RATIONALITY, APPEARENCES AND APPARENT FACTS

2023

In this paper, I provide an answer to the question “what is it for a reason to be the reason for which a belief is held?” After arguing against the causal account of the reason-for-which connection, I present what I call the rationalization account, according to which a reason R a subject S has for a belief P is the reason for which S holds P just in case R is the premise in S’s rationalization for P, where the argument from R to P becomes S’s rationalization in virtue of her endorsing it. In order to bring explicitly into view the version of the rationalization account I aim to argue for, I draw two distinctions, one between occurrent and dispositional endorsement and the other between personal and public endorsement. I show that the version of the rationalization account thus clarified receives intuitive support from various cases and survives some formidable objections that might be tempting to level against it.

Synthese, 2016

What kind of thing is a reason for action? What is it to act for a reason? And what is the connection between acting for a reason and rationality? There is controversy about the many issues raised by these questions. In this paper I shall answer the first question with a conception of practical reasons that I call 'Factualism', which says that all reasons are facts. I defend this conception against its main rival, Psychologism, which says that practical reasons are mental states or mental facts, and also against a variant of Factualism that says that some practical reasons are facts and others are false beliefs. I argue that the conception of practical reasons defended here (i) provides plausible answers to the second and third questions above; and (ii) gives a more unified and satisfactory picture of practical reasons than those offered by its rivals.

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017

Philosophical/epistemic theories of rationality differ over the role of judgment in rational argumentation. According to the “classical model” of rationality, rational justification is a matter of conformity with explicit rules or principles. Critics of the classical model, such as Harold Brown and Trudy Govier, argue that the model is subject to insuperable difficulties. They propose, instead, that rationality be understood, ultimately, in terms of judgment rather than rules. In this paper I respond to Brown’s and Govier’s criticisms of the classical model, and to the “judgment model” they propose in its place. I argue that that model is unable both to distinguish between rational and irrational judgment and to avoid recourse to rules, and is therefore inadequate as an account of rationality, critical thinking, or argument appraisal. More positively, I argue that an adequate account of rationality must include a place for both rules and judgment.

2018

This book contributes to the developing dialogue between cognitive science and social sciences. It focuses on a central issue in both fields, i.e. the nature and the limitations of the rationality of beliefs and action. The development of cognitive science is one of the most important and fascinating intellectual advances of recent decades, and social scientists are paying increasing attention to the findings of this new branch of science that forces us to consider many classical issues related to epistemology and philosophy of action in a new light. Analysis of the concept of rationality is a leitmotiv in the history of the social sciences and has involved endless disputes. Since it is difficult to give a precise definition of this concept, and there is a lack of agreement about its meaning, it is possible to say that there is a ‘mystery of rationality’. What is it to be rational? Is rationality merely instrumental or does it also involve the endorsement of values, i.e. the choice of goals? Should we consider rationality to be a normative principle or a descriptive one? Can rationality be only Cartesian or can it also be argumentative? Is rationality a conscious skill or a partly tacit one? This book, which has been written by an outstanding collection of authors, including both philosophers and social scientists, tries to make a useful contribution to the debates on these problems and shed some light on the mystery of rationality. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field.

Journal of Ethics, 2017

According to a guiding idea in metaethics, there is a necessary link between the concept of normative reasons and the concept of practical rationality. This notion brings up two issues: The exact nature of this link, and the nature of rationality. With regard to the first issue, the debate is dominated by a certain standard claim. With regard to the second issue, the debate is dominated by what I will refer to as ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’ about rationality, where the latter is assumed to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons. In this paper, it is argued that subjectivism is able capture an ordinary, non-technical, sense of ‘rational’ whereas objectivism is not. The basic reason is that objectivism fails to account for the essential connection between rationality, malfunctioning, and rational criticism. This means that we face a puzzle: While objectivism appears to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons, it fails to capture a central sense of ‘rational’. It is finally argued that this puzzle can be solved by abandoning the standard claim about the link between reasons and rationality.

