How Many Normative Notions of Rationality? A Critical Study of Wedgwood’s The Value of Rationality

Abstract

First paragraph: The main goal of Wedgwood’s book , expected to be the first instalment of a trilogy, is to defend the claim that the concept of rationality is normative. Among other things, on Wedgwood’s understanding, this is supposed to entail that ‘we always ought to be as we are rationally required to be’ (33). Since Wedgwood argues that a mentalist variety of internalism is true of rationality, in his picture the demands of rationality may be characterized as the demand that the agent is broadly coherent—that one’s way of thinking fit with the mental states and events present in one’s mind at the relevant times (4).