Manifest Rationality

This book works through some of the theoretical issues that have been accumulating in informal logic over the past 20 years. At the same time, it defines a core position in the theory of argument in which those issues can be further explored. The underlying concern that motivates this work is the health of practice of argumentation as an important cultural artifact. A further concern is for logic as a discipline. Argumentative and dialectical in nature, this book presupposes some awareness of the theory of argument in recent history, and some familiarity with the positions that have been advanced. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of logic, rhetoric, linguistics, speech communication, English composition, and psychology.

This book works through some of the theoretical issues that have been accumulating in informal logic over the past 20 years. At the same time, it defines a core position in the theory of argument in which those issues can be further explored. The underlying concern that motivates this work is the health of practice of argumentation as an important cultural artifact. A further concern is for logic as a discipline. Argumentative and dialectical in nature, this book presupposes some awareness of the theory of argument in recent history, and some familiarity with the positions that have been advanced. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of logic, rhetoric, linguistics, speech communication, English composition, and psychology.

This book gives a general theory of rational belief. Although it can be read by itself, is a sequel to the author's previous book The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017). It takes the general conception of rationality that was defended in that earlier book, and combines it with an account of the varieties of belief, and of what it is for these beliefs to count as “correct”, to develop an account of what it is for beliefs to count as rational. According to this account, rationality comes in degrees: the degree to which one's beliefs counts as rational is determined by their distance from a corresponding probability function - where this distance is measured by those beliefs' “expected degree of incorrectness” according to the probability function; the account also involves an explanation of what determines exactly which probability function plays this role in each case, and of why this probability function should play this role. In developing and defending this account, new light is shed on several central epistemological issues. These issues include: the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification; the debates between internalism and externalism, and between foundationalism and coherentism; the significance - or lack of it - of the notion of 'evidence'; the relationship between credences, full belief, inference, and suspension of judgment; the nature of the kind of possibility that is presupposed by the relevant sort of probability; and whether rationality is “diachronic” - so that the beliefs that it is rational for us to have now depend, in part, on the beliefs that we held in the past. Finally, some suggestions are made about how this theory bears on a range of further topics, including the defeasibility of inference, scepticism, and the analysis of knowledge.

This book brings together essays by one of the pre-eminent scholars of informal logic.

"In the years since I first read Bennett's brilliant philosophical parable, it has often struck me as incredible that it never became part of the canon of what came to be known . . . as the Language of Thought. Bennett begins, like Mandeville, with honeybees . . . and he takes the reader step by compelling step across the distance that the bees would have to traverse to come abreast of us. The book in my view is a philosophical classic." -- Arthur Danto, Columbia University

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

In this thought-provoking study, Jack Russell Weinstein suggests the foundations of liberalism can be found in the writings of Adam Smith (1723-1790), a pioneer of modern economic theory and a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. While offering an interpretive methodology for approaching Smith's two major works, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments "and "The Wealth of Nations," Weinstein argues against the libertarian interpretation of Smith, emphasizing his philosophies of education and rationality. Weinstein also demonstrates that Smith should be recognized for a prescient theory of pluralism that prefigures current theories of cultural diversity.