The Explanatory Problem for Cognitivism about Practical Reason

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Errol Lord
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
The Relationship

Cognitivists about practical reason hold that we can explain why certain wide-scope requirements of practical rationality are true by appealing to certain epistemic requirements. Extant discussions of cognitivism focus solely on two claims. The first is the claim that intentions involve beliefs. The second is that whenever your intentions are incoherent in certain ways, you will be epistemically irrational (given that intentions involve beliefs). Even if the cognitivist successfully defends these claims, she still has to show that the epistemic requirements explain the practical requirements. This chapter argues that it is not plausible that the epistemic requirements explain the practical requirements. This shows that the cognitivists’ project will fail even if their controversial views about the relationship between the practical and epistemic are granted.

scholarly journals Personal Identity and Practical Reason: The Failure of Kantian Replies to Parfit

Dialogue ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-350
Author(s):  
Jonny Anomaly
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Metaphysical Theory ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThis essay examines and criticizes a set of Kantian objections to Parfit's attempt in Reasons and Persons to connect his theory of personal identity to practical rationality and moral philosophy. Several of Parfit's critics have tried to sever the link he forges between his metaphysical and practical conclusions by invoking the Kantian thought that even if we accept his metaphysical theory of personal identity, we still have good practical grounds for rejecting that theory when deliberating about what to do. The argument between Parfit and his opponents illuminates broader questions about the relationship between our metaphysical beliefs and our practical reasons.

The Interplay of Intention and Reason

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Bratman
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Pragmatic Theory ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
David Gauthier ◽  
Extended Agency ◽  
Extended Life

In a series of essays—in particular, his 1994 essay “Assure and Threaten”—David Gauthier develops a two-tier pragmatic theory of practical rationality and argues, within that theory, for a distinctive account of the rationality of following through with prior assurances or threats. His discussion suggests that certain kinds of temporally extended agency play a special role in one’s temporally extended life going well. I argue that a related idea about diachronic self-governance helps explain a sense in which an accepted deliberative standard can be self-reinforcing. And this gives us resources to adjust Gauthier’s theory in response to a threat of what Kieran Setiya has called a “fragmentation of practical reason.”

Constitutivism about Reasons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality

Contemporary forms of Kantian constitutivism generally begin with a conception of agency on which the constitutive aim of agency is some form of autonomy or self-unification. This chapter argues for a re-orientation of the Kantian constitutivist project towards views that begin with a conception of rationality on which both theoretical and practical rationality aim at forms of understanding. In a slogan, then, understanding-first as opposed to autonomy-first constitutivism. Such a view gives the constitutivist new resources for explaining many classes of reasons, while also offering a new way of understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason. The chapter concludes by arguing that the resulting view is best understood, not so much as an alternative to autonomy-first constitutivism, but as a complement to it.

An Unfamiliar and Positive Law: On Kant and Schiller

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reed Winegar
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract: A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant’s reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant’s reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime feeling. These facts illuminate Kant’s views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings.

scholarly journals Repensar la democracia. Estrategia moral y perspectiva crítica en K.O.APEL

Daímon ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Domingo Viente García Marzá
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
El Sistema ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
The Relationship

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar la actualidad de algunas de las aportaciones más importantes de K.O.Apel a la reflexión democrática, en concreto a la relación entre ética y democracia. Para este objetivo compararemos estas aportaciones con las de J.Habermas, compañero de viaje en la propuesta de la ética del discurso. Comprobaremos cómo nuestro autor supo avanzar y justificar la necesidad de una estrategia moral, más aún, de una arquitéctonica de la razón práctica que relacione fundamentación y aplicación. Solo así se puede dar razón de la perspectiva crítica tanto en la fundamentación de la idea de democracia como en la aplicación del principio moral a las instituciones que componen el sistema democrático. The aim of this paper is to show the actuality of K.O. Apel's most important contributions to democratic reflection, specifically the relationship between ethics and democracy. For this purpose, we will compare these contributions with those of J. Habermas, his colleague in the discourse ethics approach. We will see how our author achieved an advance in the justification of the need for a moral strategy, even more so for an architectural theory of practical reason hich includes the conditions of its application. Only in this way we can give a reason for the critical perspective, both in the foundation of the idea of democracy and in the application of the moral principle to the institutions that make up the democratic system.

scholarly journals The Metaphysics of Practical Rationality: Intentional and Deontic Cognition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
PRESTON STOVALL
Keyword(s):  
Primate Evolution ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Ontogenetic Development ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Shared Intentionality ◽  
Deontic Reasoning ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Communal Norms

Abstract Despite growing appreciation in recent decades of the importance of shared intentional mental states as a foundation for everything from divergences in primate evolution, to the institution of communal norms, to trends in the development of modernity as a sociopolitical phenomenon, we lack an adequate understanding of the relationship between individual and shared intentionality. At the same time, it is widely appreciated that deontic reasoning concerning what ought, may, and ought not be done is, like reasoning about our intentions, an exercise of practical rationality. Taking advantage of this fact, I use a plan-theoretic semantics for the deontic modalities as a basis for understanding individual and shared intentions. This results in a view that accords well with what we currently have reason to believe about the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of norm psychology and shared intentionality in human beings, and where original intentionality can be understood in terms of the shared intentionality of a community.

