Propositional Gratitude

Comments on Sean McAleer's "Propositional Gratitude"

Sean McAleer, “Propositional Gratitude”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1 (January 2012) pp. 55-66.

As American Thanksgiving approaches, it seems a good idea to look at some philosophy of gratitude.

Sean McAleer makes a distinction, one that has since become common, between targeted gratitude, which takes the form of ‘A is grateful to B for X’, and propositional gratitude, which takes the form of ‘A is grateful that p (is true)’. It’s important to recognize – and we have seen professional philosophers trip themselves up on the point – that propositional gratitude, despite the name, is not gratitude for propositions. ‘Maria is grateful that there was no rain on her wedding day’ does not mean, ‘Maria is grateful for the proposition ‘there was no rain on her wedding day’. Propositional gratitude is gratitude for what the proposition p describes in the locution ‘A is grateful that p’. It is gratitude-that rather than gratitude-for. It is important to be clear on this right from the beginning of discussion, because propositional gratitude is described externally, from the outside, in terms of how we would commonly talk about it, and not necessarily in a way that perfectly captures what it is in itself. For instance, if you just look at the forms of the description, ‘A is grateful for X’ and ‘A is grateful that p’ seem quite different; in one case, the object of gratitude is described by X, presumably a description of a thing or event, whereas in the other it is described by p, a proposition presumably describing a state of affairs. But we can’t actually assume that the kinds of objects of the gratitude itself are fundamentally different, just because we are using different kinds of descriptions. (Consider: ‘John saw a rabbit hopping around’, which is targeted, vs ‘John saw that a rabbit was hopping around’, which is propositional.) This can complicate the question of how targeted gratitude and propositional gratitude relate to each other, a point to which we will circle back below.

In any case, back to McAleer. McAleer notes that propositional gratitude hasn’t had much discussion, so sets out to rectify the problem. Targeted gratitude is usually taken to have an agency requirement, which can be broken into two sub-requirements: the benefactor requirement, which says that gratitude must be to a benefactor, and the intentionality requirement, which says that benefactors are those who intend the benefit. McAleer considers the possibility of having a targeted gratitude that violated either of these requirements, for instance, being grateful to a nonagent (like the mountain that has become a support of wealth for you), and (unless we completely misunderstand him on this point) holds that the agency requirement is strictly speaking false, and that a proper account of propositional gratitude makes this clear. But much of his argument will assume it simply because the notion that targeted gratitude involves something like the agency requirement was (and is still) a common view among philosophers working on the topic of gratitude.

(In full disclosure, we will say explicitly that (1) the intentionality requirement seems specifically to be formulated for duties of gratitude rather than gratitude in general, and, more importantly (2) we are extremely skeptical of the intentionality requirement itself under any circumstances, even for much targeted gratitude. It is clear, at the very least, that people do not generally take this requirement to be a requirement; people are grateful to unintentional benefactors all the time, and they very often do not regard the lack of intentionality as freeing them from the general duties associated with gratitude, so the intentionality requirement should not merely be assumed. But this has no bearing on most of McAleer’s argument, beyond indicating our sympathy with his objections to the agency requirement.)

Propositional gratitude, however, seems clearly not to require either a benefactor or intentionality. For instance, if we say we are grateful that there are people of courage willing to risk their lives for others, we are not expressing gratitude to anyone in particular. McAleer suggests we can see this as propositional gratitude being characterized by ‘wide scope’ and targeted gratitude as having ‘narrow scope’:

The propositional gratitude she expresses, in which the gratitude operator, so to speak, has wide scope, can be rendered semiformally as follows:

Propositional—Wide B is grateful that (∃x)(x is a hero).

The targeted gratitude with which it might be contrasted, as when one is grateful to a particular hero for a particular act of heroism, would be rendered:

Targeted—Narrow (∃x)(B is grateful to x) for acting heroically [on occasion o]). [p. 57]

It’s a little difficult to know how seriously to take the semiformal analogy here. We can ask, for instance, what is the actual difference between ‘B is grateful that there is a hero’ and ‘B is grateful to a hero for existing’. The real difference as represented seems not to be ‘wide scope’ and ‘narrow scope’ but general and particular. That is, the real difference seems to be the ‘on occasion o’ that McAleer slips in at the end of the description of targeted gratitude. In this sense, propositional gratitude would not be ‘wide scope’ gratitude but general gratitude, i.e., gratitude for something general. McAleer in fact almost immediately seems to slide into such a view, saying, “Just as one can believe there are spies without believing of any particular person

that she is a spy, one can be grateful that there are heroes without being grateful to a particular hero” (p. 57), before switching back and saying that it is a matter of syntax rather than semantics. And yet this general/particular distinction cannot be it, either, as we see if we consider ‘B is grateful that (∃x)(x is a hero acting heroically on occasion o).’ McAleer in fact gives such an example, but as a reason for why the wide-scope/narrow-scope distinction is only approximate.

