Rationalizing Inquiry and Historical Understanding

Abstract

In ‘The Epistemic Goals of the Humanities’, Stephen Grimm (2024) argues for epistemic continuities between the humanities, on one hand, and the social and natural sciences, on the other. This paper focuses on discontinuities. Drawing inspiration from Svetlana Alexievich’s literary non-fiction, I argue that if a reader is to gain a specific kind of understanding of the actions of the agents who appear in such work, they must engage in a rational evaluation of those agents’ reasons and actions. This epistemic process may yield, not just understanding of another’s action, but a grip on the evaluative distance between the reader and the agents she reads about, together with a greater appreciation of normative matters. These epistemic gains are, I suggest, central to the value of the humanities, and play a key role in its corrective power.

Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association at the University of Birmingham July 2024

I

A Chorus, a Collage.¹

Everything we know about war we know with ‘a man’s voice’. We are all captives of ‘men’s’ notions and ‘men’s’ sense of war. Women are silent. … Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the ‘women’s’ war but about the ‘men’s’. They tune into the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful with their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, the war unknown … to all of us. … I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history. (Alexievich [1985] 2017, pp. xv–xvi)

The humanities have been very important in correcting misunderstanding. They have revealed racism and classism, they have challenged the apparent fixity of gender, and the alleged inferiority of indigenous ways of life. Svetlana Alexievich’s work belongs in this corrective vein of the humanities. However storied the Second World War may be, few are aware of how young women trained and fought as partisans, or cut off their braids, underwent training in the Red Army, and fought at the front. In reading The Unwomanly Face of War (Alexievich [1985] 2017) we come to a better understanding of the war by hearing about women’s roles in it. And listening to first-person testimonies helps us to tune out nationalist narratives about military victory, narratives that obscure the truth about what motivated individual combatants, what struggles they underwent, and what military victory meant to them.^2,3

Readers of The Unwomanly Face of War who come to a particular kind of understanding of the actions of its testifiers engage, I will argue, in rational evaluation of the agents’ attitudes and actions. More specifically, they judge the women’s actions to be rationally justified or rationally permissible. In paradigmatic cases of this distinctive kind of understanding—called Rational Understanding here—they agree with the women about the appropriateness of their actions. I will defend a more refined version of this claim:

Rational Understanding Thesis. If an epistemic agent, E, understands a course of intentional action, A, in a distinctive rationalizing way, then E judges that A is rationally justified or rationally permissible.

II

Understanding in Non-fictional Literature and in History. The first-person testimonies of The Unwomanly Face of War bring Rational Understanding very clearly into view. But this kind of understanding is not tied to listening to or reading first-person testimonies. I will argue that it is also quite central to a competent reading of such work as Tyler Stovall’s Paris Noir (1996), where first-person testimony is much less prominent. This brings me into some disagreement with Stephen Grimm’s discussion of the kind of understanding that we gain from reading history like Paris Noir. Grimm is committed to this claim:

Epistemic Gain. If in reading a work of history, W, S comes to understand the domain under investigation in W, S comes to know their way around the possibility space of that domain.

Furthermore, the process by which the reader acquires understanding is described as follows:

Epistemic Process. If on the basis of reading a work of history, W, S comes to know their way around the domain that is under investigation in W, then S (i) discovers what elements the domain contains, (ii) how those elements characteristically behave, and (iii) why some of these characteristic behaviours are realized more often than others.

These general claims are carefully argued for, and I believe that they give us insight into the epistemic value of reading history. They shed light on little noticed commonalities between the humanities, on one hand, and the social and natural sciences, on the other.

Here, however, I wish to emphasize discontinuities. As I formulate both Epistemic Gain and Epistemic Process, they are necessary conditions on understanding some historical work. It is not my aim to deny these claims. Instead, I develop additional conditions. These focus on what it takes to understand the intentional actions, practical reasons, and commitments of the people discussed in historical work . Drawing on my argument for the Rational Understanding thesis, I argue that a competent reading of Paris Noir involves Rational Understanding of agents and their actions, and so, a different epistemic gain and a different epistemic process to the gain and process found in Grimm's discussion.

