ascriptivism
( 2006) ascriptivism resurrected: the case for ascriptivism. in: action and responsibility. library of ethics and applied philosophy, vol 18. springer, dordrecht
my aim here is first to argue that the objections found geach and searle do not show that pattern of analysis, ascriptivism, to be mistaken, do not refute it. secondly, and in light of the rejection of the geach - searle position. i shall defend ascriptivism, although in a version both purged and expanded. the success of that project means that keeping semantics free of pragmatics is not possible .
what must be addressed prior to seeing what effect searle' s (unintended) assimilationist move has on ascriptivism are the reasons for holding that the meaning of' good' cannot involve a reference to commending .
a second major item to be purged from the earlier version of ascriptivism is the sharp distinction made then between evaluative and descriptive meaning and the associated claim that the descriptive meaning is dependent upon the evaluative. while there is a truth distorted in that bifurcation of two kinds of meaning, both the bifurcation and the dependence thesis are not part of a re - modeled ascriptivism. once again, a good deal of powerful criticism has been directed at this set of ideas .
the ascriptivist rebels here. ascriptivism is a naturalistic position: rather than resorting to non - natural transcendent properties discernible only by a seemingly invented faculty, it is simpler and more cogent to surrender the idea that goodness is a property and thus treat the objections to defining it as establishing that conclusion. of course, that does leave the problem of what status the predicate' good' has – and ascriptivism is only too happy to supply a radically non - traditional account .
geach tries to show that even if ascriptivism' s account of meaning is rejected, it is possible to provide an account that does not run afoul of the problem (or, in effect, searle' s criterion of adequacy. )
i shall consequently produce a larger set of considerations, set out below in no particular order and having different degrees of significance, that ascriptivism today would rely upon to show that' good' cannot be defined and that therefore goodness cannot be a property. [ 13 ]
unlike geach, searle does not set out to show how' good' can mean the same in all the various constructions in which it can occur. however, he tries to do that for one special word and thereby, quite unintentionally, shows one way that ascriptivism might solve the challenge he has made to it .
i committed myself, and ascriptivism, to the following claim: contrary to geach, the argument form' if that is good (i. e commendable), then p; but that is good (a commendation); ergo p' is valid, does not contain a fallacy of equivocation. that needs defense .
while geach' s objections to the ascriptivist pattern are vital to today' s definist tradition, the definist overlooks his contributions to the discussion in his influential' good and evil'. although the main target there is again ascriptivism, his arguments entail a powerful criticism of attempts to give a definition of' good' .
while the standard criticisms of the ascriptivist contention - that a reference to commending is a central feature of the meaning of' good' - do not succeed, nonetheless the ascriptivist view is not the default position and does not automatically succeed when criticism of it fails. more needs to be said in both explanation and defense of ascriptivism .
1. the relevant writings are: peter geach,' ascriptivism', logic matters (blackwell, 1972), pp. 250 - 254, originally published in philosophical review 69 (1960), pp. 221 - 225; geach,' assertion', logic matters, pp. 254 - 269, originally published in philosophical review 74 (1965), pp. 449 - 465; john searle, speech acts, (cambridge university press, 1969), pp. 136 - 141; (see p. 70 of speech acts for a reference to' ascriptivism' .) a related earlier paper, largely overlooked in these discussions, is geach,' good and evil', theories of ethics (oxford readings in philosophy), ed. philippa foot, (oxford university press, 1967), pp. 64–73, originally published in analysis 17 (1956), pp. 33 - 42. to save time and space i shall refer to page numbers of those works in the body of the text, citing item and page, e. g. (' ascriptivism', p. 254. )
the critics, geach, searle and their heirs, direct their specific objections to item (4), the idea that whatever is done in saying' that is t' must be involved in the meaning of t. the earlier steps in the pattern, especially the denial that the term in question is the name of a property, are typically ignored by critics of ascriptivism .
the upshot is that geach' s criticism of the ascriptivist position about' good' in particular and about the pattern generally is misguided. and since it is that criticism that has seemed to be so powerful, to deal a death blow to any attempt to indulge in ascriptivist analyses, it follows that there is no case to be made from the geach - searle perspective against ascriptivism .
