Samuel Steadman

Wilfrid Sellars’ image of the space of reasons provides a valuable way of envisioning agency, and particularly, of envisioning the special way that agency can be interpreted and explained. This paper seeks to determine what sort of reason constitutes the space of reasons, that is, what sort of reason makes this special form of interpretation and explanation possible. Because the space of reasons enables us to explain agents’ errors, we would seem to need reasons that obtain even when agents are mistaken about their normative situations. This points in the direction of reasons that are subjective, in the sense that they arise within agents’ minds. But by drawing on Donald Davidson’s principle of charity, which governs the interpretation and explanation of agency, we can show that the space of reasons is constituted by mind-independent normative reasons. Moreover, by drawing on Davidson’s externalism, we can show that normative reasons are real and that they command causal power.

Reasons are essentially addressed to agents. Many contemporary efforts to illuminate this feature of reasons effectively reduce them to features of agents, e.g., to rationally-pruned desires, plans, or roles. Such reductive accounts neglect a second feature of reasons, namely, their capacity to transcend agential nature. They also neglect a feature of agents, namely, their orientation to normative entities as entities that transcend—and thus, that can guide and give shape to—agential nature. This dissertation offers a conception of the relation running from reasons to agents that captures both the transcendent character of reasons and the transcended character of agents. I synthesize two strains of thought about reasons. The first captures their formal dependence on agency, which is manifested in each reason’s being essentially a reason for some agent to do or think something. The second captures their substantive independence from agency, which is manifested in the fact that reasons needn’t answer to what agents are like. These two strains of thought can be united in a single conception, but only if the elaboration of the formal features of reasons isn’t taken to license the reduction of reasons to features of agents. In fact, unifying the two in a single conception requires that the relevant agential features be themselves depicted as formally dependent on features of reasons, so that the explanatory landscape for the philosophy of reasons and agents is properly represented in terms of the symmetric relations of a circle, rather than the asymmetric relations of reduction. This refusal to reduce is best framed by primitivism about reasons, i.e., the view that characterizes the idea of reason as primitive. But such a primitivism must nevertheless supply the materials for an account of the practical thought by which agents can receive reasons as addressed to them. I seek to demonstrate how an idea can be primitive while at the same time supplying those materials, and thereby explaining the possibility of practical thought.