About this topic
Summary

Rational requirements, as the expression has come to be used, are requirements of coherence – for instance, the requirements to be consistent in your beliefs and in your intentions, and to intend what you take to be the necessary means to the ends you intend. The central questions about such requirements include: (i) how are rational requirements best formulated? For instance, should we accept so-called wide- or narrow-scope formulations of rational requirements (ii) Are there reasons to comply with rational requirements (that is, to be coherent)? If not, in what sense, if any, is rationality normative? (iii) How do rational requirements relate to other kinds of requirements (for instance, requirements of morality or prudence) and other normative notions, such as reasons, ‘ought’, and good reasoning?

Key works Much recent work on this topic takes off from Broome 1999 and Kolodny 2005
Introductions Way 2010
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367 found
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  1. What ought probably means, and why you can’t detach it.Stephen Finlay - 2009 - Synthese 177 (1):67 - 89.
    Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing 'detaching problems' by their failure to license modus ponens. I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems. I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for 'ought'. The semantics for 'ought' that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an end-relational theory (...)
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  2. Imre Lakatos and a Theory of Rationality.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    In this comprehensive work on theories of rationality, Leslie Allan builds on the seminal insights of Imre Lakatos. Allan begins by critically reviewing Lakatos' theory of rationality (MSRP) and his meta-theory of rationality (MHRP) and suggesting improvements to his scheme. Allan's main task is developing a theory of rationality that avoids Lakatos' Achilles' heel; the presupposition that science is a rational enterprise. To achieve this, he attempts to draw out from the general demands of an objectivist epistemology the various criteria (...)
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  3. Towards an Objective Theory of Rationality.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    Drawing on insights from Imre Lakatos' seminal work on theories of rationality, Leslie Allan develops seven criteria for rational theory choice that avoid presuming the rationality of the scientific enterprise. He shows how his axioms of rationality follow from the general demands of an objectivist epistemology. Allan concludes by considering two weighty objections to his framework.
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  4. Are There Any Good Reasons?Danny Frederick - manuscript
    David Miller argues that there are no good reasons, either sufficient or insufficient. I show that most of his arguments are invalid or unsound. Several of his arguments depend upon the false claim that every deductively valid argument is circular. I accept one of Miller's arguments for the conclusion that there are no good reasons which are less-than-sufficient. I accept one of his arguments to the conclusion that there are no probative sufficient reasons. But I explain how there are epistemic (...)
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  5. On the Normativity of Rationality and of Normative Reasons.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - manuscript
    This paper is an early draft of something that we've polished up and posted above: n-1 Guilty Men. Check that one out, if interested.
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  6. Neo-Sellarsian Metaphilosophy.T. Parent - manuscript
    This draft now appears (in revised form) as the Preamble to _Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_. See http://philpapers.org/rec/PARSFT-3.
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  7. What rationality is.Arif Ahmed -
    A choice function C is rational iff: if it allows a path through a sequence of decisions with a particular outcome, then that outcome is amongst the ones that C would have chosen from amongst all the possible outcomes of the sequence. This implies, and it is the strongest definition that implies, that anyone who is irrational could be talked out of their own preferences. It also implies weak but non-vacuous constraints on choices over ends. These do not include alpha (...)
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  8. State or process requirements?John Gardner - manuscript
    Mind 116:462 (2007): 371–85. (A reply to John Broome’s comment, “Wide or Narrow Scope?”).
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  9. Uniqueness and Modesty: How Permissivists Can Live on the Edge.Darren Bradley - forthcoming - Mind.
    There is a divide in epistemology between those who think that, for any hypothesis and set of total evidence, there is a unique rational credence in that hypothesis, and those who think that there can be many rational credences. Schultheis offers a novel and potentially devastating objection to Permissivism, on the grounds that Permissivism permits dominated credences. I will argue that Permissivists can plausibly block Schultheis' argument. The issue turns on getting clear about whether we should be certain whether our (...)
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  10. The Extended Theory of Instrumental Rationality and Means-Ends Coherence.John Brunero - forthcoming - Philosophical Inquiries.
