Emmanuel Campion-Dye (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
uctyeca@ucl.ac.uk

Rule-governed justification in the work of Kant and Wittgenstein

My project focuses on judgement – from the everyday judgements people make when they assess that they’re in the right place for a meeting to the technical judgements involved in scientific research. Specifically, my project focuses on the relationship between a judgement’s objectivity and the kinds of justification that can be given for it.

Take a classic example of an objective judgement, the judgement that the number thirteen is prime. If asked to justify this, we might do so by representing the number thirteen as following the rules that govern primeness – that is, we might say something like, “thirteen isn’t divisible by anything except itself and one.” There is no way that these rules can be met without the number being prime, so it seems like a good justification.

Now take a quite different kind of judgement, the judgement that Gwen John’s paintings are quiet. If asked to justify this, we might point out the muted palette, the matte quality, the contemplative subjects. But we can imagine paintings with all these features which are not quiet – some of Egon Schiele’s paintings arguably fit this description. The specific example here isn’t meant to be important. The point is that it seems characteristic of aesthetic qualities like ‘quiet’, ‘chaotic’, ‘imposing’ and so on that it is difficult to give a list of rules that allow someone to make judgements using those qualities.

Lots of people think that the fact that judgements of the second kind are very difficult to justify in terms of rules is an indication that these judgements are less firm or stable than the first kind. This isn’t just a matter of evidence – they think it’s something about the judgement itself, which they might express by suggesting that judgements of the second kind are less objective than those of the first. A central aim of my project is to query this link between objectivity and justification. I want to look at arguments for the view that judgements whose justification cannot be expressed explicitly in terms of rules are nonetheless as objective as others. If arguments to this effect could be given, they might be important for defending moral and aesthetic claims for which one cannot provide justifications in terms of rules. More broadly, they might challenge the tendency toward reducing claims to others whose justifiability in terms of rules is clearer, which often mean ones with easily assessable metrics.

What kind of an argument could be of use here? One suggestion, found in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1883-1951), is that the two different kinds of justification introduced above are less different than it might initially appear. If this were true, it could mean that it would be a misunderstanding to think there’s an important disparity in the objectivity of these judgements. We might thereby establish the objectivity of judgements whose justifications cannot be expressed in terms of rules. However, the places where Kant and Wittgenstein discuss judgement and justification are some of the most obscure parts of their work, and interpretations abound as to how to interpret their respective comments.

My project will proceed by attempting to make some headway into this obscurity. First, I want to develop readings of Kant and Wittgenstein’s comments on the issues that seem exegetically sound, and to place these in contrast to one another. Secondly, I want to see to what extent these arguments, if successful, would reach the target outlined above – of defending the objectivty of judgements whose justifications cannot be given in terms of rules. Finally, I want to assess the arguments developed in my readings as plausible proposals within a contemporary framework, relating them to recent work and adapting them in light of any modern developments.

Primary supervisor: Professor John Hyman