review of Laden's *Reasoning: a social picture* praising the aim and expressing puzzlement at the details,

Morton, Adam

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seasons them with a pinch of humour. His schematic accounts of the six maladiesfit rather loosely on the instances he gives of them. Why, for example, is DonJuan acolathic? His project of seducing as many beautiful women as possibleseems no less general than Don Quixote’s horetic mission of knight-errantry.Hegelian ‘bad infinity’, which Noica also discerns in Don Juan’s enterprise, mightwell apply to both cases. To the suggestion that what Don Juan rejects is the indi-vidual, Noica replies that Don Juan himself is a genuine individual. So too wasTolstoy, but Noica does not allow that to mitigate the charge of atodetia. Suchoccasional arbitrariness does not, however, nullify the interest of Noica’s discus-sions of particular cases.Noica is renowned and respected in Romania, in part because he is a distinc-tively Romanian philosopher, not simply a philosopher who happens to havebeen born in Romania. In his concluding chapter, ‘The Balance of the Age andthe Romanian Spirit’, he discusses, among other things, the peculiarities of theRomanian language, in particular the rich variety of its prepositions. He contraststhis with the dominance, in the acolathic Western world, of the ‘conjunction’,that is, the connectives, ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘if … then’ (p. 164). The English language,he says, ‘loses all contact with the primordial and is condemned not to permitabsolutely any access to philosophical thought’ (p. 135). Nevertheless, he does notclaim malady-free equilibrium for himself and his fellow Romanians. He concedesthat a spiritual malady may be more fruitful and creative than equilibrium. Hepresents a ‘clinical file’ on his own ahoretia (pp. 103–111). This is an apt diagnosisof his work, with its fragile links between the general schematism of the maladiesand the particular case studies. It lacks the ‘exactitude’ which, in Noica’s view,characterises analytical philosophy and formal logic, and which is a ‘symptom ofacolathia’ (p. 152). It is nevertheless worth reading, not only to find out what phi-losophy is up to in a remote part of Europe, but also for its intelligence andinsights. After all, Spengler had many detractors, but two distinguished admirers—Heidegger and Wittgenstein—and a similar fate may await Noica.MICHAEL INWOODTrinity College OxfordReasoning: A Social Picture. BY ANTHONY SIMON LADEN. (Oxford UP, 2012. Pp. 283.Price £33.)This is a rich, interesting, thought-provoking book that connects with issues inethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology. It is alsofrustratingly diffuse, indirect, and non-confrontational. (One imagines being inconversation with Laden and finding oneself saying more and more outrageousthings in an effort to extract a definitive No.) It is particularly frustrating forsomeone like me who is confused by the terminology of reasons and norms butthinks he has some grasp of reasoning. Below I state some of the questions towhich one might expect answers that are not even tackled. The core ambition ofBOOK REVIEWS 843© 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterlythe book is to discuss reasoning from a new, social, perspective. A standard wayof using the word makes ‘reasoning’ describe a kind of thinking, in which individ-ual people solve problems by pondering them systematically, in ways that can bemore or less effective or correct. Laden wants to replace or augment this usagewith a different one in which reasoning is something that two or more people tryto do together, succeeding only if they have had the right sort of interaction andthe right sort of effect on one another. If they have not, if for example it turnsout that they were talking past one another or not taking one another’s wordsseriously, then what they were doing was not reasoning, even if each was thinkingfuriously about the topic and about the other. So this is a kind of externalistpicture—whether a person’s experience is an instance of the real thing is some-thing she may be wrong about and may depend on factors she is not acquaintedwith—but a peculiar one in that the normal kinds of success do not come into it.Two people’s discussion can lead to a solution to the problem that occasioned itand not be reasoning, or can be reasoning and not lead to a solution.Or is it perhaps that though a solution be found, and each person be reason-ing, the process is not one of social reasoning, of reasoning together? Much asone might like to extract a confession from the text here, none seems to be forth-coming. The question is the relation between reasoning, construed as social, andone-person thinking. Laden often contrasts the social picture with the traditional,individual-centred, picture, as if these were rival views of one process. And interms of this he says for example that someone who is elaborating his insanedelusions as if they were deep insights is not reasoning, though he thinks he is,and will only be if he can persuade others to engage with him in a norm-governed back-and-forth that aims at a consensus. So there is a strong interpreta-tion according to which the social and traditional views are rivals; and there is aweaker view according to which psychologists studying reasoning, for example,are studying something which is also real, but different.Social reasoning involves shared construction, or at any rate maintenance, andexploration of a space of reasons. The metaphor of a space of reasons seems toamount to the ideas that reasons must be connected to one another, must cohere,and must situate the individuals who use them with perspectives on one anotherand on the topic. The aim of reasoning is to find reasons for believing and doing,which do more than elaborate individuals’ possible gains and losses but also showhow the thoughts and acts can be defended against challenges and urged onthose who do not accept them. In this way reasons are normative. They havesome authority over reasoners.The nature of this authority is unclear to me. People are governed by thestructure of the space of reasons that they enter into by putting their mindstogether, but it is a structure that they have created and continually modify, so inthe end it is up to them what it asks of them. Presumably the picture is of somekind of reflective equilibrium, but it would have helped me if the question ofauthority had been met head on. I think that Laden would like to count reason-ing as correct as long as it adheres to the norms of the genre of conversation inquestion, and take most clearly fallacious or faulty thinking-out-loud as not844 BOOK REVIEWS© 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterlyreasoning