Fitting things together : coherence and the demands of structural rationality /
Some combinations of attitudes, beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears and so on, don't fit together right. They are incoherent. A natural idea is that there is a class of rational requirements, the requirements of structural rationality, that forbid these incoherent states....
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2021].
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| Summary: | Some combinations of attitudes, beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears and so on, don't fit together right. They are incoherent. A natural idea is that there is a class of rational requirements, the requirements of structural rationality, that forbid these incoherent states. Yet there are surprisingly deep challenges that arise for this natural idea. First, there are challenges about how these requirements relate to "substantive" rational requirements, that require us to have attitudes that are supported by good reasons. Second, there are challenges about what, if anything, unifies the diverse class of instances of incoherence. And third, there are challenges about how, if at all, facts about coherence are normatively significant. These challenges have led many philosophers to deny that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality after all. And even the most prominent philosophers that do believe in requirements of structural rationality have often been reticent to defend the claims that such requirements are unified or normatively significant, or to give accounts of how this could be so. By contrast, this book provides a sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from, and irreducible to, substantive rationality, and of the view that it is unified and normatively significant. In developing a theory of structural rationality, it also aims to show how such a theory can help to illuminate numerous standing debates in both ethics and epistemology. |
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| Physical Description: | xvii, 335 pages ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [319]-328) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197608142 0197608140 |