In §iii, I discuss a common kind of inquiry into intentional action that is found in everyday interpersonal contexts—Rationalizing Inquiry. Drawing on this, in §§iv and v, I develop the argument for a more refined version of the Rational Understanding thesis (above). In §vi, I apply the discussion to Paris Noir in an attempt to show that we should make room for a distinctive kind of epistemic process and epistemic gain to those I have attributed to Grimm. I draw out some implications of this view, with a particular focus on the corrective power of the humanities.

III

Rationalizing Inquiry. Alexievich’s narrators are well-functioning adult humans. They are reasons-responsive (Fischer and Ravizza 1998) planning agents (Bratman [1987] 1999) who have prior commitments, such as commitments to principles, practical roles, or plans for the future. They value things, and are social agents who acknowledge rules as authoritative, from legal rules to the rules of etiquette.

The intentional actions of such complex agents stand in what are, broadly speaking, ‘normative’ relationships to their beliefs, desires, commitments, what they value, and even their abilities and sensibilities. An action can fulfil or fail to fulfil certain of the agent’s desires, and be consistent or inconsistent with her beliefs or commitments. It can be performed in order to fulfil some of her commitments, such as a practical role or principle or plan. It can be consistent with or express a value of hers, it can be harmonious with her sensibilities or not. In addition, her action can be supported or not by the balance of reasons, or be superior or inferior to other competing practical options that were available to her in the situation of action.

All of these elements come up in the course of everyday ‘reasons’ explanation of action—in everyday non-technical inquiries into intentional action. What sets such inquiry apart from other types is that intentional action is subject to scrutiny, not as a physical or social type of thing, nor even as the result of certain psychological processes, but as a rational response by the agent to her situation. Why are you doing that? Why do that now when you could do it later? Why take that option when this other one is available? And so on. As the ‘reasons explanation’ moniker may suggest that reasons are the only thing that produces understanding, and as at least some other elements, such as commitments and rules (which are not clearly reducible to reasons) play roles, I prefer to call this Rationalizing Inquiry (ri). Coming to know something about an agent’s beliefs, desires, values, or commitments, the social rules, and so on, we might come to understand why, rationally speaking, she is doing what she is doing. I will call the distinctive kind of understanding that is sought by RI Rational Understanding.

An inquirer, an ‘epistemic’ agent, E, will ordinarily know or simply assume lots of things about the acting or ‘practical’ agent, P. E may focus on one thing that provokes their curiosity, such as the action’s being, by E’s lights, inferior to some other practical option that they take to be open to P or its being inconsistent with a commitment or belief of P’s. It should be noted, however, that P’s practical reasons often play a central role in ri. It is very often the case that E’s coming to understand something about P’s commitments or values generates understanding of P’s action only in tandem with the practical reasons for which P acts. Here, I assume that practical reasons are normative states of affairs that stand in a favouring or disfavouring relationship to an action (Dancy 2000; Alvarez 2010). The hunger of children—that state of affairs in the world—favours an agent’s giving children food, just as the state of affairs of rain favours taking an umbrella, or the high price of some item disfavours buying it.

Here is not the place to engage with debates about the nature of reasons. We should note, however, that this view of practical reasons is relatively widespread (see, for example, Maguire and Lord 2018). Furthermore, it is arguably presupposed in ri. Suppose E asks of P, ‘Why are you buying that coat? It is so expensive!’ What is a seemingly decisive con-reason from E’s perspective seems to be a state of affairs in the world—it is not E’s belief that the price is high that makes the action puzzling to E, it is the state of affairs of the price’s being high. Or, in answer to ‘Why are you taking an umbrella?’, P may answer simply ‘Because it is raining’, thereby citing a state of affairs that they take to stand in a favouring relation to their action (see also Stoutland 2007). In fact, when we think about many everyday cases of ri, E’s curiosity is ordinarily world-oriented, and more specifically, oriented towards features of the world that have normative significance: practical reasons, rules, and the demands made by other agents. These states of affairs provoke curiosity because they determine, or seem to E to determine, the rational status of the intentional action under scrutiny. And this focus on normative states of affairs is not that surprising when we consider that this too is the focus of much of our own practical deliberation, our own practical take on things in everyday settings.