since i have claimed that an up - to - date ascriptivism about' good' requires that goodness not be a property and that the possibility of defining it requires that it be a property, that is, that goodness be identical with a property whose basic designation is something other than' good', ascriptivism must defend the moorean conclusion. on the other hand, obviously, given the direction of philosophical thought since moore one cannot accept the open - question argument as constituting the only line of defense of that conclusion. that it does seemingly always make sense to wonder whether the supposed defining property and goodness are the same, whether' p' and' good' mean the same, the open question argument can be no more than one item in support of moore' s conclusion .
since the definist has not addressed the issue i cannot predict what they might do by way of response. however, the current ascriptivist position is that, until something is produced by way of response to the challenge, something that is worthy of serious thought, then ascriptivism holds the field. for that reason and for all the other considerations offered above, we should reject the idea that' good' refers to a property and can be defined in terms of that property .
however, can we really explain what it is to call something good by noting that' is good' is a predicate? does that tell us whether' good' is a property being attributed to the thing or whether ascriptivism is correct in holding that in calling something good a non - descriptive claim is being made about the thing? certainly not – the choice between those questions cannot be settled by simply noticing that' good' is a predicate in its uses in various constructions .
notice: in that account of the meaning of' good', there is no distinction between two different kinds of meaning as there was in the early version of ascriptivism. the distinction between evaluative meaning and descriptive meaning vanishes, although involved in the meaning of' good' are both a reference to commendability and a requirement that features of the kind of thing in question must be cited in justifying a claim to its goodness. the old disputes about two kinds of meaning and which has precedence simply disappear .
strictly the argument here will focus on the analysis of' good'. (in doing that i am not even committed to holding that all the other mid - century cases are in fact correct .) occasionally i shall make some reference to' true' but only as a reminder that the argument is intended to have wider application than to a single concept. the reasons for selecting' good' as the test case is that it is central to the criticism in both geach (though geach prefers to talk of' bad') and searle; it is also the notion in contemporary thought that is most often and most vigorously the target of critics of ascriptivism .
of course, searle is right about those non - equivalences. however, is his representation of what ascriptivism amounts to correct? not at all: not even in the case where something is being called good. to produce his objection searle converts' that is good' wherever it occurs into' i commend that'. though his immediate targets, the mid - century ascriptivists, were confused about the relation between performatives and speech acts generally, it doesn' t follow that the ascriptivist pattern itself must be confused about that. for the commendation performed by calling something good is not to be represented by paraphrasing' that is good' as' i commend it' .
setting aside the
necessarily
( that shifts the meaning of what he intends), searle' s test is' a word is not changed in meaning by being located in different syntactical settings'. searle' s use of that test presumes that if ascriptivism were correct,' good' would change meaning in the syntactical change from' that is good' to' if that is good'. that is the reverse of the problem as i set it out above: there the assumption is that the word does mean the same and a problem thereby ensues. while there are serious troubles with searle' s test – are we more certain that the test is correct than what we say about meaning in particular cases? – let it stand since searle does make use of it .
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term due to p. t. * geach for the view (which he attacked :
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daniel dennett advocated an approach that seems similar to davidson' s, in that they both attempt to resolve the problem of reductionism within the materialist tradition, and that they both disagree with fodor. unlike davidson, however, dennett advocates an extremely weak, or liberal, interpretation of intelligence, ascribing it to almost anything that we usually ascribe beliefs and desires to, even if those may appear to be linguistic, e. g. metaphors .
in the head realism
says that brains may be analogous to common man - made computational devices, e. g. audio cassettes aren' t normally understandable, but given the correct hardware they are .
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that pattern of philosophizing, which was not fully set out by geach or searle, or, so far as i know, by anyone, has the following paradigmatic shape. [ 6 ] (1) some
philosophically exciting term t (' assertion', p. 266) is denied, contrary to the philosophical tradtion, to be the name of a property, feature, attribute; (2) hence, calling something t is not a report that the thing has the property t, is not a description of the thing; (3) calling something t, saying' that is t', must therefore be doing something other than reporting or describing; (4) whatever is thereby done is an important part of the meaning of t .
before getting down to work, there are a few necessary program notes. searle speaks of the
classical speech act analysts
. since the 1950' s are only jarringly thought of as a classical period, i shall speak of the mid - (20th) - century analysts. in doing so, i shall be retaining the idea of analysis although what was being done mid - century does not fit what g. e. moore or russell, the founders of analytic philosophy, would have thought of as analysis. analysis, an account of meaning, as understood both by searle and here, will have more in common with ryle' s notion of logical geography and strawson' s connective analysis. [ 7 ]
it will not be part of my project to explain and defend by name and citation those practitioners of mid - century analysis who were engaged in the ascriptivist pattern of thinking. i shall be referring only to the pattern without detailed concern for particular figures in its development and use .
