Class 4: First-Person Authority and Holism

The signal/noise distinction could be grounded in particular psychological facts about an individual.  Getting it right could require respecting someone’s self-interpretation, or identifying which psychological cause of their actions dominates.  But we’ll see today why these theories of the signal/noise distinction do not do a very good job of explaining why we make the kinds of characteristic mistakes that we do in distinguishing signal from noise.  This has application for the phenomena of coming out and not being accepted, living with psychiatric diagnoses, and giving credit in contexts of privilege.

The main assigned reading for today’s class is chapters 5 through 7 from When Things Get Personal. These chapters are slightly shorter than the first four chapters, so this is not substantially more reading than our last two sessions. But each explores a different new application as well as a different hypothesis about how it might be easier to avoid discord than I think it is.

As always, I have suggested background readings and some also recommended readings for thinking more about related things. This week’s suggested reading is Gary Watson’s ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’, which introduces the term ‘attributive responsibility’ and connects it to self-determination in the way that I reject.

My “also recommended” readings for this week explore responsibility and how it is connected to attributability in different ways. Both of these links are to Oxford Scholarship Online, rather than directly to the text.