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Needs, Facts, Goodness, and Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2017

Extract

In this paper I want to explore certain parallels between the logic of action and the logic of belief or, as it might otherwise be put, between practical and theoretical reasoning and rationality. The parallels will be seen to involve an ontological dimension as well as psychological and linguistic dimensions. It may help to begin by mentioning how I was drawn into an examination of these parallels. This was through becoming convinced of the correctness of an externalist account of reasons for action, having been persuaded of this by, amongst other things, arguments found in Jonathan Dancy's recent book on the subject, Practical Reality. Externalism about reasons for action appeared to me to be, on reflection, the only view that one could plausibly adopt in conjunction with a libertarian account of free will—the latter being a position which I am now convinced is not only coherent but entirely defensible and indeed correct. Oddly enough, however, recent debates concerning internalist versus externalist accounts of reasons for action tend to have been dominated by moral philosophers, whereas those concerning compatibilist versus libertarian accounts of free will tend to have been dominated by philosophers of action. As a consequence of this, the two debates have been carried on relatively independently of each other—in my view, to the detriment of both. The present paper is part of a larger exercise of trying to bring them together.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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References

1 See Dancy, Jonathan, Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

2 See Davidson, Donald, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).Google Scholar

3 See Donald Davidson, ‘Freedom to Act’, in his Essays on Actions and Events.

4 For a fuller account, see my ‘Personal Agency’, in O'Hear, Anthony (ed.), Minds and Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 I have in mind here Mackie, J. L.'s famous ‘argument from queerness’: see his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 3842Google Scholar.

6 See Armstrong, D. M., A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Ogden, C. K. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 1Google Scholar.