Philosophical Quarterly, 2016

It is standard, both in the philosophical literature and in ordinary parlance, to assume that one can fall short of responding to all one’s moral reasons without being irrational. Yet when we turn to epistemic reasons, the situation could not be more different. Most epistemologists take it as axiomatic that for a belief to be rational is for it to be well-supported by epistemic reasons. We find ourselves with a striking asymmetry, then, between the moral and epistemic domains concerning what is taken for granted about whether failures to respond to reasons are failures of rationality. My aim in this paper is to interrogate this asymmetry, and ultimately to argue that the asymmetry is groundless. Instead, I will offer an error theory to explain the asymmetry in intuitions (away). This error theory suggests that we should amend the conventional wisdom about the relationship between epistemic reasons and rationality.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Fiery Cushman argues that "[r]ationalization is designed not to accurately infer unconscious mental states, but to construct new ones; it is not a discovery, but a fiction". While we agree in broad strokes with the characterization of rationalization as a 'useful fiction', we think that Cushman's claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (i) the reality of beliefs and desires, i.e. the fictional status of folk psychological entities, and (ii) the degree to which they should be understood as useful and representative. Our aim here is to clarify both points and illuminate how rationalization could be understood as a useful fiction. In doing so, we aim to explicate the Rationale of Rationalization. Commentary: Post-hoc rationalisation, i.e., retrospectively attributing or constructing 'hidden' beliefs and desires inferred from how one has behaved in the past, has traditionally been seen to threaten the idea that humans are 'rational', since it happens subsequent to the process under consideration. If the relevant mental states that are supposed to rationalize an action only come into existence after the action has occurred, then they cannot be treated as the cause of that action. However, Cushman argues that a post-hoc process of this kind can still be seen as 'rational' in the sense that it constructs new beliefs and desires that both serve a useful function and track some underlying adaptive rationales that have shaped the behaviour being rationalized. Rationalization, according to Cushman, is supposed to be a 'useful fiction'. We think that this proposal invites two serious ambiguities, firstly to do with the ontological status of the mental states that are the outputs of rationalisation (i.e., folk psychological states like beliefs and desires), and secondly to do with the degree to which they should be understood as useful and representative. We will address each ambiguity in turn, using our resolution of the latter to help resolve the former.

2014

In contemporary philosophy and social science the features of rationality play a new significant role in the theory of mind, language, action, decision theory and in questions of cross cultural understanding. The approaches do not conceive of rationality as a subjective a priori principle of reasoning; they present a different attitude towards questions of conceptualizing rationality, and this is a first step towards contextualized understanding of rationality. We can only grasp what rationality means in this way. Rationality is not given but is rather a result of our conceptualizing and a matter of contextualization and this is also a question of rationalization of means for our personal and our collective goals. The reader presents an outline on contemporary orientations about the subject of understanding "rationality" along the main topics in philosophy, theory of language, and social science. Topics are radical interpretation, naturalized epistemology and normativity; intentions and the social aspects of rationality; and concepts of explanation, justification and reality.

In this paper I distinguish the category of "rationalization" from various forms of epistemic irrationality. I maintain that only if we model rationalizers as pretenders can we make sense of the rationalizer's distinctive relationship to the evidence in her possession. I contrast the cognitive attitude of the rationalizer with that of believers whose relationship to the evidence I describe as "waffling" or "intransigent". In the final section of the paper, I compare the rationalizer to the Frankfurtian bullshitter.

2002

This book constructs a comprehensive theory of rationality. Part I addresses theoretical rationality, roughly the territory of epistemology. Part II concerns practical rationality, roughly the territory of rational action, rational desire, and moral conduct. The third, final part addresses global rationality, the overall rationality of persons. Throughout, the role of experience is central: theoretical reason represents, in good part, our cognitive responses to experience, and it yields our map of the world. Practical reason represents, in good part, our conative responses to experience, and, in the light of our beliefs, it yields a kind of itinerary for our lives. A rational map must be appropriate to our experiential grounds for belief; and a rational itinerary must be appropriate to the features of experience, especially its rewarding and punishing aspects, that yield grounds for rational desire.