Implications

Chapter 5 lays out some of the implications of QUD Reasons Contextualism for five issues in the philosophy of normativity: the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons to be rational debate, the difficulty of defining moral reasons, and the reasons-first debate. The chapter shows that the ontology of reasons is a pseudo-problem and agent-relative reasons are not indexical facts. It offers replies to Kolodny’s arguments for the claim that we do not have reason to be rational. The chapter also offers a novel account of moral reasons and an initial statement of a reasons-first supervenience view. It also offers replies to objections to the reasons-first approach by Snedegar and Daniel Fogal.

Introduction

The Introduction provides some background on the huge role that reasons play in the literature on metaethics and epistemology over the past five decades. It also introduces the reader to why an understanding of the semantics for ‘reason’ is essential to making sense of the myriad ways reasons have been used across philosophy. Moreover, it presents the distinctions among kinds of reasons that have been prevalent in the literature and summarizes the overarching framework for understanding these distinctions and how they relate to one another.

The Competition

Chapter 4 shows why QUD Reasons Contextualism is preferable to its competitors. In particular, it considers Stephen Finlay’s conceptual analysis of reasons locutions, an expressivist view of reasons locutions based on the work of Simon Blackburn, Tim Henning’s information contextualism, and Niko Kolodny’s semantic relativism.

Logical Form

Chapter 2 presents the particular reasons locutions on which the book focuses, and argue that one of them is fundamental. The chapter identifies the logical form of this fundamental reasons locution by introducing the idea that ‘reason’ is a predicate/operator hybrid. It then shows why ‘reason’ as a count noun is not ambiguous in any way (contra Mark Schroeder and John Broome), and offer arguments against Justin Snedegar’s claim that reasons locutions are contrastive and John Skorupski’s claim that reasons locutions have an epistemic parameter and/or a weight parameter.

Reasons

Chapter 1 clarifies, organizes, and in some case corrects the extensive literature on the different kinds of reasons. We focus in particular on (i) contributory, conclusive, and sufficient reasons, (ii) adaptive, evaluative, and practical reasons, (iii) normative, motivating, and explanatory reasons, (iv) permissive and obligatory reasons, (v) internal and external reasons, and (vi) agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons. In each case, the chapter traces the history of these terms involved and establish the best way to understand them. The result is the most systematic and comprehensive reasons lexicon to date.

Semantics

Chapter 3 presents a semantic theory for reasons locutions. The semantic theory pairs a Kaplanian semantic framework with Craige Roberts’s question under discussion (QUD) pragmatic theory. The result is QUD Reasons Contextualism, which specifies eight distinct kinds of contexts of utterance for reasons locutions and the truth conditions for each one. The chapter then explains how each of the six reasons distinctions surveyed in Chapter 1 is related to the semantics for reasons locutions. In particular, the chapter shows that the agent neutral/agent relative distinction is a presemantic distinction, the normative/motivating/explanatory, objective/subjective, and permissive/obligatory distinctions are content distinctions, the adaptive/evaluative/practical and internal/external distinctions are domain distinctions, and the contributory/conclusive/sufficient distinction is a nonsemantic distinction. In addition, the chapter presents an extended example and an analogy with love locutions to illustrate the results. Finally, the chapter suggests a formal semantics for reasons locutions in the style of Kratzer’s semantics for modals.