We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in (...) order to be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps legal philosophers more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law. Of the many different possible ways of understanding "the" problem of the normativity of law, I focus here on the one insisting on the need to explain the reason- (...) class='Hi'>giving force of the law. But, I argue, once we are clear on just what reason-giving consists in, and on what claims about the reason-giving force of the law are at all plausible, accommodating the fact that the law gives reasons for action can be seen to be a pseudo-problem. In particular, not only doesn't legal positivism face an especially serious challenge here, but it can be seen to have a (modest) advantage over its competitors in accommodating one way in which the law can (perhaps) give reasons for action. (shrink)

A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps jurisprudes more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law[1]. But law is at least partially a social matter, its content at least partially determined by social practices. And how can something social and descriptive in this down-to-earth kind of way (...) be normative?[2] This is presumably a problem for any theory of law, but it is especially acute for legal positivism, according to which (roughly speaking) all there is to facts about legality are such descriptive social facts. If this is so, the thought goes, the task of accommodating the law’s normativity immediately becomes both more daunting, and more urgent[3]. Unfortunately, though, it is entirely unclear what the problem of the normativity of law is supposed to be. Indeed, I suspect that there is no one problem here, as different people seem to have in mind different problems when they use this unhelpful phrase[4]. At least one family of issues people seem to have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law is a host of issues pertaining to the reason-giving force of the law. The law, it is sometimes said, gives reasons for action, and a theory of law should accommodate this obvious fact. But even when we focus just on questions regarding the reason-giving force of the law (and from now on I will restrict myself to just those, leaving other things people may have in mind when they talk about the normativity of law for another occasion), it is still not clear what the problem is. Indeed, my main purpose in this paper is to make some progress in understanding the relevant question here. And my conclusion is going to be somewhat skeptical: Once we are clear on what reason-giving in general consists in, and on what reason-giving powers the law actually has, there is not much by way of a problem here that needs to be solved, not a deep and interesting phenomenon here that theories of law need to accommodate, and that therefore places adequacy constraints on plausible theories of the nature of law.. (shrink)

How do we change the normative landscape by making requests? It will be argued that by making requests we create reasons for action if and only if certain conditions are met. We are able to create reasons if and only if doing so is valuable for the requester, and if they respect the requestee. Respectful requests have a normative force – it will be argued – because it is of instrumental value to us that we all have the normative power (...) of creating reasons by making requests. The normative power has the potential for creating and shaping valuable interactions and relationships for the requester and the requestee. This potential could not be realized if we did not have the normative power of making requests. It will also be shown why this account of the normative force of requests should be preferred to the two alternative accounts of the reason-giving force of requests that have been put forward by James H.P. Lewis and David Enoch. (shrink)

Argument is a pervasive feature of human interaction, and in its natural contexts of occurrence, it is organized around the management of disagreement. Since disagreement can occur around any kind of speech act whatsoever, not all arguments involve a claim supported by reasons; many involve standpoints attributed to someone but claimed by no one. And although truth and validity are often at issue in naturally occurring arguments, these do not exhaust the standards to which arguers are held. Arguers hold one (...) another accountable for cooperating in the management of disagreement, infusing argumentation with a natural normativity that exists apart from any theorized appraisal standard applied to the claim-reason relationship. Argumentation’s natural normativity is visible not only in how arguments unfold in interaction but also in how humanity continuously strives to improve its methods of disagreement management. (shrink)