Rationality, the Evaluative Attitudes, and Import

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Background Theory ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Normative Implications

Understanding communities of respect requires understanding evaluative attitudes like caring, valuing, loving, and respecting. This Chapter sketches the author’s existing background theory of how evaluative attitudes are constituted by rational patterns of emotions: to care about something, for example, is for it to be the focus of a rational pattern of emotions. Different kinds of evaluative attitudes are constituted by patterns of distinct types of emotions and, conversely, we can delineate types of emotions in terms of the sorts of rational patterns they form constituting distinct forms of evaluative attitudes. The result is a revisionist account of practical rationality, in particular of a rationality of import, in terms of a type of commitment implicit in the subject’s emotions and the normative implications of such commitments. This account of rationality and the relationship between evaluative attitudes and patterns of emotions will form the backbone of the account of communities of respect.

Mathematical and Elemental Coordinates: The Role of Imagination

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-169
Author(s):  
Bernard Freydberg
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Fractal Geometry ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Creative Evolution ◽  
Logic Of Imagination ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Both in Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) and in his very recent Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental (2012), John Sallis enacts a reconfiguration of the relationship of geometry to elementology, which might be regarded more generally as a rethinking of the relation of mathematics to philosophy. The paper will trace this reconfiguration in two ways: (1) as it lies present but concealed in the history of philosophy, for example, in Descartes’ so-called “dualism” and in Kant’s pure productive imagination, and (2) in its present creative evolution in fractal geometry, as Sallis interprets it. Sallis draws together the mathematical affinity with a fundamental aesthetic drive, likening mathematical patterns to choreographic ones. I conclude by following this strain as it points to specific dance companies, and to my own sense of aesthetic homecoming as presented in my Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.

Reason and Conduct

Philosophy ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 25 (94) ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
J. J. C. Smart
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Relationship

The title of this paper is in many ways a bad one, but it does have the advantage of familiarity, and so indicates a well-known group of questions. The questions which philosophers who have talked about “Reason and Conduct” have really been discussing and which they help us to answer have been these: “What are the various ways in which the words “reasonable,” ‘wise,’ ‘foolish,’ etc., are used?” “In what senses may actions and choices be called ‘reasonable,’ and are these senses of ‘reasonable’ connected in any way, and if so in what way, with the senses in which beliefs and inferences may be called ‘reasonable’?” In other words our questions are, in a broad sense of the word, logical questions, not empirical ones. It is misleading to say, therefore, as philosophers commonly do, that we are discussing the relationship between Reason and Conduct, or that we are going into the question of whether Reason can or cannot be practical. Reason is the faculty of acting reasonably. If under “acting reasonably” we include only “inferring properly,” then Reason can only be logical. If under “acting reasonably” we also include making correct inductions and concocting good theories then Reason can also be scientific. If under “acting reasonably” we include “acting morally” or “doing one's duty,” then Reason can be practical. The dispute about whether Reason can be practical is not merely verbal but trivial, and only appears not to be trivial when we hypostatize this faculty Reason and suppose it to be a thing. It then looks as though our dispute is an empirical one about what this thing Reason can do.

Rationality and the Human Good

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Warren Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Human Good ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Humean Theory

In this essay I want to look at some questions concerning the relation between morality and rationality in the recommendations they make about the best way to live our lives and achieve our good. Specifically, I want to examine ways in which the virtue of practical rationality (conceived in neo-Humean terms as the most authoritative practical excellence) and the various moral virtues might be thought to part company, giving an agent conflicting directives regarding how best to live his (or her) life. In conducting this enquiry, I shall at some crucial points be presupposing something of an Aristotelian perspective, but only in the most general way.IIn what follows, I shall distinguish reason, the faculty or power, from rationality, the excellence or virtue (taken in the broadest sense) of that faculty. By practical reason I mean that part of reason that tells us what to do and how to live. By practical rationality (or, henceforth, rationality) I mean the excellence of that part of reason in virtue of which an agent is practically rational as opposed to irrational. By a neo-Humean conception of rationality I mean one that makes the goal of practical reason the maximal satisfaction of an agent's desires and preferences, suitably corrected for the effects of misinformation, wishful thinking, and the like. There are various versions of neo-Humean theory, and I shall not here be concerned with their specific differences. Their common essence lies in an appeal (1) to a notion of basic desires or preferences, which are not subject to intrinsic criticism as irrational and are subject to extrinsic criticism only by ways in which their joint satisfaction may not be possible, and (2) to a notion of derived desires or preferences, which are criticizable only instrumentally.

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