the ascriptivist pattern as i set it out earlier can now be exhibited in terms of' good'. (1)' good' is, contrary to the traditional view, not the name of, does not refer to, a property, attribute, character, feature, of a thing; (2) hence to call something good is not to report that it has the property of goodness, is not to describe the thing; (3) what we are doing when we call something good is commending it; (4) the notion of commendation is central to the meaning of' good' .
the rules of the game having been set out, it is time for the substance. the core of the critics' position is a problem and a challenge. the problem: the ascriptivist pattern of analysis holds that' that is good' is, by meaning, a commendation; but obviously when that same phrase is located in' if' clause there is no commendation; yet' good' means the same in both constructions. the challenge: how is that possible ?
geach and searle and those who make the consequent semantics - pragmatics distinction agree that it is not possible – and hence hold that the commending cannot be involved in the meaning of' good' and must be allocated to some other feature of language than its semantics. on the other hand, whoever defends the pattern must show how it is possible that the word means the same in the different constructions and yet in only one of them does commendation occur. my complaint against the mid - century analysts is that they did not so much as attempt to show how that is possible. i shall be required to rectify that shortcoming in reviving the position .
searle introduces a test for the success of any analysis, for any account of the meaning of a term .
now, there is a condition of adequacy which any analysis of the meaning of a word must meet... . any analysis of the meaning of a word (or morpheme) must be consistent with the fact that the same word (or morpheme) can mean the same thing in all the grammatically different kinds of sentences in which it can occur. syntactic transformations of sentences do not necessarily enforce changes of meaning on the component words or morphemes of those sentences .
( speech acts, p. 137 )
given the problem situation, (1) what are the considerations offered by geach and searle to show that the ascriptivist pattern fails and (2) what efforts do they make to show that some other analysis, some other account of meaning, can succeed where the pattern fails? both questions raise matters that are involved in updating the pattern. for reasons having to do with the aims of this paper, let me begin with the second question, an issue that may not seem the best place to start but pursuit of which reveals important matters .
before going further it is necessary to issue a warning. philosophical understanding of what it means to say that something is a predicate typically goes astray. historically,' is a predicate' has usually been treated as meaning' names a property'. so we find for instance, c. j. f. williams saying (in connection with' is true') that
our main concern in this chapter is with whether' - is true' can properly be regarded as a predicate .
[ 9 ] to which the proper answer is' of course it is a predicate – look up what a predicate is in any grammar book'. but equally certainly what williams is doing is conflating, not idiosyncratically,' predicate' with' name of a property'. the question he is worrying about is whether' true' is the name of a property. (his entire chapter illustrates over and over that conflation, even in connection with' is good'. )
for reasons that will emerge much later, i shall take it that when geach speaks of predication he must be treating' predicate' as a purely grammatical notion, not accepting the typical assumption that treats a predicate as (necessarily) a name for a property. and grammatically speaking he is quite correct:' is good' appears as a predicate in all the grammatical constructions .
geach is surely partly right: any full (?) philosophical account of the meaning of' good' must notice that it is essentially a predicate– that we can say' that is a good peach' or' the peach is good' but cannot say' that is a peach good' or' the good is peach'. so any attempt to explain its meaning by a simple' it is used to commend' cannot be the full story of our understanding of what goodness is, of how' good' functions. on the other hand, geach' s replacement explanation captures only part of the truth .
incidentally, nothing of geach' s attempt to set out the meaning of the' good' across constructions survives into his second paper on the issues, the paper entitled' assertion'. perhaps he recognized its troubles .
unlike the case of' good', searle needs to defend the possibility of meaning the same across all constructions for' promise' (and for all the performatives .) how does he show that' promise' passes the test, that it is possible for' promise' to mean the same in all the constructions whether or not a promise is being made? his solution :
for example, when one says something of the form,' if he promises that p, then so and so', one hypothesizes the performance of the act which he performs when he says something of the form,' i promise that p' .