Argument is a pervasive feature of human interaction, and in its natural contexts of occurrence, it is organized around the management of disagreement. Since disagreement can occur around any kind of speech act whatsoever, not all arguments involve a claim supported by reasons; many involve standpoints attributed to someone but claimed by no one. And although truth and validity are often at issue in naturally occurring arguments, these do not exhaust the standards to which arguers are held. Arguers hold one (...) another accountable for cooperating in the management of disagreement, infusing argumentation with a natural normativity that exists apart from any theorized appraisal standard applied to the claim-reason relationship. Argumentation’s natural normativity is visible not only in how arguments unfold in interaction but also in how humanity continuously strives to improve its methods of disagreement management. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in current accounts of the relationship between reason giving and self knowledge. On the one hand, philosophers like Richard Moran (2001) claim that deliberation and justification can give rise to first-person authority over the attitudes that subjects form or defend on the basis of what they take to be their best reasons. On the other hand, the psychological evidence on the introspection effects and the literature on elusive reasons suggest that engaging in explicit (...) deliberation or justification leads subjects to report attitudes that are not consistent with their previous attitudes or with their future behavior. On the basis of these findings, Tim Wilson (2002) argues that analyzing reasons compromises self knowledge. I shall defend a realistic account of the effects of reason giving which is compatible with the empirical findings on introspection and also with the claim that deliberation and justification have epistemic benefits. (shrink)

It is commonplace to observe that explanations of human behavior diverge from explanations of other sorts, though it is far from commonplace to articulate exactly what this divergence amounts to. One very obvious and rather marvelous fact about explanations in the human sciences is that the subject matter talks and sometimes literally explains itself. This dissertation is an essay about what sort of difference language participation makes to explaining what language participants do. ;Currently, action theorists are recruiting insights from philosophy (...) of natural language to shed light on the relation between actions and the reason-giving statements that explain them. The four contemporary action theorists studied here maintain that certain types of thought do cause actions. And further, they maintain that from a true reason-giving statement one can infer the particular thoughts that caused an individual action. ;In Chapter I, I show how a standard model of explanation fails to reveal how reason-giving statements convey causal thoughts. In Chapter II, I try to pinpoint how a special mode of description reserved for action can be distinguished from other ways of describing occurrences. ;Different action theorists focus on different linguistic facts from which they draw their conclusions about the nature and structure of actions themselves. In Chapter III, I examine how the difference between claims of Donald Davidson and Alvin Goldman regarding individuation of actions may be traced back to their respective ways of construing the data of talk about actions. ;In Chapter IV, I examine Jennifer Hornsby's thesis that a special form of entailment follows exclusively from sentences about actions, based on their grammatical or 'surface' form. ;In Chapter V, I study the way Donald Davidson and John Searle apply 'holistic' theories of meaning to the problem of analyzing action explanations. ;Overall the results here go a modest way, only to demonstrate that we know less today than might be supposed about reasons and actions. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued for what I call the reason-giving requirement for conscientious refusal in reproductive healthcare. According to this requirement, healthcare practitioners who conscientiously object to administering standard forms of treatment must have arguments to back up their conscience, arguments that are purely public in character. I argue that such a requirement, though attractive in some ways, faces an overlooked epistemic problem: it is either too easy or too difficult to satisfy in standard cases. I close by (...) briefly considering whether a version of the reason-giving requirement can be salvaged despite this important difficulty. (shrink)

I argue that the debate about the reason-giving character of perception, and, derivatively, the contemporary debate about the nature of the conceptual content of perception, is best viewed as a confrontation with refined versions of the following three independently plausible, yet mutually inconsistent, propositions: Perceptual apprehension Some perceptions provide reasons directly Exclusivity Only beliefs provide reasons directly Bifurcation No perception is a belief I begin with an evaluation and refinement of each proposition so as to crystallize the source (...) of the difficulties that dominate our thinking about the reason-giving character of perception. I argue that the contemporary literature is broadly split between those denying Bifurcation and those denying Perceptual apprehension. Though Exclusivity, too, has been target to criticism, its grip on our thinking has all too often been underestimated. As a result, a proper denial or modification of Exclusivity is yet wanting. Overcoming Exclusivity involves a considerable challenge that has not been adequately acknowledged or met—to develop a substantive account of nonconceptual apprehension. Getting a clearer understanding of the nature, the source, and possible resolution of this challenge is the primary aim of this paper. (shrink)

