One stark difference between the past and the future lies in our ability to shape the future in a way in which we are unable to shape the past. This paper investigates what kind of beliefs about the future serve as premises in our reasoning about how to act. If we think about belief in terms of agents representing the world, we cannot lose sight of the fact that agents are part of, and shape, the same world they represent. (...) Beliefs about the future appear to have a circularity about them: on the one hand, they serve as premises for deciding what we will do. On the other hand, what we decide we will do determines what we believe about the future. I argue that beliefs in future-directed counterfactuals play a central role in our practical reasoning and in how we conceptualize the actual future. I defend a robust distinction between future-directed counterfactuals and future-directed indicatives, and, contra Keith DeRose (2010), argue that it is future-directed counterfactuals that we use in deliberation about how to act. I argue that we construe the actual future in hypothetical terms and dependent on what we do now, in contrast to how we construe the actual past. This asymmetry in our belief content about the past versus the future fits well with an account of the open future in terms of counterfactual dependence. (shrink)

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future (...) and learn about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children's play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Counterfactual Character of Historiography Understanding Metaphysical Preliminaries Causal Counterfactual Analysis in Historiography Counterfactuals and Practical Reasoning Science and Counterfactuals References Further Reading.

The counterfactual comparative account of harm has emerged as the main contender in the recent literature on the nature of harm. But Erik Carlson argues that the account violates plausible normative principles connecting harm with our reasons to perform certain actions and to prefer certain outcomes. According to Carlson, the account implies that we have reason to perform actions and to prefer outcomes that we do not in fact possess. This paper defends the counterfactual comparative account from these objections.

Counterfactual reasoning has been used to account for many aspects of scientific reasoning. More recently, it has also been used to account for the scientific practice of modeling. Truth in a model is truth in a situation considered as counterfactual. When we reason with models, we reason with counterfactuals. Focusing on selected models like Bohr’s atom model or models of population dynamics, I present an account of how the imaginative development of a counterfactual supposition leads us from (...) reality to interesting model assumptions; how it guides our reasoning from these assumptions to interesting consequences for the model scenario via counterfactual entailment; and how it leads us back to conclusions on real target phenomena. (shrink)

These thirteen new, specially written essays by a distinguished international line-up of contributors, including some leading contemporary moral philosophers, give a rich and varied view of current work on ethics and practical reason. The three main perspectives on the topic, Kantian, Humean, and Aristotelian, are all well represented. Issues covered include: the connection between reason and motivation; the source of moral reasons and their relation to reasons of self-interest; the relation of practical reason to value, to freedom, to (...) responsibility, and to feelings. The editors' introduction provides a valuable introductory survey of the topic, putting the individual essays in context. Ethics and Practical Reason will be essential reading for scholars, postgraduates, and upper-level undergraduates working in this area. (shrink)

The motivational problem is the problem of understanding how we can have rational control over what we do. In the face of phenomena like weakness of the will, it is commonly thought that evaluation and reason can always remain intact even as we sever their connection with motivation; consequently, solving the motivational problem is thought to be a matter of figuring out how to bridge this inevitable gap between evaluation and motivation. I argue that this is fundamentally mistaken and results (...) in a conception of practical reason that is motivationally impotent. Instead, I argue, a proper understanding of evaluation and practical reason must include not only evaluative judgments but emotions as well. By analyzing the role of emotions in evaluation and the rational interconnections among emotions, desires, and evaluative judgments, I articulate a new conception of evaluation and motivation according to which there is a conceptual connection between them, albeit one that allows for the possibility of weakness of the will. (shrink)

I consider backtracking reasoning: that is, reasoning from backtracking counterfactuals such as if Hitler had won the war, he would have invaded Russia six weeks earlier. Backtracking counterfactuals often strike us as true. Despite that, reasoning from them just as often strikes us as illegitimate. A number of diagnoses have been offered of the illegitimacy of such backtracking reasoning which invoke the fixity of the past, or the direction of causation. I argue against such (...) diagnoses, and in favor of one that invokes a principle I call the fixity of reasons. Backtracking reasoning violates the fixity of reasons. But, the fixity of reasons is a principle that must be observed in order to engage in practical reasoning at all. (shrink)

We often say that one reason is stronger, or weightier, than another. These are metaphors. What does normative strength or weight really consist in? Scanlon (2014) offers a novel answer to this question. His answer appeals to counterfactuals of various kinds. I argue that appealing to counterfactuals leads to deep problems for his view.