( speech acts, p. 138 )
that completely fails to do the job of distinguishing between' promise' and' good' as he intends it to do. for the ascriptivist can say' when one says something of the form
if the cake is good, then so and so
, one hypothesizes the performance of the act performed when someone says something of the form
that is good
.' and so on through the various grammatical constructions .
does not searle thereby provide what was missing from the mid - century analyses, namely how to account for the sameness of meaning across all the constructions in which' good' can occur? his attempt to show how' promise' means the same across the board has the same starting place as the standard ascriptivist position: that what is done in calling something t is the foundation for understanding the meaning of' t' where ever it occurs. contrary to geach, not all the constructions containing' t' are of equal importance in setting out the meaning of the term .
in doing that, the place to begin is by deferring geach' s arguments and looking into searle first. in attempting to show that speech act analyses of words other than performatives are fallacious, searle offers the following argument :
but it is equally clear that the speech act analysis of the other words;' good',' true', ... etc. does not satisfy this condition [ of adequacy ]. consider the following examples:' if this is good, then we ought to buy it', is not equivalent to' if i commend this, then we ought to buy it'.' this used to be good' is not equivalent to' i used to commend this' .
i wonder whether this is good' is not equivalent to' i wonder whether i commend this', etc. similar counter - examples will refute the [ other ] speech act analyses .
( speech acts, pp. 138 - 139 )
calling something good stands in contrast to talking about one' s own response to the thing. the point of saying' that is good' is to get outside of oneself, to direct attention to the thing and its qualities rather than to oneself and one' s response to it. both searle and the mid - century emotivists (ayer, stevenson) fail to notice that contrast when they assimilate' that is good' to' i commend it' or to' i like it'. that failure shows up explicitly when searle tries to paraphrase one of the other constructions,' i wonder if that is good', as' i wonder whether i commend that'. searle takes that lack of equivalence to show that calling something good cannot involve commending. however, it should be taken to show that he misunderstands how the act of commending is related to the use of the word' good' .
for the ascriptivist the commendation is built into the act of calling something good and the aim in calling something good is not to talk about one' s self but rather to be referring to the thing. to wonder whether something is good is to be wondering whether the thing is commendable and not to be considering whether i have commended it .
that realization supplies the clue as to how we should regard the disputed relation between the meaning of' good' in' that is good' and its meaning in its other possible occurrences, how the ascriptivist is to reply to the original challenge. when we say' if that is good, then...' we are saying' if that is commendable, then...' similarly, for the other constructions (e. g.' that used to be good' means' that used to be commendable'). it is possible to have' good' mean the same in' that is good' and' if that is good' while being a commendation in one and not in the other: it is the notion of commendability that binds them together .
alexander miller in utilizing geach' s objection holds that the ascriptivist position on the matter is comparable to' my beer has a head on it; if something has a head on it, it must have eyes and ears; hence my beer has eyes and ears'. [ 10 ]
the relevant comparison is more like this argument:' if the pipe breaks, the room will be flooded; the pipe broke; hence the room is flooded'. or' if the pipe breaks, the room will be flooded; the pipe is breaking; hence the room is being flooded'. or' if the pipe were to break, the room would be flooded; it did break; hence the room is flooded'. all of those arguments, despite the small changes in wording, are valid – because all the terms are part of the same families, exhibiting differences only in tenses .
c. j. f. williams, speaking for logic, puts it this way .
the last example shows that we [ logicians ] need not be pernickety about what counts as a repetition of the same sentence... . sometimes repetition of exactly the same words is idiomatically impossible or clumsy in english... . english idiom does not allow us to say' percy said that charles would grow out of his shyness and charles would grow out of his shyness .
again :
but logicians... are as much entitled to take' percy said that charles would grow out of his shyness and charles has grown out of his shyness' as a substitution instance of' percy said that p and p' as they are to take' she thought that barbara ought to pay her' as a substitution instance of' x thought that barbara ought to pay x' without boggling at the change of case from' she' to' her' .
[ 11 ]
only if one is
pernickety
about sameness, only if one has extremely narrow ideas of what must be kept the same in argumentation, will one be inclined to regard the change from' good' as commending to' good' as commendable as a case of equivocation and thus the creation of an invalid argument. williams is right, logic is entitled to treat those arguments as valid – because they are valid and consequently their formal representation must treat them as valid. logicians, just as the rest of us, are entitled to reject geach' s contention and accept the variation in terminology as legitimate when the terms are internally related, i. e. related in meaning, versions of the same concept .
the mid - century analysts did not attempt what needs to be done. for them it was a matter of insight that to understand' good' requires grasping its connection to commending. while insight in philosophy is not to be sneezed at (although, with our heavy emphasis on argumentation, it typically is), nonetheless surely something can be said in favor of the claim over and above' the criticism of it fails' and' don' t you see?' .