Philosophers have been long interested in delusional beliefs and in whether, by reporting and endorsing such beliefs, deluded subjects violate norms of rationality (Campbell 1999; Davies & Coltheart 2002; Gerrans 2001; Stone & Young 1997; Broome 2004; Bortolotti 2005). So far they have focused on identifying the relation between intentionality and rationality in order to gain a better understanding of both ordinary and delusional beliefs. In this paper Matthew Broome and I aim at drawing attention to the extent to which (...) deluded subjects are committed to the content of their delusional beliefs, that is, to whether they can be regarded as authors of their beliefs (Moran 2001). We consider several levels of commitment one can have to a reported belief, delusional or otherwise, and we distinguish between _ownership_ and _authorship_ of beliefs (Gallagher 2000). After examining some examples of belief authoring (or lack thereof) in psychopathology, we argue that there is no straight-forward and unitary answer to the question whether deluded subjects author their beliefs. Nevertheless, introducing the notion of authorship in the debate can significantly contribute to the philosophical literature on the rationality of delusions and can also have important implications for diagnosis and therapy in psychiatry. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 13-16, December 2011.

The paper articulates a new understanding of individual responsibility focused on exercises of agency in reason-giving rather than intentional actions or attitudes towards others. Looking at how agents make sense of their actions, we identify a distinctive but underexplored space for assessing individual responsibility within collective actions. As a case in point, we concentrate on reason-giving for one's own involvement in systemic corruption. We characterize systemic corruption in terms of its public ‘unavowability’ and focus on the (...) redescriptions to which corrupt agents typically resort to vindicate their actions. Through a multidimensional approach to reason-giving, we show that the individual rationalisations these redescriptions point to are necessarily less-than-successful since they keep thedifferent categories of reasons involved in making sense of one’s own conduct misaligned. We argue that this involves a kind of tainted reasoning at the interface between epistemic vice and epistemic disadvantage. We then consider such test cases as self-deception, wilful ignorance, and actions on ‘autopilot’ to show that tainted reasoning is constitutive of systemic corruption, not merely caused by it. On this ground, we expound a new view of responsibility centred on reason-giving as the epistemic core which all responsibility assessments track. To demonstrate the interest of this view, we compare it with existing alternatives revolving around the ideas of accountability and attributability. We conclude by showing how our understanding of responsibility can shed new light on the analysis and normative assessment of an agent’s responsible ignorance. (shrink)

Arguments figure prominently in our practices of reason-giving. For example, we use them to advance reasons for their conclusions in order to justify believing something, to explain why we believe something, and to persuade others to believe something. Intuitively, using arguments in these ways requires a certain degree of self-reflection. In this paper, I ask: what cognitive requirements are there for using an argument to advance reasons for its conclusion? Towards a partial response, the paper’s central thesis is (...) that in order to so use an argument one must believe the associated inference claim to the effect that the premises collectively are reasons that support the conclusion. I then argue against making it a further cognitive requirement that one be aware of one’s justification for believing such an inference claim. This thesis provides a rationale for the typical informal-logic textbook characterization of argument and motivates a constraint on adequate accounts of what are referred to as inference claims in the informal logic and argumentation literatures. (shrink)

This paper explores why respondents to a telephone public-opinion survey often give reasons for answering as they do, even though reason-giving is neither required nor encouraged and it is difficult to see the reasons as attempts to deal with disagreement. We find that respondents give reasons for the policy claims they make in their answers three times as frequently as they give reasons for value or factual claims, that their reasons tend to involve appeals to personal experience, and (...) that they often talk about their thought processes, especially when the evidentiary stakes are high. We then explore several ways of explaining these findings. We suggest that one useful approach is to see the reason-giving in the survey interviews as deliberative, reflexive argumentation of the sort described as `critical thinking. We further suggest that the reason such argumentation is often conducted out loud in the interviews, rather than internally, is that it functions in the service of rhetorical ethos, in particular the need to display the fact that one is human, with human autonomy and agency. Doing this may be particularly important in contexts such as anonymous survey interviews in which people are at risk of being treated like machines. (shrink)

