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The Inference to the Best Means1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Stephen L. Darwall
Stephen L. Darwall*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Extract

Some recent writers on practical reasoning have had it that reasoning about what to do differs in logical structure from theoretical reasoning. In particular, Anthony Kenny and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that there are permissible inferences in practical reasoning which lack analogues in theoretical reasoning. Such discussions seem inevitably to draw their impetus from what Aristotle had to say on the topic, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 49 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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Footnotes

1

This paper is based on one read at the April, 1974 meetings in St. Louis of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association. I am indebted to Phillip Montague and Alvin Goldman and to the editors of the Canadian journal of Philosophy for their comments and questions.

References

2 This is essentially Kenny's rendering of Metaphysics 1032bl9f. See his “Practical Inference,” Analysis, XXVI (1966), p. 65Google Scholar. See also Anscombe, Intention, pp. 57ff.

3 The principle of inference involved here has an obvious theoretical analogue (‘p’, ‘p if and only if q’, therefore ‘q’) and thus we may treat it as uncontroversial for our purposes.

4 Most writers take ‘good’ to be the practical analogue of ‘true’. In using the construction ‘A is to be done’, rather than ‘It would be good if A were done’, I follow Kurt Baier (and, by the way, Kenny's construal of Aristotle's argument). See Baier, “Reason and Experience,” Nous, VII (1973), pp. 56–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nothing critical hangs on this. All the points I wish to make could as easily have been made by substituting ‘It would be good if A were done’ everywhere I have ‘A is to be done’.

5 See, e.g., Kenny, p. 67.

6 Harman, Gilbert “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” Philosophical Review LXXIV (1965), pp. 88–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Harman doesn't actually give such a schema, but it seems to accurately represent what he does say on the top of page 89.

8 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 411. All other references to Rawls will consist in page numbers placed in parentheses in the text.