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Rationality, reasoning and rules: reflections on Broome’s rationality through reasoning 1 Two pictures of rationality Broome proposes a particular picture of what it is for someone to be fully rational: according to him, a fully rational person satisfies all the requirement of rationality: (Requirements) Being fully rational is satisfying all the requirements of rationality. Broome contrasts his proposal with an alternative picture according to which: (Responding) Being fully rational is responding correctly to the reasons you have.1 He argues vigorously for the correctness of Requirements and rejects the Responding alternative. One central aspect of Broome’s overall position that I have not fully understood is why he takes this to be an illuminating way to set up the issue about the nature of rationality. Requirements and Responding are not intrinsically in conflict with one another. Whether they conflict depends not just on what they say as so formulated, but on what the requirements of rationality are taken to be. If the requirements of rationality were that you should respond correctly to the reasons that you have, then the two pictures would be equivalent. I believe that the contrast Broome has in mind is better captured not by the distinction between Requirements and Responding, but rather between two different conceptions of what the requirements of rationality are. First: (Structural-Rationality, SR) Being rational is ensuring that your attitudes satisfy certain structural, coherence requirements. And in contrast: (Response–Rationality, RR) Being rational is correctly responding to the reasons that you have. What Broome seems most to want to argue is that rationality consists of SR rather than RR. 2 The ‘quick objection’ to response–rationality Broome develops the following objection to Response–Rationality. RR implies the following: Core Condition. Necessarily, if you are rational, you F whenever your reasons require you to F. Broome then develops what he calls a ‘quick objection’ to the Core Condition. The objection is that it is possible for the following four propositions to be true at the same time: 1. (1) Your reasons require you to F 2. (2) You do not believe that your reasons require you to F3. (3) As a result, you do not F 4. (4) Nevertheless, you are perfectly rational If it were true that all four of these propositions could be true at the same time, then obviously the Core Condition, and with it RR, would be false. But why should we believe that (1), (2) and (4) could be true together? Could a fully rational person fail to have correct beliefs about what his reasons require him to do? If reasons were external facts, then a rational person could get them wrong. As Broome notes, though, there is an alternative way of thinking about reasons, according to which reasons are not external facts but are rather attitudes of the thinker herself. And a traditional view about a person’s knowledge of her own attitudes is that, under the right conditions, she necessarily has correct beliefs about what her attitudes are. About this attitudinal view of reasons, Broome argues that it leads to a regress: Even a rational person must have attitudes that she herself does not believe she has. Otherwise, for each of her beliefs she would have the higher-order belief that she has that belief. (p. 75) Broome’s counterargument might be deemed problematic in at least two respects. First, the attitudinal view of reasons need not commit itself to every thinker actually having correct beliefs about her beliefs, but only to her being able to form such beliefs were she to see the need to do so. That suffices to evade the regress problem. Second, and even if we were to put this point to one side, it is arguable that Broome targets the wrong view. For the most interesting alternative to the ‘reasons as external facts’ view is not that a person’s reasons are all attitudes of hers, but rather that they are all conscious mental states of hers. Such conscious states might be attitudes, but they might also be—and in the most basic cases are— conscious presentational states of seeming: such states as perceptual states, introspective states or states of intuition. On a familiar foundationalist version of such a view, in the most basic case, the only justifiers for a belief are conscious states of seeming. For a belief to function as a reason for another belief it would have to have been independently justified by one of these states of seeming. Broome’s regress problem does not arise for these seeming states: you can have a correct belief about each presentational seeming state that you have without this initiating a vicious regress. Furthermore, Broome’s Quick Objection to RR won’t work on this version of the view, because it’s hard to see how you could fail to know which conscious states of presentational seeming you are experiencing, once you ask yourself the question. So, for all that the Quick Objection shows, rationality could be at least partly about responding correctly to the reasons you have.3 Basing prohibitions, permissions and requirements In contrast with RR, Broome favors SR, according to which rationality consists in ensuring that one’s attitudes satisfy certain requirements of coherence. He proposes the following as