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Callard: Replies to Critics

Agnes Callard's 2021 symposium response in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research to four critics of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford, 2018). The paper is short (11 pages) but unusually clarifying: each reply forces Callard to re-state her central concept — proleptic rationality — in the vocabulary of the critic's specific objection. Together the replies map the four places her account is most exposed: (1) whether aspiration is paradoxical at all, (2) whether it requires a controversial theory of value, (3) whether it fits internalism about reasons, and (4) whether "acting towards a value you don't yet hold" is even coherent as rationality. Because the replies are more concise than the book, they are the fastest way to grasp the load-bearing structure of callard-aspiration — and the best source for quotable formulations usable in deep-ambition-book-thesis.

The four critics, one at a time

Callard organizes the paper as four standalone replies. Each critic concedes progressively more ground to her project; her responses calibrate accordingly.

Katsafanas: "There is no paradox here"

Paul Katsafanas makes what Callard calls "the most fundamental objection to the project of the book, which is that it is an attempt to solve a non-existent problem." He argues that aspiration only looks paradoxical against a demanding picture of agency as simple (one reason per action), unified (that reason is not composed of non-additive sub-reasons), and transparent (the agent understands what she is doing). Drop the demand, drop the paradox.

Callard defends all three requirements, but surgically. On simplicity, she distinguishes levels: a medical student's reasons for giving a shot do not exhaust her reasons for becoming a doctor. "For anything someone is doing, she must have some reason for doing that thing. My claim is not that she cannot have more than one reason, but that she must have at least one reason that hits at the right level of specificity." On unity, proleptic reasons cannot be added to ordinary reasons because "they belong to evaluative perspectives that stand in intrinsic conflict" — the distal face of the aspirant insists the proximate face has things (somewhat) wrong. On transparency, she grants that hidden motives exist but insists that when a reason is offered to justify an action, the agent must have access to it; otherwise action is not intentional at all.

Kraut: three worries about value

Richard Kraut presses three objections: the book (1) presupposes an objective-list theory of well-being, (2) misuses "intrinsic value" when it invokes proleptic reasons, and (3) places excessive weight on the final moment of aspiration.

Callard concedes less than Kraut thinks she needs to. On well-being she argues the theory is compatible with "a variety of forms of realism about the existence of (at least some!) value — even ones that are quite deflationary and subjectivist, as long as they do not amount to nihilism." On intrinsic value she grants Kraut's point and reframes: intrinsic value in her sense means "it has some noninstrumental value or other, a value peculiar to it, whose precise nature I cannot yet articulate to myself." This is what the word is doing — not asserting Platonic value, but naming the aspirant's aetiolated grasp of what she is reaching for. On the "last moment" worry, she denies that aspiration ends in a single redemptive flash: "the result of aspiration is not 'just a moment' but a stable state of character, an enduring source of joy and insight." And if the aspirant dies before arriving? "Every aspirant already has in her possession, (some) actual grasp of the value in question. This amounts to: some joy and insight, hers for the taking."

Sauvé Meyer: the internalism challenge

Sauvé Meyer concedes that aspiration is puzzling and that proleptic reasons are needed, but doubts they fall outside internalism. Her move: the aspirant does have some desire for what she aspires to — otherwise she wouldn't be engaged at all — so internalism covers the case.

Callard's key clarification: yes, the aspirant has some desire, but "if the action is truly aspirational, she does not have enough of a reason to ϕ. But this insufficiency cannot, as Sauvé Meyer believes, be cashed out in terms of the strength of the relevant desire, because what we need to explain is how someone can be motivated to increase the strength of that very desire." The aspirant's desires are not too weak to rationalize her action; they are "a work in progress," and their developmental trajectory is what a proleptic reason tracks. Snapshot internalism misses the motion.

L.A. Paul: "you can't choose values you don't have"

Paul is the closest critic — she agrees aspiration is distinctive and that acting rationally on internal reasons alone cannot explain it. But she goes further: such activity cannot be rational. "Rationality requires that when one acts, one acts in accordance with one's current values."

Callard's reply has two moves. First, she rejects the framing that aspiration requires choosing values: "My view is that one doesn't choose to aspire." Aspiration is not a self-standing action — it is rationality of a different shape, embedded in a larger temporally extended process. Second — and this is where she concedes the "deep puzzle not fully addressed by anything in my book" — she offers three analogies to defuse Paul's incoherence charge: recollecting a forgotten name, solving a geometry problem, and investigating a story that "smells fishy." In each, "the agent is guided by her target, precisely to the extent that she doesn't yet grasp it." Rational guidance can take a non-standard form where one acts not in accordance with current values but "in accordance with (the project of acquiring) her future ones."

What these replies clarify about proleptic rationality

Three sharpenings matter most:

  1. Proleptic reasons are not additive. They cannot be summed with ordinary reasons because the distal and proximate evaluative perspectives are in conflict — the future self is correcting the present self. This is stronger than the book's wording and rules out most "ordinary reasons plus curiosity" reconstructions.
  2. "Intrinsic value" is a placeholder for aetiolated knowledge. The aspirant needs a word for "there's something of noninstrumental value here whose nature I cannot yet articulate." The term is doing epistemic work, not metaphysical work.
  3. The aspirant is not self-deceived. Against Paul's reading of prolepsis as "stealth" or "indirection," Callard insists the aspirant's posture is "a painful confrontation with her own inadequacy." This is one of the book's most honest formulations and the one most directly useful for coaching and ambition writing.

Why this matters for Deep Ambition

For the Treading Water chapter (letting go vs giving up), the replies supply exactly the conceptual hygiene the book needs. Sauvé Meyer's objection is precisely the form ambition skeptics take in tech discourse: "if you don't really want it yet, you shouldn't pursue it." Callard's response — that the aspirant's desires are "a work in progress," not too weak — is a directly quotable defense of doggedness that isn't grit-theater. Paul's challenge maps to "how do you know you're not lying to yourself about the career you're chasing?" and Callard's answer — aspiration as "painful confrontation with one's own inadequacy" rather than self-deceived striving — is the cleanest philosophical brace for the honest-ambition frame. The Katsafanas reply is useful methodologically: it licenses the book's insistence that ambition has a different rational structure, not a weaker one.

Notable quotes

"For anything someone is doing, she must have some reason for doing that thing. My claim is not that she cannot have more than one reason, but that she must have at least one reason that hits at the right level of specificity."

"Someone determined to see her valuational knowledge as complete and sufficient is incapable of aspiring. The very fact that the 'distal face' has — by way of its acknowledged absence — a psychological reality for the agent should be read as an honest and humble openness to learning."

"Rational guidance can take a non-standard form, in which a person acts not in accordance with her current values, but rather in accordance with (the project of acquiring) her future ones."

"Careful, insightful criticisms … have a kind of magic power to draw out of you somewhat more than you thought you had in you. This is an instance of yet another phenomenon my book fails to sufficiently theorize: the social structure of aspiration."

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