Abstract

Austin lamented philosophers' obsession with justifications and disregard for other forms of reasoned defense. He urged attention to another way in which reasons function, which he described in terms of "excuses" and "the opposite number of excuses". I articulate a conception of reasons founded on Austin's distinction. The conception is heterogeneous, in that it construes reasons as defined by an inherent duality of function: their roles in both justifying and making excuses. The conception applies uniformly in both speculative and practical philosophy, and while my argument focuses primarily on its value for epistemology, it also emerges as central to the philosophy of agency. Basically, the distinction is between reasons' role in the subject's rationale for doing or thinking something, and their role in sorting out subject-independent grounds for so doing or thinking. Whenever someone believes or does something, appropriate rational challenges to and defenses of it may occur on either side of this distinction. ;I describe Gettier-type scenarios as involving one's having a good excuse or rationale without thereby being justified in the sense required by justified true belief accounts of knowing. My analysis of such scenarios explains why they look like, and why they cannot be, counter examples to tripartite accounts of knowing. The crux is that the justification condition demands rationales that harmonize with the grounds of truth of the belief they support. A kind of calibration between reasons in both roles is presupposed by the mere attainability of such harmony. ;This analysis raises the questions what it is for a rationale to harmonize with the subject-independent grounds of whatever it supports, and how it happens that people's excuses sometimes capture pertinent justifications. I offer a reading of Kant's practical philosophy that addresses these questions. It reveals an underlying insight that unifies Kantian thought across the practical-speculative divide: that rational subjects' placement as both doers and thinkers in the natural world is founded on the interplay between subjective and objective modes of thought. The heterogeneous conception of reasons yields a most natural way of rendering that Kantian insight