfreflection and self-transformation: if the hypothetical course of action identified proves to be successful, then the hypothetical revision of our beliefs becomes permanent and we reach a new state of stable beliefs and a new pattern of habits. This corresponds to a transformation of the agent’s identity, and the nature and depth of that transformation depends upon which habits and beliefs are affected. In a moral perspective, judgment is therefore considered both as an instrument for the normative control of the agent’s behavior and as a tool of self transformation. These bases make Dewey’s epistemology of judgment a suitable candidate for offering an account of the rational basis of morality. The pragmatist conception of inquiry as the general framework for understanding human reasoning constitutes the epistemological basis upon which I propose to understand the rational basis of moral experience. Following this pragmatist thread, it will be possible to explain moral reasoning in a way that incorporates those articulative and transformative elements that the expressivist tradition has put at the core of moral dimension. This will have a great impact on our understanding of what a moral agent is, how he controls his agency through reasoning, how he makes his decisions and justifies them. But to better see the consequences of this approach, we have to step outside the bounds of the classical pragmatist tradition. The expressive self In order to grasp the implications of this epistemological paradigm for the understanding of moral experience, I propose to examine Charles Taylor’s theory of moral agency, because it develops an expressivist model of the moral agent which is stunningly isomorphic with the pragmatist paradigm of judgment. Taylor has notably remarked that “the task of reason has to be conceived […] as that of articulating the background” (Taylor 1987: 12). Like the pragmatists, Taylor is fully aware that an expressivist conception of the self requires an articulative conception of rationality. Moreover, Taylor and Dewey share the idea that since rationality is an attribute of agency, our conception of the first depends upon the conception of the second. While Dewey’s behavioral conception of the self as being made up of habits (see Dewey MW 14) differs quite remarkably from Taylor’s conception of the self as being defined by strong value assumptions (See Taylor 1977: passim), both authors conceive of judgment as an act which has a double standing. According to both philosophies, in fact, through the utterance of a judgment an agent accomplishes two distinct activities: he formulates a claim concerning a given state of affairs, and he articulates his identity. In the case of Dewey, this is particularly evident in his theory of valuation, where judgments of valuation are conceived of as stating a given value while at the same time claiming that for that agent in that specific situation such a value has value, i.e. it has priority over competing values in orienting agency into the problematic situation. Evaluation, according to Dewey, is an act through which we state the quality of something according to a criterion of value, while at the same time we claim that this criterion has priority against competing criteria (See Frega 2006a: ch. 3). In Cavell – another philosopher who has articulated an expressivist conception of moral experience – this same intuition is evident in his idea that the claim is an act through which a criterion (a standard of valuation) is at one and the same time affirmed to be relevant and used as a standard in a specific judgment. In the case of Taylor, this theme is a key factor in his distinction between strong and weak evaluations (Taylor 1977. See also Frega 2009: ch. 4). Taylor distinguishes judgments of value which merely express an external preference (likes and dislikes) but that as such do not engage the self’s identity, from judgments of value which express value endorsements through which an agent builds and affirms his identity. Through this second type of judgments (strong evaluations) the agent claims to be the agent whose relation to the world is shaped by those values, and in so doing he commits himself to his own claims. Evaluation, according to Taylor, is a form of agency, and “the verb here implies that this is something we do, that our valuations emerge from our activity of evaluation, and in this sense are our responsibility” (Taylor 1977: 28). These three approaches consider judgment as an act through which the subject, while saying something about the world, also offers a description of himself. “A self decides and acts out of certain fundamental evaluations” (Taylor 1977: 35), but those evaluations are the outcome of an articulative process of inquiry, not the given data of an immediate access of the agent to his subjectivity. Through selfanalysis, confrontation with the world, and use of arguments, a self builds and transforms his identity and so lives his moral life. In Cavell’s words, “becoming intelligible to oneself may accordingly present itself as discovering which among the voices contending to express your nature are ones for you to own here, now” (Cavell 1990: 36). Cavell and Taylor share the idea that the logic of articulacy is a logic through which an identity is partially discovered and partially created: as in the Deweyan logic of articulacy, what is given (the problematic situation, the self) is as such indeterminate and inchoate, and inquiry is a process of partial construction that gives shape, through determination, to what lacks determinacy: using a nearly Deweyan language, Taylor claims that “articulations are attempts to