good candidates for such requirements: No Contradictory Beliefs. Rationality requires of N that N does not believe at t that p and also believe at t that not p. Modus Ponens Requirement. Rationality requires of N that, if N believes at t that p and N believes at t that if p then q, and if N cares at t whether q, then N believes at t that q. Enkrasia: Rationality requires of you that you if you believe you ought to F, you intend to F. I am inclined to agree that rationality imposes some requirements of coherence on thinkers, although I think it is doubtful that they are exactly the ones that Broome formulates above. However, I will set the point aside for now and simply grant the requirements as stated. What I want to emphasize instead, following Broome, is that rationality has views about how it would be appropriate for you to conform to these requirements. For example, suppose you find yourself with the belief that you ought to F but without the intention to F. So far, you would be in violation of Enkrasia, and granting that it is a correct principle of rationality, you would be irrational. You must somehow get yourself to conform to Enkrasia. However, while it would be acceptable for you to conform to the requirements of rationality by coming to intend to F on the grounds that you believe you ought to F, it would be unacceptable for you to reject the belief that you ought to F on the grounds that you don’t intend to F. Broome calls this a ‘basing prohibition’ of rationality. He also acknowledges basing permissions of rationality. Are such basing prohibitions and permissions consistent with Broome’s view that rationality is always just a matter of wide-scope, structural requirements of coherence? One could construe (as I have done in other work) basing an attitude F on a basis B, as a matter of taking B to be a good reason for F and F’ing as a result. On such a construal, saying that one may not base F on B is to say that one may not take B as a good reason for F’ing and F as a result of that taking. Strictly speaking, this is consistent with the Core Condition, which insists that there are positive basing requirements of rationality but is silent on whether there are basing prohibitions or permissions.2 And while Broome is prepared to acknowledge basing prohibitions and permissions, he rejects the claim that there are positive basing requirements: There are basing prohibitions but no positive basing requirements. For instance, if you believe you ought to F, there is no requirement that you have an intention to F that is based on this belief. To be rational, just having the intention is enough. Suppose you always intended to F, but you have only recently formed the belief that you ought to F. Your intention is not based on your belief, but nevertheless you may be rational. (p . 141) Pace Broome, I believe that there clearly are positive basing requirements of rationality. I won’t discuss his particular practical example, but a theoretical one instead. Suppose you have a visual perception as of a cat’s being on a mat. And suppose you are not aware of any defeating background beliefs. In those circumstances, rationality requires you not merely to believe that there is a cat on the mat but also that you base your belief on your visual impression. Why is it not enough that you merely have the relevant belief? Why does rationality require that you base it on the visual perception? Because you can have a good reason for a belief and yet not base your belief on that good reason, but rather on something else that is not a good reason for it. In such a case, you would not be rational. For your belief to gain rational standing it must not merely be had in the presence of a mental state that supports it, but must be based on that mental state. So, in addition to whatever structural requirements of coherence there may be, and in addition to the basing prohibitions and permissions, there must be positive basing requirements of rationality. 4 Basing and purely automatic processes Broome’s view that there are no positive basing requirements is of a piece with this view that the coherence requirements of rationality could be satisfied via purely automatic sub-personal processes of which the thinker may be entirely unaware. Let’s take a case in which a subject satisfies the No Contradictory Beliefs requirement, but where this satisfaction is brought about by the sorts of purely automatic, sub-personal processes of which the subject has no awareness. Say you believe that platypuses do not lay eggs. Then you hear a radio program on which an expert says that platypuses do lay eggs. As a result you acquire the belief that platypuses lay eggs and automatically lose the belief that they don’t. You don’t think about it; reflect on the fact that the two propositions are incompatible with one another; think about which one you have most reason to keep; keep it; and get rid of the other. That would be conscious active reasoning. But in the example as I described it, no such reasoning occurs. Compliance with No Contradictory Beliefs is brought about via sub-personal automatic processes of which the subject is not aware. All he will finally be aware of is that he has acquired the new belief and that the old one is gone. It is essential to Broome’s picture of rationality that if all of the