Papers by Larry Lengbeyer
Australasian Philosophical Review
Mary Kate McGowan’s project, in "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview &... more Mary Kate McGowan’s project, in "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview & an Application," seems to be motivated, laudably, by an aim to eliminate discriminatory racist speech in public spaces. However, it is crucial that any attempted cure not be worse than the disease itself, or worse than alternative possible cures. Consequently, it is important to ensure that McGowan’s theoretical apparatus—a very general account of norm enactment—is well suited to its practical objective, and not liable to promote excessive restriction of speech. It turns out, however, that this apparatus has serious weaknesses. Most fundamental, it exaggerates the normative compulsion that is exerted by moves in conversational interactions, and even more greatly exaggerates this in the case of other types of social interaction. Conversational moves do not always compel uptake by other parties, but leave significant latitude to those parties to choose how they will (not) comply. In addition, only a limited range of features of interactions appear to be regulated by the kind of norms with which McGowan is concerned. As a result of these various theoretical weaknesses, and the subtle complexities of social interaction, an initiative to reduce discriminatory behavior in public spaces might do well to rely upon moral norms rather than, as McGowan urges, legal rules and sanctions.
Journal of Military Ethics, 2021
ABSTRACT Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and task... more ABSTRACT Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and tasks. One such depicts military “sheepdogs” protecting ordinary-citizen “sheep” from predator “wolves.” But simple analogies of this kind combine surface appeal with ideological implications that make them hazardous. The sheepdog analogy's simplistic trichotomy is liable to undermine warfighters' battlefield restraint, both in how they fight and whom they fight. They may improperly expand the realm of “wolves” to be attacked, and exert less self-control in attacking. Worse, they may develop a sense of moral superiority and chafe resentfully and contemptuously under civilian control. Despite the sheepdog analogy's superficial attractions, it could end up undermining respect for democratic processes and constraints, civil liberties, and the Constitutional system that soldiers are sworn to defend. Nor can it be saved by well-intentioned revisions. Hence, it ought to be eliminated from circulation to the extent possible. Furthermore, a broader consideration of the conditions required for any acceptable warfighter analogy recommends avoidance of all beguilingly evocative simple tropes for soldier identity. Their intended constructive messages and effects are ever liable to be overtaken by unintended ones that subvert soldiers' rightful understandings of their relationships to other human beings and to the body politic.
Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 2005
The grounds for recognizing that artists possess a personal “moral right of integrity” that would... more The grounds for recognizing that artists possess a personal “moral right of integrity” that would entitle them to prevent others from modifying their works are weak. There is, however, an important (and legislation-worthy) public interest in protecting highly-valued entities, including at least some works of art, from permanently destructive transformations.
AI & SOCIETY, 2021
Imagine advanced computers that could, by virtue merely of being programmed in the right ways, ac... more Imagine advanced computers that could, by virtue merely of being programmed in the right ways, act, react, communicate, and otherwise behave like humans. Might such computers be capable of understanding, thinking, believing, and the like? The framework developed in this paper for tackling challenging questions of concept application (in any realm of discourse) answers in the affirmative, contrary to Searle’s famous ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, which purports to prove that ascribing such mental processes to computers like these would be necessarily incorrect. The paper begins by arguing that the core issue concerns language, specifically the discourse-community-guided mapping of phenomena onto linguistic categories. It then offers a model of how people adapt language to deal with novel states of affairs and thereby lend generality to their words, employing processes of assimilation, lexemic creation, and accommodation (in intersense and intrasense varieties). Attributions of un...
Australasian Philosophical Review, 2021
Mary Kate McGowan’s project, in "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview & an Applicat... more Mary Kate McGowan’s project, in "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm: An Overview & an Application," seems to be motivated, laudably, by an aim to eliminate discriminatory racist speech in public spaces. However, it is crucial that any attempted cure not be worse than the disease itself, or worse than alternative possible cures. Consequently, it is important to ensure that McGowan’s theoretical apparatus—a very general account of norm enactment—is well suited to its practical objective, and not liable to promote excessive restriction of speech. It turns out, however, that this apparatus has serious weaknesses. Most fundamental, it exaggerates the normative compulsion that is exerted by moves in conversational interactions, and even more greatly exaggerates this in the case of other types of social interaction. Conversational moves do not always compel uptake by other parties, but leave significant latitude to those parties to choose how they will (not) comply. In addition, only a limited range of features of interactions appear to be regulated by the kind of norms with which McGowan is concerned. As a result of these various theoretical weaknesses, and the subtle complexities of social interaction, an initiative to reduce discriminatory behavior in public spaces might do well to rely upon moral norms rather than, as McGowan urges, legal rules and sanctions.