True, ri-inquiries also concern psychologically real features of agents, such as their beliefs and commitments, but even then, in ri-inquiries, where the focus is on an intentional action as a rational response by the agent to her situation, these features will play a role in understanding in virtue of their role in E’s normative assessment of the action. The agent’s commitments or values or sensibilities, say, make it the case that the agent has a reason to do one thing or another: it is because P is the father of the children, occupies that practical role and has certain commitments as a result, that he has decisive reason to find them something to eat when they are hungry; or it is because P loathes air travel that she has a reason to stay at home.

Here are some elements in light of which we may inquire into intentional actions in ri, and which may play a role in our coming to Rationally Understand an intentional action:

• (i) the agent’s beliefs;

• (ii) her desires;

• (iii) her unrescinded commitments, such as plans, principles, practical roles, promises;

• (iv) her values;

• (v) the standards of action given by the act-types that she is trying to token (O’Brien 2021);

• (vi) her emotional and other sensibilities;

• (vii) social rules that the agent is subject to;

• (viii) demands that the agent is subject to, for example, a request to enlist in the military;

• (ix) competing practical options, O₁, …, O_n, that are open to the agent;

• (x) practical reasons pro and con.

Let’s call such elements as (i)–(x) elements of the Rational Structure of intentional action. An intentional action has Rational Structure in virtue of the, broadly speaking, normative relationships—of fulfilment, consistency, compliance, harmoniousness, being favoured or disfavoured, and so on—that it bears to such elements.

IV

Cases of Rationalizing Inquiry. The foregoing discussion makes an initial case for accepting the view that there is a distinctive kind of inquiry that is pursued in everyday interpersonal settings that concerns the Rational Structure of intentional action. Central to this practice are practical reasons understood as normative states of affairs. Here I will try to strengthen the case for these claims by considering some cases in more detail, such as this one:

Gore’s Concession. Al Gore, the Democratic Party candidate, conceded to George Bush, the Republican Party candidate, in the exceptionally close-run American Presidential election of 2000. Gore was acting (let’s suppose) on his commitment to rule R: one should not risk fomenting political unrest by contesting elections too strenuously.

Consider three different epistemic agents E₁, E₂, and E₃, who are all curious about why Gore conceded. From their perspective, a Republican presidency, which will result from Gore’s concession, is an extremely weighty reason for Gore not to concede, and so they are puzzled by his action.

Let’s suppose that Gore’s action is explained to E₁ in terms of R and the reasons for R, such as that too strenuous contesting of the election would deepen political divisions, which in turn would generate political unrest and an increase in social distrust. These likely eventualities of refusing to concede are powerful reasons that favour conceding. Let’s suppose that E₁ hadn’t thought of these things. And let’s also suppose that Gore and his advisors are right: the balance of reasons decisively favours committing to R and going on to concede. In mulling over R and these reasons herself, E₁ comes to think that Gore was right, and that her own earlier puzzlement was based on her failure to appreciate these reasons. It also seems that in rationally evaluating Gore’s decision and action, and in coming to a fuller appreciation of the balance of reasons, she comes to Rationally Understand the action that is Gore’s concession. After all, E₁ has come to a fresh appreciation of the action’s Rational Structure: it stands in relationships of being favoured by weighty reasons. And E₁ no longer has grounds for asking why Gore did what he did. Her ri seems to be satisfied.

E₂ also hears about and mulls over the reasons. But she does not appreciate them as E₁ does. In fact, they simply raise further ri-questions for her. She thinks ‘Why is avoiding political unrest so much more important than blocking a Republican presidency?’ Such inquiries further probe the rational justification for conceding and reveal (given that we are assuming that Gore had decisive reasons to concede) E₂’s lack of understanding of the reasons, and so of the action’s Rational Structure.

Let’s suppose that this lack of understanding also prompts what seems to be a different kind of inquiry for E₂: ‘Why are Gore and his advisors so preoccupied with the risk of political unrest?’ Where ri is concerned with the Rational Structure of an intentional action, this inquiry is concerned with Gore’s psychology, with why he thinks about things as he does, even though, by E₂’s lights, he lacks reasons to think as he does. Given this new line of inquiry, and the fact that E₂’s understanding of the action and its relationship to reasons has not changed much on the basis of answers to her initial ri-questions, we have reason to think that E₂ doesn’t satisfactorily complete her ri-inquiry and doesn’t attain the Rational Understanding that she set out for. What is of central interest here is that E₂’s initial curiosity is concerned with the action’s relationship to practical reasons, and Rational Understanding fails when she does not come to see Gore’s action as rationally justified.

