Model Of Practical Reasoning Research Articles

Scripture and Habits of Interpretation: A Model of Practical Reasoning

In his 1998 Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation, Stephen Fowl conceives of biblical interpretation as a skill that is learned over time. Fowl’s perspective not only gives close attention to the habits that interpreters acquire in practice, but also clarifies the goals that readers recognize through their interaction with biblical texts. This paper builds upon Fowl’s approach by providing a critical analysis of practical reasoning in a twofold analysis. In the first part, we will interact with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention. Engaging with these philosophers shines light on what is meant by reasoning practically towards particular goals. In the second part, we will focus on how scripture portrays love and knowledge as habits of interpretation. In this part, it is proposed that love and knowledge will refine interpreters’ practical reasoning as they move towards particular ends. In conclusion, this article provides fresh angles for biblical interpretation by arguing that interpreters’ practical reasoning is sustained by the habits of love and knowledge.

Pragmatism and Associative Political Obligations

Proponents of an associative account of political obligation maintain that individuals bear certain moral duties simply in virtue of their membership in a particular political community. I defend this thesis by interpreting it as a metaethical claim that expresses or implicitly relies on a pragmatist account of the nature of normativity, justification, and knowledge. Such a defense has a number of virtues. First, it offers a compelling rationale for the strategy commonly employed to defend the associative thesis. Second, a pragmatist reading provides the resources necessary to rebut a number of objections advanced against the associative thesis, such as the criticism that associative theorists cannot distinguish actually having political obligations from merely believing or feeling that one has political obligations. Third, a pragmatist metaethics entails a particular model of practical reasoning, namely constructive interpretation, that helpfully illuminates our actual practice of attributing or contesting political obligations.

'An Expansionist Model of Legal Reasoning'

In this paper, I engage with J.J. Moreso’s account of legal reasoning. First, I reconstruct Moreso’s conception of legal deliberation, which I regard as taking a distinctive stance within the contemporary debate in jurisprudence, since it innovatively expands on some of the most sophisticated models of practical reasoning and legal reasoning that have been defended in the literature. Building on this interpretation of Moreso’s theory of legal reasoning, I will go on presenting some reflections on the idea of practical rationality that undergirds the practice of reasoning in law, when this practice is conceived in Moreso’s terms. In this context, I account for two central features of the conception of practical rationality that underlines, and best fits with, Moreso’s explanation of legal reasoning. Since Moreso has yet to systematically explore the idea of practical rationality associated with his theory of legal argument, the claims I advance in this part of the paper are merely tentative. Whilst I try to make a rigorous attempt to develop Moreso’s jurisprudence from a theoretical perspective that is sympathetic to his overall project, nothing in the discussion I carry out here should be taken to suggest that Moreso is conceptually committed to the views about practical rationality I associate his theory of legal reasoning with.

Justice, Reason, and Luck in Rationing Lifesaving Medical Resources

Justice, Reason, and Luck in Rationing Lifesaving Medical Resources

Shaming in and into Argumentation

Shame appeals may be both relevant to and make possible argumentation with reluctant addressees. I propose a normative pragmatic model of practical reasoning involved in shame appeals and show that its explanatory power exceeds that of a more traditional account of an underlying practical inference structure. I also illustrate that analyzing the formal propriety of shame appeals offers a more complete explanation of their normative pragmatic force than an application of rules for dialogue types.

The dMARS Architecture: A Specification of the Distributed Multi-Agent Reasoning System

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.

Pollock on Practical Reasoning

The epistemologist John Pollock has implemented computationally an architecture for a rational agent which he calls OSCAR. OSCAR models both practical and theoretical (or epistemic) reasoning. I argue that Pollock's model of practical reasoning, which has seven components, is superior not only to the two-component belief-desire model stemming from Aristotle, but also to the three-component belief-desire-intention model developed especially by Michael Bratman. Despite its advantages, Pollock's model of practical reasoning is incomplete in at least three respects: it is solipsistic, it is egoistic and it is unsocial.

New foundations for practical reasoning

Practical reasoning aims at deciding what actions to perform in light of the goals a rational agent possesses. This has been a topic of interest in both philosophy and artificial intelligence, but these two disciplines have produced very different models of practical reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to examine each model in light of the other and produce a unified model adequate for the purposes of both disciplines and superior to the standard models employed by either. The philosophical (decision-theoretic) model directs activity by evaluating acts one at a time in terms of their expected utilities. It is argued that, except in certain special cases, this constitutes an inadequate theory of practical reasoning leading to intuitively incorrect action prescriptions. Acts must be viewed as parts of plans, and plans evaluated as coherent units rather than piecemenal in terms of the acts comprising them. Rationality dictates choosing acts by first choosing the plans prescribing them. Plans, in turn, are compared by looking at their expected values. However, because plans can be embedded in one another, we cannot select plans just by maximizing expected values. Instead, we must employ a more complex criterion here named ‘coextendability’.

Understanding Irrationality

Abstract Recent philosophical work attempts to understand irrational acts on the model of practical reasoning. Such acts are regarded as intelligible in the light of ordinary propositional attitudes which are nevertheless conjoined in a way that explains the irrationality. It is here argued that some irrational acts cannot be so understood; that they are not actions, per se; and that Freud’s notion of “primary process”, particularly in its emphasis on hallucinatory wish-fulfillment and on what he calls “omnipotence of thought”, provides a useful description of such acts. Where hallucinatory wish-fulfillment (or phantasy) is operative, an anxiety or need causes an agent to see the world as one in which the anxiety-provoking state does not exist or has- somehow been dealt with satisfactorily. The need or lack is not acknowledged, as it is when one can properly speak of desire and of a reasoning that attempts to implement it.

Judicial Reasoning

What we mean precisely by judicial reasoning is the reasoning of the judge as disclosed in the grounds of his judgment. The writings of jurists, the arguments of counsel, the indictment filed by the prosecuting officer—all provide grounds which may effect the judge's decision ; but it is the reasoned judgment alone which provides all the elements required to unfold the characteristic features of judicial reasoning.The operative part of the judgment, the very ruling, is preceded by the grounds which constitute the reasoning on which the ruling is based. Judicial reasoning thus constitutes a model of practical reasoning, aimed at justifying a decision, a choice or a claim, and establishing that they are neither arbitrary nor unjust: the judicial ruling is justified if the conclusion following its reasons conforms to the law.Assimilating judicial reasoning to a syllogism whose conclusion is true because it can be formally proved as deriving from true premises, would deny the very nature of practical reasoning and make it impersonal and devoid of its essential element of adjudication. The specific juridical nature of the judge's reasoning is not the formally correct deduction drawn from premises—in this respect legal deduction bears no distinctive features—but lies in the reasoning which serves to lay down those premises within the frame of an existing legal system.