Fitting Things Together

Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality

Alex Worsnip (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

360 Seiten

2022
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-760814-2 (ISBN)

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Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's reasons.

In Fitting Things Together, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics.

Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon.

Alex Worsnip is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works primarily in epistemology, ethics, and the theory of rationality. He is the author of over twenty articles in leading philosophy journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Ethics, and Noûs.

Preface
Part I: Dualism about Rationality Defended
Chapter 1 Getting Structural (Ir)rationality into View
Chapter 2 A Rough Account of Substantive Rationality
Chapter 3 Eliminations and Reductions I
Chapter 4 Eliminations and Reductions II
Part II: A Theory of Structural Rationality
Chapter 5 Unifying the Instances of Incoherence
Chapter 6 Requirements of Structural Rationality
Chapter 7 Talk about Structural Rationality
Chapter 8 The Normativity of Structural Rationality
Part III: Drawing Some Lessons
Chapter 9 Upshots for Other Debates
Coda The Tyranny of Value
References

Erscheinungsdatum	02.11.2021
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	239 x 164 mm
Gewicht	649 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
Themenwelt	Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik
ISBN-10	0-19-760814-0 / 0197608140
ISBN-13	978-0-19-760814-2 / 9780197608142
Zustand	Neuware