Correct reasoning

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-188
Author(s):  
Andreas Müller
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Correct Reasoning

According to the account of practical reasons presented in Chapter 4, those reasons are ultimately grounded in the soundness of certain episodes of practical reasoning. This chapter addresses what it is for an episode of practical reasoning to be correct, which is a necessary condition for their soundness. It first shows that, at least when it is applied to reasoning, the notion of correctness need not itself be understood in terms of reasons, which would render the constructivist’s overall view circular. Then, it presents an account that characterizes correct reasoning as reasoning in compliance with the constitutive rules of that activity. It also discusses how those rules can be determined, and what the constructivist should say about their ontological status.

Taking Stock

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dancy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
A Value ◽  
Theoretical Reasoning ◽  
Similar Explanation

This chapter considers some general issues about the nature of the account that is emerging. It asks whether moral reasoning should have been treated as it was in Chapter 5. It also askes whether an explanation of practical reasons by appeal to value could be mirrored by a similar explanation of theoretical reasoning if one thinks of truth as a value. One might also think of the probability of a belief as a respect in which it is of value. The chapter ends by introducing the idea of a focalist account, and maintains that the account offered of practical reasoning is focalist.

Moral Reasoning and the Primacy of the Practical

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dancy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Complete Theory ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Moral Thought

This chapter considers how to locate moral reasoning in terms of the structures that have emerged so far. It does not attempt to write a complete theory of moral thought. Its main purpose is rather to reassure us that moral reasoning—which might seem to be somehow both practical and theoretical at once—can be perfectly well handled using the tools developed in previous chapters. It also considers the question how we are to explain practical reasoning—and practical reasons more generally—by contrast with the explanation of theoretical reasons and reasoning offered in Chapter 4. This leads us to the first appearance of the Primacy of the Practical. The second appearance concerns reasons to intend.

Varieties of Uniformity: The First Century of the Church of Ireland

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Head Of State ◽  
Sufficient Cause ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Change Of Perspective ◽  
The Church

The historiographical background to this paper is provided by a recent dramatic change of perspective in the study of the Reformation in Ireland. Traditionally the failure of Protestant reform has been explained in ways that amounted to determinism. In its crudest expression, this involved the self-sufficient premise that the Catholic faith was so deeply ingrained in the Irish as to be unshakable. More subtly, it assumed a set of equations, of Protestantism with English conquest and Catholicism with national resistance, that acted to consolidate the faith. In the 1970s, these simplicities were questioned. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Canny argued that religious reform had made sufficient headway in its initial phase to suggest that the replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism was at least within the bounds of possibility, and raised a fresh question; why did this not happen? That the debate which followed was inconclusive was due in part to an inability to shake off an old habit of circular thought, so that the issue has remained one of deciding whether Protestantism failed because Catholicism succeeded, or Catholicism succeeded because Protestantism failed. Both Dr Robinson-Hammerstein, when she observed that ‘Ireland is the only country in which the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the Head of State’, and Dr Bottigheimer, when he insisted that the failure of the Reformation must ‘concentrate our attention on the nature and limits of political authority’, implied that what needs to be explained is how actions were deprived of their effect. The alternative possibility is that the actions themselves were inherently ineffectual. The premise of this paper is that the failure of Protestantism and the success of Catholicism were the necessary condition, but not the sufficient cause, of each other, and its object is simply to recall attention to the existence of very practical reasons why the Church of Ireland should have evolved as it did in the hundred years or so between the first and second Acts of Uniformity, that is, from an inclusive Church, claiming the allegiance of the entire community, to one that excluded all but a privileged minority.

Practical Reasoning and Practical Reasons in Hume

Hume Studies ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasons

scholarly journals Isolating Correct Reasoning

Reasoning ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 129-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Worsnip
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Positive Account ◽  
Deductive Logic ◽  
Correct Reasoning

This chapter tries to do three things. First, it argues that rules of correct reasoning do not always preserve justification: if you begin with a justified attitude, and reason correctly from it, it can nevertheless happen that you’ll arrive at an unjustified attitude. Second, it argues that rules of correct reasoning do not even correspond to permissions of “structural rationality”: it is not always structurally permissible to base an attitude on other attitudes from which it follows by correct reasoning. Third, from these observations it tries to build a somewhat positive account of correct reasoning as a more sui generis notion irreducible to either justification or structural rationality. This account vindicates an important unity of theoretical and practical reasoning as well as a qualified version of the thesis that deductive logic supplies rules of correct reasoning.

