Actions and Inconsistency: the Closure Problem of Practical Reasoning

This article formulates a fundamental problem in the philosophy of action. It will become apparent that the same problem is also an abstract and general, but very important question for the field of artificial intelligence and robotics in particular. As well, the nature of the problem, as revealed below, will make evident its importance in the field of logical evaluation of natural language argumentation. The problem is one of when a knowledge-based goal-directed inference leading to an action (or a recommendation for a course of action to be taken) may be said to be structurally correct (or closed), parallel to the sense in which a deductive argument is said to be valid (deductively closed). Solving this problem will require a formalization of practical reasoning in the end, to be carried out in the way that the analysis of the problematic case developed in the article will indicate. However, being a philosophical contribution, this article will merely pose and sharpen the problem, making certain questions to be asked more precise. No claim is made that anything like a complete formalization of practical reasoning is given by the considerations brought forward in this article. However, by solving the philosophical and practical problem of closure, the way is opened to developing a formalization of practical resolving as a distinctive type of reasoning that can be evaluated as normatively binding on a rational agent. A structure of practical reasoning is presented, and it is argued that the job of evaluating cases of arguments based on a criticism of inconsistency of actions, or "not practising what you preach", is best accomplished by applying this structure. In general, the task addressed by the article is one of evaluating the argumentation reconstructed from the text of discourse given in a particular case, and then using this evidence to judge whether the given argument meets the standards of practical rationality or not, as defined by the structures that should be used to judge such cases. Thus the goal of this article is seen to be one of applied logic, or as evaluating argument, as "correct" or "incorrect", as opposed to being a psychological inquiry into the agent's actual intentions, the motives of my particular person, weakness of will, or my other deeper psychiatric matters that lie behind a given case. It is not that these psychological or psychiatric questions are uninteresting. Indeed, the framework presented in this article could be used as a means of assisting empirical inquiries into them. But such a psychological investigation is not our goal. Our goal is that of evaluating a given argument normatively, based on the commitments of the participants,