Skeptical invariantism does not account for the intuitive connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning and this constitutes a significant problem for the position because it does not save corresponding epistemic appearances (cf. Hawthorne (2004:131-5)). Moreover, it is an attraction of fallibilist over infallibilist-skeptical views that they can easily account for the epistemic appearances about the connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning (cf. Williamson (2000:249-255)). Call this argument ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. I motivate (...) and develop a Humean, pragmatist strategy for a skeptical response to ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. Afterwards I outline a ‘toy’ version of pragmatic skepticism that can implement the strategy and save our everyday practice of assertion and practical reasoning. To this effect, I distinguish between assertibility conditions and truth conditions for ‘know’ and suggest that while assertibility conditions are pragmatic conditions sensitive to practical exigencies, truth conditions are semantic conditions sensitive only to truth. I briefly respond to three objections and conclude that pragmatic skepticism is resourceful enough to save our everyday practice of (fallibilist) assertion and practical reasoning and, hence, pay some due respect to corresponding epistemic appearances. (shrink)

If the task of theoretical reason is to discover truth, or reasons for belief, then theoretical reason is impossible. Attempts to circumvent that by appeal to probabilities are self-defeating. If the task of practical reason is to discover what we ought to do or what actions are desirable or valuable, then practical reason is impossible. Appeals to the subjective ought or to subjective probabilities are self-defeating. Adapting Karl Popper, I argue that the task of theoretical reason is to (...) obtain theories that we can agree to instate given that they appear to have greater explanatory merit than their rivals. I then argue that the task of practical reason is to decide which ought-propositions to act on. As a consequence theoretical reason is seen as a branch of practical reason. This approach makes both theoretical and practical reason practicable and free of the defects of the usual accounts. (shrink)

When we evaluate artworks, we often point to what an artist could have done or what a work could have been in order to say something about the work as it actually is. Call this counterfactual reasoning in art criticism. On my account, counterfactual claims about artworks involve comparative aesthetic judgments between actual artworks and hypothetical variations of those works. The practice of imagining what an artwork could have been is critically useful because it can help us understand how (...) artworks achieve specific aesthetic effects. I conclude by responding to an objection to my account on the basis that it violates the widely accepted acquaintance principle in aesthetics, on which aesthetic judgments must be based on firsthand perceptual encounters with their objects. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophers and philosophers of the emotions widely agree that Kant’s discussion of compassion is an unfortunate byproduct of his rationalistic and legalistic account of ethics. In fact, Kant departs from the solid established rationalist tradition not only in distancing himself from dogmatic and perfectionist rationalism but also in claiming that there is a practical use of reason, which commits him to acknowledge that reason directly guides rational agents by furnishing them motives for action. Kant’s argument is that (...) reason is not assisted by sensibility in this function. The practical function of reason is ensured only if reason produces motives of its own, autonomously, rather than depending on the emotions. To highlight the role of these two concepts, I will focus on two distinct models of compassion which are said to sharply depart from Kant: I. Murdoch and T.W. Adorno. My conclusion is that despite overwhelming critiques, Kant provides us with a useful distinction between two kinds of compassion. I deploy the distinction between proximal and distal compassion to capture the significance of the much criticized—and admittedly obsolete, but also little understood— distinction between pathological and practical compassion, which takes center stage in Kant’s account of the duties of benevolence. Proximal compassion is felt in the presence of suffering and mandates immediate action. By contrast, distal compassion is directed to suffering that is distant, e.g. placed in a distant time, either future or past or felt by persons unrelated by proximity and intimacy. While proximal compassion is not a virtue, and may even have a bad impact on moral agency, distal compassion is a virtue that requires abstraction and the exercise of rational capacities. Kant’s complex account of compassion coheres with empirical psychology and succeeds in vindicating different roles of compassion in practical reasoning. (shrink)