formulate what is initially inchoate, or confused, or badly formulated. […] To give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way” (Taylor 1977: 36). In a broader and more abstract way, that enables to connect this description of moral experience to the general paradigm of inquiry, Dewey reminds us that “in actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world – a situation. The singular object stands out conspicuously because of its especially focal and crucial position at a given time in determination of some problem of use or enjoyment which the total complex environment presents” (LW 12: 72-3). It should be noted, moreover, that the notion of a qualitative trait identifying the situation as a whole was used by Dewey also with reference to the human self (see LW 5: 245).The indeterminate situation might refer to our experience, and the objects might stand for values and criteria. In all three cases, the articulative process is considered to have a constructive or constitutive force. This idea is deeply rooted both in the pragmatist conception of inquiry as being transformative and in the perfectionist focus on self-transformation and moral growth in Taylor’s and Cavell’s philosophies. The idea that lies behind this articulative model is that our criteria of judgment, while being constitutive, are neither merely ‘posited’ (they are not the creation of free will) nor discovered (they are not the lot of a hermeneutical process). Rather, they emerge out of this articulative and transformative expressive process of inquiry which includes both thinking and action. In this context, moral inquiry is seen as encompassing a broad array of thinking activities such as self- analysis (I try to examine and understand my reactions to specific situations), situation analysis (I compare my attitudes and criteria with external elements from tradition, culture, etc.), reflection on outcomes and consequences (I assess the consequences associated to different possible judgments), hypothesis making (I try to articulate a coherent version of my self). As such, moral inquiry is characterized by the two interlinked dimensions of c ritical self-endorsement of one’s stance (the criteria are not given but rather endorsed) and critical self-transformation (the self is not the outcome of a discovery but rather of a quest)xiv. The acquisition of an articulative competence constitutes, therefore, an epistemological condition of our moral standing (Taylor 1977: 2425), as long as our moral competence – our capacity to behave as moral agents – depends upon our capacity to adopt an articulative attitude towards ourselves. Such an attitude, if we see it through the lenses of Dewey’s epistemology, coincides with our rational competence at engaging in inquiry. Rational inquiry, when addressed to the agent’s experience rather than to social or natural factors, operates in ways similar to those described by Taylor: it helps the agent to analyze his own moral constitution in order to make it more explicit, to fix its reference points, and to deploy its framework. In the agent’s articulation of an indeterminate situation (his own position), his moral reasoning is not primarily aimed at settling disputed matters of fact, nor at justifying the moral assumptions an agent considers to be true (the hyper rationalistic account of moral reasoning so often found in philosophy) but at constructing his position through a multiple reference system: to his self- understanding (the constitution of the self through its articulation), to the perceived consequences related to his assumptions (the constitution of the self through interaction with the environment) and to the normative construction of shared consensus (the constitution of the self through intercourse with others). These are the main dimensions through which I propose to define the model of expressive inquiry, in a way that explicitly integrate pragmatist and expressivist sources. As such, it denotes a central part of morality, as it accounts for the agent’s self understanding and constitution, and it has a rational nature, since it denotes a form of inquiry. Expressive inquiry constitutes, therefore, an indispensable part of moral inquiry to the extent that without accomplishing this articulative movement, the agent lacks an adequate level of selfunderstanding: his deeds, while rational from an instrumental point of view, might nevertheless remain unintelligible as far as their expressive meaning is concerned. The implication of this understanding is that moral rationality has to be conceived in a way that accounts for the specific form of its relation to the agent. This trait, as I have shown, affects the whole understanding of rationality and, as a consequence, the way moral justification and normativity are conceived as being indispensable parts of our moral experience. Justification and normativity in expressive inquiry The theory of justification which is required by an expressivist conception of inquiry is grounded in the assumption that a justificatory practice is part of the articulative activity of an agent. This implies a reference to criteria of evidence attuned to the experimentalist and fallibilist paradigm of inquiry. But it includes also elements from the expressivist paradigm, and notably from the idea that our justificatory practices are shaped by criteria which are often inarticulate but which, through their articulation, can be incorporated into the justificatory practice itself. As an example of a theory of moral justification coherent with this paradigm, I will briefly discuss Stanley Cavell’s theory of rationality as claim. Although the notion of claim might