When Rational Reasoners Reason Differently

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Reasoning is just beginning to emerge as a central topic in its own right in analytic philosophy. One reason for this is the growing interest in the epistemology of inference. What justifies us in making some inferences and not others, and under what conditions does inference lead to justified belief? This growing interest coincides with a “cognitive turn” in epistemology more generally, an increasing awareness that epistemological theorizing should be informed by what we know from psychology and the philosophy of mind. At the same time, analytic philosophers are also beginning to investigate ways in which notions from epistemology relate to normative notions from the theory of rationality—for example, by looking at how one’s evidence relates to what one ought to believe, or whether reasoning that obeys normative requirements preserves epistemic justification. And finally, there is a growing recognition that many of the central questions about reasoning and rationality are best addressed by setting aside the traditional separation between theoretical and practical reasoning; reasoning has a nature and significance that we should strive to understand independently of whether it is reasoning about what to believe or about how to act. The essays on reasoning in this volume flow from all of these important developments and take them in provocative new directions.