On Dancy’s account of practical reasoning

Abstract

Dancy's main thesis is that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action, and indeed that makes the reasoning practical. I trace his argument, suggest improvements to its superficial deficiencies, and conclude that it fails because Dancy misunderstands the nature of reasoning.

Keywords:

• reasoning
• practical reasoning
• Dancy

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to John Hyman and Eliot Michaelson for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Joseph Raz is a Fellow of the British Academy and Research Professor of Law and King’s College, London. His selected recent publications include Between Authority and Interpretation (OUP 2009), Normativity to Responsibility (OUP 2011), and “Normativity: The Role of Reasoning”, Philosophical Issues 24 (2015). Many of his papers can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/josephnraz/

Notes

1 My own views on the subject, which on many points supplement the comments below, are to be found in Part Two of Raz (2011) and in Raz (2015).

2 I am quoting from Dancy’s précis written for this exchange. In the book he writes: “Practical reasoning is not going to be any form of inference, and it will have neither premises nor conclusion” (end of 1.10). I take it that his emphasis is on rejecting the identification of reasoning with inference. As he allows himself to talk of conclusions of practical reasoning, I will do the same, and where there are conclusions there are the premises from which one concludes.

3 Section 2.1

4 Hence, just to mention the point briefly, another mistake to avoid is that the reaching of a conclusion is necessarily a mental act. Sometimes it is, but most of the conclusions we reach, whether or not as a result of reasoning, are transitions to a new state or process, which need not be due to any act. For example, the belief with which we conclude a reasoning is acquired of necessity by our becoming convinced that the inference underlying the reasoning concludes with a proposition which that belief expresses. 

5 Yes, even though Dancy’s main thesis is that actions are (sometimes) conclusions of practical reasoning – he also protests against thinking of reasoning in terms of premises, inferences, and conclusions – again there is no contradiction. He rejects only certain theoretical uses of “conclusions”.

6 This proposition is always true of the conclusion of reasoning that is deductively valid.

7 In any instance of reasoning it is a premise, for rarely, if ever, can an instance of reasoning include substantive examination of the content of what “all other things are equal” would require if it were not a premise but an established conclusion.

8 The paragraph above relies closely on my discussion of the issue in Raz (2015). In part the thrust of the point is to avoid confusing inference as a logical structure with reasoning. P entails P is a correct proposition, but one cannot reason from P to P. Other implications of this lesson refute Dancy.

9 The absence of a sensible account of reasoning undermines Dancy’s account of theoretical reasoning as well. But illustrating this point is beyond our current topic.