    In Rational Powers in Action, Sergio Tenenbaum sets out a new theory of instrumental rationality that departs from standard discussions of means-ends coherence in the literature on structural rationality in at least two interesting ways: it takes intentional action (as opposed to intention) to be what puts in place the relevant instrumental requirements, and it applies to both necessary and non-necessary means. I consider these two developments in more detail. On the first, I argue that Tenenbaum’s theory is too narrow (...)
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  11. Hypocrisy and Conditional Requirements.John Brunero - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper considers the formulation of the moral requirement against hypocrisy, paying particular attention to the logical scope of ‘requires’ in that formulation. The paper argues (i) that we should prefer a wide-scope formulation to a narrow-scope formulation, and (ii) this result has some advantages for our normative theorizing about hypocrisy – in particular, it allows us to resist several of Daniela Dover’s (2019) recent arguments against the anti-hypocrisy requirement.
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  12. Ends and Persons: A Transcendental Argument.David DeMatteo - forthcoming - Episteme: An Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper makes a transcendental argument. It assumes the normative validity of the instrumental principle, and then investigates the conditions of its validity. Ultimately, it argues that there are three necessary conditions for its validity. Firstly, agents must be rationally capable of regarding themselves as having a single self that possesses the same reasons, ends, and means. Secondly, agents must be rationally capable of distinguishing themselves from other selves that possess ends. Thirdly, these two conditions must actually obtain, which means (...)
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  13. When Things Fail to Fit Together.Daniel Fogal - forthcoming - Analysis.
    Critical Notice of Alex Worsnip's 'Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality' (OUP 2021).
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  14. Coherence as Joint Satisfiability.Samuel Fullhart & Camilo Martinez - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    According to many philosophers, rationality is, at least in part, a matter of one’s attitudes cohering with one another. Theorists who endorse this idea have devoted much attention to formulating various coherence requirements. Surprisingly, they have said very little about what it takes for a set of attitudes to be coherent in general. We articulate and defend a general account on which a set of attitudes is coherent just in case and because it is logically possible for the attitudes to (...)
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  15. Review of Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality[REVIEW]Benjamin Kiesewetter - forthcoming - Mind.
  16. Belief and Settledness.Wooram Lee - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper elucidates the sense in which belief is a question-settling attitude. In her recent work, Jane Friedman suggests that we understand the settledness of belief in terms of a normative principle about belief and inquiry: one ought not inquire into a question and believe the answer to the question at the same time. On the basis of the distinction between dispositional and occurrent belief, I argue against Friedman that there is no principle linking belief and inquiry that is both (...)
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  17. Permissiveness in morality and epistemology.Han Li & Bradford Saad - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Morality is intrapersonally permissive: cases abound in which an agent has more than one morally permitted option. In contrast, there is a dearth of cases in which an agent has more than one epistemically permitted response to her evidence. Given the structural parallels between morality and epistemology, why do sources of moral permissiveness fail to have parallel permissive effects in the epistemic domain? This asymmetry between morality and epistemology cries out for explanation. The paper's task is to offer an answer (...)
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  18. The Mental States First Theory of Promising.Alida Liberman - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Most theories of promising are insufficiently broad, for they ground promissory obligation in some external or contingent feature of the promise. In this paper, I introduce a new kind of theory. The Mental States First (MSF) theory grounds promissory obligation in something internal and essential: the mental state expressed by promising, or the state that promisors purport to be in. My defense of MSF relies on three claims. First, promising to Φ expresses that you have resolved to Φ. Second, resolving (...)
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  19. Objectivism and Subjectivism in Epistemology.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Veli Mitova (ed.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology. Cambridge University Press.
    There is a kind of objectivism in epistemology that involves the acceptance of objective epistemic norms. It is generally regarded as harmless. There is another kind of objectivism in epistemology that involves the acceptance of an objectivist account of justification, one that takes the justification of a belief to turn on its accuracy. It is generally regarded as hopeless. It is a strange and unfortunate sociological fact that these attitudes are so prevalent. Objectivism about norms and justification stand or fall (...)
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  20. Are there counterexamples to the consistency principle?Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - Episteme:1-18.
    Must rational thinkers have consistent sets of beliefs? I shall argue that it can be rational for a thinker to believe a set of propositions known to be inconsistent. If this is right, an important test for a theory of rational belief is that it allows for the right kinds of inconsistency. One problem we face in trying to resolve disagreements about putative rational requirements is that parties to the disagreement might be working with different conceptions of the relevant attitudes. (...)
