Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning

It’s widely accepted that normativity is not subject to truth values. The underlying reasoning is that truth values can only be predicated of descriptive statements; normative statements are prescriptive, not descriptive; thus truth value predicates cannot be assigned to normative statements. Hence, deonticity lacks logical semantics. This semantic monism has been challenged over the last decades from a series of perspectives that open the way for legal logics with imperative semantics. In the present paper I will go back to Kant and review his understanding of practical judgments, presenting it as supported by a pluralistic semantics. From this perspective a norm of Law is a logical expression that includes as content a generic description of a possible behavior by a generality of juridical agents, and assigns to that content the assertion of its obligatory character, accompanied by a disincentive for non-compliance. From this perspective legal norms can be syntactically formalized and assigned appropriate semantic values in such terms that they can be incorporated into valid inferential schemes. The consequence is that we can put together legal logics that handle both the phenomenal and the deontic dimensions of legality.

1998

I criticize the normative and interpretive practices of recognition that underlie discursive exchanges within Robert Brandom's so-called 'game of giving and asking for reasons.' The central criticisms illuminate the shortcomings of Brandom's approach on both descriptive and prescriptive grounds. As concerns the former, I show that Brandom's account of the practices of discursive recognition cannot explain the means by which discursive beings acquire facility with the norms that guide their discursive dealings with others. As concerns the latter, I argue that a Brandomian recognizer would fail to discursively recognize others that she, by rights, ought to so recognize. I then show how Brandom's commitment to this form of discursive recognition undermines his commitment to the broadly Kantian picture of discursive freedom and constraint by norms.

Abstracta, 2014

Philosophy has recently been presented with, and started to take seriously, sociological studies in which our 'folk concepts' are elaborated. The most interesting concepts studied are moral concepts, and results have been achieved that seem to sharply contradict the speculation of philosophers and to threaten the very way in which moral philosophy has been done in the past. In this paper, I consider these results and then sketch a version of a reactive attitude theory that allows for a genuine sense in which our intuitions about responsibility may be incoherent in a certain sense but without making moral reasoning radically contextual.

What is it that explains the rationality of transitions in thought? It is natural to think that any such explanation will need to advert to at least two interrelated issues. The first has to do with what is constitutive of the validity of a transition, and the second with our actual practice of making inferential transitions. Many accounts attempt to deal with both issues simultaneously by showing how it is that a thinker, competent with a logical expression N, grasps the content of N in such a way as to make their inferential practices with N rational. Advocates of the conceptualist approach to rationality, such as Christopher Peacocke, attempt to account for this relationship by grounding rationality in concept possession. This paper argues against this account, because (a) it cannot provide an appropriate way of distinguishing true and false normative commitments; (b) typing a token cognitive state as a propositional attitude does not depend upon any specific set of conditions that thinkers must instantiate as a matter of metaphysical necessity. In response, I briefly offer suggestions towards an alternative, and psychologically tractable, account of rational commitment by resisting the tendency to run-together the two issues.

The Journal of Transcendental Philosophy

Grazer Philosophische Studien, New Perspectives On Concepts. Edited by Julia Langkau and Christian Nimtz, pp. 13-35(23), 2010

This paper discusses the integrated approach to the semantics and pragmatics of language developed in my Making It Explicit (Brandom 1994). The core claim is that there are six consequential relations among commitments and entitlements that are sufficient for a practice exhibiting them to qualify as discursive, that is, as a practice of giving and asking for reasons, hence as one conferring genuinely conceptual content on the expressions, performances, and statuses that have scorekeeping significances in those practices. I divide the six consequential relations into two groups, the fundamental-semantic and the social-pragmatic, and I characterise the complex interactions between them. The bold and potentially falsifiable overall claim is that any practice that exhibits this full six-fold structure will be interpretable in a broadly Davidsonian sense: roughly, mappable onto ours in a way that makes conversation with us possible.

I criticize the normative and interpretive practices of recognition underlying discursive exchanges within Robert Brandom’s so-called ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. The central criticisms illuminate the shortcomings of Brandom’s approach on both descriptive and prescriptive grounds. As concerns the former, I show that Brandom’s account of the practices of discursive recognition cannot accommodate an account of the means by which discursive beings acquire facility with the norms that guide their discursive dealings with others. As concerns the latter, I argue that a Brandomian recognizer would fail to discursively recognize others that she, by rights, ought to so recognize. I then show how Brandom’s commitment to this form of discursive recognition undermines his commitment to the broadly Kantian picture of discursive freedom and constraint by norms.

In this Chapter, my aim is to explore three normative aspects of practical commitments, on the one hand, and to suggest an account of the requirements governing rational agency, on the other. Section 2.1 is concerned with the first of these two aims: the analysis of three normative features of practical commitments. The first of them concerns the link between reasons and normative judgements—this is, the normative structure of practical reasoning. I will argue that (i) reasons are facts, and not mental states; and (ii) they have to be possessed by that agent: effective reasons are subjective (or agent‑relative) reasons. Second, I will defend that the conclusion of practical reasoning is a normative belief, and not an intention. Finally, I will discuss the 'bootstrapping objection', proposed by Bratman (1987). The objection can be stated as follows: “you cannot bootstrap a reason into existence from nowhere, just by a forming an intention” (Broome 2001). Section 2.2 is devoted to the analysis of normative requirements. Attributions of irrationality are made on the basis of a violation of some of those requirements. I will first present a recent debate about the appropriate formulation of normative requirements: wide versus narrow‑scope formulations (§2.2.1). I will argue that narrow‑scoped requirements have the advantage of gathering the directionality and agent‑relativity of practical rationality. In Section 2.2.2, I will suggest an alternative formulation of three rational requirements: enkrasia, resolve, and means‑ends reasoning, whose violation is the basis for attributing akrasia and weakness of will (see Section 1.2.3). I will defend that enkrasia is better understood as a restriction, rather than a requirement, and that the means‑end coherence requirement is derived from a more general rationality principle regarding consistency amongst intentional states, which I call resolve.