Conner Schultz

Transparency is the view that the deliberative question whether to believe P gives way to the question whether P. In this paper, I argue that transparency is false. I begin by teasing out two commitments of transparency: (i) the set of possible answers to the question whether to believe P is the same set of possible answers to the question whether P; (ii) the question whether to believe P can be settled on the basis of all and only those considerations on the basis of which the question whether P can be settled. Against (i), I argue that a distinct type of suspended judgment constitutes an answer to whether to believe P, but not whether P. Against (ii), I argue that the question whether to believe P, but not the question whether P, can be settled partly on the basis of considerations about which evidential standards to use.

Must reasons be able to feature in our deliberation? Proponents of a deliberative constraint on reasons endorse an affirmative answer to this question. Deliberative constraints enjoy broad appeal and have been deployed as premises in support of a variety of controversial philosophical positions. Yet, despite their uses, deliberative constraints have not received systematic philosophical attention. This entry aims to fill this gap in the literature. First, I sketch what's at stake in the debate over whether a deliberative constraint is true. Then, I offer a taxonomy of the different versions of a deliberative constraint. Finally, I assess some of the arguments for and against a deliberative constraint.

In this paper, I argue for Strong Eliminativism—the view that there are no reasons for emotions. My argument for this claim has two premises. The first premise is that there is a deliberative constraint on reasons: a reason for an agent to have an attitude must be able to feature in that agent’s deliberation to that attitude. My argument for this premise is that in order to have reasons for an attitude, we need to be able to exhibit some relevant form of control over this attitude, and this relevant form of control is deliberative control. The second premise is that no one can deliberate to any emotion. My argument for this premise turns on the claim that there is no deliberative question that is settled by forming (or giving up) an emotion. I contend that this is so due to the well-known phenomenon of recalcitrant emotions: for any deliberative question that can be settled, there is no guarantee that the relevant emotional state will follow (or be revised). Strong Eliminativism follows from these two premises.