at all, because it violates some basic conditions on shared reason-giv-ing. (This is my reconstruction: he doesn’t say it.) Here things are complicated bythe enormous range of activities that Laden includes as reasoning: negotiation,deliberation, consensus-seeking, practical problem-solving, and others. He issurely right that we do reason together to do all these things, and that we con-sider one another to have done so more or less well across the range of them.What is less clear is how autonomous the standards we apply to specific conversa-tional activities are, and what could be a taxonomy that made sense of all ofthem.Rudeness is a case in point. Laden discusses norms of conversation that centreon turn-taking and encouraging the discussion to continue, connecting with workin linguistics, and norms that centre on taking one another’s contributions seri-ously, connecting with work in ethics. (There is work in feminist epistemology,such as Miranda Fricker’s on testimonial injustice, which is clearly relevant.) Soconsider a boorish and disrespectful participation in a shared intellectual enter-prise, which is for all that relevant and constructive. Less may result because ofits manner, and the participants may be harmed, and it may be contemptible inone way while admirable in another. Does it qualify less as real reasoning for thenorms it violates? Laden does not address the issue. I would expect him to saythat there are tugs in both directions and that a lot depends on the details. Butthe problem is that whether or not someone is reasoning seems to be a yes or nobusiness, though buzzing with maybees, while the selection and balancing ofmany cooperative and conversational norms seems to be multi-dimensional, notheaded for any such summing up.What seems boorish or arrogant or unbalanced to us will be normal conversa-tional practice at another time and place. There is a tension between local toler-ance and global ambition in Laden’s discussion of this. On the one hand hewants the standards to be constructed by the people concerned, and on the otherhand he wants to require respect for all participants in a proper joint reasoninginteraction. Reconciling these two seems to require either an enormous optimismthat everyone’s norms lead ultimately to enlightened tolerant respect for auton-omy, or to a sad admission that a lot of what people over the ages and across theplanet have taken as reasoning is really something rather less. (When we modernsread Platonic dialogues we see a lot of bullying and manipulation that was notexplicit in the original design.)The kinds of interaction Laden is concerned with must exploit specific humansocial capacities. For example rules of sharing and turn-taking in conversationmost likely turn on uses of volume and intonation that could work differently inanother animal. It must be a multiply instantiable business depending on whichactivities mobilise which innate resources. This could be suggestive of the manyways in which shared human life contingently shapes the thinking of individualpeople. But that is not Laden’s line. For him the variety of shared activity ispartly constitutive of a single over-arching activity of social reasoning. Whether ornot this is right, this book contains a wealth of examples and considerations rele-vant both to the project of exploring the links between individual cognition andBOOK REVIEWS 845© 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterlyshared activity and to the project of teasing out the many-person-ness of what atfirst seems individual.ADAM MORTONUniversity of British ColumbiaDishonest to God: On Keeping Religion out of Politics. BY MARY WARNOCK. (London:Continuum, 2010. Pp. 172. Price £16.99 h/b, £10.99 p/b)Mary Warnock’s book is an attempt to address in a short space a large theme:‘some aspects of the role of religion, and therefore the idea of God, in thetwenty-first century, as it relates to legislation and politics’ (p. 1). Along the wayshe raises many subsidiary themes, including the historical influence of religionon the law, the tension between religion and liberalism, the difficulty of provid-ing a philosophical foundation for secularist ethics, and the problems of plural-ism and relativism that have pervaded such discussions. Her approach to thesetimely but complex topics is through the lens of various pieces of legislation thatcame through the British Parliament over the past 40 years or so, including inthe House of Lords, of which she was a member for more than twenty years.In particular, she discusses legislation relating to abortion, research on humanembryos, homosexuality, assisted suicide, and human rights. In general, Profes-sor Warnock does no more than identify and skim the surface with regard tothe cluster of issues that surround this large topic, but her discussions will behelpful to the general reader, and will whet appetites for further reflection andreading. But the professional philosopher will find her analysis somewhatwanting.The book is divided into five chapters, with the first two concerned with Brit-ish legislative history regarding abortion and assisted suicide, where she attemptsto give a sense of the discussion that actually took place in parliament. In ch. 3,she rejects the legal positivism of Jeremy Bentham, and argues for a positionthat few would dispute today: that morality is independent of the law, and mustbe justified prior to our forming laws based on it. Chapter 4 has an ambitioustask: to show that one can defend a secular foundation for morality, separatingit from religion, while at the same time avoiding moral relativism. The lastchapter explores the question of whether religion is necessary to human society;this chapter meanders quite a bit, and it is hard to discern her own view,though she does observe that religion is not out-dated, but the difference todayis that it is no longer compulsory! As one who works in American academia, anobvious further observation concerns the reasonable and even tone Warnockadopts throughout the book. She has no axes to grind, no tendentious or con-troversial agendas to support, and shows none of the intolerance that one seesin the United States on this topic, especially from the left in academic settings.She never represents her own view as obvious, or portrays contrary views asirrational, never insults those who disagree with her or paints them as morallyevil! This book is a model of what a reasonable philosophical exploration and846 BOOK REVIEWS© 2012 The Author The Philosophical Quarterly © 2012 The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly

Reasoning: A Social Picture. By Anthony Simon Laden

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Reasoning: A Social Picture. By Anthony Simon Laden

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