Life and Action
In the ongoing discussion about practical rationality, one of the big questions has become: how does one go about conducting an argument about the forms that practical reasoning can take? Life and Action is thus of great interest not just because it advances substantive and novel views as to what those inference patterns are, but in that it puts on the table, by my count, five distinct methods of arriving at conclusions as to what reasoning about what to do can and must be.1 1 am here going to focus on methodological concerns, which means that much else that is worthy of discussion in this very rich book will be left to one side. Thompson's first method is derived from one of the several competing readings of Frege, associated with Tom Ricketts and Warren Goldfarb, and for right now, I am going to call it Logical Form Extraction. Its raw material is our grasp of the correctness and incorrectness of inference. (On the cluster of views that usually travel along with the method, there is no such thing as a logical alien, someone for whom a different logic than our own is correct, but Thompson is incidentally putting in place the pieces of an argument to the effect that, when it comes to practical rationality, what 'our' means is, us human beings; so there is no coverage for the rational space aliens that would be included in, say, a Kantian treatment.) Where Frege devoted his efforts to rendering explicit truth-functional and quantificational inferential potentials in a representation of the proposition, Thompson attempts, in two