Uncertain guilt

Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday. (Perhaps I have suffered from some memory loss.) What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right. For guilt to be appropriate, I should believe that I’ve done a wrong thing, and 75% is not high enough for belief.

Guilt does come in degrees, but those degrees correlate with the degrees of culpability and wrongness, not with the epistemic confidence that I actually did the deed.

If I am not sure that I’ve done something, then a conditional apology makes sense: “Due to memory loss, I don’t know if I did A. But if I did, I am really sorry.” Maybe there is some conditional guilt feeling that goes along with conditional apology. But I am not sure there is such a feeling.

However, even if there is such a thing as a conditional guilt feeling, it presumably makes just as much sense when the probability of wrongdoing is low as when it is high. But it seems that whatever feeling one has due to a probability p of having done the wrong thing should co-vary proportionately to p.

Here’s an interesting possibility. There is no feeling that corresponds to a case like this. Feelings represent certain states of the world. The feeling of guilt represents the state of one’s having done a wrong. But just as we have no perceptual state that represents ultraviolet light, we have no perceptual state that represents probably having done a wrong. Other emotions do exist that have probabilistic purport. For instance, fear represents a chance of harm, and the degree (and maybe type: compare ordinary fear with dread!) of fear varies with the probability of harm.

While we can have highly complex cognitive attitudes, our feelings have more in the way of limitations. Just as there are some birds that have perceptual states that represent ultraviolet light, there could be beings that represent a probability that one did wrong, a kind of uncertain-guilt. But perhaps we don’t have such a feeling.

We get around limitations in our perceptual skills by technological means and scientific inference. We cannot see ultraviolet, but we can infer its presence in other ways. Similarly, we may well have limitations in our emotional attitudes, and get around them in other ways, say cognitively.

It would be interesting to think what other kinds of feelings could make sense for beings like us but which we simply don’t have.

Reid's critique of Aristotelian accounts of perception

Reid thinks that the Aristotelians make the same mistake as the Lockeans and Berkeleians: they all think that the phenomenal qualities or “ideas” (in the Lockean sense) in our minds are similar to the properties of physical objects. Thus, the sensation of hardness when I press my hand on the table is supposed to be similar to the physical hardness of the table. But Reid thinks that a bit of reflection shows that the mental entity is quite different from the physical entity.

Presumably, the reason the Aristotelian is accused of this mistake is that the Aristotelian is supposed by Reid to think that a single objectual quality, such as hardness, is found in the table and in the mind (presumably in different ways).

However, I think the criticism of the Aristotelian fails. Let’s take the Aristotelian theory to be as Reid seems to think of it. We still have a choice as to what item in the Aristotelian view we identify with the phenomenal qualities. There is

1. the hardness itself

and

2. the sort-of-but-not-quite-inherence relation between the mind and the hardness.

Which one of these is the phenomenal quality or “idea”? The difficulty here is that Reid seems to accept two claims about Lockean “ideas”:

3. we always have immediate awareness of “ideas”

and

4. “ideas” are the states of awareness.

On the Aristotelian view in question, (1) satisfies (3) and (2) satisfies (4). But (1) does not satisfy (4), and I don’t think the Aristotelian should allow that (2) satisfies (3).

The Aristotelian can now give this story in response to Reid. If we identify (1) as the phenomenal quality, the “what I feel”, then there is nothing absurd about saying that what I feel—namely, hardness—is what is in the extramental table. If we identify (2) as the phenomenal quality, on the other hand, then the Aristotelian will agree with Reid that the phenomenal quality is not found in the extramental object, because the inherencish relation is only found in the mind.

In fact, the Aristotelian’s refusal to accept that there is a single sense of “ideas” that satisfies (3) and (4) is a very good thing. For if we accept both (3) and (4), then for anything we are aware of, our state of awareness will itself be something we are aware of, and any awareness will immediately imply infinitely many levels of higher-order awareness, which is empirically false.

I am not a Reid scholar, however. I might be badly misreading Reid.