Critics often argue that Ross’s metaphysical and epistemological accounts of all-things-considered duties suffer from the problem of explanation. For Ross did not give us any clear explanation of the combination of pro tanto duties, i.e. how principles of pro tanto duties can combine. Following from this, he did not explain how we could arrive at overall justified moral judgements. In this paper, I will argue that the problem of explanation is not compelling. First of all, it is based on the (...) classical account of pro tanto duties. Principles of pro tanto duties can be understood in another way, i.e. in terms of reason-giving account that might be of help to provide a response to the critics. Furthermore, critics fail to see some evidence in Ross about how we can arrive at moral judgements. (shrink)

Arguments, understood initially as premise-conclusion complexes of propositions, figure in our practices of giving reasons. Among other uses, we use arguments to advance reasons to explain why we believe or did something, to justify our beliefs or actions, to persuade others to do or to believe something, and (following Pinto 2001b) to advance reasons to worry or to fear that something is true. This book is about our uses of arguments to advance their premises as reasons for believing their (...) conclusions, i.e., as reasons for believing that their conclusions are true. The focus here is reason-giving centered on such reason-to-believe uses of arguments. Accordingly, the book does not discuss uses of arguments to advance their premises as reasons for believing that the conclusion is plausible, compelling, reasonable, nontrivial, helpful, plausibly deniable, or possible in principle. For ease of reference, hereafter I'll refer to uses of arguments to advance their premises as reasons for believing that their conclusions are true simply as reason-giving uses of argument. The book focuses on reason-giving uses of arguments that have three features, put briefly as follows. (shrink)

Epistemic infinitism is one of the logically possible responses to the epistemic regress problem, claiming that the justification of a given proposition requires an infinite and non-circular structure of reasons. In this paper, I will examine the dialectic between the epistemic infinitist and the regress skeptic, the sort of skeptic that bases his attack to the possibility of justification on the regress of reasons. I aim to show that what makes epistemic infinitism appear as well-equipped to silence the regress skeptic (...) is the very same thing that renders it susceptible to a powerful skeptical assault by the regress skeptic. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the Reasonability View: the position that medical professionals seeking a conscientious exemption must state reasons in support of their objection and allow those reasons to be subject to evaluation. Recently, this view has been criticized by Jason Marsh as proposing a standard that is either too difficult to meet or too easy to satisfy. First, I defend the Reasonability View from this proposed dilemma. Then, I develop this view by presenting and explaining some of the (...) central criteria it uses to assess whether a conscientious objection is proper grounds for extending an exemption to a medical practitioner. (shrink)

In their own way, inferentialists and interactionists both trace the roots of reflective reasoning to practices and skills for making, assessing, and responding to public performances in communicative practices of giving and asking for reasons. Inferentialists have developed the idea mostly on conceptual grounds. Interactionists ask, in a more empirical spirit, why and how such practices and skills might have evolved. Thus they promise complementary “anthropological” insights of foremost interest to inferentialists. But interactionist theories advance a number of controversial (...) claims that deserve careful scrutiny. In this essay I focus on one such claim: namely that confirmation bias can be plausibly explained as a design feature that promotes postulated functions of interactive reasoning. And I argue that each of three extant proposals fails to make the claim good. (shrink)

The rapid development of large language models (LLM’s) and of their associated interfaces such as ChatGPT has brought forth a wave of epistemic and moral concerns in a variety of domains of inquiry...

By promising, requesting and commanding we can give ourselves and each other reasons for acting as promised, requested, and commanded. Call this our capacity to give reasons robustly. According to the triggering account, we give reasons robustly simply by manipulating the factual circumstances in a way that triggers pre-existing reasons. Here I claim that we ought to reject the triggering account. By focusing on David Enoch’s sophisticated articulation of it, I argue that it is overinclusive; it cannot adequately distinguish between (...) threats and robust reason-giving; and it cannot adequately explain why epistemic reasons cannot be robustly given. I suggest that when we give reasons robustly, we do so directly, without explanatory intermediaries. (shrink)

