Niko Kolodny
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Berkeley

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The Shadow of Reason: A Theory of Structural Rationality

When advising someone what he ought to believe or do, we sometimes try to show him that his beliefs are not plausible, or that his aims are not worthwhile.  We can call claims of this kind, which are about or the evidence for specific beliefs, or the worth of specific aims, claims about substantive reasons.  Often enough, however, we don’t directly address the reasons for or against those attitudes.  Instead, we point out that those attitudes simply don’t hang together.  “If you believe that God created all men equal, then you ought to believe that God created this man equal,” we might say. “If you mean to memorize all of that trivia, then you need to start studying.”  We can call claims of this second kind, which are merely about the relations among our attitudes, claims of structural rationality.

These claims of rationality are common not only in ordinary discourse, but also in epistemology and moral philosophy.  Many philosophers, in fact, have viewed these requirements of rationality as the core or foundation of what we ought to believe and do. On this view, either there are no substantive reasons, or these substantive reasons can be constructed from requirements of rationality.  Despite their other differences, many latter-day Humeans and Kantians, for example, take rationality to be primary in this way.  This view has many sources of appeal, not the least of which is that requirements of rationality seem obvious and uncontroversial.

While ubiquitous in theory and practice, these requirements of rationality pose two problems, which have largely gone without the attention that they are due.  The problem of significance, as I call it, is that it is obscure why we ought, or would do well, to comply with rational requirements.  Rational requirements simply call for us to organize our attitudes in certain ways.  Why should we care about this kind of psychological housekeeping?  Superficially plausible answers are often given: complying with rational requirements leads us to better supported beliefs and intentions, or is in some way constitutive of the very attitudes themselves.  As we press these familiar answers, however, we find them lacking.

The second problem, the problem of conflict, is that in certain cases, rationality seems to require us to defy reason: to oppose what the evidence supports, or what it would be valuable for us to pursue.  The upshot is that no matter how responsible we might be, we must either be irrational, or against reason.  This is what happens, I suggest, in certain well-known paradoxes of belief, such as the paradox of the preface.  Moreover, there are similar paradoxes with other attitudes, such as intention and degrees of belief.

Having elaborated these problems, The Shadow of Reason presents a positive proposal.  At its core is the suggestion that to be rational is to follow our assessment of our reasons.  This Assessment-Responsive Conception offers a unified account the content of rationality, which shows how the various particular requirements are derived from simpler and more general principles, and explains why different kinds of attitudes are governed by the requirements that they are.  I argue that the prevalent view that there are other, independent, requirements of rationality, which demand that our attitudes have contents that are logically or arithmetically coherent, is an explicable mistake.

The Assessment-Responsive Conception offers an account, partly deflationary, of the significance of rationality.  In particular, while it isn’t quite correct that we have reason to respond as rationality requires, it will always seem to us as though we have reason so to respond.  For what rationality requires, according to the Conception, is simply to respond as it seems to us that we have reason to.  The Assessment-Responsive Conception also avoids intractable conflicts between reason and rationality.  So long as we perceive our reasons accurately, complying with reason and complying with rationality are one and the same.

By representing rationality as the psychological shadow of reason, the Assessment-Responsive Conception in effect upends the idea, noted earlier, that requirements of rationality are foundational.  The book closes by investigating what becomes of the philosophical projects based on this idea, and of their perennial appeal.

Material will be drawn from:

“The Myth of Practical Consistency”

“Why Be Disposed to Be Coherent?”

“How Does Coherence Matter?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (forthcoming, uncorrected proofs)

“State or Process Requirements?,” Mind 116:462 (2007): 371–85. (A reply to John Broome's comment, “Wide or Narrow Scope?”)

“Why Be Rational?,” Mind 114:455 (2005): 509–63.