Talk About Structural Rationality

Abstract

This chapter turns to the semantics of our ordinary talk about structural rationality. Such talk is typically conditional in form, and there is a challenge about whether it squares with the account of the fundamental form of the requirements of structural rationality defended in the previous chapter. Some have tried to meet this challenge by saying that ordinary conditional normative utterances express wide-scope claims, but this chapter argues that this theory is not semantically plausible. Instead, it shows how a standard contextualist semantics for modals and conditionals can vindicate the truth of ordinary conditional utterances about rationality and, indeed, how it can say that these utterances come out true in virtue of requirements of structural rationality of the kind defended in the previous chapter.