Table Of ContentPolitics of Practical Reasoning
Politics of Practical Reasoning
Integrating Action, Discourse and Argument
Edited by Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by Lexington Books
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2012 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Politics of practical reasoning : integrating action, discourse, and argument / edited by Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-7226-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-7227-8 (electronic)
1. Practical reason. I. Edmondson, Ricca. II. Hülser, Karlheinz.
BC177.P58 2012
128'.4—dc23 2012018320
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Markus H. Woerner
Contents
Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART I: FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURES OF PRACTICAL REASONING
Chapter 1: Aristotle’s Political Anthropology
Chapter 2: Pragmatics and the Idea of the Illocutionary in Stoic Language Theory
Chapter 3: Utrum gratitudo sit virtus moralis vel passio animae, or: Gratitude—An
Aristotelian Virtue or an Emotion?
Chapter 4: Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us
Chapter 5: Reasons to Act and Practical Reasoning
PART II: DEVELOPING CONVINCING ARGUMENTS
Chapter 6: Practical Reasoning in Place
Chapter 7: Toulmin’s Rhetorical Logic
Chapter 8: Reason, Production, and Rival Visions of Working Life
Chapter 9: Reasoning About Disability in the Light of Advances in Technology
Chapter 10: Principles in Practice
PART III: ENGAGEMENT FOR THE PRACTICAL UNITY OF LIFE
Chapter 11: The Theory of Double Truth Revisited
Chapter 12: Philosophia sine qua non
Chapter 13: Skeptical Wisdom
Chapter 14: Art as “Organizer” of Life
Afterword
About the Contributors
Preface
Practical reasoning, manifestly, is a central theme in contemporary philosophical debate. It is
an activity carried out by and among people in the context of human interaction, mostly in
situations marked by uncertainty but decisive for human life-courses, and developing over
time. This collection represents a conversation between authors addressing this common topic
from subject areas that interrogate human agency from different viewpoints: applied ethics,
aesthetics or metaphysics, rhetoric and argumentation theory. Their methodological approaches
include analytical philosophy, phenomenology and analytical Thomism. This diversity is
designed to allow the capture of features of practical reasoning that are otherwise easily
occluded. The complementarity of these contributions is strengthened too by the fact that they
develop approaches within which practical reasoning has been interrogated during the career
of a specific philosopher, Markus H. Woerner. His work stresses the need for an unblinkered
exploration of factors in verbal communication that can give us grounds for being convinced by
each other, particularly in connection with human affairs.
The first section of this book thus highlights implications of the fact that practical reasoning is
immersed in life and geared to action, interpersonal and in the end political. It explores the
multifaceted nature of political reasoning in the work of Aristotle, with his stress on the
conjoined and relational aspects of human action. It continues to the radically pragmatic
dimensions of language interrogated in the insights of the Stoics: they are related to features of
language which Woerner also explored, in the first monograph in German to reflect on J. L.
Austin’s work on performatives and illocutionary acts. This section of the book treats Thomas
Aquinas as another ally in this tradition; his stringent conception of reasoning would not have
supposed it entirely divorced from other human capacities such as emotion or habits of
character. It explores the work of Adam Smith, influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics, who
expressly returned to the concept of reasoning as involving sympathy and imagination, and
concludes by examining contemporary research about reasoning and the version of naturalism
it supports.
The second part of the book focuses on practical reasoning in social and political life,
analyzing how argumentation proceeds in detail in cases that cannot rest on certainty, and
interrogating the influence of particular conceptions of practical reasoning on public life. This
section responds to Woerner’s work on argument and rhetoric, reflected not only in his
analyses of Aristotelian rhetoric but also in his contemporary work on the most constructive
forms of rhetoric, wise arguing. It underlines the political implications of this approach to
reasoning, for example, showing how different forms of organization of work are based on
different conceptions of practical reasoning, how public policy on disability is influenced by
different argumentation styles, or how attempts to apply ethical principles in public life cannot
be conducted without the types of case responsiveness and practical wisdom in which Woerner
is particularly interested.
The last section begins by addressing themes central to his work: on the one hand, religious
and other sources of meaning, and on the other hand science—interrogating their compatibility
in a lived life. It deals too with philosophical responses to overall uncertainty, before going on
to a field crucial to Woerner’s work on reasoning as an integrative set of creative and
imaginative human responses to the world: aesthetics. Thus it approaches the ways in which
works of art may be regarded as cases of practical reasoning, and in which artistic production
as a practice is a (political) form of reasoning.
In this way, this book follows a narrative that explores the ways in which reasoning about
human affairs is enlivened by its embeddedness in action; this narrative is deepened by the
friendship of its authors with its dedicatee.
We wish to acknowledge the support for this book given by its publisher, Lexington, and our
editor, Jana Hodges-Kluck, as well as by the Grant-in-aid-of-Publications Fund of the National
University of Ireland, Galway, and by its Social Sciences Research Centre.
The cover shows an etching by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), no. 43 in
his 1799 collection Caprichios, entitled “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos/Sleep of
Reason Produces Monsters.” This image is reproduced by kind permission of the Brooklyn
Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY. The five works by Jackson Pollock rendered in
c. 14 on pp. 270–283 are reproduced by kind permission of the respective copyright owners
listed on p. 290.