E₃, let’s suppose, also hears about R and its reasons. While E₃ agrees that the rule is a good one, they think that Gore should nevertheless have rescinded his commitment to it. But let’s suppose that E₃ also quite fully appreciates the appeal of R and the reasons that favour it. Furthermore, E₃ cannot identify a decisive reason against conceding. Consequently, E₃ comes to see the action as related to reasons in a way that they hadn’t appreciated before. They see the action, not as fully rationally justified but as, at least, rationally permissible. They remain confident, nevertheless, that the better option would be to refuse to concede at least for a while more. But E₃ no longer has pressing ri-questions, because they do see the reasons that Gore acted on as weighty, and their initial puzzlement has dissipated. So they seem to understand the action by coming to see it as rationally permissible.⁴

When we consider Gore’s Concession and the responses of E₁, E₂ and E₃, it is noteworthy that we can make clear sense of each inquiry as one that is concerned with the relationship between Gore’s action and reasons, together with some other elements of his action’s Rational Structure, such as his commitment to a rule. And each failure or success in understanding can be understood in terms of the inquiring agent’s appreciating or failing to appreciate relationships between the action and these elements of its Rational Structure. It seems plausible to say that it is largely because E₂ does not appreciate such relationships that she does not achieve Rational Understanding, and it is largely because E₁ and E₃ do appreciate such relationships that they achieve Rational Understanding.

Let’s consider one more case to clarify what I am calling ri and to elaborate on the specific kind of understanding, Rational Understanding, that it seeks. Scattered liberally throughout The Unwomanly Face of War are first-personal accounts of why agents did what they did. Consider the case of the sniper Maria Ivanovna Morozova (from which, for the sake of brevity, much has been omitted):

Sniper. I decided to shoot. I decided, and suddenly a thought flashed through my mind: he’s a human being; he may be an enemy, but he’s a human being … my hands began to tremble, I started trembling all over … But I got hold of myself, I pulled the trigger … He waved his arms and fell. Whether he was dead or not, I didn’t know (Alexievich [1985] 2017, p. 9).

First, it is not implausible to suppose that when we read accounts in which agents explain their actions, such as Maria Ivanovna’s explanation of her brief re-deliberation about how to proceed, we take in these explanations as we do the action explanations that we encounter in everyday ri-contexts. Whether we are directly observing an action and interacting with the agent or simply reading her account of her action after the fact, there is still an attempt being made by an acting agent to explain their action as a rational response to their situation. And the action still has Rational Structure—Maria’s pausing to reassess the situation is taken by her to be favoured by the reason that the German officer is a human being, and it is in conflict with her commitments as a sniper. Even if the context is not an interpersonal one, and even if the reader does not directly address an ri-question to the agent, the action may provoke ri-curiosity for the reader.

Suppose that one reader, First Reader, finds the humanity of the officer to be a salient and weighty reason that rationally challenges the reasonableness of following through on a commitment to kill the enemy and makes her pausing to reassess rationally justified. This reader seems to gain Rational Understanding. Suppose that for another reader, Second Reader, such things as the importance of halting the tremendous brutality of the Third Reich’s assault on the Soviet Union and the duty of armed personnel to protect their sisters and brothers in arms are much more salient, and are, by Second Reader’s lights, very weighty reasons against pausing to reassess.

Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Second Reader is right: there are immensely weighty reasons against pausing to reassess. Of course, Maria Ivanovna’s action may be understood by Second Reader as a common phenomenon among new recruits, but as with E₂ above, although they may thereby have some kind of psychological understanding of Maria, they do not have Rational Understanding of her pausing.

