Practical reason and the structure of actions

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Publication Type Journal Article
School or College College of Humanities
Department Philosophy
Creator Millgram, Elijah
Title Practical reason and the structure of actions
Date 2005-08-24
Description A wave of recent philosophical work on practical rationality is organized by the following implicit argument: Practical reasoning is figuring out what to do; to do is to act; so the forms of practical inference can be derived from the structure or features of action. Now it is not as though earlier work, in analytic Philosophy;, had failed to register the connection between action and practical rationality; in fact, practical reasoning was usually picked out as, roughly, reasoning directed toward action. But for much of the twentieth century, attention moved quickly away from this initial delineation of the subject area, to the interplay of beliefs and desires within the mind (Humean theories, including their Davidsonian and Williamsian variants), or to procedures for checking that a plan of action was supported by sufficient yet consistent reasons (Kantian theories), or to the ultrarefined sensibilities of the practically intelligent reasoner (Aristotelian theories). The hallmark of the emerging family of treatments to be surveyed here is, first, the sustained attention paid to answering the question, "What does it take to be an action (at all)?", and second, the use made of a distinction between full-fledged action and its lesser relatives. (Characterizations and terminology vary, but often the less robust alternative is called "mere activity" or "mere behavior".) Very schematically, these arguments for a theory of practical reasoning try to show that reasons brought to bear on choice must have some particular logical form, if action is not to lapse into something less than that.
Type Text
Publisher The Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University
Subject Practical reasoning; Inference; Philosophy
Subject LCSH Act (Philosophy;); Reason; Criticism
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Millgram, E. (2006). Practical Reason and the Structure of Actions. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy;, Spring 2006, 11p. Retrieved July 12, 2006 from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/practical-reason-action/
Rights Management (c) Elijah Millgram
Format Medium application/pdf
Identifier ir-main,305
ARK ark:/87278/s6mk6xds
Setname ir_uspace
ID 705923
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6mk6xds