Certainty and Practical Reason is concerned with Kant's practical response to epistemological skepticism and radical doubt. ;It begins from Kant's remark that the concept of freedom is the keystone of the arch of reason, theoretical as well as practical, and sustains reason against skepticism; and from Kant's account of the practical motives of transcendental realism, the source of skepticism, in the First and Second Critiques. The Critiques suggest both that Kant's response to skepticism is practical, (...) and that skepticism is itself both practically motivated and associated with practical error. ;In the first chapter, it is argued that the Transcendental Analytic of the First Critique is not a final refutation of skepticism and radical doubt, and that Kant does not see it as such. The theoretical arguments of the Transcendental Analytic need to be completed with an appeal to practical reason if we are to ground Kant's starting assumption, the fact of experience. ;The second chapter considers epistemological skepticism as involving a practical error answered by the practical cure of the categorical imperative. ;The third chapter begins by considering Cartesian doubt as a practically motivated attempt to pose the problem of practical rationality, and Kant's response to this problem. It then discusses Kant's view that the transcendental realist demand for knowledge of the noumenal, which gives rise to skeptical doubt, is a pursuit of the unconditioned whose hidden meaning is practical; and explains how Kant responds to the doubt by responding to and interpreting transcendental realism as a practical project. ;The fourth chapter discusses the Critique of Judgment as a response to "enthusiasm" or the transcendental realist claim to knowledge of the unconditioned, and thereby to skepticism as well. (shrink)

It has become recently popular to suggest that knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning and that this provides an important constraint on the correct account of knowledge, one which favours subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism and classic invariantism. I argue that there are putative counterexamples to both directions of the knowledge norm. Even if the knowledge norm can be defended against these counterexamples, I argue that it is a delicate issue whether it is true, one which relies (...) on fine distinctions among a variety of relevant notions of propriety which our intuitions may reflect. These notions variously apply to the agent herself, her character traits, her beliefs, her reasoning and any resultant action. Given the delicacy of these issues, I argue that the knowledge norm is not a fixed point from which to defend substantive and controversial views in epistemology. Rather, these views need to be defended on other grounds. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Humean theories of moral motivation appear preferable to Kantian approaches only if one assumes a broadly foundationalist conception of rational justification. Like foundationalist approaches to justification generally, Humean psychology aims to counter the regress-of-justification argument by positing a set of ultimate regress-stoppers-in this case, unmotivated desires. If the need for regress-stoppers of this type in the realm of practical deliberation is accepted, desires do indeed appear to be the most likely candidate. But if (...) this foundationalist strategy is rejected, there is no longer any reason to suppose that all motivation must be traceable to some extra-rational incentive. This clears the way for a rehabilitation of the Kantian claim that reasons for action can take the form of categorical imperatives. To illustrate this thesis, I show how a conception of practical rationality that incorporates a contextualist model of justification can be developed that treats social norms as reasons for action, without assigning any mediating role to agent desires. a theory of action of this type eliminates the gap between moral obligation and action, and so articulates the fundamental Kantian intuition that acting on the basis of moral principle-and with disregard for self-interest-is just one way of acting rationally. (shrink)

