Jordan Scott

Performances, epistemic and practical, can be understood as having aims and methods which jointly determine whether the performance was successful. In this paper, I advance a novel, structural account of the rationality of performances that draws on this aims/methods framework. Performance-rationality, I argue, is a distinct kind of structural rationality determined by internal conflict within methods (i.e. when methods have incompatible, jointly unsatisfiable steps). I argue that this account represents an important advance on structural views which are centred around incoherent combinations of mental-states. This method-based picture allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in an intuitive framework, sheds new light on the normativity of structural rationality, and offers a new way of thinking about what unifies rational norms.