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  21. Bootstrapping and Persuasive Argumentation.Guido Melchior - forthcoming - Argumentation:1-22.
    That bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning fail to instantiate persuasive argumentation is an often informally presented but not systematically developed view. In this paper, I will argue that this unpersuasiveness is not determined by principles of justification transmission but by two straightforward principles of rationality, understood as a concept of internal coherence. First, it is rational for S to believe the conclusion of an argument because of the argument, only if S believes sufficiently many premises of the argument. Second, if S (...)
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  22. How should your beliefs change when your awareness grows?Richard Pettigrew - forthcoming - Episteme:1-25.
    Epistemologists who study credences have a well-developed account of how you should change them when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they boast a diverse range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of possibilities and propositions you have not entertained before; that is, when your awareness grows. In this (...)
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  23. Suspension, entailment, and presupposition.Luis Rosa - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-17.
    The paper is concerned with the rational requirements for suspended judgment, or what suspending judgment about a question rationally commits one to. It shows that two purported rational requirements for suspended judgment cannot both be true at the same time, at least when the entailment relation between questions is understood a certain way. The first one says that one is rationally required to suspend judgment about those questions that are entailed by the questions that one already suspends judgment about. The (...)
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  24. Responsibility for Rationality: Foundations of an Ethics of Mind.Sebastian Schmidt - forthcoming - New York: Routledge.
    How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and in ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. Responsibility for Rationality is the first book that connects recent debates on responsibility and on rationality in a unifying dialectic. It achieves four main goals: first, it reinterprets the problem of responsibility (...)
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  25. Isolating Correct Reasoning.Alex Worsnip - forthcoming - In Magdalena Balcerak Jackson & Brendan Balcerak Jackson (eds.), Reasoning: New Essays on Theoretical and Practical Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This paper tries to do three things. First, it tries to make it plausible that correct rules of reasoning do not always preserve justification: in other words, if you begin with a justified attitude, and reason correctly from that premise, it can nevertheless happen that you’ll nevertheless arrive at an unjustified attitude. Attempts to show that such cases in fact involve following an incorrect rule of reasoning cannot be vindicated. Second, it also argues that correct rules of reasoning do not (...)
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  26. Imperfection, Accuracy, and Structural Rationality.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1095-1116.
    Structural requirements of rationality prohibit various things, like having inconsistent combinations of attitudes, having means-end incoherent combinations of attitudes, and so on. But what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? And do we fall under an obligation to be structurally rational? These issues have been at the heart of significant debates over the past fifteen years. Some philosophers have recently argued that we can unify the structural requirements of rationality by analyzing what is constitutive of our attitudes (...)
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  27. What is Structural Rationality?Wooram Lee - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2):614-636.
    The normativity of so-called “coherence” or “structural” requirements of rationality has been hotly debated in recent years. However, relatively little has been said about the nature of structural rationality, or what makes a set of attitudes structurally irrational, if structural rationality is not ultimately a matter of responding correctly to reasons. This paper develops a novel account of incoherence (or structural irrationality), critically examining Alex Worsnip’s recent account. It first argues that Worsnip’s account both over-generates and under-generates incoherent patterns of (...)
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  28. The very idea of rational irrationality.Spencer Paulson - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (1):3-21.
    I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and being (...)
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  29. Generalized Immodesty Principles in Epistemic Utility Theory.Alejandro Pérez Carballo - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (31):874–907.
    Epistemic rationality is typically taken to be immodest at least in this sense: a rational epistemic state should always take itself to be doing at least as well, epistemically and by its own light, than any alternative epistemic state. If epistemic states are probability functions and their alternatives are other probability functions defined over the same collection of proposition, we can capture the relevant sense of immodesty by claiming that epistemic utility functions are (strictly) proper. In this paper I examine (...)
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  30. Structural Rationality and the Property of Coherence.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (1):170-194.
    What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...)
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  31. Rational Norms for Degreed Intention (and the Discrepancy between Theoretical and Practical Reason).Jay Jian - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):360-374.
    Given the success of the formal approach, within contemporary epistemology, to understanding degreed belief, some philosophers have recently considered its extension to the challenge of understanding intention. According to them, (1) intentions can also admit of degrees, as beliefs do, and (2) these degreed states are all governed by the norms of the probability calculus, such that the rational norms for belief and for intention exhibit certain structural similarity. This paper, however, raises some worries about (2). It considers two schemes (...)
