Patterson Critiques Mikhail's Cognitivism

Dennis Patterson (Law, Rutgers-Camden) has sent a symposium article (Brooklyn Law Review, forthcoming) to the Neuroethics & Law Blog.  The piece is called "On the Conceptual and the Empirical (A Critique of John Mikhail's Cognitivism)". (Download Patterson_on_Mikhail_Cog.pdf ).  Here is a teaser from the introduction (footnotes omitted):

In this article, I will argue for two claims. First, that there is in fact a distinction between conceptual and empirical questions. Second, that conceptual questions are prior to (that is, they antecede) matters of truth and falsehood. The relationship between the conceptual and the empirical is important because any empirical inquiry that proceeds from conceptual confusion cannot yield satisfactory results.

After setting out the distinctions just outlined in Part I, I will illustrate my claims in Parts II—V with reference to recent work by John Mikhail on moral cognition. Just as Noam Chomsky hypothesizes a universal linguistic grammar to explain speech behavior, so too, Mikhail argues, we can explain the moral behavior of persons in terms of universal moral grammar” (“UMG”) I will argue that Mikhail’s claims on behalf of UMG suffer from conceptual confusions that are not amenable to empirical resolution.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thanks for posting this. While I admit to being constitutionally inclined to look with favor on Dennis's argument here against (yet another species of fashionable) cognitivism, he is in any case uncommonly intelligent and refreshingly incisive when it comes to topics in philosophy of law and debates in legal theory. His works amply reward careful reading of their contents.