requirements of rationality could be fulfilled in this automatic, sub-personal way, then a person would count as ideally and fully rational. After all, what the requirements do is ask for a person’s attitudes at a time to satisfy certain patterns. The requirements don’t speak to how those patterns are to be achieved. As a result, no particular process by which the patterns are achieved is called for or ruled out. Indeed, Broome is very clear that, on his view, nothing further is required. He discusses reasoning not because he regards it as somehow constitutive of rationality. He discusses it only because he believes that, as a matter of contingent fact, psychologies like ours are incapable of satisfying the requirements through purely automatic means. As a result, we resort to reasoning. In principle, though, a creature could be fully rational while relying only on purely automatic processes. Some ideally rational creatures such as angels may have a rational disposition that works infallibly in this automatic manner. They find themselves automatically satisfying every rational requirement they are under. … But we mortals will never match up to angels. Some requirements are too difficult for our automatic processes to cope with; I shall soon give an example of difficult Bayesian requirements. But when automatic processes let us down, our mortal rational dispositions equip us with a further, self-help mechanism. We have another way of improving our score by our own efforts. We can do it through the mental activity of reasoning. (p. 207) We engage in reasoning, then, only because purely automatic processes let us down: in psychologies like ours, the engineering of rationality satisfaction cannot achieve all its goals through purely automatic processes. I don’t believe that Broome’s picture of an ideally rational creature is right. If we were to put the point into a slogan it would be this: a rational creature is a thinker that is presented to itself as a rational creature. It believes what it does partly because doing so is the rational thing to do. It follows that a creature can’t count as fully rational if it fulfills its requirements automatically and opaquely, without a conception of why it’s doing so. What I have given voice to just now is one version of a standard internalist view of rational belief fixation. If you are rational in believing something you have access, in some appropriate sense, to the fact that your belief is rational, and to what it is that makes your belief rational. The standard way of motivating such a view consists in hypothetical cases like that of Norman the clairvoyant (see Bonjour 1985 ). Norman has the ability to have clairvoyant beliefs about certain subject matters, but he is utterly unaware that he has this ability. Every so often, this ability of his delivers into his consciousness a belief—in this case, say, that the President of the US is on a secret trip to Iran. This thought, along with the conviction that it’s true, just pops into his head. However, he lacks an introspectibly appreciable basis why the belief that has popped into his head is the right thing to think about the President’s whereabouts. In such a circumstance, Norman’s natural response wouldn’t necessarily be to ask straight away: Is this belief true? But rather: Do I have any reason to believe it? Do I already possess evidence that would make this a reasonable belief for me to hang onto? Or is it just something that is popping into my head, along with the conviction that it is right, for which I lack any evidence? To answer this question he would have to try to call to mind evidence that he could recognize to bear on the question of the President’s current whereabouts. Does he remember reading about this? Or someone’s telling him? Suppose Norman is reasonably confident that he couldn’t have read about this or found out about in any testimonial way. Nor, in the nature of the case, could he have found about it in any other more direct way. If he went on believing it, would he be rational? Surely, not—even if the belief were true and the output of a reliable process. What does this sort of example show? In my view it shows that being fully rational does involve something like having an introspectibly accessible basis for your belief, a basis whose relevance to supporting your belief you must be in a position to appreciate. If that’s right, then Broome is wrong to claim that you could count as fully rational even if you end up conforming to the requirements of rationality via purely automatic processes. Norman’s case is one of non-inferential belief. But the style of example would apply equally to inferential belief. Someone could be hyper reliable in believing q whenever he both believed p and believed if p, then q. But unless he did so with some awareness that having those two beliefs made it rational for him to have the third, we would not think of him as rational. Reliable, maybe; but not rational. Broome, of course, doesn’t think that conformity to the requirements of rationality is always achieved via purely automatic processes. But he thinks that this is a purely contingent matter. On my view, a creature that satisfied all the requirements automatically, without having some conception of why that’s the epistemically correct thing to do, would not be fully rational.