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  32. Structural Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter & Alex Worsnip - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality – including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, synchronic or diachronic, and whether they govern processes (...)
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  33. The ranges of reasons and creasons.Clayton Littlejohn - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-10.
    In this discussion, we look at three potential problems that arise for Whiting’s account of normative reasons. The first has to do with the idea that objective reasons might have a modal dimension. The second and third concern the idea that there is some sort of direct connection between sets of reasons and the deliberative ought or the ought of rationality. We can see that we might be better served using credences about reasons (i.e., creasons) to characterise any ought that (...)
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  34. Resolutions Against Uniqueness.Kenji Lota & Ulf Hlobil - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1013–1033.
    The paper presents a new argument for epistemic permissivism. The version of permissivism that we defend is a moderate version that applies only to explicit doxastic attitudes. Drawing on Yalcin’s framework for modeling such attitudes, we argue that two fully rational subjects who share all their evidence, prior beliefs, and epistemic standards may still differ in the explicit doxastic attitudes that they adopt. This can happen because two such subjects may be sensitive to different questions. Thus, differing intellectual interests can (...)
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  35. Refusing the COVID-19 vaccine: What’s wrong with that?Anne Meylan & Sebastian Schmidt - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (6):1102-1124.
    COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...)
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  36. What kind of reason does incoherence provide?Keshav Singh - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-9.
    In this commentary, I raise a few questions about Schmidt’s argument against (R-E): whether facts about incoherence are directly reasons for suspension on particular propositions, as opposed to reasons against sets of attitudes; whether (R-E) should really be formulated in terms of a broad category of “doxastic attitudes” that includes transitional attitudes like suspension; and whether incoherence-based reasons really must fit into the category of “epistemic reasons,” as opposed to be a more general category of right-kind reasons. Though my questions (...)
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  37. Being Rational Enough: Maximizing, Satisficing, and Degrees of Rationality.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):111-127.
    ABSTRACT Against the maximizing conception of practical rationality, Michael Slote has argued that rationality does not always require choosing what is most rational. Instead, it can sometimes be rational to do something that is less-than-fully rational. In this paper, I will argue that maximizers have a ready response to Slote’s position. Roy Sorensen has argued that ‘rational’ is an absolute term, suggesting that it is not possible to be rational without being completely rational. Sorensen’s view is confirmed by the fact (...)
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  38. Human-Centered AI: The Aristotelian Approach.Jacob Sparks & Ava Wright - 2023 - Divus Thomas 126 (2):200-218.
    As we build increasingly intelligent machines, we confront difficult questions about how to specify their objectives. One approach, which we call human-centered, tasks the machine with the objective of learning and satisfying human objectives by observing our behavior. This paper considers how human-centered AI should conceive the humans it is trying to help. We argue that an Aristotelian model of human agency has certain advantages over the currently dominant theory drawn from economics.
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  39. The Limits of Partial Doxasticism.Facundo M. Alonso - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):326-345.
    Doxasticism is the thesis that intention is or involves belief in the forthcoming action (Velleman, Harman). Supporters claim that it is only by accepting that thesis that we can explain a wide array of important phenomena, including the special knowledge we have of intentional action, the roles intention plays in facilitating coordination, and the norms of rationality for intention. Others argue that the thesis is subject to counterexample (Davidson, Bratman). Yet some others contend that the thesis can be reformulated in (...)
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  40. Rationality and Normativity.John Brunero - 2022 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Wiley.
    This entry considers the question of whether rationality is normative; that is, the question of whether one always ought (or, more weakly, has a reason) to be rational. It first distinguishes substantive from structural rationality, noting how structural rationality presents a more serious challenge to the thesis that rationality is normative. It then considers the plausibility of skepticism about structural rationality, and notes some problems facing such skepticism. However, if we are not skeptics about structural requirements, we face the task (...)
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  41. Immodesty and permissivism.Marc-Kevin Daoust & David Montminy - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-21.