Both Gore’s Concession and Sniper raise an important question. Although it cannot be fully dealt with in this short paper, let me briefly consider it. Can an inquiring agent achieve ri-understanding of an intentional action if the inquirer is mistaken about what reasons obtain or what weights those reasons have? Can First Reader gain Rational Understanding of Maria’s pausing to reassess? On the assumption that there is Rational Structure to this action, it is natural to say that when First Reader seems to ‘get’ the action as something that is justified by the weighty reason of the officer’s humanity, they do not achieve a full Rational Understanding of the action, even if they are unaware of this. By hypothesis, First Reader misunderstands the normative facts, and as a result it seems as if in taking the action to be fully rationally justified she misunderstands the action’s Rational Structure. Second Reader, by contrast, has a better overall understanding of the action: it has a Rational Structure that is flawed by being decisively disfavoured by con-reasons, and it is not possible to veridically see it as rationally justified.⁵ And indeed, were First Reader’s grip on the normative facts to improve, she would cease to see the action as rationally justified or permitted. She would, like Second Reader, come to see it as unamenable to being fully Rationally Understood.

This may seem implausible. After all, at the outset First Reader seems to understand Maria’s action much better than Second Reader. First Reader can, let’s suppose, imagine quite well what it is like to be faced with the prospect of shooting someone for the first time and, being assailed by doubt, pause to reassess. But note that imagining this clearly, and on this basis appreciating the psychological difficulty of following through on one’s commitment, does not involve the same explanandum as we are concerned with in ri: in ri we are concerned with the Rational Structure of the action. It may be, then, that although First Reader understands Maria’s ‘perspective’ or psychological responses quite well, and better than Second Reader, it does not follow that she has successfully completed an ri and has better Rational Understanding than Second Reader.⁶

Although the foregoing deserves more elaboration and discussion, if we accept this line of thought, ri may not yield Rational Understanding for at least two different reasons. Full Rational Understanding may be unavailable because the intentional action that is being inquired into is just not rationally justified. Its Rational Structure is defective, to put it another way, and the understanding of it sought by ri is unavailable. Alternatively, Rational Understanding may not be available to a particular inquirer because she does not, or is unable to, appreciate the normative facts.

The examples give support for the view that ri is often motivated by a failure to judge that an action is rationally justified. Furthermore, this specific kind of inquiry is satisfied by coming to see the action as rationally justified or permissible. In the final line of discussion just above, it was also suggested that veridically seeing the action as rationally justified or permissible is required, but as this latter claim raises issues that cannot be dealt with in this short paper, and as it will not greatly affect the discussion to come, I set further defence of that suggestion aside.

But doesn’t the well-known example of someone who drinks a glass of petrol while mistaking it for gin present a problem for the view? (Williams 1980). We can gain some kind of rational understanding of the agent’s lifting the glass to her lips without finding the action rationally justified—it isn’t justified. But ri seeks to understand intentional action in terms of its being the agent’s rational response to her situation. And it should then be taken into account what non-normative beliefs the agent has about her situation. In this case, our agent believes that she is drinking gin. If we are to complete an ri, we should evaluate whether she would have good reason to drink gin in the situation that she takes herself to be in. If she would have good reason to do this, we seem to be able to gain Rational Understanding of what she aimed to do. A full theory of Rational Understanding would need to relativize rational justification to the agent’s non-normative beliefs about her practical situation, but a full treatment of this issue must await a full theory of ri and Rational Understanding.

What about common everyday examples of what looks like ri and may be classed with ri in the literature? Suppose that E is looking at P’s raising her arm and asks:

q: ‘Why are you raising your arm?’

a: ‘I am stretching.’

E’s question stems from ignorance, rather than puzzlement about the rationality of the action, and E’s epistemic position is improved by a true belief about P’s aim in acting. If this is ri, ri is sometimes unconnected to a judgement that the action is rationally justified.

But it does not follow that, in knowing what they know about P’s action, E thereby comes to understand P’s action as a rational response to P’s situation. It is not clear that q expresses an ri, even if q has the same superficial linguistic form as ri-questions. And if knowing what P is doing on the basis of a satisfies E’s curiosity but does not reveal whether or not a is rationally justified, it may not qualify as ri.

