Contextuality in Practical Reason
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Price - - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1pt2: Reviews Contextuality in Practical Reason. Clarendon Press, Pp. Simon Kirchin - - Philosophy 84 2: Price, Contextuality in Practical Reason.
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Robert Audi - - Routledge. Ethics and Practical Reason. Intrinsic Contextuality as the Crux of Consciousness.
Proceedings of Toward a Science of Consciousness: This makes acceptable certain patterns of inference that would otherwise license counter-intuitive conclusions. What reasons for action are ascribable to an agent depends both on the context of action, and on the deliberative context. Facts tell in favor of actions against a background of particular circumstances, and in ways whose relevance to an ascription to an agent of a reason for action depends upon the perspective within which the ascription is made.
Reasoning with Conditionals 4. He taught previously at York and Oxford. It is these stimulating ideas that make this book a very rewarding read. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Academic Skip to main content. Choose your country or region Close.
Ebook This title is available as an ebook. One consequence that Price draws from the above is the falsehood of a thesis he calls "logicism. For logicism, as understood by Price, is not just the claim that standard logic suffices to capture our criteria for valid practical reasoning; Price has certainly cast doubt on this idea.
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But Price's denial of logicism is also meant to imply that practical inference is not subject to a distinctive "formal logic of its own. I fail to see that this has been established. Presumably contemporary logic has more resources on offer than the ones exploited by Hare and Kenny, so Price's pessimism seems a bit hasty. Why should it be impossible to define a connective that intuitively expresses an appropriate means-end relation? Semantic interpretations for a language containing this connective might, for example, employ a suitable function from pairs of contexts sets of worlds, say and agents onto sequences of items.
This, these people may say, is a platitude that is true of almost any old type of sentence. Here, detachment is plausible in simply "[matching] an economy of means to an economy of effect. The last part of Price's book presents an account of reasons for action that is supposed to underwrite these claims. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. Facts tell in favor of actions against a background of particular circumstances, and in ways whose relevance to an ascription to an agent of a reason for action depends upon the perspective within which the ascription is made. The second part of the account is a contextualist treatment of a certain kind of reason ascription and a corresponding moderate particularist 'metaphysics' of reasons. Space, Time, and Stuff Frank Arntzenius.
These items could serve to represent relevant ends, available means and much else, relative to the agent and context. A logic with some such connective might fare better at licensing only inferences that preserve "practicality", or so it seems. Anyway, no matter how you like this particular sketch: Price has simply not shown that nothing of this kind could be made to work.
Contextuality in Practical Reason. A. W. Price. An original approach to practical reason; Context and reasons are two of the hottest topics in. A. W. Price, Contextuality in Practical Reason, Oxford University Press, , pp., $ (hbk), ISBN Reviewed by Tim.
Price then turns to judgments containing practical modalities like "ought" and "must. This contextualist theory has the most interesting results in connection with conditionals containing "must" and "ought". Price's discussion of practical conditionals starts with a familiar problem from Hare.
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Consider these two apparently conflicting conditional "ought"-statements:. Price agrees with Hare that, intuitively, the relation between 1 and 2 "is not one of straightforward inconsistency" So it seems that there must be more to the logical form of at least one of them than meets the eye. Price discusses a popular proposal to the effect that some "ought"s take wide scope over conditionals, and that at least in some such cases it is not possible to 'detach' the consequent of such a conditional by affirming the antecedent. Interpreting either 1 or 2 along these lines will thus avoid inconsistency.
However, as Price shows, it is not easy to understand conditionals thus interpreted.
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In showing this, he examines at some length J. Broome's influential theory of "normative requirements" as Broome calls non-detachable wide-scope "ought"-conditionals. Price starts by arguing that many of Broome's examples of requirements are inadequate; he then finds a more plausible way to explain what requirements might express in a proposal by J.
According to Dancy, requirements should be seen as expressing a ban against certain combinations of acts and attitudes. His example is hypocrisy: So according to the interpretation of requirements that Price finds most plausible, they are subject to a rule of contraposition.
But this rule is counterintuitive when applied to most of the conditionals we seek to understand. Taking up Dancy's example, Price points out that our judgments about hypocrisy are too asymmetrical to allow for contraposition; for "[the sincere man] models his words and actions on his thoughts, and not his thoughts on his words and actions" Thus the question is "whether Broome can intelligibly ground the asymmetry without licensing detachment" 83 -- and, according to Price, he cannot. Price then offers an alternative view of conditional "ought"s, according to which something akin to detachment is in fact permitted, but the Hare-intuition about 1 and 2 can still be respected.
Price's strategy is, not surprisingly, a contextualist one.
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He starts with detailed proposals as to how the logical form of conditional "ought"-statements is to be represented, to the effect that, among other things, they do not permit contraposition. However, the main result is that such conditionals, rightly understood, allow for what Price labels "quasi-detachment", but only defeasibly. This defeasibility is, at least in part, due to the context sensitivity of "ought.