AI & Society, 2021
Imagine advanced computers that could, by virtue merely of being programmed in the right ways, ac... more Imagine advanced computers that could, by virtue merely of being programmed in the right ways, act, react, communicate, and otherwise behave like humans. Might such computers be capable of understanding, thinking, believing, and the like? The framework developed in this paper for tackling challenging questions of concept application (in any realm of discourse) answers in the affirmative, contrary to Searle's famous 'Chinese Room' thought experiment, which purports to prove that ascribing such mental processes to computers like these would be necessarily incorrect. The paper begins by arguing that the core issue concerns language, specifically the discourse-community-guided mapping of phenomena onto linguistic categories. It then offers a model of how people adapt language to deal with novel states of affairs and thereby lend generality to their words, employing processes of assimilation, lexemic creation, and accommodation (in intersense and intrasense varieties). Attributions of understanding to some computers lie in the middle range on a spectrum of acceptability and are thus reasonable. Possible objections deriving from Searle's writings require supplementing the model with distinctions between present and future acceptability, and between contemplated and uncontemplated word uses, as well as a literal-figurative distinction that is more sensitive than Searle's to actual linguistic practice and the multiplicity of subsenses possible within a single literal sense. The paper then critiques two misleading rhetorical features of Searle's Chinese Room presentation, and addresses a contemporary defense of Searle that seems to confront the sociolinguistic issue, but fails to allow for intrasense accommodation. It concludes with a brief consideration of the proper course for productive future discussion.
Racism in Mind: Philosophical Explanations of Racism and Its Implications, eds. Michael Levine & Tamas Pataki (Cornell University Press), 2004
If racism is a matter of possessing racist beliefs, then it would seem that its cure involves pur... more If racism is a matter of possessing racist beliefs, then it would seem that its cure involves purging one’s mind of all racist beliefs. But the truth is more complicated, and does not permit such a straightforward strategy. Racist beliefs are resistant to subjective repudiation, and even those that are so repudiated are resistant to lasting expulsion from one’s belief system. Moreover, those that remain available for use in cognition can shape thought and behavior even in the event that one has recognized their falsehood. Yet if one is intent upon combating the racism within one’s mind, one is not without effective cognitive countermeasures that can render one’s racist beliefs ineffectual.
David Spurrett, Don Ross, Harold Kincaid, & Lynn Stephens, eds., Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context , Jan 1, 2007
The standard philosophical and folk-psychological accounts of cognition and action credit us with... more The standard philosophical and folk-psychological accounts of cognition and action credit us with too much spontaneity in our activities and projects. We are taken to be fundamentally active rather than reactive, to project our needs and aims and deploy our full supporting arsenal of cognitive instruments upon an essentially passive environment. The corrected point of view presented here balances this image of active agency with an appreciation of how we are also continually responding to the world, that is, to the pragmatic situations that effectively select subsets of our cognitive resources to be at our disposal in generating responses. The result is a superseding of the standard Cognitive Integrationist picture by a model of a structurally divided mind, comprising a multiplicity of diverse and sometimes-conflicting standpoints, personas, and wills whose elicitation is a complex function of agent intentions and plans, the encountered environment, past experience, and temporal sequence. According to this model, the manifold stored representations constituting a person’s cognitive endowment do not form a single integrated network all equally ready for use. Cognition at any given moment is limited to drawing upon only a subset of one’s perspective, the perspect that is activated in accordance with the specific mental task or situation (the pragmatic context) that one perceives oneself to be facing. The system enlists the environmental context as trigger for practical and theoretical activity, based upon the agent’s prior experience. Though susceptible to certain kinds of error, and not inherently inclined toward innovative thinking, it enables the generally efficient use of our enormous cognitive endowments in conducting our lives in real time.
Social theory and practice, Jan 1, 2005
Humor, Context, and Divided Cognition Need one be sexist to laugh at a sexist joke? Racist to lau... more Humor, Context, and Divided Cognition Need one be sexist to laugh at a sexist joke? Racist to laugh at a racist joke? Anti-Semitic to laugh at an anti-Semitic joke? One influential construal of joke-telling and joke-receiving behavior suggests an affirmative answer to such questions. This position, advanced by Ronald de Sousa, 1 relies upon what we may call the "Endorsement Thesis," to the effect that experiencing amusement at such humor entails that one endorses the sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic premises upon which the logic of the joke depends. I will argue, however, for a negative answer to the question facing us, for two reasons. First, the Endorsement Thesis is false. The laughter that a joke elicits from us is a response not only to the joke's content-its semantics, if you will-but also to the pragmatics of the joketelling, that is, what is conveyed to the audience by virtue of the contexts in which the particular telling takes place. Some of these broader pragmatic features can provoke amusement in those who do not share a joke's underlying sexist premises. (I will generally be focusing upon sexism, taking it to be representative of the larger set.) This provides us with clear counterexamples to the Endorsement Thesis. Second, even if the Endorsement Thesis is true, it does not, on its most reasonable interpretation, entail that one must be sexist in order to enjoy a sexist joke. People can momentarily endorse sexist ideas without being properly described as sexists. The divided, compartmentalized nature of cognition permits us to operate temporarily with outlooks that do not reflect or represent the ones that most accurately characterize us.