Indeed, for all E knows on the basis of a, P herself finds her action rationally unintelligible. Suppose that P knows on the basis of her doctor’s testimony that she shouldn’t stretch her arm if she wishes to avoid doing damage to her ligaments, and furthermore, P is committed to looking after her health. P wonders ‘Why am I doing this?’ She doesn’t have a good answer and, qua rational response to her situation, her action is defective and largely unintelligible to her, or to anyone else. If the action is largely rationally unintelligible, but E’s knowing what P is doing is sufficient to satisfy her inquiry, then q and a do not seem to qualify as ri.

On my view, we cannot have Rational Understanding of akratic actions. But is this true? Don’t we quite fully understand the action of the agent who continues to watch TV instead of getting back to work, even though they judge that this is what they should do? On my view, akratic actions are not intelligible qua rational responses, which is to say that they cannot be made fully intelligible in light of elements of the action’s Rational Structure. But of course we can certainly know what it is like to continue to sit on the couch against our better judgement. Or we may understand the behaviour in the terms of the psychological sciences. But none of these kinds of understanding amounts to understanding the action qua rational response. The objection runs different kinds of understanding together.

V

The Necessity of Evaluative Judgements. ris are often motivated by E’s own take on what would be right or appropriate for P to do in the practical situation that P finds herself in. Inquiry stems, not just from lack of belief or knowledge—such as when we ask ‘Why did the window break?’ because we don’t know the cause—but from an evaluative judgement of what the agent should, by E’s lights, have done. And, as I have been arguing, ri is satisfied when E comes to (veridically) see the action as rationally justified or permissible.

Note that to come to see the intentional action as rationally justified or permissible, E must come to appreciate the action’s normative relations to the agent’s reasons, intentions, her other commitments, and so on. It seems that the only route to this is for E to engage in the relevant evaluative judgements herself. Even if there were knowledge available of whether the action is justified in the absence of E’s making such evaluative judgements—suppose there were reliable testimony to the effect that an action serves certain commitments, or is, as a matter of fact, supported by the balance of reasons, and so on—E’s knowledge would come without any understanding of why the relevant relations held between an action and these elements of Rational Structure. E would not, then, understand the action as a rational response by the agent. To understand an action as a rational response by an agent is to understand its relationships to such things. But to do this, it seems that one must make the relevant evaluative judgements oneself.

If the foregoing is correct, our coming to have Rational Understanding of the Rational Structure of an intentional action will require making evaluative judgements concerning the relations between the action and the elements (i)–(x). This is a key claim that I will rely on in the next section:

Rational Understanding Thesis. If an epistemic agent, E, achieves some understanding of an intentional action, A, as a rational response of an agent, P, to P’s situation, then E makes evaluative judgements concerning the relations between the action and one or more of the elements (i)–(x) of Rational Structure, and comes to judge the action as rationally justified or rationally permissible for P.

VI

Understanding in Paris Noir. So far, the aim has been, first, to characterize a kind of inquiry that finds expression, not just in interpersonal contexts, but also in reading literary non-fiction such as The Unwomanly Face of War. Second, I have argued that the acquisition of Rational Understanding requires E to rationally evaluate P’s action and come to (veridically) see it as rationally justified or rationally permissible. I wish to return now to Stephen Grimm’s treatment of Paris Noir and evaluate this treatment in light of these claims.

As noted above, Paris Noir does not rely as heavily on first-personal testimonies as The Unwomanly Face of War. But it still centrally concerns intentional actions qua rational responses. For example, some of the discussion deals with why ‘exile abroad’ was more attractive to African Americans than facing racism in America (Stovall 1996, pp. 26–30). Other discussions concern why individuals such as Logan Rayford, Bricktop, or Josephine Baker decided to emigrate to Paris, and there is a striking extended discussion of Richard Wright’s decision to live in exile in Paris (Stovall 1996, pp. 190–9). There are also extensive discussions of why Montmartre was an appealing place to live for African Americans and why Paris retained its appeal for African Americans after the end of the Jazz Age. These are just some examples where the Rational Structure of intentional actions comes to the fore. And the competent reader will be led by the text to have curiosity about such things. As discussed above, I do not think that we must engage in interpersonal interaction, such as posing ri-questions to agents, to undergo ri-curiosity and to seek to satisfy that curiosity. We have reason, then, to think that acquiring Rational Understanding is a component of coming to understand the domain of Paris Noir.