Why believe Hume's Dictum, according to which there are, roughly speaking, no necessary connections between wholly distinct entities? Schaffer suggests that HD, at least as applied to causal or nomological connections, is motivated as required by the best account of of counterfactuals---namely, a similarity-based possible worlds account, where the operative notion of similarity requires 'miracles'---more specifically, worlds where entities of the same type that actually exist enter into different laws. The main cited motivations for such an account of similarity (...) are first, that some salient contexts presuppose CF asymmetry, and second, that accounts of CFs failing to presuppose CF asymmetry are epistemologically problematic, such that under conditions of determinism, the variations in initial micro-conditions needed to implement a given counterfactual antecedent would result in so many changes to macro-states that evaluation of CFs would be rendered practically impossible. Against the first reason, I argue that no non-artificial contexts presuppose CF asymmetry; against the second, I observe that such micro-variation is compatible, in principle, with significant similarity as regards macroscopic states of affairs---enough, in particular, to allow CFs to be appropriately evaluated. (shrink)

Causal reasoning is an aspect of learning, reasoning, and decision-making that involves the cognitive ability to discover relationships between causal relata, learn and understand these causal relationships, and make use of this causal knowledge in prediction, explanation, decision-making, and reasoning in terms of counterfactuals. Can we fully automate causal reasoning? One might feel inclined, on the basis of certain groundbreaking advances in causal epistemology, to reply in the affirmative. The aim of this paper is to (...) demonstrate that one still has good skeptical grounds for resisting any conclusions in favour of the automation of causal reasoning. If by causal reasoning is meant the entirety of the process through which we discover causal relationships and make use of this knowledge in prediction, explanation, decision-making, and reasoning in terms of counterfactuals, then one relies besides on tacit knowledge, as might be constituted by or derived from the epistemic faculty virtues and abilities of the causal reasoner, the value systems and character traits of the causal reasoner, the implicit knowledge base available to the causal reasoner, and the habits that sustain our causal reasoning practices. While certain aspects of causal reasoning may be axiomatized and formalized and algorithms may be implemented to approximate causal reasoning, one has to remain skeptical about whether causal reasoning may be fully automated. This demonstration will involve an engagement with Meno’s Paradox. (shrink)

Counterfactuals abound in science, especially when reasoning about and with models. This often requires entertaining counterfactual conditionals with nomologically or metaphysically impossible antecedents, namely, counternomics or counterpossibles. In this paper I defend the make-believe view of scientific counterfactuals, a naturalised fiction-based account of counterfactuals in science which provides a means to evaluate their meanings independently of the possibility of the states of affairs their antecedents describe, and under which they have non-trivial truth-values. Fiction is here understood (...) as imagination (in contrast with its most typical association with falsity), characterised as a propositional attitude of pretense or ‘make-believe’ (Walton 1990). The application of this theory to scientific counterfactuals makes their evaluation a game of make-believe: a counterfactual is (fictionally) true iff its antecedent and the rules of the game prescribe the imagining of its consequent (Kimpton-Nye 2020). The result is a practice-based account of counterfactuals and counterfactual reasoning in science which incorporates insights from theoretical and experimental analytic philosophy as well as cognitive science. This way, the make-believe view of scientific counterfactuals shows that the evaluation of scientific counterfactuals is none other than a question of scientific representation in disguise. (shrink)

This paper is about how epistemic and practical reasons for belief can be compared against one another when they conflict. It provides a model for determining what one ought to believe, all-things-considered, when there are conflicting epistemic and practical reasons. The model is meant to supplement a form of pluralism about doxastic normativity that I call ‘Inclusivism’. According to Inclusivism, both epistemic and practical considerations can provide genuine normative reasons for belief, and both types of consideration can (...) contribute to metaphysically determining what beliefs one ought, all-things-considered, to have. (shrink)

Traditional philosophy of science regards theoretical reasoning, based on the example of Euclidian geometry, as the hallmark of a mature science. There is, however, a parallel tradition of practical reasoning based on specific cases that goes back to Aristotle. In this paper I argue that practical reasoning is an essential part of the practice of chemistry and should be understood and appreciated on its own merits rather than regarded as a symbol of the immaturity and (...) inferiority of chemistry as a science. (shrink)