Ethical theory and moral practice, Jan 1, 2005
What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie selfless conduct, both 'thinking' and unthinking?... more What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie selfless conduct, both 'thinking' and unthinking? We first consider deliberate selflessness, a manner of selecting acts in which, in evaluating options, one expressly chooses not to weigh the potential consequences for oneself (though this formulation is seen as needing some qualification). We then turn to unthinking behavior in general, and whether we are responsible for it, as the foundation for analyzing the unthinking variety of selflessness. Using illustrative cases (Grenade Gallantry, The Well-Meaning Miner, Ignorant Ilya, Self-Disregarding Sally) we explore just what is involved in setting aside one's self-interests unthinkingly. Eventually, this account links up with work on mental compartmentalization, as it becomes apparent that unthinking selflessness encompasses both unthinking behavior (calling upon inexplicit cognitive utilization of stored images) that is selfless, and thinking behavior (calling upon reasoning with sentences) that is unthinkingly selfless (by virtue of an unreasoned, automatic shift of cognitive standpoint to a 'compartment' that omits information about one's self-interests). The analysis points toward a practical program for generating increased selflessness in ourselves and others.
Journal of Military Ethics , 2021
Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and tasks. One su... more Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and tasks. One such depicts military “sheepdogs” protecting ordinary-citizen “sheep” from predator “wolves.” But simple analogies of this kind combine surface appeal with ideological implications that make them hazardous. The sheepdog analogy's simplistic trichotomy is liable to undermine warfighters' battlefield restraint, both in how they fight and whom they fight. They may improperly expand the realm of “wolves” to be attacked, and exert less self-control in attacking. Worse, they may develop a sense of moral superiority and chafe resentfully and contemptuously under civilian control. Despite the sheepdog analogy's superficial attractions, it could end up undermining respect for democratic processes and constraints, civil liberties, and the Constitutional system that soldiers are sworn to defend. Nor can it be saved by well-intentioned revisions. Hence, it ought to be eliminated from circulation to the extent possible. Furthermore, a broader consideration of the conditions required for any acceptable warfighter analogy recommends avoidance of all beguilingly evocative simple tropes for soldier identity. Their intended constructive messages and effects are ever liable to be overtaken by unintended ones that subvert soldiers' rightful understandings of their relationships to other human beings and to the body politic.
Academic Questions, Jan 1, 2004
C harges of anti-Semitism continue to be potent weapons of moral and in-tellectual critique in ou... more C harges of anti-Semitism continue to be potent weapons of moral and in-tellectual critique in our culture. It is good that these have a place in our arsenal--though, of course, it is best when they need not be wielded, when their mere presence deters the activities that would ...
Journal of Military Ethics, Jan 1, 2006
Adverse, even dire events and circumstances are our inevitable lot in life as human beings, and w... more Adverse, even dire events and circumstances are our inevitable lot in life as human beings, and we usually suffer mightily on their account. Some among us even become engaged in enterprises whose basic nature involves confronting such events and circumstances—in ...
Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 2005
The grounds for recognizing that artists possess a personal "moral right of integrity" that would... more The grounds for recognizing that artists possess a personal "moral right of integrity" that would entitle them to prevent others from modifying their works are weak. There is, however, an important (and legislation-worthy) public interest in protecting highly-valued entities, including at least some works of art, from permanently destructive transformations.
Teaching Ethics, 2019
This article’s objectives are two-fold: (i) to argue for making a communication ethics course a ... more This article’s objectives are two-fold: (i) to argue for making a communication ethics course a staple of virtually every undergraduate philosophy program; and (ii) to assist in bringing this vision to fruition by offering, to the interested instructor, (a) practical guidance on how such a course might be structured as a workshop so as to prompt students to do exciting independent philosophizing that capitalizes upon their vast funds of experience with everyday communication, and (b) a reasonably rich set of specific topics and questions that the course might productively address.
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Papers by Larry Lengbeyer