Norm-Like Patterns
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Notes
Mindreading Attributions Are Normative
While laws of mechanics apply no less to us agents than to anything else, it would usually be futile, perhaps even incoherent, to attempt to move according to these laws. By contrast, one role of mental state attribution is to provide norms which individuals can measure themselves against and aim to live by (McGeer, 2007; Zawidzki, 2013).
To illustrate, consider the familiar distinction between revealed and stated preferences. In investigating the value people place on a life, we could observe how much less people pay to own a house near a known source of carcinogenic pollution. Or, alternatively, we could give them a questionnaire asking how much they would pay to eliminate the same risk. A range of research has examined how revealed and stated preferences diverge (Carson, Flores, Martin, & Wright, 1996; Alberini, 2019, for example). There is also research on the factors that ‘often create a wedge between revealed and normative preferences’ (Beshears, Choi, Laibson, & Madrian, 2008, p. 1788). In practice, divergences between revealed and stated preferences matter because they create difficult questions for policy makers on how much to invest in preventing deaths. For our more theoretical purposes, the divergence illustrates how some attributions of preference have a normative aspect. Agents’ stated preferences are, in effect, views about how a model applies to them. Where agents sometimes aim to live out these views, they are not inert commentary. The problem is not fundamentally that this complicates predicting behaviour. It is that where agents aim to conform to a model, incorrect ‘predictions’ are indicators of normative failures.
Hart’s distinction between rules and patterns
The difference, so Hart, is that rules involve ‘an “internal” aspect’; this is specified as ‘a critical reflective attitude to certain patterns of behaviour as a common standard’ which finds its ‘characteristic expression in the normative terminology of ‘ought’ (Hart, 1994, pp. 55–7).
(Hart uses the term ‘habit’ losely for mere patterns of behaviour.)
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Hart made an analogous point about general acceptance of rules in a modern state. He observed that ordinary citizens may ‘know nothing more about the laws than that they are “the law”’, whereas experts involved in law-making will be guided by knowledge and ‘critical attitudes.’ He stresses that ‘both aspects must be kept in view if we are to see this complex social phenomenon for what it actually is’ (Hart, 1994, p. 61).