Contrastive Reasons and Promotion

Snedegar, Justin

doi:10.1086/677025

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…: 113. For additional discussion of the promotion relation, see Behrends and DiPaolo (2011;2016), Coates (2014), DiPaolo and Behrends (2015), Evers (2009), Lin (forthcoming), Sharadin (2015) and Snedegar (2014). 43 Schroeder (2007: 109).…”

Section: Premise (3′) and The Overdetermination Responsementioning

confidence: 99%

Normative Source and Extensional Adequacy

Behrends

2017

JESP

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Internalists about practical reasons maintain that all of an agent’s reasons for action derive their normative force via some relation in which they stand with that agent’s pro-attitudes, or the pro-attitudes that the agent would have in some idealized set of circumstances. One common complaint against internalism is that the view is extensionally inadequate – that it cannot render the correct verdicts about what reasons agents have in a range of important cases. In this paper, I examine that charge of extensional inadequacy, taking as my starting point an argument that Derek Parfit has recently leveled against internalism. Through a close evaluation of that argument and potential replies to it, I attempt to show that internalists cannot accommodate important pre-theoretical intuitions about what reasons we have. However, I also argue that Parfit’s case is importantly overstated; I set out to show that his argument cannot establish, as he thinks it does, that no reasons derive their normative force in the way that internalists believe that all do. In doing so, I draw attention to the possibility of a hybrid position about practical reasons that, surprisingly, receives little attention in the existing literature. If the arguments of the paper succeed, I will have established a modest theoretical advantage for hybridism over internalism – namely, that it is not vulnerable to the charge of extensional inadequacy. My hope is that this goes some way toward establishing hybridism’s credentials as a serious alternative to its “pure” competitors.

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Section: Premise (3′) and The Overdetermination Responsementioning

confidence: 99%

Normative Source and Extensional Adequacy

Behrends

2017

JESP

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“…28 What it means to 'promote' a desire or interest, and in particular whether promotion is always a matter of probability increasing, is a matter of some controversy. See, for example, my Sharadin (2015aSharadin ( , 2016, Dellsén and Sharadin (unpublished), Snedegar (2014), DiPaolo and Behrends (2015), Lin (2016), Coates (2014) and Behrends and DiPaolo (2011). But in order to have some account to be getting on with, I assume a roughly probabilistic account of promotion.…”

Section: The Modal Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic instrumentalism and the reason to believe in accord with the evidence

Sharadin

2016

Synthese

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Epistemic instrumentalists face a puzzle. In brief, the puzzle is that if the reason there is to believe in accord with the evidence depends, as the instrumentalist says it does, on agents' idiosyncratic interests, then there is no reason to expect that this reason is universal. Here, I identify and explain two strategies instrumentalists have used to try and solve this puzzle. I then argue that we should find these strategies wanting. Faced with the failure of these strategies, I articulate a heretofore neglected solution on behalf of instrumentalism.

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“…The Subsets inference is similar to "basic contraction consistency" (Property α), while the Unions property is similar to "basic expansion consistency" (Property γ). 11 See [19,20].…”

Section: Inheritance-like Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deontic Reasoning Across Contexts

Snedegar

2014

Deontic Logic and Normative Systems

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Abstract. Contrastivism about 'ought' holds that 'ought' claims are relativized, at least implicitly, to sets of mutually exclusive but not necessarily jointly exhaustive alternatives. This kind of theory can solve puzzles that face other linguistic theories of 'ought', via the rejection or severe restriction of principles that let us make inferences between 'ought' claims. By rejecting or restricting these principles, however, the contrastivist takes on a burden of recapturing acceptable inferences that these principles let us make. This paper investigates the extent to which a contrastivist can do this.This paper is about deontic reasoning, or reasoning with oughts. This is very plausibly the kind of reasoning deontic logicians aim to formalize. But I am not here directly concerned with formal logical systems. Rather, I am interested in natural language inferences we can make using the English word 'ought'. In particular, I am concerned with whether a particular kind of theory of the meaning of 'ought' can explain some intuitive deontic inferences, which I take to be data that such a theory needs to explain.Insights from deontic logic are relevant for developing and evaluating accounts of natural language deontic reasoning, and vice versa. Thus, a next step in this project would be to explore proposals in deontic logic, to see what they can teach us about analogous issues in natural language deontic reasoning. Unfortunately, though, all I can do here is flag places where this strategy, of drawing on lessons from deontic logic, seems promising. Near the end of the paper, I will suggest that recent work in preference-based deontic logic, in particular, offers an interesting avenue for future development of the picture I develop.

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Contrastive Reasons and Promotion

Cited by 23 publications

References 15 publications

Normative Source and Extensional Adequacy

Normative Source and Extensional Adequacy

Epistemic instrumentalism and the reason to believe in accord with the evidence

Deontic Reasoning Across Contexts

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