seem to be at odds with the experimentalist side of inquiry, it offers a good example of how normativity can be brought into an expressivist approachxv. Stanley Cavell has developed a conception of justificatory practices based on three conditions. The first is a state of trust in the validity of the inarticulate ground of assumptions which lies at the bottom of our explicit moral claims, according to which “our knowledge is not merely ruled by what we mean with ‘evidence’ or ‘truth conditions’ but by ‘criteria’” Cavell 1979: 38). The second condition is the agent’s reflective competence and willingness to make these assumptions explicit once one of his claims is challenged by a rival claim, as happens in cases of disagreement, where agents face the impossibility to adjudicate between competing claims. Cavell’s move from judgments to criteria is analogous to Taylor’s move from preferences to strong evaluations or from advocacy claims to ontological commitments (See Taylor 1989b). It denotes a form of moral reasoning that has the logical articulative and transformative structure that I have elaborated dwelling on Dewey’s epistemology of practice. The third condition is the success in finding an agreement on the grounds of these basic assumptions, either persuading the other to share them or through the identification of new, shared, criteria. As in the case of Dewey’s logic of articulacy, the justificatory practice that Cavell associates to the notion of claim is irreducible to the standard pattern of deductive and inductive reasoning: it is not deductive, since it does not claim to descend from some unquestioned assumptions (universal principle, a priori truth, neutral claim, subjective interest or preference) that would ground the validity of the claim itself; it is not inductive, since it is not based upon some explicitly gathered evidence that could be shown in support of the claim. Cavell’s remarks on justification shed light on the role played by this inchoate or indeterminate ground of evidence in moral justification. In ordinary (linguistic, aesthetic, socio-political, moral) practices, the force of the individual’s claim to evidence presupposes the capacity to render explicit the relationship of his tacit assumptions to those of a broader practice, such as language or morality. Agreement is based upon the shared possession of some common but unarticulated ground which is responsible for the empirical convergence upon specific judgments xvi. This kind of inarticulate presupposition becomes problematic in cases of disagreement or when, as in the pragmatist paradigm, a situation becomes problematic and agency is blocked. What Cavell, following Wittgenstein, calls a grammatical inquiry, can be considered as a step in expressive inquiry: it is the kind of inquiry we enter into once we face disagreement on specific matters, and the reestablishment of a condition of agreement (construction of shared common identity, identification of contextual conditions for local action) requires the agent to articulate the undetermined whole that controls his explicit judgments. The grammatical nature of this kind of inquiry implies that we are operating outside the experimental domain of empirical verification, hypothesis testing and deduction of consequences of inquiry. In the face of contradictory judgments, in fact, the first move required by the grammatical inquiry is not to determine which statement is false and which is true, putting them to some form of experimental trial. In a way that might seem paradoxical, the expressive inquiry requires rather that we step back from the specific issue of disagreement, in order to search for its causes not in the truth or falsity of the statements at hand, but in the way they are expressively related to deeper assumptions that give shape to the agent’s moral identity. The first aim of this kind of inquiry is to make explicit the conditions under which an agent perceives his explicit claims to be binding not only for him but also for a larger group of which he believes himself to be a part. While the notion of claim refers to the state of confidence that binds the agent to the ground of evidence that supports his utterances, the notion of articulation refers to the state of doubt in which the agent is thrown with reference to this same ground of evidence, once one or more of his beliefs are put into question by his experience or by the challenge of another’s claims. A corollary of this analysis is the need to broaden the conception of validity and of valid arguments in moral reasoning. Cavell has often remarked that failure to justify moral (but also aesthetic) claims does not result in falsification of propositions but rather in withdrawal of the claim (Cavell 1979: 44-45). In so doing, Cavell recovers Austin’s criteria of felicity and infelicity: the unsuccessful or infelicitous claim is the one which is not able to gain the expected agreement from other agents: failure here comes not from lack of strict epistemic validity conditions of the claim itself, but from the awareness that the process of articulacy has brought about incompatible moral perspectives instead of bringing forth a shared framework. As a consequence, other agents will not be ready to share the ground of the claimant. On the contrary, the claim is successful when the claimant succeeds in framing a shared system of presuppositions through the articulation (and possibly revision) of his own position. Possibility of success is expressed in terms of agreement: the claimant succeeds in having his claim accepted when the others come to share his basis of justification, a basis which is made up of the