scholarly journals Acting Without Reasons

Disputatio ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (23) ◽  
pp. 229-246
Author(s):  
Josep L. Prades
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Practical Conclusion ◽  
Acting For Reasons

Abstract In this paper, I want to challenge some common assumptions in contemporary theories of practical rationality and intentional action. If I am right, the fact that our intentions can be rationalised is widely misunderstood. Normally, it is taken for granted that the role of rationalisations is to show the reasons that the agent had to make up her mind. I will argue against this. I do not object to the idea that acting intentionally is, at least normally, acting for reasons, but I will propose a teleological reading of the expression ‘for reasons.’ On this reading, it is quite possible to act for reasons without having reasons to act. In a similar way, paradigmatic cases of cogent practical reasoning do not require the transference of justification from the premises to the practical conclusion.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Joshua Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The Way

In the introduction the book’s central themes are introduced. Agents are often considered special, in that agents actively do things. Non-agents, by contrast, are zones of mere passivity. The aim of this book is to offer a perspective on agency that allows agency to stand out as special when compared to non-agentive systems. This perspective will be developed by way of interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. Novel accounts of several key phenomena are developed: control over behavior, non-deviant causation, intentional action, skill, and knowledgeable action. Along the way the role of planning, practical reasoning, belief, and knowledge receive thorough discussion.

scholarly journals The Shape of Agency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Action Control ◽  
Action Execution ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Display Quality ◽  
The Way

In this book Shepherd offers a perspective on the shape of agency by offering interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. In the book’s first part, he offers accounts of phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behavior, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition and undermine the claims of many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore intentional action. In the book’s second part, he turns to modes of agentive excellence—ways that agents display quality of form. He offers a novel account of skill, including an account of the ways that agents display more or less skill. He discusses the role of knowledge in skill and concludes that while knowledge is often important, it is inessential. This leads to a discussion of knowledge of action—of the way that knowledge of action and knowledge of how to act informs action execution. Shepherd argues that knowledgeable action includes a unique epistemic underpinning. For in knowledgeable action, the agent has authoritative knowledge of what she is doing and how she is doing it when and because she is poised to control her action by way of practical reasoning.

The Frame Problem in Ethics

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Sebastian Gałecki
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Frame Problem ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
The Frame Problem ◽  
The Invisible

Although the “frame problem” in philosophy has been raised in the context of the artificial intelligence, it is only an exemplification of broader problem. It seems that contemporary ethical debates are not so much about conclusions, decisions, norms, but rather about what we might call a “frame”. Metaethics has always been the bridge between purely ethical principles (“this is good and it should be done”, “this is wrong and it should be avoided”) and broader (ontological, epistemic, anthropological etc.) assumptions. One of the most interesting meta-ethical debates concerns the “frame problem”: whether the ethical frame is objective and self-evident, or is it objective but not self-evident? In classical philosophy, this problem takes the form of a debate on the first principles: nonprovable but necessary starting points for any practical reasoning. They constitute the invisible but essential frame of every moral judgment, decision and action. The role of philosophy is not only to expose these principles, but also to understand the nature of the moral frame.

scholarly journals Truth in Practical Reason: Practical and Assertoric Truth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michail Pantoulias ◽  
Vasiliki Vergouli ◽  
Panagiotis Thanassas
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Controversial Subject ◽  
Practical Syllogism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
De Interpretatione

Truth has always been a controversial subject in Aristotelian scholarship. In most cases, including some well-known passages in the Categories, De Interpretatione and Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the predicate ‘true’ for assertions, although exceptions are many and impossible to ignore. One of the most complicated cases is the concept of practical truth in the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics: its entanglement with action and desire raises doubts about the possibility of its inclusion to the propositional model of truth. Nevertheless, in one of the most extensive studies on the subject, C. Olfert has tried to show that this is not only possible but also necessary. In this paper, we explain why trying to fit practical truth into the propositional model comes with insurmount­able problems. In order to overcome these problems, we focus on multiple aspects of practical syllogism and correlate them with Aristo­tle’s account of desire, happiness and the good. Identifying the role of such concepts in the specific steps of practical reasoning, we reach the conclusion that practical truth is best explained as the culmination of a well-executed practical syllogism taken as a whole, which ultimately explains why this type of syllogism demands a different approach and a different kind of truth than the theoretical one.

