Conceptual Agency

Julian Ratcliffe (University of Oxford)

ABSTRACT: It is a basic feature of our epistemic and discursive lives that we do not always choose the concepts with which we describe the world. I did not, for instance, choose to describe the world in terms of democracy, consumerism, and scientific consensus any more than a Medieval pauper would have chosen to describe it in terms of heresy, salvation, and piety. Rather, I inherited my concepts from the particular cultural formation in which I find myself just as the pauper inherited hers. However, since the intentional actions that agents can perform depend, as Anscombe famously puts it, on their being recognised “under some description”, this means that our possibilities for intentional action depend on the possibilities of description that our conceptual repertoires afford us, possibilities in large part beyond our control. That what we can intentionally do is so constrained duly suggests that we are in some sense unfree.

The objective of my talk is to explore just how we ought to understand this kind of unfreedom. To do so, I shall argue that the contingency of our inherited concepts threatens to undermine their normative authority. I shall then argue that Korsgaard’s metanormative constructivism offers a compelling if incomplete response to this problem. Finally, I shall argue that appropriately supplementing Korsgaard’s picture means that we ought to understand the unfreedom that emerges on Anscombe’s picture of intentionality as a form of alienation, the amelioration of which requires modifying the parts of the world to which they are ascribed.