assumptions which are the outcome of the process of articulation. Such an approach supports a non transcendental conception of normativity: the basis of moral justification is never presupposed as an unquestionable starting point but always empirically discovered through the process of articulation, so that “if the disagreement persists, there is no appeal beyond us” (Cavell 1979: 19). The response to moral disagreement, once we acknowledge that we lack a common basis of justification, can be found only in a process of transformation which engages the self’s attitudes and beliefs according to an epistemological paradigm, which is that of the judgment of practice. The expressivist conception of inquiry is opposed to moral realism and considers rational disagreement as a possible and legitimate outcome of moral inquiry. Moral rationality operates between the limits of a nearly subjectivist rooting of reasoning in the agent’s perspective (my way of seeing or doing) and the continuous effort at transcending it towards a common framework that operates as an intersubjective system of reference but which is always ahead of us. This tension, which dominates Cavell’s philosophy, is implicit in the pragmatist rejection of the dualism of interiority and exteriority. The process of expressive inquiry so conceived calls into question both of the contenders (the claimer and the counter-claimer): if the failure of the claimer to get the other’s assent shows that the reason for disagreement lies in the different frameworks that each claimant articulates, two paths are open for continuing moral reasoning. The first is to acknowledge and, the as a incompatibility consequence, among to the perspectives articulated accept disagreement as the consequence of belonging to different and incommensurable forms of life. This option is living and concrete, since it is a logically sound consequence of the acknowledgment that the agents build their identities upon different moral principles among which radical differences might exist. The second option, which is as living and concrete as the first, requires the adoption of the transformative stance. By so doing, the agents acknowledge the existing difference between their articulated positions (their respective sets of moral beliefs and attitudes) but accept a challenge to them in order to try to build the common framework which is necessary to find a basis for agreement. This account of moral reasoning offers a deep insight into the nature of moral disagreement, showing not only the real roots that generates it but offering also some concrete insight on how to proceed in order to overcome it. This counters those traditional theories of moral reasoning which conceive of it as the capability to transcend the specific agent’s position in order to accede to a neutral or universal point of view. According to the expressivist paradigm, the apparently irrational reference to our practices or to the ultimate ground of experience should be understood as a move in the rational process of expressive inquiry: through the articulation of this ground, the agent makes explicit the limits of his capacity of self-transformation, the ground of those beliefs and attitudes which he considers to be beyond revision. When the agent appeals to practice, he is not giving up altogether the epistemic requirements of justification: on the contrary, he is making explicit a specific pattern of justification in moral inquiry and taking responsibility for his own position. In expressive inquiry, the rock bottom is highlighted not in order to put an end to inquiry, but as a necessary step in the inquiry itself. Although apparently at odds with the fallibilistic stance of pragmatist epistemology, this conception of justificatory practice proves to be a necessary ingredient of an expressivist conception of inquiry, as it accounts – with suitable epistemological resources – for a central aspect of moral experience. On the other side, conceiving this practice of justification as being a move in the rational process of moral inquiry, helps us in dispelling an air of irrationality that is often attached to the idea of rock bottom. Conclusions: the logic of expressive inquiry According to the paradigm of expressive inquiry I have outlined, the rationality of moral experience is based upon the capacity to enact articulative and transformative forms of reasoning which ground our normative practices in the very process of moral experience. Through them, the agent not only accounts for his choices and endorses responsibility for his criteria of judgment in light of the practical consequences that they project upon agency, but he only gives shape to his moral personality. Joining together the pragmatist and the expressivist perspectives, we can develop the idea of an expressive form of inquiry whose rationality relies upon the following forms of reasoning: 1. self-analysis: it covers all forms of reasoning through which an agent reflects upon his attitudes towards agency. Taylor’s concept of moral articulacy, as well as Dewey’ idea of imagination as dramatic rehearsal, are mainly located in this dimension, as it is focused on the self-reflective process through which the agent deepens his self-understanding, becomes aware of the main elements that dominate his moral personality, and takes a critical stance towards them, 2. normative analysis: it covers all forms of reasoning focused on normative traits of the moral situation and on their relationship with behavior. Cavell’s concepts of self and criteria are mainly located here, as they offer powerful insight on the collective basis of our moral thinking. 