This thesis defends an account of what it is to trust other people, and what gives matters of trust (i.e. situations where we trust/distrust others) a characteristic interpersonal, normative, or moral/ethical importance to us. In other words, it answers what the nature of betrayal (and being susceptible to betrayal) is. -/- Along the way I put forward/defend accounts of the following: the relationship between trust and reliance (chapter 4); an account of reliance itself (chapter 5); trust and distrust as one/two/three-place (...) attitudes (chapter 7); and the ethical/normative significance of trust and betrayal as a matter of attachment security (chapters 6 and 8). -/- In addition to these accounts, the thesis also gives (in chapter 2) a conceptual/historical overview of the dominant paradigm in philosophical understanding of trust: as a form of reliance 'plus' betrayal conditions (a la Baier 1986; Holton 1994; Hawley 2014, among others). It also offers a rebuttal of that dominant paradigm in chapter 3 and 4. Furthermore, it offers an overview of how trust is understood more generally across philosophical and some social scientific/psychological literature (chapter 1). It also offers a rebuttal of the rational choice/game-theoretic understanding of trust and economic rationality a la so-called 'trust games' (chapter 1). This carries the consequence that analysis of trust in these traditions is not really based on anything resembling interpersonal trust, as we would intuitively recognise it. (shrink)

Three main motivations can explain compliance with social norms: fear of peer punishment, the desire for others' esteem and the desire to meet others' expectations. Though all play a role, only the desire to meet others' expectations can sustain compliance when neither public nor private monitoring is possible. Theoretical models have shown that such desire can indeed sustain social norms, but empirical evidence is lacking. Moreover it is unclear whether this desire ranges over others' “empirical” or “normative” expectations. We propose (...) a new experimental design to isolate this motivation and to investigate what kind of expectations people are inclined to meet. Results indicate that, when nobody can assign either material or immaterial sanctions, the perceived legitimacy of others' normative expectations can motivate a significant number of people to comply with costly social norms. (shrink)

Feminist argumentation theorists have criticized the Dominant Adversarial Model in argumentation, according to which arguers should take proponent and opponent roles and argue against one another. The model is deficient because it creates disadvantages for feminine gendered persons in a way that causes significant epistemic and practical harms. In this paper, I argue that the problem that these critics have pointed out can be generalized: whenever an arguer is given a role in the argument the associated tasks and norms of (...) which she cannot fulfill, she is liable to suffer morally significant harms. One way to react to this problem is by requiring arguers to set up argument structures and allocate roles so that the argument will be reasons-reflective in as balanced a way as possible. However, I argue that this would create to heavy a burden. Arguers would then habitually have to take on roles that require them to divert time and energy away from the goals that they started arguing for and instead serve the goal of ideal reasons-reflectiveness. At least prima facie arguers should be able to legitimately devote their time and energy towards their own goals. This creates a problem: On the one hand, structures that create morally significant harms for some arguers should be avoided—on the other hand, arguers should be able to take argument-roles that allow them to devote themselves to their own argumentative goals. Fulfilling the second requirement for some arguers will often create the morally significant harms for their interlocutors. There are two possible solutions for this problem: first, arguers might be required to reach free, consensual agreements on the structure they will adopt for their argument and the way they will distribute argumentative roles. I reject this option as both fundamentally unfeasible and practically unrealistic, based on arguments developed by theorists like Krabbe and Jacobs. I argue that instead, we should take a liberal view on argument ethics. Arguers should abide by moral side constraints to their role taking. They should feel free to take roles that will allow them to concentrate on their argumentative goals, but only if this does not create a situation in which their interlocutors are pushed into a role that that they cannot effectively play. (shrink)

Este artículo defiende que las obligaciones sociales emergen de las normas de la racionalidad. A través de un análisis de los requisitos normativos de la racionalidad que gobiernan los compromisos individuales, se muestra que los agentes poseen autoridad racional para revaluar sus razones, modificar sus juicios prácticos y cambiar sus intenciones. De esta autoridad depende su autonomía racional: uno y el mismo sujeto puede obligarse a hacer algo, y revocar esta orden. Mediante un compromiso social, el deudor renuncia a su (...) autoridad y autonomía racionales en favor del acreedor, generando así una obligación en el deudor, un derecho en el acreedor, y una razón normativa relativa al deudor. (shrink)

Unrecognized conventions—practices that are conventional even though their participants do not recognize them as such—play central roles in shaping our lives. They range from the indispensable (e.g. unrecognized linguistic conventions) to the insidious (e.g. some of our gender conventions). Unrecognized conventions pose a challenge for accounts of conventions because it is difficult to incorporate the distinctive arbitrariness of conventions—the fact that conventions always have alternatives—without accidentally excluding many unrecognized conventions. I develop an Accessibility Requirement that allows us to account for (...) both arbitrariness and unrecognized conventions. Specifically, I argue that a conventional practice must have at least one alternative that is at least approximately as good and at least approximately as accessible as the conventional practice itself, independent of the dominance the practice gained as it became conventional. In the course of arguing for this requirement, I also show that two prominent accounts of conventions, David Lewis’s and Ruth Garrett Millikan’s, run into problems with capturing the arbitrariness of conventions. The Accessibility Requirement opens the door to improved accounts of conventions by precisely identifying the way in which conventions are arbitrary. (shrink)

In this paper I put forward a thesis regarding the anatomy of “cultural evolution”, in particular the way the “cultural” transmission of behavioral patterns came to piggyback, through us humans, on the transmission effected by genetic evolution. I claim that what grounds and supports this new kind of transmission is a complex behavioral “meta-pattern” that makes it possible to grasp a pattern as something that “ought to be”, i.e. that transforms the pattern into what we can call a rule. (Here (...) I draw especially on the philosophical insights of Wilfrid Sellars.) In this way I interlink empirical research done in evolution theory with some more speculative philosophical theories, thus shedding new light on the former and adding an empirical footing to the latter. (shrink)

Our claim in this paper is that a theory of “pretense” (in all its crucial uses in human society and cognition) can be built only if it is grounded on the general theory of “behavioral implicit communication” (BIC), which is not to be confused with non-verbal communication (with distinct notions being frequently conflated, such as “signs” vs. “messages”, or goal as “intention” vs. goal as “function”). Pretense presupposes some BIC-based human interaction, where a normal, practical behavior is used for signifying (...) something, based on a sign that is not a conventional one. In light of BIC interaction theory, one can exploit this sign or message in a deceptive way in order to induce the other to believe that he/she is performing a given behavior or has a given mental state. -/- . (shrink)

I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptances and in terms of motives and plans. We have to revise the behavioristic view of “scripts” and “roles”; when we play a (...) role we wear a “mind.” No collective action would be possible without shared and/or ascribed mental contents. This is also very crucial for a central form of automatic mind-reading (mind ascription). Second, I will argue that often what really matters is the ascribed/prescribed, worn, mind not the real, private one. We have to play (like in the symbolic play) “as if” we had those mental contents. This social convention and mutual assumption makes the interaction work. The ascribed beliefs and goals are not necessarily explicitly there; they might be just implicit as inactive (we act just by routine and automatically) or implicit as potential. The coordination and social action works thanks to these “as if” (ascribed and pretended) minds, thanks to those conventional constructs. Our social minds for social interactions are coordination artifacts and social institutions. (shrink)