Volume 26, Number 2
December 2023
ARTICLE

The Essence of Structural Irrationality: The Impossibility of Attitudinal Success

Volume 26, Number 2, December 2023, Pages 377–419
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v26i2.1886
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Abstract

The phenomenon of “structural irrationality” covers a diverse range of combinations of attitudes, including (inter alia) contradictory beliefs, contradictory intentions, means–end incoherence, akratic incoherence, and cyclical preferences. This paper offers a novel, unified account of when a pattern of attitudes qualifies as structurally irrational. It begins by setting up the core of the view I will be defending: a set of attitudes is irrational if and only if it is impossible for those attitudes to be jointly successful. I show that this view can account for a wide range of paradigmatically irrational combinations of attitudes. I then refine the account to make it sufficiently subjective. I argue that a set of attitudes is irrational only if the impossibility of their joint success is (1) logically transparent, (2) subjectively inferable, and (3) not justifiably denied.
Copyright © 2023 Julian Fink
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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