3. reflection on outcomes and consequences : it covers more experimental forms of reasoning aimed at finding out relevant facts of the matter concerning the moral problematic situation at issue. The pragmatist idea of social inquiry as based on identification and assessment of consequences associated to ideas and habits has to be located here. 4. hypothesis making: it refers to the constructive moment of inquiry, through which the agent articulates his position with respect to internal values and external situation and provides a guide for agency. This is the location of the general pragmatist framework of inquiry as being experimental, of beliefs as being hypothetical and of agency (also moral agency) as bearing an experimental weight with reference to the beliefs that guide agency. 5. justification through give and take of reasons : it refers to that part of inquiry which aims at facing moral disagreement as a source of problematic moral situations. It incorporates elements from steps 1-4 in order to reach agreement with other agents. Agreement might concern basic assumptions (strong evaluations in Taylor’s sense, or criteria in Cavell’s sense), but also contextual aspects of agency to be enacted in the context of the problematic situation at hand (consequences in the pragmatist sense). In conclusion, expressive inquiry defines a complex reflective process composed of the forms of reasoning highlighted above, where articulation denotes a multi-layered process of self-understanding and self-transformation in which linguistic practices (the search for a language of interiority in Taylor and Cavell), experiments in imagination (Dewey’s dramatic rehearsal) and agency (the pragmatist test of hypothesis in experience acting upon the chosen values) are inextricably joined together. The five steps outlined above join together the insightful description of moral experience found in works such those by Taylor and Cavell with the powerful account of practical reasoning as inquiry developed by pragmatism. In so doing, an epistemological concern for conditions of validity, according to the principle no rationality without epistemic criteria of validity is joined with a deep concern for the complexities of moral experience and for the impossibility to reduce moral reasoning to some form of neutral, agent-free form of activity. Bibliography Burke T. (1994), Dewey’s New Logic, Chicago University Press, Chicago and London. Burke T. Hester M., Talisse R., eds, (2002), Dewey’s logical theory, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. Cavell S. (1979), The Claim of Reason, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cavell S. (1969), Must we mean what we say?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cavell S. (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome , University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. Dewey J. (1903), “Logical conditions for a scientific treatment of morality” The Middle Works, vol. 3: 3-39, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Dewey J. (1915), “The logic of judgment of practice”, The Middle Works, vol. 8: 14-82, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Dewey J. (1929), The Quest for Certainty, The Later Works, vol. 4, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Dewey J. (1930), “Qualitative Thought”, The Later Works, vol. 5, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Dewey J. (1938): Logic. The Theory of Inquiry, The Later Works, vol. 12, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Dewey J. (1939), Theory of Valuation, The Later Works, vol. 13: 189-252, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. Diggins P. (1994), The Promise of Pragmatism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Frega R. (2006a), Pensée, expérience, pratique. Etude sur la théorie du jugement de John Dewey, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006. Frega R. (2006b), John Dewey et la philosophie comme épistémologie de la pratique, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006. Frega R. (2009), Voci della ragione. Teorie della razionalità nella filosofia americana contemporanea, Quodlibet, Macerata. Goodman R. (2007), “Two Genealogies of Action in Pragmatism”, in Cognitio, 8, 2. Hacking I. (1983), Representing and Intervening, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hauser M. (2006), Moral Minds, HarperCollins, New York. Kulp B.C. (1992), The End of Epistemology: Dewey and His Current Allies on the Spectator Theory of Knowledge, Westport, Greenwood Press. Saito N. (2005), The Gleam of Light, Fordham University Press, New York. Smith J. (1978), Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism , Hutchinson, London. Taylor C. (1977), “What is Human Agency”, in id. Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, , Cambridge. Taylor C. (1987), “Overcoming Epistemology”, in id., Philosophical Arguments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Taylor C. (1989b), “Cross-purposes”, in id., Philosophical Arguments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. Taylor C. (1989a), Sources of the Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. i I have provided a detailed account of the notion of ‘epistemology of practice’ in Frega 2006a and Frega 2006b. I am aware, as an anonymous reviewers has recalled me, that some scholar, and especially those that follow Rorty’s reading of Dewey, consider the very idea of a deweyan epistemology an oddity. Contrary to this unhappy tradition, I contrariwise consider Dewey's epistemology the most original part of his philosophy, which remains of an unsurpassed actuality. A detailed explanation of the epistemological relevance of Dewey’s philosophy would require the kind of work I have accomplished in the two books quoted above, which unfortunately are available only in French. In English see Kulp 1992, where Dewey's conception of epistemology is examined in details and carefully distinguished from traditional conceptions of epistemology – what Dewey called “the spectator theory of knowledge”. ii I have discussed Dewey’s moral philosophy and defended the legitimacy of a ‘perfectionist’ reading of his moral theory and of his theory of the self in Frega 2006a. I basically share Saito’s (2005) idea that Dewey’s moral thinking is definitely richer than what appears from reductively instrumental accounts. