The Value of Rationality, by Ralph Wedgwood

Abstract

The book is the first in a planned trilogy, with Rationality and Belief and Rationality and Choice to follow, titles which signal Wedgwood’s view that one concept of rationality applies across the practical and epistemic domains. The book’s chapters deal with a variety of disparate issues (for example, ‘ought implies can’, the nature of reasons, the meaning of ‘ought’, the structure of virtue, the virtue of rationality, and comparative values), each well worth studying for its own sake, and each explored with reference to the history of the subject, and to some of the main relevant discussions today. Yet, together they form a theory of rationality and its value. Wedgwood is developing a theory of the concept in order to understand the property it expresses. The concept is used primarily to evaluate mental states (beliefs, intentions) and events (decisions, judgements), evaluations that are based purely on the degree to which the mental states and events present in the thinker’s mind at, or shortly before, the relevant time (internalism) constitute a coherent pattern. Norms of rationality, that is, principles specifying what rationality requires, are constitutive of the mental state to which they apply. I assume that this means that what makes a mental state one of a particular kind is that certain requirements of rationality apply to it, namely, those that apply to the kind. Wedgwood underlines another aspect: each type of mental state and event that can be rational has an aim, and thinking rationally is a means of satisfying the aim. Beliefs aim at truth and choice aims at the practicable good. The means to the ends are rational mental states that are correct, that is, conform to norms of correctness that are themselves constitutive of the types of mental states, though they evaluate mental states by their relations to the external world. Both rationality and correctness come in degrees. The more irrational a person’s ways of thinking, the more incorrect his thinking is likely to be.