it has long been recognized that moore' s self - named naturalistic fallacy is mis - named. others have pointed out that he should have called it the definist fallacy. he was denying that it is possible to define' good'. any such a definition is intended to be reductionist: the word' good' would be held to mean the same as a word / phrase where the defining term is the name of, stands for a property. goodness, on that view, is identical with that property, is nothing other than, over and above, that property. ascriptivists, then and now, accept the moorean thesis that' good' cannot be defined, i. e. that it is not equivalent in meaning to any term designating a property, even in the very broad sense of' property' intended, and that consequently goodness is not a property of things .
so the outcome hinges on objections to defining' good'. if the definist project, and not just particular definitions, fails, then the idea that goodness is a property fails. moore, of course, came to the conclusion that' good' cannot be defined by employing the open - question argument: any attempt to define' good' fails because it will always make sense to ask' it has the property p but is it good?' it is today widely accepted that the open - question argument does not do what moore assumed it did, namely provide a complete refutation of the idea that' good' can be defined. instead, it is merely the beginning of an extended and ramified discussion between supporters and opponents of the idea that' good' can be defined .
start here. although it is a clever move to have one' s favored claim about some subject matter smuggled in as a matter of meaning, one must be suspicious about such definitions. why should not the' definitions' of' good' be regarded as substantial claims about what makes something, anything, good rather than as explications of the term? there seems to be nothing in the definist literature addressing that question. it appears that the aim of the definist program, especially in its resurrected naturalistic (scientistic) form, is to get rid of, by reduction, a notion not amenable to scientific investigation .
it is often said that goodness is a moral concept .
moore sets out to argue that moral terms such as' good' are not definable... .
[ 14 ] but' good' is not a specifically moral term - it is applicable to items of many other kinds than to matters of morality. speaking of a good cigar or a good essay is as much relevant to the question of what' that is good' means, what its function is, as its reference to a person, action, etc. (' he is a good father',' that was a good deed'). in fact, given the recognition by oliver wendell holmes that hard cases make bad law, we can say that hard cases, matters of morality, make bad theses about meaning. to investigate the meaning of' good' we should chiefly concern ourselves with what it means to say, e. g.' that is a good peach'. however, the definitional enterprise does not do that. the great gap between the sorts of answers that that enterprise results in, whether naturalistic or theological, and what is going on when we consider whether a given peach is good produces deep suspicions about the legitimacy of the definist project .
as is widely recognized, what turns up when we think about what counts as a good peach are its properties (flavor, texture, etc .). but when we also consider what counts, for example, as a good shortstop and what makes for a good philosophical essay, we quickly realize that there is no overlap in the properties cited in all the various cases. since none of those good - making properties can plausibly be taken as contained in the meaning of the word' good' - it is applicable to so many different kinds of thing - but are rather what is mentioned in the differing judgments of goodness about different kinds of things, to cigars and essays and shortstops, it certainly seems that goodness cannot be understood in terms of specific defining properties .
recalling that to talk of (say) a good philosophical essay in ordinary practice makes reference to characteristics of the essay, a further difficulty for the definist enterprise comes out. how do those various attempted definitions of' good' relate to the properties cited in our ordinary judgments of the goodness of a cake or a piece of philosophy? are they being recommended as replacements? are they what' good' really means contrary to our practice? are they generalizations of what we are talking about when we cite the juiciness of the peach and the argumentation of the philosophical essay? is it simply not recognized by the definist that we do make reference to such properties when we call things good? once again, the status of the results of definist projects are not spelled out in the literature .
geach notices that from' that is a yellow rose' we can infer' that is yellow' but that from' that is a large flea' we cannot infer' that is large'. he holds that' good' follows the pattern of' large' and not of' yellow': from' he is a good assassin' we cannot infer' he is good' simpliciter. it does not follow, of course, that' good' is not a property word, for then we would be committed to' large' not being a property word either: and it clearly is. but what we can conclude is that goodness is relative to the kind of thing being characterized as good. that means that there is no such property as goodness independently of the applicability of' good' to various kinds of things. as we have seen, what makes this kind of thing good is not what makes that kind of thing good. there is no property generally definable as constituting goodness. there is no form of the good .