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that the kind of expressive twist that thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell have given to our understanding of moral reasoning contribute something which is quite new, although fully compatible with Dewey’s epistemology of practice. I have described in much greater details the novelty of the expressivist approach in moral epistemology in Frega 2009. iii A term of art, that in Dewey’s epistemology denotes the complex whole in which an agent finds himself. While the dynamical transaction between the agent and the situation (or the organism and the environment) defines in abstract terms the general naturalistic framework according to which the nature and function of rationality are conceived, different kinds of situations call for specific variants in inquiry. The reference to expression and articulation is precisely meant at qualifying some traits that defines a situation as possessing a moral properties. iv In using this term, I will not refer to expressivism as it is currently debated in contemporary analytical philosophy. I rather refer, quite loosely, to a rather vague and general intuition, that can be traced back to the Hegelian concept of self (a source shared by Taylor and Cavell, and of course Dewey and the pragmatists) and that considers the activity of the self as being constitutive of his identity. My interest in expressivism is limited to its epistemological implications, and notably to the idea that moral reasoning has a constitutive role that should be integrated in our understanding of moral rationality. To this extent, an expressivist theory of inquiry aims precisely at redefining inquiry as a rational practice that incorporates the articulative and expressive dimensions of moral experience so powerfully described by thinkers such as Taylor and Cavell. v A theme already present in Dewey’s moral theory but somehow obfuscated by his dominant focus on themes of control and active transformation. vi I am using the notion of situation in the technical sense as defined by Dewey. For a classical account, see Sleeper 1987. See also Burke 1994 and Frega 2006a. vii See for an example Smith (1978) and Diggins (1994). Judgment is introduced here as the technical term that in Dewey’ logic denotes the viii deliberative process through which the agent examines the situation in order to intervene into it. See Dewey 1938: ch. 7. While inquiry refers more broadly to the agent-situation transaction, judgment focuses more precisely on the epistemic dimension of searching for premises, formulating hypothesis and drawing conclusions. ix This idea has been developed notably in Dewey’s logical works and it is therefore with reference to those works that I will present it. x Neither Sleeper 1986 nor Burke 1994 have acknowledged the logical novelty of the articulative dimension in reference to the traditional dualism between the analytic and the synthetic. xi A position recently advocated by Bruno Latour, whose pragmatist commitments are becoming progressively more explicit. xii “By the term situation in this connection is signified the fact that the subject-matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions is a complex existence that is held together in spite of its internal complexity by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality”. “By “object” is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction” (LW 5: 246). xiii The clearest instance of the transformative factor in rationality is offered by the experimental revolution in science, as the detached and contemplative attitude of classical metaphysics is replaced by the interactive operation of the experimental scientist who develops an actively transformative attitude towards reality. xiv I anticipate here my conclusion, i.e. that a general pattern of moral inquiry should be capable of including elements directly drawn from the pragmatist tradition of problem solving and elements drawn from the expressivist tradition of moral reasoning as being articulative. xv Here I can only offer a very brief sketch of Cavell’s theory of rationality. For a longer account see Frega (2009: ch. 5). xvi An experimental confirmation of Cavell’s idea is emerging from studies in evolutionary psychology which shows that in an experimental setting individuals usually provide the correct moral responses but without being able to articulate the moral principle that justifies them. Facing an experimentally given moral dilemma, individuals with different socio-cultural backgrounds provide the same answer, which is neither deduced by some shared principles (socio-cultural variation grants this) nor derived by experience (experimental dilemmas are of a kind never encountered in ordinary life). See Hauser (2006) for a detailed discussion of some examples. While I disagree with the philosophical explanation he offers, I nevertheless consider the examples useful in that they provide experimental support to Cavell’s theory.