Abstract

Hard Truths is an important book in its own right. It is also the latest contribution to a complex and impressive project that Elijah Milligram has been developing from his first book onwards. There he characterized practical induction as a type of reasoning that enables agents to learn from experiences of the new and the unfamiliar, agents whose inferences are from beliefs that they have formed either ‘in ways that have a suitable amount to do with [their] truth’, or, when ‘the appeal to truth is unhelpful’, in ways that underwrite such inferences as they are committed to drawing . In his introduction to his anthology on practical reasoning, Millgram catalogued the presently competing theories of practical reasoning, posing the question: what kind of reasoning should we employ in deciding between the claims of rival theories? The subtitle of his third book , ‘Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory’, already suggests its central thesis, that we should first survey the range of theories of practical reasoning , should then identify which moral theory it is with which each theory of practical reasoning is paired , should next decide which theory of practical reasoning is correct , and, finally, should adopt the moral theory paired with that theory of practical reasoning. There are at least three clusters of problems that badly need extended attention, if the claims of these three books are to be sustained: one concerning the account of truth presupposed by Millgram, a second to do with the inferences that we need to employ, and a third concerning the unity of reasoning agents. All three provide Hard Truths with subject-matter, but Millgram’s principal focus is ….