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Introduction: Practical reasoning and normativity

Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do. It may be distinguished from theoretical reasoning, which is reasoning about what to believe. Many important philosophical questions arise about practical reasoning. One set of questions concerns the normativity of practical reasoning. There are two, ostensibly quite different, kinds of normative considerations at play within practical reasoning. First, there are principles of rationality. These govern practical reasoning in the sense that they impose limits of what counts as correct practical reasoning. Second, there are a range of considerations that bear upon what agents ought to do: reasons, values, principles of morality and prudence, and so on. The articles in this special issue are all concerned in one way or another with the task of better understanding these two kinds of normative phenomena, the relations between them and how they bear upon practical reasoning. The authors of the first three articles in the volume – Michael Bratman, Andrew Reisner and Elijah Millgram – are all concerned principally with how to understand the principles of rationality that structure our practical reasoning. Michael Bratman’s article, ‘Intention Rationality’, presents an account of the normativity of certain central principles of practical rationality, specifically, intention consistency and means–ends coherence. Bratman aims to steer a middle course between a ‘myth view’ on the one hand, that denies that these principles have any genuine normativity, and a ‘cognitivist view’ that seeks to derive their normativity from principles of theoretical rationality, on the other. He concludes that the best way to make sense of the normativity of intention consistency and means–ends coherence is to regard these principles as stemming from reasons of self-governance. Andrew Reisner’s article, ‘Unifying the Requirements of Rationality’, offers a diagnosis of the debate between those like John Broome (2007), who hold that principles of practical rationality are principally synchronic and have wide scope, and those like Niko Kolodny (2005), who hold that they are principally diachronic and have narrow scope. According to Reisner, this stems from two fundamental desiderata of a satisfactory theory of practical rationality, that it be both evaluative and action-guiding. Reisner argues that these two desiderata cannot be fulfilled at the same time. This suggests a deep schism within practical rationality; instead of a unified theory of rationality, it may be that we should accept a hybrid theory.