How Many Normative Notions of Rationality? A Critical Study of Wedgwood’s The Value of Rationality

Abstract

The main goal of Wedgwood's book 1 , expected to be the first instalment of a trilogy, is to defend the claim that the concept of rationality is normative. Among other things, on Wedgwood's understanding, this is supposed to entail that 'we always ought to be as we are rationally required to be' (33). 2 Since Wedgwood argues that a mentalist variety of internalism is true of rationality, in his picture the demands of rationality may be characterized as the demand that the agent is broadly coherent-that one's way of thinking fit with the mental states and events present in one's mind at the relevant times (4).Yet, internal coherence can't prevent one from being led astray on occasion, as the possibility of acquiring misleading evidence and the predicament of victims of sceptical scenarios illustrate. If so, as Wedgwood acknowledges, 'we may well doubt whether it must always be true that there is something good simply in being coherent' (38, emphasis original). Addressing this concern-that is, explaining what is good about coherence, and why we should always avoid being incoherent-takes up the main part of the book (chapters 4-9).Wedgwood's answer begins with five careful chapters of stage-setting and preliminary considerations. These chapters develop many philosophical insights and arguments that any philosopher would find worth engaging with independently of the goal that they serve in the book, and include the following broad topics. Chapter 4 offers a discussion of why it is a mistake to think that the most fundamental normative notion is that of reasons; chapter 5 discusses the distinction between different senses of 'ought' and isolates the sense that is taken to be linked to rationality; chapter 6 proposes that the most fundamental normative concepts are evaluative ones and that the concept of rationality is one of them; chapter 7 defends mentalist internalism about rationality, and chapter 8 critiques attempts to explain why rationality matters within frameworks that accept Wedgwood's commitments to internalism and decisiveness of the requirements of rationality.The specific answer to the question of why rationality matters --why we should always avoid being incoherent --arrives in chapter 9, and it is rich in technical details. Simplifying, Wedgwood suggests 'that every type of mental state or mental event that can be rational or irrational has an aim, and thinking rationally is a means to achieving that aim' (5). Wedgwood takes the relevant aim to be an external one: to get things right. The aim is external because the norms that regulate it do not evaluate mental states on the basis of what goes on in the thinker's mind, but on the basis of those mental states' relations to the external world (6, 147, passim). In a nutshell, the reason why we should care about the coherence of our mental states is the following:The general connection between rationality and correctness is this: if your way of thinking is irrational, that is bad news (according to what these mental states are 'telling you' about the worl...