Abelard Bruno Podgorski

Research StatementMy research interests are in normative theory practical, moral, and epistemological. The largest part of my work so far concerns the nature of rational norms. There has recently been considerable debate over whether rational norms place constraints only on our intentions, beliefs and other attitudes at individual times, or whether they also, or instead, place constraints on the relationship between our attitudes at different times. I have argued that both of these views rest on the mistake of assuming that rational norms place constraints on attitudes and other states of mind at all. My work is part of an ongoing project to develop an alternative picture of the nature of rational norms on which they govern mental processes like consideration and reasoning rather than states like intention or belief.Dissertation: Process-Oriented Rationality My dissertation, which compiles my work on process-oriented rationality, decomposes naturally into five self-standing papers. I argue that the process-oriented picture, which has never been explored in depth, has special resources to deal with several puzzles and challenges for more traditional views of rational norms. In the first chapter, forthcoming as a paper in Mind, I show that several recent arguments against the existence of diachronic norms have no force against a view that takes diachronic norms to be process-oriented. In the second and third chapters, I argue that rejecting the state-centered norms prevalent in the literature allows us to construct better versions of epistemological views like conservatism and permissivism, which can preserve the distinctive virtues of these views without being vulnerable to their traditional objections. In the fourth chapter, I argue that the prevalent synchronic versions of rational norms fail to account for a phenomenon I call rational delay the fact that rational agents sometimes take time to update their attitudes in response to changes in their mental state. Synchronic state-oriented views do not allow such delay and thereby place demands on human agents that are not within their cognitive abilities to satisfy. This problem is not solved, I argue, simply by revising such norms to be diachronic rather than synchronic norms on states it takes a robustly process-oriented approach to adequately account for rational delay.Idealization and the Nature of Rationality One of the most general issues that emerges from my other work on rationality, and the topic of the final chapter of the dissertation, is the question of the role of idealization in normative theory. I argue that principles that describe the behavior of highly idealized agents do not have as central a place in a theory of rationality as many contemporary theorists, especially in the Bayesian tradition, maintain. In particular, I am working on developing the worry that the role of such ideals cannot be usefully distinguished from the role of purely objective ideals like truth. A second strand of this research is concerned with developing a principled way of arguing about what rational ideals could be like. I explore the view that rational requirements represent standards for criticism which is roughly, a nonmoral analogue to blame, and how this might help illuminate the role our cognitive limitations play in a theory of rationality. Moral PhilosophyI have also been engaged, independently, in work on normative ethics. One of the going series of objections to traditional versions of rule consequentialism, sometimes called the ideal world objection, is that the view has counterintuitive implications stemming from its assessment of distant, idealized worlds. The standard diagnosis of the problem is that it turns on the degree of idealization in those theories, and more sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism lessen this degree in an attempt to avoid these worries. I argue that the problem doesnt turn on the commitment to evaluating idealized worlds, but rather on the commitment to evaluating distant worlds. This commitment is an essential structural feature of rule consequentialism, while the degree of idealization is a flexible feature. Moreover, once we see the force of this problem, it generalizes to a broad class of views outside of the rule consequentialist tent which share this structural feature.Decision DependenceA major recent research project that spans the normative disciplines is that of making sense of decision-making under conditions where something important to our evaluation of the options depends crucially on which decision we make – for example, the identity of our children or other objects of our special relationships, the identity of the people who exist, or our beliefs about the likelihood of relevant states of affairs. Future WorkThe work in my dissertation sets an agenda for further work in exploring a fully process-oriented model of rationality. Several of the results have important corollaries for related topics the conservative view I develop in epistemology, for instance, has an analogue in the philosophy of intention, and the permissivist view I develop has implications for the philosophy of disagreement. In addition, because the process-oriented approach is new, there is much work to do in developing a plausible and complete account of such norms. In particular, I am interested in the way particular design features of human psychology, as revealed by the cognitive sciences, affect the proper formulation of process norms. On a view which is process-centered and which is motivated by a respect for the actual cognitive constraints facing human agents, empirical work like that of Daniel Kahneman on cognitive heuristics or Philip Koralus on erotetic reasoning may have significant implications for the study of rationality that few philosophers have appreciated.I am also interested in the relation between rationality, on the process-oriented model, and other core normative notions, like ought, knowledge, reason, and good. Because of the differences between the process picture and the traditional understanding of rational norms, we may need to rethink connections in normative space. Rationality, for instance, is typically taken to be necessary for knowledge. But if knowledge norms apply to beliefs and rational norms apply to processes, this connection will not be quite so straightforward.