33 research outputs found
Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons
This paper takes a closer look at ordinary thought and talk about motivating reasons, in an effort to better understand how it works. This is an important first step in understanding whetherâand if so, howâsuch thought and talk should inform or constrain our substantive theorizing. One of the upshots is that ordinary judgments about motivating reasons are at best a partial and defeasible guide to what really matters, and that so-called factualists, propositionalists, and statists are all partly right, as well as partly wrong, when it comes to the question of what motivating reasons âareâ
Descartes and the Possibility of Enlightened Freedom
This paper offers a novel interpretation of Descartes's conception of freedom that resolves an important tension at the heart of his view. It does so by appealing to the important but overlooked distinction between possessing a power, exercising a power, and being in a position to exercise a power
Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure
There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between oneâs mental states, independently of whether those attitudes are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated with a distinctive set of requirements that mandate or prohibit certain combinations of attitudes, and itâs in virtue of violating these requirements that incoherent agents are irrational. I think the standard view is mistaken. The goal of this paper is to explain why, and to motivate an alternative account: rather than corresponding to a set of law-like requirements, structural rationality should be seen as corresponding to a distinctive kind of pro tanto rational pressureâi.e. something that comes in degrees, having both magnitude and direction. Something similar is standardly assumed to be true of substantive rationality. On the resulting picture, each dimension of rational evaluation is associated with a distinct kind of rational pressureâsubstantive rationality with (what I call) justificatory pressure and structural rationality with attitudinal pressure. The former is generated by oneâs reasons while the latter is generated by oneâs attitudes. Requirements turn out to be at best a footnote in the theory of rationality
The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations
Itâs commonly held that particular moral facts are explained by ânaturalâ or âdescriptiveâ facts, though thereâs disagreement over how such explanations work. We defend the view that general moral principles also play a role in explaining particular moral facts. More specifically, we argue that this view best makes sense of some intuitive data points, including the supervenience of the moral upon the natural. We consider two alternative accounts of the nature and structure of moral principlesââthe nomic viewâ and âmoral platonismââbefore considering in what sense such principles obtain of necessity
Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape
What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to itâi.e., theories of speech actsâhave proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit.
We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversationâs context or âscoreâ. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed
When Things Fail to Fit Together
Critical Notice of Alex Worsnip's 'Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality' (OUP 2021)
Reasons and belief
Much recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect what we ought to believe by constituting distinctively practical (i.e., non-epistemic) reasons for or against belief. According to pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations bear on what we ought to believe by affecting epistemic justification (e.g. how much justification is required to justifiably believe). Both debates center around intuitive judgments about cases together with various principles involving reasons (or justification) and belief, with many contributors in the pragmatism andâto a lesser extentâencroachment debates helping themselves to talk of belief without saying much about what exactly they have in mind. There has also been a tendency to overlook potentially relevant distinctions among different kinds of reasons that have been drawn elsewhere. The goal of this paper is to argue that greater clarity and care concerning both reasons and belief is called for. Increased sensitivity to various subtleties will not only minimize the chances of unwittingly engaging in merely verbal disputes but also allow us to better navigate the pragmatism and encroachment debates
Explaining Normative Reasons
In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to Ï is for it to explain why thereâs normative support for Ï-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationismâought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodnessâas well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of âweighingâ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, thereâs no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls âredundant reasonsâ
Ditching Decision-Making Capacity
Decision-making capacity (DMC) plays an important role in clinical practiceâdetermining, on the basis of a patientâs decisional abilities, whether they are entitled to make their own medical decisions or whether a surrogate must be secured to participate in decisions on their behalf. As a result, itâs critical that we get things rightâthat our conceptual framework be well-suited to the task of helping practitioners systematically sort through the relevant ethical considerations in a way that reliably and transparently delivers correct verdicts about who should and should not have the authority to make their own medical decisions. Unfortunately, however, the standard approach to DMC does not get things right. It is of virtually no help in identifying and clarifying the relevant ethical considerations. And, embedded in the prevailing anti-paternalist paradigm, DMC assessments obfuscate and distort the underlying ethical justification for granting or withholding decisional authority. Here, we describe the core commitments of the standard approach to DMC and then highlight three problems with it. We then argue that these problems are significant enough that they call for more than merely tinkering and fine tuningâvariations of the standard approach cannot adequately address them. Instead, we should ditch DMC