As mentioned above, Grimm is committed to these claims:

Epistemic Gain. If in reading a work of history, W, S comes to understand the domain under investigation in W, S comes to know their way around the possibility space of that domain.

Epistemic Process. If on the basis reading a work of history, W, S comes to know their way around the domain that is under investigation in W, then S (i) discovers what elements the domain contains (its ‘furniture’), (ii) how those elements characteristically behave, and (iii) why some of these characteristic behaviours are realized more often than others.

I will argue that these conditions do not capture epistemic processes and epistemic gains that are bound up with ri-curiosity and Rational Understanding.

vi.1 Epistemic Process and Rational-Epistemic Process. If the Rational Understanding thesis is true, when readers aim to understand the actions of Stovall’s protagonists as rational responses, they must engage in rational evaluation of the relevant actions. But if this is correct, the reader who is keen to gain Rational Understanding assumes a lot about the domain under discussion in Paris Noir. They assume not only that there are intentional actions but that the agents who perform these actions are reasons-responsive and have beliefs, practical commitments, desires and values. They also assume that there are reasons that favour or disfavour courses of action, that there are social rules whose authority agents accept, and so on.

Given what is taken for granted, it is not clear that Epistemic Process is the best description of the process by which a reader of Paris Noir acquires Rational Understanding. Such a reader will sometimes be less engaged with discovering what fills the domain and coming to a better grip on how those things characteristically behave than with inserting new information into a pre-existing framework for understanding rational social agents, who are simply assumed to have many well-understood characteristics.

Readers also have a method for gaining understanding that they inherit from their own lives as social agents: the process of rationally evaluating actions in light of their Rational Structure. And this process does not look as though it involves coming to a richer understanding of the characteristic behaviours of the furniture of the domain. It concerns, rather, whether particular actions or attitudes are rationally justified. Given this, it seems reasonable to accept this as a distinct claim from Epistemic Process:

Rational-Epistemic Process. If on the basis of reading Paris Noir S comes to know their way around the possibility space of the African-American diaspora in Paris, S has evaluated the rationality of the actions of the agents in the diaspora by appeal to elements of the actions’ Rational Structure.

If Rational-Epistemic Process is just one epistemic process that the reader of Paris Noir engages in, Epistemic Process can remain important. And it remains central, let’s grant, for coming to fully understand such things as American racism, or the world wars as major military events that had a huge impact on life in Paris, and so on. However, assessing how helpful Epistemic Process is for understanding the epistemic engagement of the competent reader with Paris Noir depends on how central Rational Understanding is to the text. It seems quite central on my reading. Rational-Epistemic Process should, then, be accommodated, and its relationship to Epistemic Process examined and clarified.

vi.2 Epistemic Gain. Let us turn now to Epistemic Gain. It is supported by Grimm’s compelling argument to the effect that the many narrative details that Stovall provides concerning factors like the virulence of American racism, the comparatively enlightened attitudes of the French, and so on, allow us to understand the African-American diaspora:

[B]y working through the narrative … we get a sense of the relative power or strength of these different factors, and it is by getting a sense of the relative power and strength of these factors that we are better able to know our way around this possibility space. In particular, we become better able to answer the ‘What if things had been different?’ questions that lie at the core of understanding. (Grimm 2024, p. 221)

But Rational Understanding is not readily captured by Epistemic Gain. This seems to be a more suitable characterization:

Rational-Epistemic Gain. If S comes to understand the African-American diaspora in Paris on the basis of reading Paris Noir, S comes to (veridically) see many of the actions of the agents discussed in Paris Noir as rationally justified or rationally permissible.

On Grimm’s view, the narrative details give rise to an increasingly sophisticated grip on the complex dependency relationships obtaining among factors in the domain of Paris Noir such as racism in America, the African-American community in Paris, and African-American emigration to Paris. But if we accept Rational-Epistemic Gain, the narrative details do not just deepen our appreciation of such dependency relations, they allow readers to rationally evaluate actions or types of action in light of elements of their actual Rational Structure. Although the relationship between our understanding of the dependencies that Grimm is concerned with and Rational Understanding is not easy to disentangle, as long as we do not assume that one is reducible to the other, we have grounds for thinking that the narrative details play an epistemic role that is not captured by Grimm’s claims. Plausibly, the narrative details play a key role in giving rise to Rational Understanding. If this is correct, we should add Rational-Epistemic Gain as a distinct epistemic gain.

