-
2406Instrumental RationalityIn Tim Crane (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philsophy, Routledge. 2013.This is a short introductory article. I focus on three questions: What is instrumental rationality? What are the principles of instrumental rationality? Could instrumental rationality be all of practical rationality?
-
590Two Accounts of the Normativity of RationalityJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 4 (1): 1-9. 2009.Recent views of reasons and rationality make it plausible that it can sometimes be rational to do what you have no reason to do. A number of writers have concluded that if this is so, rationality is not normative. But this is a mistake. Even if we assume a tight connection between reasons and normativity, the normativity of rationality does not require that there is always reason to be rational. The first half of this paper illustrates this point with reference to the subjective reasons account …Read more
-
1310The Normativity of RationalityPhilosophy Compass 5 (12): 1057-1068. 2010.This article is an introduction to the recent debate about whether rationality is normative – that is, very roughly, about whether we should have attitudes which fit together in a coherent way. I begin by explaining an initial problem – the “detaching problem” – that arises on the assumption that we should have coherent attitudes. I then explain the prominent “wide-scope” solution to this problem, and some of the central objections to it. I end by considering the options that arise if we reject …Read more
-
2010What is Reasoning?Mind 127 (505): 167-196. 2018.Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph Wedgwood and John Broome, and arg…Read more
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara
PhD, 2008
Southampton, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
9 more