Varieties of Practical Reasoning

Front Cover
Elijah Millgram
MIT Press, 2001 - Philosophy - 487 pages

Practical reasoning is the study of how to figure out what to do. It is of particular importance to ethics. Indeed, new developments in practical reasoning promise to break through long-standing ethical and moral dilemmas. Practical reasoning also has consequences for philosophy of mind, value theory, and the social sciences. This anthology provides an overview of this important area of philosophy. Over the past two decades the field of practical reasoning has changed rapidly, with a small number of entrenched positions giving way to a healthy profusion of competing views. This book covers a broad spectrum of positions on practical reasoning--from the nihilist view that there are no legitimate forms of practical inference, and hence no such thing as practical reasoning, to inferential expressivism, which holds that our desires express commitments to arbitrarily different kinds of practical inferences (as when the desire to stay dry makes explicit the commitment to inferring the need to carry an umbrella if rain is forecast). Underlying all the contributions is the question of how one should go about determining what the legitimate forms of practical reasoning are.

 

Contents

Chapter
9
Chapter
20
Instrumentalism
49
Chapter 4
77
Chapter 5
99
Chapter 7
127
Taking Plans Seriously
203
Chapter 10
221
Chapter 13
279
Chapter 14
301
Chapter 15
331
Chapter 16
355
Chapter 17
373
The Idea of Perfection
403
Chapter 19
437
Chapter 20
465

Chapter 11
237
Chapter 12
259
Contributors
481
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Elijah Millgram is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.

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