Statement on practical reasoning

By “practical reasoning” I shall understand reasoning about what to do. Doing something includes as the most elementary case (1) the immediate initiation of a change in the agent itself (typically a movement of some part or parts of its body). More complex cases are (2) the immediate initiation of a series of bodily movements and (3) adoption of an intention to initiate a sequence of bodily movements later (a “plan”, which may be only partially elaborated at first). Typically the actions to be performed will not be described in terms of how the agent moves the parts of its body (and indeed it may be somewhat indeterminate what bodily movements will constitute the action), but rather in terms of what function the movement of the parts of the body will amount to, e.g. calling someone on the telephone and asking them a certain question. (4) Plans may be logically complex, including for example disjunctions or conditions. (5) More general than a plan is a policy, which is the carrying out of a certain plan whenever specified conditions obtain (e.g. whenever I want to walk across a street, do so only when it is safe). More complex still are (6) cases where the agent is not an individual human being but an organization of human beings–an academic department, a municipal government, the board of directors of a joint-stock company, the executive of a voluntary organization, etc. Actions of all these types include intentional omissions, i.e. intentionally not initiating (now or later) a certain bodily movement or series of bodily movements, defeating a resolution to undertake some initiative, etc. Thus, generically, practical reasoning is reasoning directed to the adoption of a policy by some agent, where policies include as limiting cases plans (policies adopted for just one occasion) and actions (plans with only one component), and the agent adopting the policy may or may not be identical to the set of individuals carrying out the reasoning. Philosophers are interested in practical reasoning from two points of view: explanation and guidance; for the distinction, see Raz’s introduction to his (1978). The explanatory interest leads them to consider such questions as whether a desire-belief model is the correct explanation of intentional action, whether reasons are causes, how akrasia (“weakness of will”) is possible, what is the difference between akrasia and (possibly self-deceptive) hypocrisy, and whether all reasoning-produced motivation is partly derivative from motivation already present in the reasoner (“motivational internalism”). Although the investigation of such questions is sometimes relevant to questions related to guidance, and indeed it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a given philosophical contribution is oriented to explanation or guidance, I shall focus in the remainder of this statement on guidance-oriented questions–i.e. those which are constitutive of the general issue of how an individual or group ought, if it were fully rational, to arrive at and implement decisions about what to do.