The central problem of the ‘normativity of law’ concerns how legal rules or directives give us reasons for actions. The core of this question is how something that is external to the agent, such as legal rules or directives, can be ‘part of the agent’, and how they can guide the agent in performing complex actions (such as legal rule-following) that persist over time. David Enoch has denied that the normativity of law poses any interesting challenge to theories of law. (...) He argues that law provides reasons for actions in terms of what he calls triggering-reasons and he advances the view that because there are many circumstances in which reasons are triggered, law does not pose a special challenge. According to Enoch, once we understand the way that triggering reasons operate, we can understand how legal rules and directives provide us with reasons for actions. In §II of this paper, I set the stage for the debate and establish a set of principles that emerge from the common sense of view of reasons for actions and argue that any theory of reasons for action should provide a coherent explanation of these key principles. I focus on the idea that a satisfactory account of reasons for action should also explain reasons in actions. In §III I explain briefly the different theories of reasons for action and locate Enoch’s conception of reasons for action as triggering-reasons within this theoretical framework. In §IV I show that Enoch’s conception of reasons for actions does not explain some of the key features or principles that emerge from our common sense view of reasons for action and nor does it explain reasons in actions.Resumen:El problema central de la ‘normatividad del derecho’ versa sobre cómo las reglas o directrices jurídicas nos dan razones para la acción. El núcleo de esta cuestión reside en cómo algo que es externo al agente, tal como las reglas o directrices jurídicas, pueden ser ‘parte del agente’, y cómo pueden guiar a ese agente al llevar a cabo acciones complejas (tal como la obediencia de las reglas) que persisten en el tiempo. David Enoch ha negado que la normatividad del derecho presente algún reto interesante a las teorías del derecho. Arguye que el derecho provee razones para la acción en términos de lo que él llama razones detonantes (triggering-reasons) y propone la perspectiva de que, dado que hay muchas circunstancias bajo las cuales se detonan las razones, el derecho no plantea ningún reto especial. De acuerdo con Enoch, una vez que entendemos la manera en que operan las razones detonantes, podemos comprender cómo las reglas y directrices jurídicas nos proveen razones para la acción. En la sección II de este artículo, fijo el escenario para el debate y establezco una serie de principios que emergen de la visión de sentido común sobre las razones para las acciones, y sostengo que cual- quier teoría de las razones para la acción debería proporcionar una explicación coherente de estos principios clave. Me centro en la idea de que una concepción satisfactoria de las razones para la acción también debe- ría explicar las razones en las acciones. En la sección III, explico brevemente las diferentes teorías de las razones para la acción y ubico la concepción de Enoch de razones para la acción como razones detonantes (triggering-reasons) dentro de este marco teórico. En la sección IV muestro que la concepción de Enoch de razones para las acciones no explica algunas de las principales características o principios que emergen de nuestra visión de las razones para la acción basada en el sentido común, ni tampoco explica las razones en las acciones. (shrink)

This chapter considers whether legal requirements can constitute reasons for action independently of the merits of the requirement at hand. While jurisprudential opinion on this question is far from uniform, sceptical views are becoming increasingly dominant. Such views typically contend that, while the law can be indicative of pre-existing reasons, or can trigger pre-existing reasons into operation, it cannot constitute new reasons. This chapter offers support to a somewhat less sceptical position, according to which the fact that a legal requirement (...) has been issued can be a reason for action, yet one that is underpinned by bedrock values which law is apt to serve. Notions discussed here include a value-based conception of reasons as facts ; a distinction between complete and incomplete reasons ; and David Enoch’s idea of triggering reason-giving. Following a discussion of criticism against the view adopted here, the chapter concludes by considering some more ‘robust’ conceptions of law’s reason-giving capacity. (shrink)

I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don't have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. By my asking, I managed to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason- (...) class='Hi'>giving consist in? And how is it that we can do it? In this paper, I characterize what I call robust reason giving, the kind present in requests. I distinguish it from epistemic and merely triggering reason-giving, I discuss in detail the phenomenology of robust reason-giving, and I offer an analysis of robust reason-giving in terms of the complex intentions of the reason-giver and of the normative background. (shrink)