    What is the relationship between Immodesty and Permissivism? For permissivists, epistemically rational agents are sometimes permitted to take incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P. Immodesty is a requirement governing our estimations or beliefs about our own credences and standards. If agents believe that their standards and credences are not among the most truth-conducive ones available to them, they are not immodest. Some philosophers think that Immodesty is incompatible with Intrapersonal Permissivism :41–56, 2014, J Philos 116:237–262, 2019). Others think that Immodesty can (...)
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  42. Absence of evidence against belief as credence 1.Andrew del Rio - 2022 - Analysis 83 (1):31-39.
    On one view of the traditional doxastic attitudes, belief is credence 1, disbelief is credence 0 and suspension is any precise credence between 0 and 1. In ‘Rational agnosticism and degrees of belief’ (2013) Jane Friedman argues, against this view, that there are cases where a credence of 0 is required but where suspension is permitted. If this were so, belief, disbelief and suspension could not be identified or reduced to the aforementioned credences. I argue that Friedman relies on two (...)
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  43. Smithies on Self-Knowledge of Beliefs.Brie Gertler - 2022 - Analysis 81 (4):782-792.
    This commentary focuses on Smithies’ views about self-knowledge. Specifically, I examine his case for the striking thesis that rational thinkers will know all their beliefs. I call this the ubiquity of self-knowledge thesis. Smithies’ case for this thesis is an important pillar of his larger project, as it bears on the nature of justification and our ability to fulfill the requirements of rationality. Section 1 outlines Smithies’ argument for the ubiquity of self-knowledge. Section 2 sets the stage for a detailed (...)
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  44. Money-Pump Arguments.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Suppose that you prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. Your preferences violate Expected Utility Theory by being cyclic. Money-pump arguments offer a way to show that such violations are irrational. Suppose that you start with A. Then you should be willing to trade A for C and then C for B. But then, once you have B, you are offered a trade back to A for a small cost. Since you prefer A to B, you (...)
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  45. Rationality is Not Coherence.Nora Heinzelmann - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):312-332.
    According to a popular account, rationality is a kind of coherence of an agent’s mental states and, more specifically, a matter of fulfilling norms of coherence. For example, in order to be rational, an agent is required to intend to do what they judge they ought to and can do. This norm has been called ‘Enkrasia’. Another norm requires that, ceteris paribus, an agent retain their intention over time. This has been called ‘Persistence of Intention’. This paper argues that thus (...)
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  46. The Real Myth of Coherence.Wooram Lee - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1211-1230.
    In this paper, I offer a novel view of the coherence (or structural) requirements on belief and intention, according to which they are not norms, but rather principles describing how your belief and intention operate. I first argue, on the basis of the unintelligibility of some relevant attitudes-reports, that there are conditions under which you simply do not count as believing or intending unless your beliefs and intentions satisfy the requirements: the conditions under which all of your relevant attitudes are (...)
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  47. Pyrrhonism Past and Present: Inquiry, Disagreement, Self-Knowledge, and Rationality.Diego E. Machuca - 2022 - Cham: Springer.
    This book explores the nature and significance of Pyrrhonism, the most prominent and influential form of skepticism in Western philosophy. Not only did Pyrrhonism play an important part in the philosophical scene of the Hellenistic and Imperial age, but it also had a tremendous impact on Renaissance and modern philosophy and continues to be a topic of lively discussion among both scholars of ancient philosophy and epistemologists. The focus and inspiration of the book is the brand of Pyrrhonism expounded in (...)
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  48. Nonrational Belief Paradoxes as Byzantine Failures.Ryan Miller - 2022 - Logos and Episteme 13 (4):343-358.
    David Christensen and others argue that Dutch Strategies are more like peer disagreements than Dutch Books, and should not count against agents‘ conformity to ideal rationality. I review these arguments, then show that Dutch Books, Dutch Strategies, and peer disagreements are only possible in the case of what computer scientists call Byzantine Failures—uncorrected Byzantine Faults which update arbitrary values. Yet such Byzantine Failures make agents equally vulnerable to all three kinds of epistemic inconsistencies, so there is no principled basis for (...)
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  49. Minimal Rationality: Structural or Reasons-Responsive?Jean Moritz Müller - 2022 - In Christine Tappolet, Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (eds.), A Tribute to Ronald de Sousa.
    According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...)
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  50. Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality.Richard Pettigrew - 2022 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James' ideas in 'The Will to Believe', proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It's called epistemic utility (...)
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