Abstract
On an increasingly popular view of rationality, rationality is fundamentally about responding correctly to reasons and there is no independent rational requirement to avoid incoherence: having an incoherent combination of attitudes is irrational not because there is a fundamental requirement of rationality that prohibits it, but rather because you are guaranteed to fail to respond correctly to reasons in having it. This paper argues that any such attempt to explain the irrationality of incoherence in terms of responsiveness to reasons fails. For there is something distinctively irrational about incoherence that is not explained in terms of the guaranteed failure to respond to reasons. Any adequate account of the nature of coherence requirements on belief and intention should take into account the distinctive kind of commitments involved in each type of attitude.
Highlights
On many views of rationality, rationality is at least partly about avoiding incoherence
The reason why rationality appears to be about coherence is that an incoherent combination of attitudes has an interesting property: when you have an incoherent combination of attitudes, it is guaranteed that you fail to do what you have decisive reason to do
If the RB-account were right, there would be no structural requirements that are independent of the demands of reasons, and coherence would only be of derivative significance from the standpoint of rationality
Summary
On many views of rationality, rationality is at least partly about avoiding incoherence. If you believe that p and believe that not-p, either your reasons decisively count against the former or they decisively count against the latter, and so at least one of your beliefs fails to be responsive to your reasons, which explains your irrationality. Call this the reasons-based (‘RB’, ) account of incoherence.. It is possible for you to have, without being irrational, a combination of attitudes that guarantees the failure to respond to your reasons This means that even if the RB-account succeeds in showing that every case of incoherence involves the guaranteed failure to respond to reasons, it falls short of providing an adequate account of the irrationality of incoherence.
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