Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure

Abstract

There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one's attitudinal mental states, independently of whether those states are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated with a distinctive set of requirements that mandate or prohibit certain combinations of attitudes, and it's in virtue of violating these requirements that incoherent agents are irrational. I think the standard view is mistaken. The goal of this paper is to explain why, and to motivate an alternative account: rather than corresponding to a set of law-like requirements, structural rationality should be seen as corresponding to a distinctive kind of pro tanto rational pressure—that is, something that comes in degrees, having both magnitude and direction. Something similar is standardly assumed to be true of substantive rationality. On the resulting picture, each dimension of rational evaluation is associated with a distinct kind of rational pressure—substantive rationality with (what I call) justificatory pressure and structural rationality with attitudinal pressure. The former is generated by one's reasons while the latter is generated by one's attitudes. Requirements turn out to be at best a footnote in the theory of rationality.

The Real Myth of Coherence

“…Admittedly, this picture of local coherence requirements cannot be taken for granted. Fogal (2019), for example, denies that there are requirements that are strict in this sense and defends a view according to which coherence is a matter of responding to gradable and pro tanto "pressure" generated by an attitude to form or give up another attitude. On his view, there are no principles the violation of which would necessitate irrationality, and there are effectively no "requirements" of coherence in the strict sense.…”

“…First, my argument has focused only on local coherence requirements, which apply to combinations of attitudes rather than individual attitudes. However, there is yet another important dimension in our rational assessment: correctly responding to one's reasons by adopting or giving up particular attitudes (Schroeder 2009;Parfit 2011;Kiesewetter 2017;Lord 2018;Fogal 2019), which goes under the name of substantive rationality. People fail to be substantively rational (1) when they believe or intend what they have no reason to believe or intend, or (2) when they fail to believe or intend what they have strong reason to, and they are criticized as irrational in many such cases.…”

The dual scale model of weighing reasons

“…Such dilemmas are instances of structural irrationality, which is often distinguished from substantive irrationality. While structural irrationality is often explained in terms of the violations of requirements, I agree with Fogal (2020) that both structural and substantive irrationality should be explained in terms of pressure, or weight. (Here I disagree with Gert, who explains structural irrationality in a different way (e.g., 2004: 69‐72).)…”

Structural Rationality and the Property of Coherence

“…I thank a referee for inviting me to address this objection. 49 See, e.g.,Daoust (2020) andFogal (2020) on this point.…”

“…In section 3, I argue that it is implausible that the concept of coherence in the 1 See, e.g., Lee (2020), Mildenberger (2019), and Worsnip (2018a;2018b;. Fogal (2020) refers to structural rationality and coherence nearly interchangeably. Kolodny (2005) says that rationality is tied to coherence (although some of his remarks also suggest that first-order requirements-like, e.g., the requirement not to believe P and disbelieve P simultaneously-are not genuine requirements).…”