We present a unified approach for investigating rational reasoning about basic argument forms involving indicative conditionals, counterfactuals, and basic quantified statements within coherence-based probability logic. After introducing the rationality framework, we present an interactive view on the relation between normative and empirical work. Then, we report a new experiment which shows that people interpret indicative conditionals and counterfactuals by coherent conditional probability assertions and negate conditionals by negating their consequents. The data support the conditional probability interpretation of (...) conditionals and the narrow-scope reading of the negation of conditionals. Finally, we argue that coherent conditional probabilities are important for probabilistic analyses of conditionals, nonmonotonic reasoning, quantified statements, and paradoxes. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss the relation between practical reason and emotions in Kant. First, I begin by explaining why knowledge of emotions is important for the transcendental project in the moral domain, understood as the claim that reason can determine our actions, in spite of our inclinations. Second, I explain the definition of affects and passions in Kant's philosophy and relate the two to feelings and the faculty of desire. I then question the possibility of controlling emotions, (...) showing that it is, if not an altogether impossible task, at least a difficult one. I show that while affects present a momentary loss of control, they can still coexist with practical reason. Passions, however, may ground principles for actions, and represent a serious danger for rational mastery over inclinations. (shrink)

The article offers an account of the constructivist methodology in ethics and political philosophy as 1) deriving from an agnostic moral ontology and 2) proposing intersubjective justifiability as the criterion of justification for normative principles. It then asks whether constructivism, conceived in this way, can respond to the challenge of “content skepticism about practical reason”, namely whether it can provide sufficiently precise normative guidance whilst remaining faithful to its methodological commitment. The paper critically examines to alternative way of meeting (...) this challenge, namely John Rawls's original position and O'Neill's Kantian constructivism, analyses what is problematic about both, and endorses a third, possibly intermediate model. Within such a model, the basic features of the original position are accepted, but in a flexible and heuristic manner, thereby accommodating some of O'Neill's concerns. (shrink)

Property and Practical Reason makes a moral argument for common law property institutions and norms, and challenges the prevailing dichotomy between individual rights and state interests and its assumption that individual preferences and the good of communities must be in conflict. One can understand competing intuitions about private property rights by considering how private property enables owners and their collaborators to exercise practical reason consistent with the requirements of reason, and thereby to become practically reasonable agents of deliberation (...) and choice who promote various aspects of the common good. The plural and mediated domains of property ownership, though imperfect, have moral benefits for all members of the community. They enable communities and institutions of private ordering to pursue plural and incommensurable good ends while specifying the boundaries of property rights consistent with basic moral requirements. (shrink)

How is practical reasoning related to ethical reasoning? The most common view is that they are identical: practical reasoning just is ethical reasoning. I criticize this view and then propose an alternative account of the relation between ethical thought and practical thought: ethical reasoning is reasoning about sound practical reasoning. I argue that this account of the relation between ethics and practical reasoning explains various phenomena that more (...) familiar views leave unexplained. It also entails that the philosophy of action bears heavily on ethical inquiry. (shrink)

I argue that assertion and practical reasoning must be governed by the same epistemic norm. This is because the epistemic rule governing assertion derives from the epistemic rule governing practical reasoning, together with a plausible rule regarding assertion, according to which assertion must manifest belief.

The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assuming is (...) the right one, and that hence they have been rash to conclude that there is a conceptual relation between knowledge and practical reasoning. (shrink)

Ethics and Practical Reason, edited by Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut, contains thirteen essays, most of which were presented at a conference at the University of St. Andrews, March 23–6, 1995. The essays are preceded by the editors’ introduction in which they nicely set up the collection by explaining the dialectic among competing Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian accounts of the nature of practical reasoning, particularly in relation to ethical reasoning. What follows is but a glimpse of (...) the various essays, each of which I found to be of outstanding philosophical merit. (shrink)

