A puzzle about enkratic reasoning
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A puzzle about enkratic reasoning Jonathan Way1
Accepted: 2 September 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Enkratic reasoning—reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing—seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then argue that the best solution is to deny that correctness is always independent of your epistemic position. As I explain, a notable upshot is that a central epistemic norm directs us to believe, not simply what is true, but what we are in a position to know. Keywords Reasoning Enkratic reasoning Correctness Objectivism and perspectivism about ought
Suppose you are wondering whether to stop by the deli. You’d like to get bagels but you’re also running late for an appointment. After brief consideration, you figure that it won’t matter much if you’re a little later still and so come to believe that you ought to stop by the deli. On that basis, you form the intention to stop by the deli. This last step is an example of what Broome (2013) calls enkratic reasoning: moving from a belief that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing. It seems like good reasoning. Of course, you might make mistakes along the way. You might be wrong about the pros and cons, or how they stack up. You might be & Jonathan Way [email protected] 1
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
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J. Way
unjustified in these assessments. Still, considered just as a transition of thought, independently of the status of its inputs, enkratic reasoning seems hard to fault. Indeed, enkratic reasoning seems to play a central role in deliberation. When you deliberate, you try to figure out what to do—to settle on a course of action, by forming an intention. If, during deliberation, you reach the conclusion that you ought to act in a certain way, you can close deliberation, by settling on acting in that way. But this just is to engage in enkratic reasoning: to form an intention on the basis of a belief about what you ought to do. Enkratic reasoning is thus a central way of bringing deliberation to a close. These remarks concern beliefs about what you ought to do in the ‘all-out’, ‘overall’, or, as I shall say, ‘deliberative’ sense of ‘ought’. In the example above, you might believe that you ought, given only your concern for bagels, to stop by the deli and that you ought, given only your concern for your appointment, to head straight there. These beliefs do not allow you to form intentions. But it is extremely plausible that there is a further question you can ask: given this conflict, what ought I to do? It is answering this question that allows you to move to an intention.1 So enkratic reasoning seems good—indeed, it seems like it must be good. But there
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