The existence of this confusion actually makes a certain amount of sense. Propositional gratitude is originally characterized as gratitude taking a propositionally described object. But propositions are not distinguished from non-propositions by the wide-scope/narrow-scope distinction, nor are they distinguished from them by whether they are about something general or particular. We seem to have proliferating descriptions, so that all three of these are proposed as accounts of propositional gratitude, although they are not the same as each other:

– takes propositionally rather than objectually described objects
– ‘gratitude operator’ has wide scope rather than narrow scope
– is about the general rather than the particular.

These confusions are not exclusive to McAleer; when we survive the philosophical literature, they seem to pervade the entire topic, even to this day.

As noted before, McAleer thinks that the wide-scope/narrow-scope way of formulating the distinction is only approximate. Nonetheless, he thinks it significant that some cases of propositional gratitude can be expressed in his wide-scope way, whereas no cases of targeted gratitude can. This at least establishes that propositional gratitude does not reduce to targeted gratitude. We think he goes too far too quickly here; what it establishes is that propositional descriptions of gratitude do not reduce to targeted descriptions of gratitude. It seems very plausible that you can at least sometimes describe the same gratitude in both ways; it may well be that propositional descriptions are capable of serving certain logical or communicative functions that targeted descriptions cannot, or vice versa, but even if so we do not know that the gratitude is different.

This is a significant question in certain cases that touch on the existence of God. We often have gratitude that this or that feature of the world is good, and you could argue, then, that there must be a benefactor, capable of providing features of the world, to whom we are grateful for it, such as God. McAleer wants to block this and hold that the atheist can be grateful the world is beautiful, or whatever, without being committed to there being a benefactor to whom he can be grateful or being committed to saying that the atheist’s gratitude has an as-if or fictional structure in which he is grateful to a nonexistent benefactor, or some such thing. It may or may not be the case that the atheist can be grateful-that without being grateful-to, but this somewhat muddled logical distinction is entirely insufficient grounds for saying that he can.

If we assume that propositional gratitude and targeted gratitude are actually distinct kinds of gratitude, what we can say about propositional gratitude in particular? McAleer wants to argue against the idea that targeted gratitude would be the only morally significant gratitude; propositional gratitude is not morally neutral. (On this he seems to us to reach much stronger ground.) His way of arguing this is interesting; he argues that propositional gratitude and targeted gratitude to nonagents both have clear moral value when they express the virtue of humility. To some extent, of course, this kind of argument depends on details in someone’s account of humility, which we will not get into in detail here. But McAleer’s argument is that propositional gratitude and targeted gratitude to nonagents often express a recognition of ways in which the good in your life do not depend on you, and that other things make an active contribution to that good. Gratitude is a way we can recognize that we are “finite rational beings with needs” (p. 60); by propositional gratitude, we often recognize our limitations and appreciate our dependencies, thus expressing and developing humility. To be sure, this is not a necessary connection. But propositional gratitude and humility are naturally connected by object, so to speak; propositional gratitude is very fit for the kind of recognition we need to have in order not to be arrogant. (Think of the matter from the opposite direction, and how often and how easily we associate ingratitude and arrogance.)

As we approach Thanksgiving, a day devoted to gratitude in general, it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect on McAleer’s idea. Humility is often associated with self-knowledge, and if the cultivation of gratitude is a way to express and develop humility, it can also be a contributor to our knowledge of ourselves. On Thanksgiving, we stop, and we reflect, on how much we owe to others, to good fortune, to institutions, to nature, to God; we also reflect on good we owe though we do not know to whom or to what we owe it. Thereby, perhaps, we help to cultivate a more honest view of ourselves, as well as (with targeted gratitude) maintaining the relationships that make our lives possible. Something to think about as you pass the turkey and the mashed potatoes.

Winslow Homer, “Thanksgiving Day — The Dinner”, wood engraving in black ink on paper, printed in Harper’s Weekly, November 27, 1858, from the Smithsonian Open Access collection.