Elijah Millgram - Professor of Philosophy

I'm a philosopher with a day job at the University of Utah. One focus of my research interests has been the theory of rationality, that is, what it is to reason correctly. Over the years, I've divided my attention between theoretical reasoning, i.e., figuring out what the facts are, and practical reasoning, that is, figuring out what to do.

In my first book, Practical Induction (Harvard UP, 1997), I argued that we learn what matters from experience, and that consequently one widespread preconception -- that being practically rational has to do solely with effectively pursuing one's desires or ends -- is a mistake. A subsequent book, Hard Truths (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), argued that our reasoning about how the facts stand must often contain steps that we understand to be, not true, but true enough: our inferences incorporate and depend on approximations, idealizations and other forms of partial truth.

I've been interested in rationality because I think results in this field can drive work in other areas. My second book was meant to make the case that advances in the theory of practical rationality can move moral theory forward; Ethics Done Right (Cambridge UP, 2005) argues that what you think decision making looks like goes a long way towards determining your moral and ethical views. If I am right, my views about theoretical rationality should likewise have consequences for metaphysics, and in particular and especially, for how we conceive of the field and how seriously we take it. If arguments in metaphysics are best understood as being about the choice of idealizations or approximations, rather than as attempts to establish the existence of, to put it a bit baldly, exotic invisible objects, then metaphysics is intellectual ergonomics: an applied science with real practical benefits.

As the social and physical environment becomes more demanding, we have to rethink what rationality is going to be, and The Great Endarkenment (Oxford UP, 2015) takes up a distinctively human kind of plasticity. On the one hand, we specialize in ways that allow us to occupy quite narrow ecological niches. (In highly articulated social environments these are frequently professional roles: think of VLSI engineers, branding consultants, cardiologists and so on.) The extreme forms that specialization takes in human life gives us the ecological appearance of emperor penguins or pandas or polar bears, animals that have been overengineered to exploit the resources and opportunities provided by demanding local environments. On the other hand, because we specialize in software rather than hardware, we are able to migrate from niche to niche; when we do, we abandon the systems of standards and representations that served to guide us inside the niches we have left behind, and we adopt new practical and theoretical categories capable of providing effective guidance elsewhere. A shorthand for this bit of philosophical anthropology is that human beings have become serial hyperspecializers. It seems to me that coping with and managing our hyperspecialized society will mean learning to reason in new ways.

A second focus of my research has been the meaning of life. What to make of it is a question that I think philosophers should take more seriously than mostly they do, and in my view it is best investigated by thinking through actual lives. Under this heading, I've taken an interest in John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde.