The Unity of Reasons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Special Case

This chapter is concerned with the question of what unifies reasons for action and reasons for belief, sometimes called practical and epistemic reasons. According to some views, reasons for belief are a special case of reasons to do something, and so epistemic reasons are a special case, very broadly speaking, of practical reasons. According to other views, reasons for action are a special case of reasons to draw some conclusion, and so practical reasons are a special case of epistemic reasons. This chapter considers some of the evidence that bears on whether either of these claims is correct, or whether instead practical and epistemic reasons have something else in common.

The Range of Reasons

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
First Order ◽  
Underlying Principle ◽  
Comprehensive Framework ◽  
Order Commitment

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle.

scholarly journals An Instrumentalist Account of How to Weigh Epistemic and Practical Reasons for Belief

Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1071-1094
Author(s):  
Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen ◽  
Mattias Skipper
Keyword(s):  
Combinatorial Problem ◽  
Good News ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Combinatorial Properties ◽  
Epistemic Instrumentalism ◽  
Added Benefit ◽  
Instrumental Reasons

Abstract When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner.

Teleological Reasons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Portmore
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Do So

A teleological reason to φ is a reason to φ in virtue of the fact that φ-ing would either itself promote a certain end or is appropriately related to something else that would promote that end. And teleological reasons divide into direct and the indirect kinds, depending on whether the first or second of these two disjuncts applies. Thus, supposing that our end is to maximize utility, the fact that my killing one to save two would maximize utility is a direct teleological reason for me to do so, whereas the fact that my killing one to save two is prohibited by the code of rules whose universal acceptance would maximize utility is an indirect teleological reason for me to refrain from doing so. This chapter discusses various types of reasons, such as epistemic reasons (that is, reasons to believe), and whether all, some, or none of them are teleological. The chapter pays particularly close attention to the issue of whether all practical reasons (that is, reasons for action) are teleological.

The Value-First Account and the Unity of the Normative

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Richard Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
The Way

The Value-First Account (VFA) analyses reasons for pro-attitudes in terms of goodness or value. This chapter makes an argument against VFA. It argues that epistemic reasons for belief should not be analysed in terms of value. But it argues that if epistemic reasons should not be analysed in terms of value but reasons for pro-attitudes should be analysed in terms of value, then epistemic reasons for belief cannot be instances of the very same relation as reasons for pro-attitudes. And this chapter argues that we should hold that epistemic reasons for belief are instances of the very same relation as practical reasons. So, we should reject VFA because it is inconsistent with the way in which epistemic normativity relates to practical normativity.

The Game of Belief

2020 ◽  
Vol 129 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Maguire ◽  
Jack Woods
Keyword(s):  
Functional Role ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Standard ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Important Sense

It is plausible that there is a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there is a range of practical reasons bearing on belief. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. To resolve the tension, the authors draw on an analogy with a similar distinction between types of reasons for actions in the context of activities. This motivates a two-level account of the structure of normativity. The account relies upon a further distinction between normative reasons and authoritatively normative reasons. Only the latter constitutively play the functional role of explaining what state one just plain ought to be in. The authors conjecture that all and only practical reasons are authoritative. Hence, in one important sense, all reasons for belief are practical reasons. But this account also preserves the autonomy and importance of epistemic reasons.

scholarly journals Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Norms ◽  
Plausible Assumption ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Epistemic Trust ◽  
Conceptual Connection ◽  
Epistemic Blame

AbstractThe normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.

Practical Steps and Reasons for Action

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Clark
Keyword(s):  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
The Real ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Practical Inference

There is an idea, going back to Aristotle, that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief. Not surprisingly, the idea has almost always led to some form of inferentialism about reasons for action. In this paper I argue that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief, but that this requires abandoning inferentialism about reasons for action. This result will be thought paradoxical. It is generally assumed that if there is to be a useful parallel, there must be some such thing as a practical inference. As we shall see, that assumption tends to block the fruitful exploration of the real parallel. On the view I shall defend, the practical analogue of an ordinary inference is not an inference, but something I shall call a practical step. Nevertheless, the practical step will do, for a theory of reasons for action, what ordinary inference does for an inferentialist theory of reasons for belief. The result is a general characterization of reasons, practical and theoretical, in terms of the correctness conditions of the relevant sorts of step.

Can there Be Epistemic Reasons for Action?

2006 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Robert Booth
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Basing Relation

In this paper I consider whether there can be such things as epistemic reasons for action. I consider three arguments to the contrary and argue that none are successful, being either somewhat question-begging or too strong by ruling out what most epistemologists think is a necessary feature of epistemic justification, namely the epistemic basing relation. I end by suggesting a "non-cognitivist" model of epistemic reasons that makes room for there being epistemic reasons for action and suggest that this model may support moral realism.

Reasoning about Means

2019 ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Ingmar Persson
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Direction Of Fit ◽  
Standard Formula

An advantage of using conditionals as the standard formula for reasons for action is that the conditional form can also be used to bring out the structure of reasons for belief—thus making possible a close comparison between these kinds of reasons and reasoning. It then becomes apparent that the direction of derivation is the reverse in the practical case when we reason our way to desiring sufficient means to an end from desiring the end to the theoretical case when we derive beliefs from sufficient conditions for their truth. This reversal reflects the opposite direction of fit of beliefs and desires. The implications of this account of reasoning with desires for the moral doctrine of the double effect and for reasoning with respect to emotions are briefly considered.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Christopher Cowie
Keyword(s):  
Error Theory ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Moral Error Theory ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Epistemic Consequentialism ◽  
Argument From Analogy ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Categorical Reasons

The views outlined in earlier chapters are systematically presented. These include: the truth of epistemic institutionalism and falsity of analogous institutionalist views in morality; the challenges facing categorical reasons for action that do not apply to categorial reasons for belief; the reducible nature of epistemic properties and relations—including the defensibility of this view in light of concerns with the normativity of probability and the falsity of both veritism and epistemic consequentialism—in contrast to the irreducible nature of moral properties and relations, and the possibility of ‘the puzzling combination’. It is concluded that the argument from analogy fails and that the moral error theory may yet be true, but that it would be illegitimate to conclude that it is true.

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