Abstract
I argue for a commitment-discharging condition of reasoning, according to which to engage in reasoning is to discharge the theoretical and practical commitments one has undertaken. I highlight the ways in which this condition is distinct from other proposals, particularly the Taking Condition, and argue that it can explain certain intuitions about reasoning that otherwise remain elusive. In particular, I argue that the commitment-discharging condition can provide a unified account of attitude-formation and premise-discharging reasoning as well as practical and theoretical reasoning. It also provides a novel way to evade the regress that bedevils many accounts of inference.
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Notes
In this paper, I use “reasoning” and “inferring” interchangeably.
As is clear, all such norms are formulated objectively. But the norms can be also formulated subjectively. For example, one is entitled to undertake a cognitive commitment if one has evidence for it. Or one might abandon a cognitive commitment only if one finds evidence against it. Of course, I accept that such formulations are also correct. But I think the objective formulations are more fundamental and that they can also explain the subjective formulation. For example, it is because ‘cognitive commitment ought to be true’ that ‘you ought to have evidence for your cognitive commitments’ (see for example Wedgwood, 2002, p. 276).
Marcus (2021) offers a way to avoid the regress that has some affinities with my view. As he puts it, “I address the problem of regress by arguing that possession of the concept of entailment includes the knowledge that if p entails q, then the truth of p guarantees the truth of q. Thus, the belief that (p and p → q) → q is already part of what it is to believe the premises {p, p → q}” (pp. 110–111). As is clear, for Marcus it is part of possessing the concept of entailment that one believes the conclusion, while on my account it is a constitutive norm of the concept of belief. So while Marcus focuses on the content of premises, I focus on the force of the premises, namely the attitude that is held towards the content. One obvious advantage of my view is that I can explain why supposition, but not imagination, behaves like belief in theoretical reasoning. This is so because such attitudes have a similar normative constitution. On Marcus’s view, it should be part of the very concept of entailment that only belief and supposition, and not imagination, are subject to this rule of reasoning—which is somehow weird. This is further to the fact that my account is independently motivated by the committive conception of belief and its fulfillment norm.
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I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Synthese for their perceptive comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Kazemi, A. Reasoning and commitment. Synthese 202, 91 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04308-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04308-x