Requirements of Structural Rationality

This chapter turns to the nature and form of requirements of structural rationality. It presents a recipe for generating requirements of structural rationality from verdicts about which states are incoherent (by the account defended in the previous chapter). On the resulting view, requirements of structural rationality are prohibitions on (incoherent) combinations of states. The chapter compares this with the closely related view that the requirements of rationality are “wide-scope” before reframing the debate over the scope of rational requirements and arguing for a view that is wide-scope, rather than narrow-scope, in spirit. It also argues that requirements of structural rationality are synchronic rather than diachronic. Finally, it defends the view that the demands of structural rationality are best thought of as requirements at all against a recent challenge.

Fitting Things Together

Some combinations of attitudes—beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on—don’t fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there is a class of rational requirements—the requirements of structural rationality—that forbid these incoherent states. Yet there are surprisingly deep challenges that arise for this natural idea. First, there are challenges about how these requirements relate to “substantive” rational requirements that require us to have attitudes that are supported by good reasons. Second, there are challenges about what, if anything, unifies the diverse class of instances of incoherence. And third, there are challenges about how, if at all, facts about coherence are normatively significant. These challenges have led many philosophers to deny that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality after all. And even the most prominent philosophers who do believe in requirements of structural rationality have often been reticent to defend the claims that such requirements are unified or normatively significant, or reticent to give accounts of how this could be so. By contrast, this book provides a sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality—distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality—and of the view that it is unified and normatively significant. In developing a theory of structural rationality, it also aims to show how such a theory can help to illuminate numerous standing debates in both ethics and epistemology.

Desires and Reasons

This chapter explores subjectivism, the view that all reasons have their source in desire. It first rehearses two classic objections to subjectivism: it has implausible implications about which reasons people have, and about what good deliberation looks like. The chapter then offers some reasons to think that objectivism, especially when combined with desire-as-belief, can explain away the appeal of subjectivism. Most centrally, we should make a clear distinction between rational requirements and non-rational requirements, and then say that our desires make a difference only to what it is rational to do. The chapter ends by offering some reasons to doubt desire-based theories of wellbeing, which would also fit poorly with desire-as-belief.

Self-Knowledge Requirements and Moore's Paradox

Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding Moore's paradox might be marshaled to support rational requirements to know one's beliefs, and finds that none succeed.

A number of issues raised for the development of teaching staff at universities today

As a knowledge maker, developing capacity and quality for students, the teaching staff has made a great contribution to train human resources that are specialized for society. Accordingly, developing the teaching staff is a key task in improving the quality of training of universities. The content of development of teaching staff includes, developing in quantity, quality and structure, which ensures sufficient quantity, meeting quality and rational requirements as an important requirement for each school. In the current context, the development of teaching staff is facing advantages but also many difficulties and challenges require management subjects at all levels to pay attention, seek reasonable solutions to improve quality amount of this important human resource.

Intention

This chapter develops a view according to which there is a constitutive aim of intention that parallels the constitutive aim of belief, and both of these constitutive aims can be used to explain some of the rational requirements governing intentions and beliefs. The chapter first considers in what sense there is an “aim of intention.” It begins by looking at many of the philosophical ideas associated with the “aim of belief,” noting that some of these won’t easily carry over to the “aim of intention” in the relevant way. However, if we understand constitutive aims in terms of the “job descriptions” of attitudes, there is room for optimism here. It then considers how the constitutive aims might explain certain consistency and coherence requirements, including means–ends coherence. The chapter critiques Michael Bratman’s suggestions for how these explanations might go, and offers an alternative view, which it calls “Non-normative Disjunctivism.”

Normativity II

This chapter turns to the question of whether means–ends coherence is normative in the sense that we always ought, or more weakly, have reason to comply with it. The chapter considers the view, inspired by Prichard’s critique of “moral philosophy,” that rationality provides its own reasons, and so we need not search for “external” reasons to comply with rational requirements. It argues that the request for such reasons is a legitimate request, and it’s hard to see what those reasons might be. It then turns to Strong Normativity—the thesis that we always ought to be means–ends coherent—and present three arguments against it. The first concerns cases of advantageous incoherence, the second concerns transmission to necessary means, and the third concerns transmission to sufficient means.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the plan for the book, and provides an overview of each of the main chapters. It also looks to a well-known historical precursor to contemporary work on means–ends coherence: Kant’s famous discussion of hypothetical imperatives in the Groundwork. The chapter also explores two contemporary sources of philosophical interest in instrumental rationality: an older debate about the scope of practical reason, and a more recent debate about the normativity of rational requirements. Lastly, the chapter begins to explain and defend the formulation of means–ends coherence that will be used throughout the book.

Scope

This chapter takes up the debate over the formulation of rational requirements, particularly over whether “requires” should have wide or narrow scope. The chapter shows how if there’s a real disagreement between the wide-scoper and narrow-scoper, it must concern the formulation of diachronic, not synchronic, requirements. It presents what it takes to be the strongest argument for the wide-scope formulations, and show how attempts by narrow-scopers to address this argument will lead them to further difficulties. The chapter then considers the strongest motivation for the narrow-scope view: the objection concerning the symmetry of rational responses predicted by the wide-scope view. The chapter shows how the wide-scoper has resources to deflect the strongest versions of this objection.

Rational requirements for suspended judgment

How does rationality bind the agnostic, that is, the one who suspends judgment about whether a given proposition is true? In this paper I explore two alternative ways of establishing what the rational requirements of agnosticism are: the Lockean–Bayesian framework and the doxastic logic framework. Each of these proposals faces strong objections. Fortunately, however, there is a rich kernel of requirements of agnosticism that are vindicated by both of them. One can then endorse the requirements that belong to that kernel without thereby committing oneself to the problematic implications that stem from either of the aforementioned proposals.