Martin Niederl
University of Vienna
If you ask me why I φed, I ideally provide you with an explanation in terms of my motivating reasons for φing: a reason explanation ([1], 170). By referring to the rain as my reason for bringing an umbrella, I’m telling you that the rain appeared to me as a good reason to do so ([9]). As such, reason explanations work insofar as they grant you insight into my perspective on the situation.
This raises the following question: is my perspective part of the explanation, or is it a mere precondition for it without having any explanatory import itself? Call ‘the agent’s perspective’ their cognitive and conative relations to a given situation. Humeans typically argue that reason explanation (or rationalization) constitutively involves the agent’s perspective through some causally efficacious belief-desire pair ([7]; [10]; [11]; [8]). Objectivists, on the other hand, argue that one’s beliefs and desires are mere ‘enabling conditions’ ([4], 127) for successful reason explanations – the agent’s perspective is thus explanatorily idle. The explanatory work is done entirely by the state of affairs in light of which I acted ([3]; [4]; [2]; [6]).
I argue (contra [2]; [4]; [5]) that the Humean account of reason explanation is not just compatible with an objectivist account for motivating reasons, it actually better explains an important feature of reason explanations that some objectivists accept ([4]; [5]; [9]). For this end, I first differentiate between two types of explanatory reasons that occur in reason explanations. I thus create room for the possibility of genuinely explanatory considerations besides the agent’s motivating reason. Second, I argue that Dancy’s ([5]) idea of reason explanation’s creation of intensional contexts is actually better accounted for by such explanations essentially involving reference to mental states. I thus suggest the agent’s perspective constitutes a part of the genuinely explanatory considerations at work in reason explanations.
Bibliography
[1] Alvarez, Maria. 2010. Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[2] —. 2018. “Reasons for action, acting for reasons, and rationality.” Synthese 195 (8): 3293-3310.
[3] Collins, Arthur W. 1997. “The psychological reality of reasons.” Ratio 10 (2): 108–123.
[4] Dancy, Jonathan. 2000. Practical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[5] —. 2014. “On Knowing One’s Reason.” In Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion, edited by Clayton Littlejohn and John Turri, 81-96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[6] —. 2018. Practical Shape: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[7] Davidson, Donald. 1963. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” Journal of Philosophy 60 (23): 685-700.
[8] Radcliffe, Elizabeth S. 2020. “A Humean explanation of acting on normative reasons.” Synthese 199 (1-2): 1269-1292.
[9] Singh, Keshav. 2019. “Acting and Believing Under the Guise of Normative Reasons.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (2): 409-430.
[10] Smith, Michael. 1987. “The Humean theory of motivation.” Mind 96 (381): 36-61.
[11] Turri, John. 2009. “The ontology of epistemic reasons.” Noûs 43 (3): 490-512.
Chair: Sharon Casu
Time: September 6th, 15:20-15:50
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 