Moore's Paradox - Proposed Explanations

Proposed Explanations

Philosophical interest in Moore's paradox, since Moore and Wittgenstein, has undergone a resurgence, starting with, though not limited to, Jaakko Hintikka, continuing with Roy Sorensen, David Rosenthal, Sydney Shoemaker and the first publication, in 2007, of a collection of articles devoted to the problem.

There have been several proposed constraints on a satisfactory explanation in the literature, including (though not limited to):

• It should explain the absurdity of both the omissive and the commissive versions.
• It should explain the absurdity of both asserting and believing Moore's sentences.
• It should preserve, and reveal the roots of, the intuition that contradiction (or something contradiction-like) is at the root of the absurdity.

The first two conditions have generally been the most challenged, while the third appears to be the least controversial. Some philosophers have claimed that there is, in fact, no problem in believing the content of Moore's sentences (e.g. David Rosenthal). Others (e.g. Sydney Shoemaker) hold that an explanation of the problem at the level of belief will automatically provide us with an explanation of the absurdity at the level of assertion via the linking principle that what can reasonably be asserted is determined by what can reasonably be believed. Some have also denied (e.g. Rosenthal) that a satisfactory explanation to the problem need be uniform in explaining both the omissive AND commissive versions. Most of the explanations offered of Moore's paradox are united in holding that contradiction is at the heart of the absurdity.

One type of explanation at the level of assertion exploits the view that assertion implies or expresses belief in some way so that if someone asserts that p they imply or express the belief that p. Several versions of this view exploit elements of speech act theory, which can be distinguished according to the particular explanation given of the link between assertion and belief. Whatever version of this view is preferred, whether cast in terms of the Gricean intentions (see Paul Grice) or in terms of the structure of Searlean illocutionary acts (see speech act), it does not obviously apply to explaining the absurdity of the commissive version of Moore's paradox. To take one version of this type of explanation, if someone asserts p and conjoins it with the assertion (or denial) that he does not believe that p, then he has in that very act contradicted himself, for in effect what the speaker says is: I believe that p and I do not believe that p. The absurdity of asserting p & I do not believe that p is thus revealed as being of a more familiar kind. Depending on one's view of the nature of contradiction, one might thus interpret a speaker of the omissive Moorean sentence as asserting everything (that is, asserting too much) or asserting nothing (that is, not asserting enough).

An alternative view is that the assertion "I believe that p" often (though not always) functions as an alternative way of asserting "p", so that the semantic content of the assertion "I believe that p" is just p: it functions as a statement about the world and not about anyone's state of mind. Accordingly what someone asserts when they assert "p and I believe that not-p" is just "p and not-p" Asserting the commissive version of Moore's sentences is again assimilated to the more familiar (putative) impropriety of asserting a contradiction.

At the level of belief, there are two main kinds of explanation. The first, much more popular one, agrees with those at the level of assertion that contradiction is at the heart of the absurdity. The contradiction is revealed in various ways, some using the resources of doxastic logic (e.g. Hintikka), others (e.g. Sorensen) principles of rational belief maintenance and formation, while still others appeal to our putative capacity for self-knowledge and the first-person authority (e.g. Shoemaker) we have over our states of mind.

Another alternative view, due to Richard Moran, views the existence of Moore's paradox as symptomatic of creatures who are capable of self-knowledge, capable of thinking for themselves from a deliberative point of view, as well as about themselves from a theoretical point of view. On this view, anyone who asserted or believed one of Moore's sentences would be subject to a loss of self-knowledge—in particular, would be one who, with respect to a particular 'object', broadly construed, e.g. person, apple, the way of the world, would be in a situation which violates, what Moran calls, the Transparency Condition: if I want to know what I think about X, then I consider/think about nothing but X itself. Moran's view seems to be that what makes Moore's paradox so distinctive is not some contradictory-like phenomenon (or at least not in the sense that most commentators on the problem have construed it), whether it be located at the level of belief or that of assertion. Rather, that the very possibility of Moore's paradox is a consequence of our status as agents (albeit finite and resource-limited ones) who are capable of knowing (and changing) their own minds.