Some features of Rational-Epistemic Gain bear highlighting. First, granting that E must come to see P’s action as rationally justified or permissible if E is to understand it, and granting that P—if she is a well-functioning rational agent—will have regarded her action as rationally justified, E’s acquiring Rational Understanding of P’s action will involve E’s appreciating some of what P herself appreciated about her action. E may, for example, evaluate competing practical options as P did, or take the reasons to speak in favour of the action, just as P did, and so on. This helps us to make sense of the intriguing idea that we can sometimes ‘see things as another sees them’: the epistemic gain is not just seeing an action as rationally justified or permissible; it is also seeing relevant normative matters as P saw them.

Second, in repeatedly seeking Rational Understanding, we stand to improve our appreciation of what reasons are weighty, what rules are authoritative, what practical options are really worthwhile across diverse contexts. In being sophisticated practical agents who have many commitments, conflicting desires, and who are confronted with many practical options, it is of value to us to mull over and come to appreciate what is worth doing and why in a wide variety of contexts. Even if we are not ourselves in such a context when engaging in ri, we may find ourselves in a relevantly similar context in the future, and be better able to navigate it because of having considered its pros and cons through ri.

Let me turn to one more epistemic gain. The process of rationally evaluating another’s action is egocentric in the specific sense that E employs her own standards of what is reasonable to evaluate P’s action. Very often there will be considerable distance between E and P, not just because their socio-historical contexts are different and the epistemic gaps are hard to cross, but because their takes on normative issues differ. But even when this is so, in trying to satisfy ri-curiosity, E can come to see differences between her and P in a more fine-grained way—she comes to realize, say, that it is a difference, not in their assessment of the weights of practical reasons, but in an awareness of what practical reasons there are, that sets them apart. In doing this, E is able to more accurately map the distance between her and the agents whose actions she tries to understand.⁷

This egocentric mapping is especially important when ri is pursued in interpersonal contexts—when E and P share a social world and must rub shoulders—for through ri, E comes to a better understanding of whether she can work with P or not. But it is also important when a reader considers the actions of those who are distant in space and time. The reader, E, is given the opportunity to see how different from, or similar to, P she is. In evaluating P’s views, E’s own views can be challenged by those of P’s, and potentially changed in light of them. E and P may remain far apart, or E may find in P a kindred spirit, and recognizing this gives E a better grip on her own moral and intellectual community and its boundaries.

When such a process brings the reader into quite direct intellectual contact with agents who have been silenced by misogyny or racism or by national narratives into which they do not easily fit, epistemic justice is arguably also done. The agents of works like The Unwomanly Face of War and Paris Noir are not just given an audience that comes to understand them; in coming to find their attitudes and actions rationally justified, that audience comes to appreciate those agents’ authority on normative matters, on matters of what is valuable, what rules are authoritative, what reasons are weighty. This is arguably important work of humanities in a corrective vein: not only are those who are silenced given an audience, their take on important practical matters is evaluated, and they may come to be appreciated as members of many readers’ moral and intellectual community.

VII

Concluding Remarks. Grimm’s defence of the commonalities between the humanities, on one hand, and the sciences, on the other, is insightful and persuasive. Here I have argued for discontinuities: some work in the humanities affords us Rational Understanding. If this is correct, it raises several questions. What is the relationship between the different kinds of understanding discussed here? Is one more fundamental than the other? Is one more central to the humanities than the other? What relationship, if any, does Rational Understanding bear to Verstehen as that is discussed by Dilthey and others?⁸

I have also argued that acquiring Rational Understanding involves an egocentric evaluative engagement with others’ actions. This opens the reader to examining and correcting her own views on normative matters and to a better appreciation of the extent and diversity of her moral and intellectual community. This too raises questions, such as questions about what roles the humanities can and should play in developing key capacities of well-functioning rational practical agents, in delivering epistemic justice, and in fostering moral and intellectual community.⁹

References

Footnotes