there is another possible wrinkle in the definist research program. recently, perhaps from the anxiety that the open - question argument cannot be completely dismissed, that the moorean insistence that' good' does not mean' p' is nothing but conceptual confusion, some of today' s definers have attempted to employ a different model of definition. rather than holding that' good' means
p', they have resorted to frege' s sinn and bedeutung distinction. on that view,' good' and' p' do not mean the same – rather' good' and' p' have different senses but they refer to (name, stand for) the same property. [ 15 ]
that' good' is referential, is a property word, is simply assumed there as it was when the other version of definition was employed. the battery of arguments above to show that it is not the name of a property are not recognized. in consequence, the resort to the fregean model will not do to save the definist position .
moreover, because the good - making characteristics of a kind of thing are tied to the kind of thing it is, and are not a character applicable across the board which is attached to the word' good', are not part of the meaning of' good', there is no single mode of presentation for' good', no sinn for' good'. hence' good' is a word with neither a sinn nor a bedeutung .
having now disposed of the traditional alternative to the thesis that commending is a central feature of the meaning of' good', the time has come to take up the task of defending that thesis. i am simply ignoring another alternative, one that was also the off - spring of moore' s anti - definist views, namely emotivism. the objections to that position are too powerful to take it seriously at this date .
let us return to geach' s' good and evil'. the non - validity of the inference from' she is a good player' to' she is good' reminds us that what makes some kind of thing good varies radically from kind to kind and that there are no good - making characteristics that are applicable to everything that is good. geach is tempted by that fact to say that' good' has no meaning other than in' a good k'. but of course that isn' t so. if it were, there would be no intelligibility in the fact that we use the same word' good' in connection with oranges, designs, helicopters and on and on. moreover, the word' good' would be enormously equivocal – and it is not .
geach, although tempted to talk as if' good' does not mean anything independently of its connection to kinds, realizes that won' t work, no doubt for the above reasons. but if' good' means the same across kinds of thing, the problem of what that common meaning is rears its head. it would appear that here is where the ascriptivist idea that commending is central to the meaning of the term finds a place .
the line between semantics and pragmatics, where it is taken that a reference to deeds cannot be part of the meaning of a term, hangs on the geach - searle criticism. seeing that that criticism does not succeed means that the sharp line between meaning and what we do with words cannot be maintained. although some aspects of the use of a word may not fall into its meaning, some references to what we are doing must be located there. as wittgenstein was fond of saying in light of faust' in the beginning was the deed' .
2. alexander miller, an introduction to contemporary metaethics, (polity press, 2003) .
4. h. l. a. hart,' the ascription of responsibility and rights', proceedings of the aristotelian society new series, vol 49 (1948 - 49), pp. 171 - 194; reprinted in anthony flew ed. , logic and language, 1st series, (blackwell, 1951) .
5. c. j. f. williams, what is truth? , (cambridge university press, 1976, reprinted 2009), p. 16 .
7. ryle introduced the notion of logical geography as a replacement notion for the older idea that analysis was like chemical analysis, a breaking down of a substance into its ultimate parts. gilbert ryle, the concept of mind, (hutchinson' s university library, 1949), p. 7. strawson talks of connective analysis as a better way of conceiving of the activity of analysis than the old reductive version or ryle' s logical geography or wittgenstein' s therapeutic analogy. peter strawson, analysis and metaphysics, (oxford university press, 1992), chapter 2 .
12. in treating intuition as a faculty, i am taking sides in a dispute concerning how to conceive of what moore meant by' intuition'. pursuing the dispute here would be too large a side - show .
13. miller does not consider any other objections to giving a definition of' good' than the open question argument. the additional objections that i offer are not recognized and so not evaluated .
16. robert arrington, rationalism, realism, and relativism: perspectives in contemporary moral epistemology, (cornell university press, 1989), p. 56 .
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ascriptivism is the view that human beings are to be held responsible for their social actions . ascriptivists hold that to say an action was voluntary on the part of an agent is not to describe the act as caused in a certain way , but to ascribe it to the agent , or to hold the agent responsible for it . 
ascriptivism is the view that human beings are to be held responsible for their social actions. ascriptivists hold that to say an action was voluntary on the part of an agent is not to describe the act as caused in a certain way, but to ascribe it to the agent, or to hold the agent responsible for it.
ascriptivism is the view that human beings are to be held responsible for their social actions. ascriptivists hold that to say an action was voluntary on the part of an agent is not to describe the act as caused in a certain way, but to ascribe it to the agent, or to hold the agent responsible for it.