Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality PDF
Preview Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality
ALEXW ORSNIP Fitting Things Together Fitting Things Together Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality ALEX WORSNIP 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Worsnip, Alex, author. Title: Fitting things together : coherence and the demands of structural rationality / Alex Worsnip. Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031183 (print) | LCCN 2021031184 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197608142 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197608159 (updf) | ISBN 9780197608173 (oso) |ISBN 9780197608166 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Practical reason. Classification: LCC BC177 .W67 2021 (print) | LCC BC177 (ebook) | DDC 128/.33—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031183 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031184 DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197608142.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America For Jess, Without whom I would not fit together Contents Preface Lx Acknowledgme11ts xv PART 1 DUALISM ABOUT RATIONALITY DEFENDED 3345 1. Getting Structural (Ir)ralionality into View 359 2. A Rough Account of SubstantiveR ationality 3. Eliminations and Reductions 1 4. Eliminations and Reductions 11 PART II A THEORY OF STRUCTURAL RATIONALITY 5. Unifyingt he Lnstanceso f incoherence l27 6. Requirements ofStructurnl Rationality 165 7. Talk About Structural Rationality 196 8. The Normativity of Structural Rationallly 235 PART III DRAWING SOME LESSONS 9. Upshots for Other Debates 281 Coda: The Tyranny of Value 315 知jere,ICes 319 Ind扛 329 Preface Wilfrid Sellars famously wrote that “the aim of philosophy, abstractly formu- lated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”1 This book is about how a fairly specific kind of thing—n amely, attitudinal mental states such as beliefs, credences, desires, intentions, preferences, hopes, and fears—h ang (or don’t hang) together in a fairly specific sense, namely that of being co- herent, or structurally rational. Obviously, I’ll have much more to say about the notion of structural ra- tionality in due course, and I’ll introduce some central examples in §1.1. But, to give you some initial idea of what I mean, structural rationality (po- tentially) includes things like intending the means to one’s ends, respecting one’s own judgments about what one ought to do (and believe), having con- sistent beliefs, having credences that obey the probability axioms, having preferences that aren’t cyclical, and many other examples. The primary aim of this book is to defend the view that structural ration- ality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phe- nomenon. Let me briefly explain these claims in turn. • When I say that it is genuine, I mean that being coherent genuinely amounts to a kind of rationality (and that being incoherent genuinely amounts to a kind of irrationality). • When I say that it is autonomous, I mean that it is both distinct from and not reducible to what I will call substantive rationality, or reasons- responsiveness. According to me, structural and substantive ration- ality are two distinct but equally genuine kinds of rationality, neither of which can be explained in terms of the other. I call this part of my view dualism about rationality. • When I say that it is unified, I mean that there is something that unifies the instances of coherence and that unifies the instances of incoherence. 1 Sellars (1963: 1). x Preface • And when I say that it is normatively significant, I mean (roughly) that facts about the structural (ir)rationality of possible sets of attitudes bear on whether we ought (not) to have, or do something that results in our (not) having, those attitudes. In arguing for these claims, I also offer a positive theory of structural ration- ality: of the nature and form of its requirements, of the semantics of our talk about it, of what unifies its instances, and of the way in which it is norma- tively significant. A further aim of the book is to explore the ways in which both dualism about rationality and the specific theory of structural rationality that I defend have tangible consequences for existing debates in (meta)ethics and episte- mology. This book draws a lot of distinctions. Works like this one can feel like they engage in distinction- mongering for its own sake, and the debates of which they are part can seem only to concern how to chop up concepts. I’ll try to show that, at least in this case, this is not so: the view I defend does not leaves things as they were. It has ramifications for a wide range of philo- sophical debates, including those about moral rationalism, neo-K antianism in ethics, ideal attitudes accounts of reasons, rational choice theory in social science, Bayesian conditionalization, higher-o rder evidence, the normativity of logic, and epistemic permissivism. There has been a recent spate of philosophical books on rationality2 (as well as countless journal articles). Why yet another? To explain the need for this book, I will take the opportunity to briefly situate my view in relation to the existing literature about rationality. Some literature on rationality proceeds without even considering the possibility of distinguishing substantive and structural rationality, simply employing an undifferentiated, monistic notion of rationality. Though this sort of approach is becoming rarer, it persists in much of epistemology. Many epistemologists take it to be a “truism” or a “platitude” that rationality, as it applies in the doxastic domain, is concerned with one’s taking the doxastic attitudes that one’s evidence supports: in other words, with responding correctly to one’s evidential reasons.3 Indeed, more or less tacitly, they as- sume that it is exclusively concerned with this. (In this respect, the episte- mological literature contrasts sharply with the practical rationality literature, 2 E.g., Broome (2013), Kiesewetter (2017), Wedgwood (2017), Lord (2018), Henning (2018), and Brunero (2020). 3 See, among many others, Williamson (2000: 164), Kelly (2006: §2), Cohen (2013: 99).
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