1.  Research Circle on Rationality, Coherence Requirements and Normativity in Metaethics and Epistemology

In Spring 2010 I ran a research circle on the recent literature on requirements of procedural rationality in metaethics and epistemology.  On the bibliographies page, you can find a detailed reading list I made for the group.  Here are the main questions that we covered, with relevant contributors to the literature mentioned parenthetically. 

* Do requirements of rationality have wide or narrow scope?  When there are local conflicts between attitudes that are governed by requirements of rationality, is there a unique way of resolving them, or several equally permissible ways?

(Wide-scopers / favorers of multiple resolution: Broome, Way, Wallace, Bratman and Hussain.  Narrow-scopers / favorers of unique resolution: Parfit, Kolodny, Schroeder.  Mixed accounts: Dancy, me.)

* Are requirements of rationality robustly normative?

(Favorers of robust normativity: Way, Southwood, Buss, Bratman, Wallace, Setiya, Lord.  Deniers of robust normativity: Kolodny, later Broome.  )

* If requirements of rationality are robustly normative, is there any interesting story to be told about what grounds them? 

(No story: Hussain.  Cognitivist story: Wallace, Setiya.  Self-governance-based story: Bratman, Bridges.  Constitution of agency story: Korsgaard, Buss.  First-person authority story: Southwood.  Subjective reasons story: Schroeder, Way.  Evidence-relative reasons story: Ross, Lord.) 

* If they are robustly normative, are they grounded in reasons, or are they a separate part of normative reality?

(Grounded but not (clearly) in reasons: Wallace, Setiya, Southwood.  Grounded in reasons: Bratman, Buss, Schroeder, Lord, Way, Ross.  Ungrounded: early Broome.)

* Can any requirements of substantive rationality be derived from requirements of rationality in the narrow sense?

(Yes: some Kantians and temporal parts of Michael Smith.  No: most people writing in the post Kolodny/Broome literature.)

* Are disputes about rationality merely terminological, resting on many different concepts of rationality, or is there some core notion that really deserves the name more than the others?

(There is no official literature on this.  But much of the literature in the Oxford Handbook of Rationality indirectly addresses the question.)

* What is the link between rational requirements and reasoning?  Is a response to a conflict of attitudes an act of compliance with a requirement only if it qualifies as a piece of reasoning?

(There is no literature that directly addresses this question, but "classic" papers by Kolodny and Broome indirectly address it.  Some of Kolodny's arguments turn crucially on the assumption that there is a close link between requirements and reasoning, and that the answer to the second question here is "yes".)

* What are the symmetries and asymmetries between these debates about rationality in the practical and epistemic cases? 

(My own works in progress address this question.  My dissertation proposes a solution to the puzzle about the normativity of rational requirements in epistemology, but I do not think the same kind of solution should be given in the practical case.  Indeed, I suspect there just is a deep asymmetry here.)