Constructing Practical Reasons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Müller
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
The Future ◽  
Great Pain ◽  
Distinctive Role

Some things are reasons for us to perform certain actions. That it will spare you great pain in the future, for example, is a reason for you to go to the dentist now, and that you are already late for work is a reason for you not to read the next article in the morning paper. Why are such considerations reasons for or against certain actions? Constructivism offers an intriguing answer to this question. Its basic idea is often encapsulated in the slogan that reasons are not discovered but made by us. This book elaborates the constructivist idea into a fully fledged account of practical reasons, makes its theoretical commitments explicit, and defends it against some well-known objections. It begins with an examination of the distinctive role that reason judgements play in the process of practical reasoning. This provides the resources for an anti-representationalist conception of the nature of those judgements, according to which they are true, if they are true, not because they accurately represent certain normative facts, but because of their role in sound reasoning. On the resulting view, a consideration owes its status as a reason to the truth of the corresponding reason judgement and thus, ultimately, to the soundness of a certain episode of reasoning. Consequently, our practical reasons exhibit a kind of mind-dependence, but this does not force us to deny their objectivity.

Ethical Constructivism

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Bagnoli
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Main Task ◽  
Rational Agency ◽  
Dynamic Dimension ◽  
Correct Reasoning ◽  
Constitutive Principles

Ethical constructivism holds that truths about the relation between rationality, morality, and agency are best understood as constructed by correct reasoning, rather than discovered or invented. Unlike other metaphors used in metaethics, construction brings to light the generative and dynamic dimension of practical reason. On the resultant picture, practical reasoning is not only productive but also self-transforming, and socially empowering. The main task of this volume is to illustrate how constructivism has substantially modified and expanded the agenda of metaethics by refocusing on rational agency and its constitutive principles. In particular, this volume identifies, compares and discusses the prospects and failures of the main strands of constructivism regarding the powers of reason in responding to the challenges of contingency. While Kantian, Humean, Aristotelian, and Hegelian theories sharply differ in their constructivist strategies, they provide compelling accounts of the rational articulation required for an inclusive and unified ethical community.

Reasoning and reason judgements

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-81
Author(s):  
Andreas Müller
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Infinite Regress ◽  
Constructivist Theory ◽  
Practical Reasons

This chapter takes the first step in developing a constructivist theory of practical reasons. It does so by giving an account of the cognitive role that judgements about those reasons play in an agent’s psychology. In particular, it presents the Normative Guidance Account of practical reasoning, according to which such reasoning always involves a reason judgement that guides it. This account is shown to be preferable to competing accounts in the literature and defended against two influential objections: the objection that it requires too much conceptual sophistication and thus excludes certain reasoners, and the objection that it leads into an infinite regress.

Practical Reason

Philosophy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jussi Suikkanen
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Mental Faculty

Practical reason is the mental faculty that enables agents to deliberate about what they ought to do and to act on the basis of such deliberation. Much of the philosophical investigation of practical reason and its limits has been done in three historical traditions, originating from Aristotle, Hume, and Kant. This article begins from some of the most interesting recent publications within these traditions. It then moves on to the literature of the different problem-centered debates concerning practical reason, practical reasoning, and rationality. The notion of philosophy of practical reason has also been used more widely to cover philosophy of normativity generally, that is, philosophical investigation about what we ought to do, what reasons we have, and so on. Two sections of this bibliography—Dualism of Practical Reason: Prudence versus Morality and Practical Reasons—include some literature of the philosophy of practical reason in this wider sense.

scholarly journals The problems and peculiarities of G. P. Shchedrovitsky's reform of mindset, science, pedagogy and other fields of knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Vadim Markovich Rozin
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Science Pedagogy ◽  
Expected Outcome ◽  
The One ◽  
Complex Phenomena ◽  
Second Period ◽  
The Ideal

This article analyzes the creative path of G. P. Shchedrovitsky and the programs for reforming different fields of knowledge (mindset, science, pedagogy, design, etc.). The author claims that Shchedrovitsky formed the approach towards studying the indicated fields of knowledge under the influence of the works of A. A. Zinoviev and L. S. Vygotsky, Marxist doctrine, Scientist attitudes of that time. However, there was a different perspective on the reforms in the three key periods and programs of the Moscow Methodological Circle – creation of the theory of reasoning, theory of activity, and concept of mental activity. In the first period, it was deemed that the reforms will be successful if the reformers follow the method of reasoning developed by Marx in “Das Kapital”; in the second period – if the subjects and fields of knowledge under reform will be viewed as transformed in the context of philosophical, scientific, and practical reasoning; as well as activity (including mental activity). within the framework of which these subject and fields were created, will be subsequently reconstructed. The author examines the peculiarities of implementation of Shchedrovitsky’s reforms and assesses this work negatively. Namely because from the author’s perspective, Shchedrovitsky, on the one hand, did not give due attention to the structure and life of the studied complex phenomena, while on the other hand, designing them as the ideal objects, which is a necessary condition for philosophical and scientific research, he first and foremost fulfilled his personal values and attitudes, ascribing corresponding values to the ideal objects. The author believes that this is an expected outcome, since Shchedrovitsky's methodology for creating the ideal objects did not suggest ascertainment of the structure and life of the corresponding real phenomena.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document