What theory should we accept from the practical point of view, or accept as a basis for guiding our actions, if we don’t know which theory is true, and if there are too many plausible alternative theories for us to take them all into consideration? This question is the theme of the first three parts of this dissertation. I argue that the problem of theory acceptance, so understood, is a problem of practical rationality, and hence that the appropriate (...) grounds for theory acceptance are practical considerations. I argue for a number of principles of theory acceptance, and I explore the implications of these principles for the acceptance both of descriptive theories and evaluative theories. (shrink)

The paper constitutes a detailed critical commentary on Stephen Darwall’s Impartial Reason. Its central thesis is that Darwall’s attempt to integrate a naturalist theory of substantive reasons for acting with a neo-rationalist derivation of moral requirements from the very concept of practical rationality is faced with insurmountable theoretic problems. The author argues that anyone who would accept a plausible internalist account of reasons, that justificatory reasons for an agent to act are facts which must be capable of motivating that (...) agent under certain conditions, cannot establish on an a priori or rationalist basis claims for the intersubjective validity of reasons or substantive normative requirements of any kind, but rather must acknowledge that such claims are both irreducibly empirical and epistemically risky. (shrink)

In discussions of practical reason we often encounter the view that a fact is a reason for an agent to act only if the fact is capable of moving the agent to act. This view figures centrally in many philosophical controversies, and while taken for granted by some, it is vigorously disputed by others. In this essay I show that if the disputed position is correctly interpreted, it is well armored against stock objections and implied by a premise that (...) is not only plausible, but generally accepted by the position's critics. (shrink)

A common and plausible assumption about the relation between desires and practical reasons—namely, that if øing is an optimal way (or even just a way) for a person, P, to satisfy one of his or her desires, then P has a (normative) reason to ø. This paper discusses that assumption. Although it does not deny that desires are a source of practical reasons, it shows that in some situations, rare though not impossible, P can lack a reason to (...) ø despite having a desire that he or she could satisfy optimally by øing. (shrink)

What happens to our conception of mind and rational agency when we take seriously future-directed intentions and plans and their roles as inputs into further practical reasoning? The author's initial efforts in responding to this question resulted in a series of papers that he wrote during the early 1980s. In this book, Bratman develops further some of the main themes of these essays and also explores a variety of related ideas and issues. He develops a planning theory of (...) intention. Intentions are treated as elements of partial plans of action. These plans play basic roles in practical reasoning, roles that support the organization of our activities over time and socially. Bratman explores the impact of this approach on a wide range of issues, including the relation between intention and intentional action, and the distinction between intended and expected effects of what one intends. (shrink)

In his pre-critical lectures on rational psychology, Kant employs an argument from the I to the transcendental freedom of the soul. In the (A-edition of the) first Critique, he distances himself from rational psychology, and instead offers four paralogisms of this doctrine, insisting that ‘I think’ no longer licenses any inferences about a soul. Kant also comes alive to the possibility that we could be thinking mechanisms – rational beings, but not agents. These developments rob him of his pre-critical rationalist (...) argument for freedom. In the Groundwork, this is a serious problem; if we are not free, morality will be a phantasm for us. In Groundwork III, Kant attempts to overcome this by offering a new argument for our freedom, involving the standpoint of practical reason. In this paper, I detail these developments and present a practical and phenomenological reading of Kant’s approach in Groundwork III. I also venture a defence of this new argument. (shrink)

There is wide agreement that friendship is marked by deep and particularized care for each other. Often this care is understood as practical concern for the friend’s good. And this seems unobjectionable. But things quickly become complicated once we observe that a friend, the object of your care, is herself an agent, someone with her own projects, aims, and relationships that give her reasons for action. Caring for her as the kind of thing she is—as an agent—seems to be (...) not exhausted by a concern to benefit her, and so the reasons your friendship with her gives you will be more than just reasons to benefit her; indeed, some of these other reasons of friendship can conflict with and sometimes take priority over your reasons to benefit her. This chapter aims to trace these complications by mapping out some of the ways in which you, as someone who cares for your friend as an agent, ought to respond to her reasons—those she has on account of her own projects, aims, and relationships—and incorporate them into your own practical reasoning. (shrink)

