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theses

Here I defend a version of internalism about normative practical reasons, which I call discriminative stimulus internalism. Discriminative stimuli feature prominently in explanations of human and non-human animal learning and behavior. And according to discriminative stimulus internalism, the property of being a reason is the property of being a discriminative stimulus of a special kind. To defend this theory of reasons I first attempt to resolve a much simpler question: what regulates the concept of a normative practical reason? This question can be answered by characterizing both the rule and property that regulate the concept. According to what I call the guidance account, the rule that regulates that concept is explained by a more basic rule which determines how a wide variety of entities - from animals to artificial forms of intelligence - can learn to respond to considerations in particular ways, which, to observers, may appear to be instrumentally rational. These more basic rules are captured by principles of classical and instrumental conditioning and reinforcement learning. Those more basic rules explain when a consideration may come to guide an entity's response. When it can do so it is a discriminative stimulus. According to the guidance account, the property of being a discriminative stimulus regulates the concept of a reason. The guidance account supports discriminative stimulus internalism in two major ways. First, it poses the parsimony challenge to a competing theory of reasons. This challenge casts doubt on the claim that normative beliefs and practices provide evidence for the existence of reasons offered by this competing theory. But it allows that those beliefs and practices provide evidence of the existence of reasons which are discriminative stimuli of a special kind. Second, the guidance account undermines two important objections against discriminative stimulus internalism: the extension and normativity objections. This straightforward, preliminary defense of discriminative stimulus internalism suggests it is well-positioned to emerge as the correct theory of normative practical reasons.

ETD_7511

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Marcello Antosh

doi:10.7282/T3CF9SD9

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.