Practical Reasoning

This chapter discusses two contemporary pictures of practical reasoning. According to the Rule-Guidance Conception, roughly, practical reasoning is a rule-guided operation of acquiring (or retaining or giving up) intentions to come to meet synchronic requirements of rationality. According to the Reasons-Responsiveness Conception, practical reasoning is, roughly, a process of responding to apparent reasons. Its standards of correctness derive from what we objectively have reason to do, if things are as we suppose them to be. I argue that a version of the latter has some significant advantages. This has some surprising consequences for how we should conceive of the structure and process of instrumental reasoning in particular.