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of (...) counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism's developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity. (shrink)

In his most recent book Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes the dominant moral system of advanced societies, which “presents itself as morality as such.” Yet, he argues, its primary function is to channel human desires into patterns that will minimize conflict amid distinctively modern economic and political arrangements. Although he appreciates how what he calls “expressionism” has unmasked this ideological function of modern morality, he points out that expressionism is also impotent to provide adequate moral guidance amidst the “conflicts of modernity.” He (...) proposes that Neo-Aristotelianism’s account of reasoning and desire has the ability to overcome the moral failings of these modern modes of thought. Yet he relies on an excessively deductive version of reason and overlooks Aristotle’s fuller account of desire. The article shows how Bernard Lonergan’s account of both provides a superior account of both Aristotle’s own writings and the actual human phenomena of reasoning and desire. (shrink)

This article points out an internal tension, or even conflict, in the conceptual foundations of Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking. Siegel justifies critical thinking, or critically rational autonomy, as an educational ideal first and foremost by an appeal to the Kantian principle of respect for persons. It is made explicit that this fundamental moral principle is ultimately grounded in the Kantian conception of autonomous practical reason as normatively and motivationally robust. Yet this Kantian conception openly conflicts with Siegel’s (...) own two-component theory of critical thinking, which on close inspection turns out to be a version of the Humean conception of instrumental practical reason as normatively and motivationally powerless. It is concluded that Siegel cannot have it both ways: he cannot appeal both to means-end and to robust rationality. Siegel’s Kantian justification of the critical thinking educational ideal is, therefore, found wanting in terms of his own Humean premises. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that the input-output behavior of some common machine learning classifiers can be captured in symbolic form, allowing one to reason about the behavior of these classifiers using symbolic techniques. This includes explaining decisions, measuring robustness, and proving formal properties of machine learning classifiers by reasoning about the corresponding symbolic classifiers. In this work, we present a theory for unveiling the _reasons_ behind the decisions made by Boolean classifiers and study some of its theoretical and (...) class='Hi'>practical implications. At the core of our theory is the notion of a _complete reason,_ which can be viewed as a necessary and sufficient condition for why a decision was made. We show how the complete reason can be used for computing notions such as sufficient reasons (also known as PI-explanations and abductive explanations), how it can be used for determining decision and classifier bias and how it can be used for evaluating counterfactual statements such as “a decision will stick even if...because....” We present a linear-time algorithm for computing the complete reasoning behind a decision, assuming the classifier is represented by a Boolean circuit of appropriate form. We then show how the computed complete reason can be used to answer many queries about a decision in linear or polynomial time. We finally conclude with a case study that illustrates the various notions and techniques we introduced. (shrink)

Practical reasons, roughly, are reasons to have our desires and goals, and to do what might secure these goals. I argue for the view that lack of freedom to do otherwise undermines the truth of judgments of practical reason. Thus, assuming that determinism expunges alternative possibilities, determinism undercuts the truth of such judgments. I propose, in addition, that if practical reason is associated with various values in a specified way, then determinism precludes such values owing to determinism's (...) imperiling practical reason. (shrink)

Synthese: An International Journal for Epistemology, Logic and Philosophy of Science, 157, 2007, 197-240. Published version available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q9402gv46t415504/fulltext.pdf.

Abstract There are at least eight good reasons practicing historians should concern themselves with counterfactual claims. Furthermore, four of these reasons do not even require that we are able to tell which historical counterfactuals are true and which are false. This paper defends the claim that these reasons to be concerned with counterfactuals are good ones, and discusses how each can contribute to the practice of history. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9817-z Authors Daniel Nolan, School (...) of Philosophy, Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, Australia Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

This book covers a broad spectrum of positions on practical reasoning—from the nihilist view that there are no legitimate forms of practical inference, and ...