Ricca Edmondson is grateful to the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Potsdam (in
particular Professor Hans-Peter Krüger), for allowing her the opportunity to complete much of
the work involved in this collection. She would also like to thank Professor Marja-Liisa
Kakkuri-Knuuttila of the Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki, and the late
Professor Richard Harvey Brown of the University of Maryland for their constant
encouragement and their passion for understanding the nature of practical reasoning. Karlheinz
Hülser would like to thank Professor Mauro Nasti De Vincentis of the University of Salerno in
Italy, whose symposium in the autumn of 2000 provided him with his first opportunity to
discuss his ideas on pragmatics in the context of Stoic logic. Both editors would like to recall
the services to philosophy of Professor John Cleary of Boston College and the National
University of Ireland, Maynooth, who wished to contribute to this book but was prevented by
his untimely death.
R. E. and K. H.
Introduction
Integrated Practical Reasoning
Ricca Edmondson and Karlheinz Hülser
In everyday language as well as in some academic conventions, practical reasoning is often
understood in the context of differentiations: in opposition to theory and theoretical argument,
to mere speaking, to productive reasoning and production, to scientific argument, technology
and statistics, to the world as such. All these distinctions can be useful for pragmatic purposes
connected with what reasoning is used for on particular occasions: an argument about
technology will look very different from one about, say, history. But this diversity masks a
more fundamental unity of practical reasoning and human practice, a unity that demands an
integrated understanding of what we are doing when we take decisions and make choices about
the world in which we move.
This collection explores this integrative concept of practical reasoning, considering it first
and foremost as a characteristically human activity. It examines multiple implications of seeing
reasoning about human affairs as a process of engaged interaction with the world and other
people. Thus it asks what follows from stressing that reasoning is performed by and between
people, in particular practical circumstances, predicaments and environments that are shared in
multifaceted ways, yet may be heavily contested. On this approach, practical reasoning is not
simply a cognitive process, distinct from other human activities and in need of reconnection
with them. Nor is it a defective or subordinate form of thought, but on the contrary at the center
of human activity itself: embedded in acting in the world, in relationship with other people and
their interwoven forms of reason, emotion and character. The contributions to this collection
exhibit the appeal and the challenges of treating practical reasoning as integrating
interpersonal, political sets of capacities, closely entwined with virtues and practices, and
inseparable from communication and action.
Practical reasoning is the commonest form of reasoning there is. It is also the most complex,
embracing not only explicit reasoning about what I, you, we or they ought to do or practicably
can do, but also the whole realm of implicit reasoning built into directed activity itself and the
social and political contexts in which it is carried out. Thus, the field of practical reasoning is
not focused narrowly on what precisely constitutes “a reason.” It embraces reasoning as a
process, characteristically an interactive one with discursive causes and effects, incorporating
assumptions and implications about who the reasoners involved are, how they should be
envisaged, and what capacities they possess.
Problems about what individuals can and should do are not altogether separable from
questions about what can and should be done by larger groups and societies; social and
political deliberations are central forms of practical reasoning. Key among the capacities they
involve are those concerned with communication and argument, forms of action with
conspicuous consequences whose real-life modes of functioning can tell us much about
appropriate criteria for assessing them.
The impacts of this integrative position can be understood against the background of powerful
efforts during the last century to reconcretize our understanding of reasoning. In different ways,
phenomenological, Wittgensteinian and Austinian approaches to philosophy all urged views of
reasoning which located it within an understanding of everyday action. Parallel emphases were
achieved by the link underscored between interpretation, tradition and reasoning by Gadamer,
by the stress placed on the concept of communicative and emancipatory action by Habermas,
or on praxis as highlighting deliberation within communities by MacIntyre. But much longer
traditions featuring responses to practical reasoning as practical derive from classical Greece,
including among others aspects of the work of Aristotle or the Stoics. Medieval theologians
and philosophers such as Aquinas confront these issues, as do thinkers of the Scottish
Enlightenment and as does Kant. In sum, for over two and a half thousand years, informal,
emotional, characterological, aesthetic, social and political aspects of thought have been
explored as potential constituents of reasoning as well as influences on it, and demand
engagement today.
Human beings in their daily lives, singly and together, deliberate and act in ways that try to
embody reasonable inferences in which a variety of emotional and evaluative processes and
effects of virtue or character are intertwined: when weighing the advice of psychologists, when
deciding how to act in political dilemmas, when trying to understand how something can seem
good grounds for action to someone from another culture. Exploring what is done in the course
of such activities allows us to interrogate the multivalency of the term “reasonable” and to
identify, and critique, some of its implications. This does not present reasoning as less rational
than might have been expected, but it exposes new challenges to the sorts of justification it
needs. The problems examined in this collection—what it means to respond to arguments about
meaningful work or disability, or how to communicate in terms of habitual or traditional
aspects of everyday inferences, for instance—are not susceptible to exclusively “cognitive,”
technical solutions; this does not mean abandoning them to unreason. It may mean situating
reasoning in close relationship to other activities central to engagement with the human
condition: acknowledging, and evaluating, its intrinsically hybrid nature (see Dunne 1992).
Practical reasoning itself responds in complex ways to problems with roots in disparate
sources. It therefore seems inevitable that attempts to understand what processes are involved
in it demand contributions from a wide variety of sources. In this collection we aim at
cooperation between different theoretical approaches, trying to make perspicuous the
conventions of particular intellectual practices in order to make their fundamental rationales
intelligible to others. The contributors to this volume show that it is possible for seemingly
diverse approaches to converse with each other, even over historical time, beginning with
