Abstract
This critical study of John Broome’s Rationality Through Reasoning (i) raises some questions about the various requirements of rationality Broome formulates, pointing out some apparent gaps and counterexamples; (ii) proposes a general description of rationality that is broadly consistent with Broome’s requirements while providing them with a unifying justification, filling the gaps, and removing the counterexamples; and (iii) presents two objections to the book’s broader argument concerning the nature and importance of reasoning.
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Notes
John Broome, Rationality through Reasoning.
For the narrower formulation, see Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), 4:417.
This supplements the fuller discussion of standard-fixing accounts of rationality in Garrett Cullity, "Decisions, reasons and rationality", Section VII. That paper defines such accounts as those that impose two necessary conditions on rationality. Here, I refine those conditions and claim that they are sufficient.
In Chapter 11, Broome says he finds it plausible that rationality is normative is plausible, but cannot find a convincing argument that it is. I suggest that this idea gets its plausibility from the fact that rationality is usually derivatively normative; but that there is no convincing argument for the claim that it is itself normative, because it is not.
These are attempts to improve on the formulations offered in Cullity, "Decisions, Reasons and Rationality", pp. 72–74. For Broome’s objections to those formulations, see John Broome, "Reply to Southwood, Kearns and Star, and Cullity", pp. 104–108. One of his objections concerns a case in which you falsely believe that you have chosen a means to your intended end. The Intention-Formation Requirement still classifies cases of that kind as irrational, correctly in my view—even if we should agree with Broome that they should not be called cases of instrumental irrationality.
In fact, I would say that “seems red” is ordinarily the name of a complex state: a state in which one has the attitude of seeming-true towards the proposition that the object is red, because of the way it looks—that is, because of the distinctive phenomenology of one’s visual experience when presented with it. (So it seems—in the second sense—to me).
References
Broome, J. (2013a). Rationality through reasoning. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Broome, J. (2013b). Reply to Southwood, Kearns and Star, and Cullity. Ethics, 119, 96–108.
Cullity, G. (2008). Decisions, reasons and rationality. Ethics, 119, 57–95.
Kant, I. (1996). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785). (Gregor, M. J. Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Cullity, G. Describing rationality. Philos Stud 173, 3399–3411 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0717-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0717-0