2. A reason-based approach to significance

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The fundamental difficulty in developing an account of significance is

what we might call the thick-thin problem. On the one hand, we need an

account of significance that is thick enough to forbid an ‘‘anything goes’’

attitude toward significance. For example, no matter how intrinsically

compelling one might find the problem of (say) establishing the length of

one’s left thumbnail at every five second interval, that interest, by itself,

does not make that problem particularly significant. (That’s not to say, of

course, that we can’t imagine a fanciful scenario in which close thumbnail

monitoring is a highly significant problem. But for most of us most of the

time, it’s not.) So we need an account of significance that is thick enough

to yield the result that a problem might be relatively insignificant even if

someone has a powerful subjective desire to tackle it. But on the other

hand, we need an account of significance that is thin enough to license

some dramatic interpersonal differences in what problems are significant.

For example, establishing whether the short-tailed shrew is the smallest

North American mammal with poisonous saliva might be a very significant

problem to a biologist whose professional reputation depends on her

knowledge of North American shrews. For most of the rest of us, however,

this is not an especially significant problem. So the thick-thin problem is

that the constraints on significance must allow for some substantive interpersonal

and interinstitutional differences about what problems are

significant without licensing an ‘‘anything goes’’ subjectivism.

Our view holds that the significance of a problem for S is a function of

the weight of the objective reasons S has for devoting resources to solving that

problem. This view assumes that we have objective reasons of various sorts

for action and that we can weigh these reasons against one another. We are

aware that these are bold and controversial assumptions. But given our

broadly Aristotelian approach to epistemology, we don’t think it’s possible to think fully and clearly about epistemology without also bringing in views

about other normative domains. So we will unabashedly take the assumption

that there are objective reasons for action—they stand regardless of

whether a subject recognizes them or (after reflection) accepts them as legitimate

(see Railton 1986; Boyd 1988). This reason-based account of significance

has the resources to handle the thick-thin problem. Some reasons

(such as those that arise from basic moral obligations) are universal. They

place firm restrictions on the sort of problems that can be significant. But

other reasons (such as those that arise from one’s social or professional

obligations) might be quite different for different people. These sorts of

reasons permit fairly dramatic differences in the sorts of problems that

different people might find significant.

The two most intuitively compelling kinds of objective reasons are

also the most important for our purposes. We take it that people have

objective moral reasons and objective prudential reasons for action. So

consider the reasoning problem faced by a doctor who is diagnosing

whether a patient has a serious disease on the basis of various test results.

This problem is highly significant for the doctor because she has objective

moral and prudential reasons for reasoning very carefully and well about

such a problem. These reasons are objective because they stand regardless

of whether she recognizes them or, upon reflection, accepts them. This is

particularly plausible in a case (like this one) in which the objective reasons

the doctor has for devoting resources to this problem are connected

(at least in part) to the consequences of her reasoning. Accurately diagnosing

a patient is a high-stakes proposition, both for the patient and for

the doctor. The potential costs of an inaccurate diagnosis are huge, as are

the potential benefits of an accurate diagnosis. When someone’s objective

reasons for tackling a problem are a function of the consequences of getting

or not getting an accurate result, it’s intuitively plausible that these

reasons stand even if the doctor doesn’t recognize or care about them. And

since these reasons are weighty, the problem is significant for the doctor

(not to mention her patient!).

It would be a mistake, however, to think that all the objective reasons

we could have for action involve only consequences. Individuals can have

reasons for tackling certain problems because they have pursued or accepted

the moral and professional duties (along with the attendant benefits)

of certain social or professional roles. For example, regardless of the

consequences, doctors have a duty (a moral and professional duty) to

devote resources to thinking clearly about their patients; police officers

have a duty to devote resources to thinking clearly about solving and preventing crime; university professors have a duty to devote resources to

thinking clearly about how to effectively teach their students—and some

have a duty to devote resources to thinking clearly about short-tailed

shrews or the mind-body problem.

Objective reasons include more than moral, prudential, or social-role

sorts of reasons. For example, people can have legitimate (and objective)

epistemic reasons for tackling a certain problem. We take it that discovering

the truth about the basic physical or social structure of the world is

intrinsically valuable. So even if we can’t be sure that it will lead to any

practical results, the physicists at CERN and Fermilab have epistemic

reasons (beyond their prudential reasons) for spending cognitive resources

on trying to discover the Higgs boson.

Let’s consider three worries about this reason-based account of significance.

The first worry concerns insignificant problems. For those of us

who have no legitimate reasons and no personal interest in constantly

monitoring our fingernail length or the number of Goodyear Blimps in

our field of vision, our view is that such problems are insignificant. But the

thick-thin problem arises when we ask: What about the subject who is

interested in tackling such navel-gazing reasoning problems? Doesn’t this

interest, by itself, give the subject some objective reason to tackle the problem?

