Evidential Support and Instrumental Rationality

Evidential Support and Instrumental Rationality

Instrumental Desires , Instrumental Rationality

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more obl...

Instrumental Rationality

0. Is there any distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of ―instrumental rationality‖? Recently, Joseph Raz (2005) has argued that instrumental rationality is a ―myth‖. In this essay, I shall give some qualified support to Raz‘s position: as I shall argue, many philosophers have indeed been seduced by certain myths about instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, Raz‘s conclusion ...

Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique

My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent epistemologists frequently em...

Symmetry and Evidential Support

This article proves that formal theories of evidential favoring must fail because they are inevitably language dependent. I begin by describing Carnap’s early confirmation theories to show how language dependence problems (like Goodman’s grue problem) arise. I then generalize to show that any formal favoring theory satisfying minimal plausible conditions will yield different judgments about the...