According to John McDowell and Bill Brewer, our experiences have the type of content which can be the content of judgements - content which is the result of the actualization of specific conceptual abilities. They defend this view by arguing that our experiences must have such content in order for us to be able to think about our environment. In this paper I show that they do not provide a conclusive argument for this view. Focusing on Brewer’s version of the (...) argument, I show that it rests on a questionable assumption - namely, that if a subject can recognize the normative bearing of a mental content upon what she should think and do, then this content must be the result of the actualization of conceptual capacities (and in this sense conceptual). I argue that considerations regarding the roles played by experience and concepts in our mental lives may require us to reject this assumption. (shrink)

Both because of the vagueness of the word ‘give’ when speaking about giving reasons, and because we lack an adequate definition of ‘reasons’, there is a harmful ambiguity in the expression ‘giving reasons’. Particularly, straightforwardly identifying argumentation with reasons giving would make of virtually any interplay a piece of argumentation. Besides, if we adopt the mainstream definition of reasons as “considerations that count in favour of doing or believing something”, then only good argumentation would count as argumentation. (...) In this paper, I defend a qualified characterization of argumentation as reasons giving that is shown to be fruitful for shedding light on the practice of giving reasons, and an inferentialist conception of reasons that makes room for speaking of “bad reasons” and, consequently, makes it possible to talk of argumentation as reasons giving even if we are talking about bad argumentation. (shrink)

Both because of the vagueness of the word ‘give’ when speaking about giving reasons, and because we lack an adequate definition of ‘reasons’, there is a harmful ambiguity in the expression ‘giving reasons’. Particularly, straightforwardly identifying argumentation with reasons giving would make of virtually any interplay a piece of argumentation. Besides, if we adopt the mainstream definition of reasons as “considerations that count in favour of doing or believing something”, then only good argumentation would count as argumentation. (...) In this paper, I defend a qualified characterization of argumentation as reasons giving that is shown to be fruitful for shedding light on the practice of giving reasons, and an inferentialist conception of reasons that makes room for speaking of “bad reasons” and, consequently, makes it possible to talk of argumentation as reasons giving even if we are talking about bad argumentation. (shrink)

In their article, ‘Responsibility, Second Opinions, and Peer-Disagreement—Ethical and Epistemological Challenges of Using AI in Clinical Diagnostic Contexts,’ Kempt and Nagel argue for a ‘rule of disagreement’ for the integration of diagnostic AI in healthcare contexts. The type of AI in question is a ‘decision support system’, the purpose of which is to augment human judgement and decision-making in the clinical context by automating or supplementing parts of the cognitive labor. Under the authors’ proposal, artificial decision support systems which produce (...) automated diagnoses should serve chiefly as confirmatory tools; so long as the physician and AI agree, the matter is settled, and the physician’s initial judgement is considered epistemically justified. If, however, the AI-DSS and physician disagree, then a second physician’s opinion is called on to resolve the dispute. While the cognitive labour of the decision is shared between the physicians and AI, the final decision remains at the discretion of the first physician, and with it the moral and legal culpability. The putative benefits of this approach are twofold: healthcare administration can improve diagnostic performance by introducing AI-DSS without the unintended byproduct of a responsibility gap, and assuming the physician and AI disagree less than the general rate of requested second opinions, and the AI’s diagnostic accuracy supersedes or at least …. (shrink)

I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don't have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. What exactly happened here? Your having the reason to read my draft – indeed, the very fact that there (...) is such a reason – depends, it seems, on my having asked you to read it. By my asking, I managed to make it the case that you have such a reason, or to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason-giving consist in? And how is it that we can do it? In the next section, I distinguish between purely epistemic reason-giving, merely triggering reason-giving, and the kind of reason-giving I will be primarily interested in, the kind presumably involved in requests, which I call robust reasongiving. Then, in section 3, I try to characterize in some detail the intuitive or phenomenological data. I try, in other words, to clarify what it is we want an account of robust reason-giving to accommodate. But at the end of section 3 it remains entirely open whether any possible account in fact satisfies the desiderata elaborated in that section. In section 4 I thus proceed to inquire whether such an account is there to be found. I argue that the only plausible way of making sense of robust reason-. (shrink)

Is there a world beyond the senses? Can we perceive future events before they occur? Is it possible to communicate with others without need of our complex sensory-perceptual apparatus that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years? Can our minds/souls/personalities leave our bodies and operate with all the knowledge and information-processing ability that is normally dependent upon the physical brain? Do our personalities survive physical death?