Agency, Culture, Modernity: Towards a New Understanding of Confucian Practical Reasoning

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Kai Marchal
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Zhu Xi ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The West ◽  
Global Age ◽  
To Come ◽  
Complex Forms

In this essay, I argue for a historical-critical perspective on rationality. In our global age, we in the West need to come to terms with the fact that non-Western traditions have developed complex forms of practical rationality. I will first give an overview of what I call the “Confucian standards of reasoning.” Secondly, I will explain how the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) has rearticulated the earlier understanding of practical reasoning. Thirdly, I will demonstrate why a comparative perspective may enrich our reasoned engagement with individuals in the Chinese-speaking world. In developing forms of global reasoning, we should make sure that these are neither parochial nor difference-blind.

The Role of Public Practical Reasoning in Good Governance

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
Shashi Motilal ◽  
Keya Maitra ◽  
Prakriti Prajapati
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Good Governance

Knowledge without Observation

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
John Schwenkler
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Accurate Description ◽  
First Person ◽  
Blue Book ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Bodily Movements

This chapter discusses the argument of Sections 28–32 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention. It begins by relating Anscombe’s thesis that intentional action is known without observation to Wittgenstein’s discussion in the Blue Book of the knowledge of oneself “as subject” and Anscombe’s discussion in “The First Person” of unmediated self-knowledge. Following this, the chapter explores the difficulties that herself Anscombe raises for her thesis, and considers her reasons for thinking that the scope of an agent’s non-observational self-knowledge is not limited to her interior states or immediate bodily movements. Finally, it considers how the difficulties that Anscombe has raised are supposed to be addressed by her discussion of how descriptions of one’s intentional action can be contradicted, and of the difference between a list that has the role of an order and one whose role is to provide an accurate description of some facts.

Practical Knowledge

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hunter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Bodily Sensation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Philosophical Questions

A person typically knows what she is doing when she does something intentionally, and she usually knows this without having to observe herself. This so-called practical knowledge raises many philosophical questions. Does intentional action require practical knowledge and, if so, what is the strength of this requirement? What is it about intentional action that requires it, since a person can be doing something unintentionally without knowing about it? What is the source or ground of this knowledge? How is it related to observation, bodily sensation, and proprioception? How is a person’s practical knowledge connected to the reasons she has for acting and to practical reasoning more generally? In what sense, if any, is a person’s practical knowledge the “cause” of what it understands, as Anscombe famously claimed? While the notion of practical knowledge was central to the theory of action in the middle decades of the 20th century, it lost this place in the 1960s. But the last ten years has seen a renewed interest in the notion. This article aims to chart both the early debates and the recent discussions of practical knowledge. While it organizes the literature according to certain questions and topics, other ways to organize the literature are possible and nearly all of the texts would fit equally well under several headings.

scholarly journals Francisco de Vitoria on Prudence and the Nature of Practical Reasoning

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-60
Author(s):  
Anselm Spindler
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Francisco De Vitoria ◽  
Scientific Framework

Abstract The history of prudence is often depicted as a history of loss. According to one version, the scientification of moral knowledge in medieval philosophy calls into question the role of prudence in moral action (Nussbaum 1978). And while Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) still tries to integrate prudence into a scientific framework of moral knowledge, the Salmantine theologian Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) eventually abandons this approach and excludes prudence from moral knowledge altogether (Fidora 2013). I would like to argue, however, that Vitoria plays a different role in this development: He does not exclude prudence from scientific moral knowledge but gives an integrated account that Aquinas lacks. But this integration comes at a price because he is eventually unable to explain how prudence allows an agent to deal with the problem of contingency in action.

Certainty and Authority

1990 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 223-237
Author(s):  
Peter Winch
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
On Certainty ◽  
Human Rationality

So is this it: I must recognize certain authorities in order to make judgments at all? (OC, 493)I want in this paper to consider Wittgenstein's great posthumous work On Certainty in a different perspective from the usual: from the point of view of certain deep questions in political philosophy. These questions concern the nature of the state's authority and the citizen/s obligation to it; the notion of legitimacy and the role of consent in this context. Such issues have many dimensions; but they arise in part out of difficulties in reconciling the application of such concepts with our understanding of human rationality, especially practical rationality. I think it has been, and remains, characteristic of the main tradition of discussion of such issues to leave certain important questions about the nature of practical rationality unasked. I believe that these questions are asked, though in a different context, in Wittgenstein's On Certainty.

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