Rationality and the First Person
Prize Winner: Keshav Singh
Despite many disagreements, contemporary theorists of rationality largely agree that substantive rationality is to be understood in terms of correctly responding to reasons. While recent literature focuses on questions about the relationship between substantive and structural rationality, or which kinds of normative reasons are involved in substantive rationality, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of what it is to correctly respond to reasons. Recent dispositionalist accounts of correctly responding to reasons mark an exception to this trend. In this paper, I argue that dispositionalist accounts make a crucial mistake in eschewing an essential role for the agent's first-personal normative outlook. As a result, they cannot make sense of the fact that rational evaluation is a form of credit or criticism. I conclude that a successful account of correctly responding to reasons must capture the agent's first-personal normative outlook as an indispensable component of rational evaluability.
Call for Papers:
Special Issue on Rationality and the First Person
Res Philosophica invites papers on the relation between rationality and the first person for the 2024 Res Philosophica Essay Prize. The author of the winning paper will receive a prize of $3,000 and publication in the special issue of the journal on the same topic. Submissions for the prize will be automatically considered for publication in the journal's special issue. Accepted papers will be published alongside an invited paper by Eric Marcus (Auburn).
Guest Editor: Eric Wiland (University of Missouri - St. Louis)
Deadline for Submission:
Extended Deadline: February 1, 2025
Prize: $3,000
Description:
What is the connection, if any, between self-consciousness and rationality? Going back at least to Kant, there is a tradition that sees the two topics as intimately related. This tradition understands self-consciousness as a precondition for the kind of reflective awareness that characterizes being a rational creature. Answering the question whether there is a reason to believe p has seemed, to some, to depend upon the capacity to ask whether I myself have a reason to believe p. Answering a question asking about the reason for one’s action has seemed, to some, to depend upon the ability to know one’s own (intentional) actions in a distinctively first-personal way.
Philosophical orthodoxy, however, sees self-consciousness and rationality as two rather distinct topics. Some now view rationality as primarily a matter of whether one’s various psychological attitudes are coherent with one another. Thus the question of rationality (or lack thereof) can apply to any creature with a diverse array of mental states, applying equally well to frogs, dogs, and human beings. Others now view rationality as the subjective shadow of reason, according to which one is rational just in case one’s psychological attitudes would be reasonable if the world were as one believes it to be. One does not need the first-personal concept to be rational, so understood. Neither picture of rationality, then, sees an essential connection between self-consciousness and rationality.
We invite original submissions that discuss whether there is indeed some relation between rationality and the first-personal stance—and, if so, what that relation is.
Submission Guidelines
Submissions will be triple anonymously reviewed: authors do not know the identity of the referees; referees do not know the identity of the authors; and editors do not know the identity of the authors. Please format your submission so that it is suitable for anonymous review. (Instructions are available here.) We do not normally publish papers longer than 12,000 words long (including footnotes). Please use the online submission form for submitting your essay, available here. All submissions must be in English. We prefer submissions in Microsoft Word format. Papers may be submitted in any standard style, but authors of accepted papers will be required to edit their papers according to the journal’s style, which follows The Chicago Manual of Style (latest edition).