Yes. We can grant the following general principle: If S desires to do X,

that gives S some (objective) reason to do X. But notice, this principle is

silent about the strength of this objective reason. On the assumption that S

has no other reasons—moral, prudential, epistemic, aesthetic, etc.—to

pursue this problem, it would seem that this problem, while not completely

insignificant, is of very, very little significance. If S is devoting

resources to monitoring his fingernail length rather than (say) the safety

of his child, this is a pathology that goes well beyond concerns with

poor reasoning. But on our view, devoting resources to a barely significant

problem instead of a significant problem is a case of poor reasoning—and

possibly worse.

A second worry about our view concerns ‘‘lost cause’’ problems. Consider

the problem of whether the current health care system in the U.S. is

just and efficient. Given our health care system’s barriers to participatory

influence, it might be that an individual has no power to change or help

change the system. Is this apparently ‘‘lost cause’’ a significant problem for

the person? If the person is interested in the problem, then (as in the

navel-gazing cases) that makes the problem at least a little bit significant.

But on what grounds might it be more than barely significant? One might

have prudential reasons to think about the health care system in order to understand it well enough to make good use of it. But let’s suppose this

consideration isn’t relevant to the reasoner. There are still two classes of

objective reason that could make ‘‘lost cause’’ problems significant. First,

we have a civic or political duty to be well informed on important topics

of the day (i.e., topics that are important to people’s well-being). How

does this duty work? The only way positive change can occur in a democracy

is if those with minority opinions don’t give up when they don’t

foresee beneficial changes coming in the short term. But the possibility of

positive change also requires that those who aren’t informed on important

subjects pay attention to them. This seems to us to be the basis of the civic

or political duty that makes thinking about the moral status of our society’s

institutions significant—even when we have vanishingly small

prospects for changing them. Another set of objective reasons that might

ground the significance of these ‘‘lost causes’’ involves considerations of

virtue. Following up on our generally Aristotelian approach to epistemology,

it seems plausible to suppose that there is a nonaccidental connection

between being an excellent reasoner and an excellent person. We

venture to guess (and we take this to be a testable assumption) that

spending resources thinking seriously about whether one’s society is just is

a feature of an excellent character and a flourishing life. Indeed, it’s not

too much of an overstatement to say that Western philosophy originated,

in the person of Socrates, in precisely this kind of serious reflection on

‘‘lost causes.’’

The third worry about our view concerns ‘‘negatively’’ significant

reasoning problems. Reasoners may have objective reasons for not devoting

resources to particular sorts of problem. For example, we suspect that

a psychologically healthy person will not regularly calculate and recalculate

what are his narrow self-interests—particularly if such constant recalculation

alienates him from activities he finds satisfying and casts his friends

as potential competitors. We take it that this can be a ‘‘negatively’’ significant

reasoning problem. This is a separate category from significant

and insignificant problems. ‘‘Negatively’’ significant problems are those for

which one has positive reason (not based on opportunity costs) to avoid.

We have discussed (in chapter 3) some of the counterintuitive findings of

‘‘hedonic psychology.’’ These findings suggest that focusing cognitive

resources on certain kinds of problem are likely to lead to frustration and

loss of happiness. To take one perhaps unsurprising example, people who

pursue money in the belief that it will increase their happiness express

greater frustration than their peers (Myers 2000). We suspect (although

we have only anecdotal evidence for this hypothesis) that ‘‘philosophy graduate student disease’’ (the constant monitoring of one’s actual or

perceived ‘‘smartness’’ status) involves the devotion of resources to a negatively

significant problem.

Our general account of epistemic significance resides, ultimately, in

judgments about what conduces to human well-being. If we view humans

as part of the natural order, then the conditions that contribute to human

well-being are open to scientific investigation. Some might worry that

these conditions are too variable to be studied systematically and generalized

about scientifically. There is, however, reason for optimism. While

the conditions of human well-being may be tied to norms that differ

across individuals and across cultures, the challenges of generalizing across

varied groups and individuals have been surmounted in other sciences,

such as developmental and evolutionary biology. There is ample empirical

evidence that the basic conditions of human well-being involve health,

deep social attachments, personal security, and the pursuit of significant

projects (Diener and Seligman 2002; Myers 2000). Just as certain personality

types engage in activities that make them less happy, there are

economic, social, and political institutions that have a systematic and

adjustable influence on people’s happiness (Diener 2000; Diener and Oishi

2000; Frey and Stutzer 2002; Lane 2000). For example, income, unemployment,

and inflation all have marked and sustained influences on happiness

(Frey and Stutzer 2002). Interestingly, all three partly result from institutional

planning—of tax policy, monetary policy, and available services—

and so can be regulated to a certain extent by government action. To

continue the theme, certain objective economic conditions, such as destitution,

are incompatible with well-being (Dasgupta 1993). These empirical

findings about the conditions that influence happiness and welfare set

limits on what can count as a significant problem. Some of the most

significant problems we face concern how to renovate maladaptive social

institutions that undermine our happiness and well-being, and how to

implement new social, political, and economic institutions and procedures

that are most likely to promote well-being and control the sources of

avoidable unhappiness.