In Giving Reasons: A Linguistic-pragmatic-approach to Argumentation Theory (Springer, 2011), I provide a new model for the semantic and pragmatic appraisal of argumentation. This model is based on a characterization of argumentation as a second order speech-act complex. I explain the advantages of this model respecting other proposals within Argumentation Theory, such as Pragma-dialectics, Informal Logic, the New Rhetoric or the Epistemic Approach.

_Giving Reasons_ prepares students to think independently, evaluate information, and reason clearly across disciplines. Accessible to students and effective for instructors, it provides plain-English exercises, helpful appendices, and a variety of online supplements.

En Giving Reasons: A Linguistic-pragmatic-approach to Argumentation Theory (Springer, 2011), propongo un nuevo modelo para la evaluación semántica y pragmática de la argumentación. Este modelo se basa en una caracterización de la argumentación como un acto de habla compuesto de segundo orden. Explico las ventajas de este modelo respecto de otras propuestas dentro de la Teoría de la Argumentación, tales como la Pragma-dialéctica, la Lógica Informal, la Nueva Retórica o el Enfoque Epistémico.

I ask you to X. You now have a reason to X. My request gave you a reason. How? One unpopular theory is the epistemic account, according to which requests do not create any new reasons but instead simply reveal information. For instance, my request that you X reveals that I desire that you X, and my desire gives you a reason to X. Peter Schaber has recently attacked both the epistemic account and other theories of the (...) reason-giving force of requests. Schaber defends a new theory of the reason-giving force of requests according to which request give reasons because it is valuable for requesters and requestees that requests have this power. In this paper I argue that Schaber's attack on the epistemic account fails, and that his own theory ought to be rejected because it faces compelling objections. (shrink)

The most long-standing criticism of virtue ethics in its traditional, eudaimonistic variety centers on its apparently foundational appeal to nature in order to provide a source of normativity. This paper argues that a failure to appreciate both the giving and taking of reasons in sustaining an ethical outlook can distort a proper understanding of the available options for this traditional version of virtue ethics. To insist only on giving reasons, without also taking (maybe even considering) the reasons provided (...) by others, displays a sadly illiberal form of prejudice. The paper finds and criticizes such a distortion in Jesse Prinz’s recent discussion of the ‘Normativity Challenge’ to Aristotelian virtue ethics, thus highlighting a common tendency that we can helpfully move beyond. (shrink)

What justifies practices of “standing”? Numerous everyday practices exhibit the normativity of standing: forbidding certain interventions and permitting ignoring them. The normativity of standing is grounded in facts about the person intervening and not on the validity of her intervention. When valid, directives are reasons to do as directed. When interventions take the form of directives, standing practices may permit excluding those directives from one’s practical deliberations, regardless of their validity or normative weight. Standing practices are, therefore, puzzling – forbidding (...) giving reasons and, if given, permitting disregarding such reasons. What justifies standing practices are the values that they protect, including privacy, autonomy, independence, valuable relationships, and equal respect. These values count in favor of standing’s duty against certain interventions and, when these duties of non-intervention are breached, the values underpinning those duties count in favor of standing’s permission to discount or exclude those interventions from one’s practical deliberations – the normative weight of those interventions notwithstanding. (shrink)

Bermejo-Luque, Lilian. Giving Reasons. A Linguistic-Pragmatic Approach to Argumentation Theory Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s10503-011-9258-z Authors C. Andone, Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam, The Netherlands Journal Argumentation Online ISSN 1572-8374 Print ISSN 0920-427X.