Unfinished Business

My new book "Unfinished Business. Rational Attitudes in Reasoning" has been published by Oxford University Press in March 2025 (hardcover and Oxford Scholarship Online). Email me if you lack access.

If you'd like to read Unfinished Business in one of your classes, you can consult this teaching guide I made for it.

Here's a short description:

Explaining how people reason is central to understanding ourselves as human beings. Complex deliberations that take unexpected turns are central to many good detective stories, but they are also ubiquitous in everyday life and academic research. While philosophers have studied both ends of complex deliberations – learning new information and reaching justified conclusions – little has been said about our states of mind when we’re in the middle of thought. Yet, this stage of intellectual limbo is where we often produce genuine insight. Integrating theoretical research in philosophy with empirical results from cognitive science, this project advances a new theory of the transitional stages of complex deliberation. It postulates a new attitude type, transitional attitudes, that we hold towards potential answers to the question at hand while we’re deliberating. Transitional attitudes possess their own rationality conditions that differ from the norms of rationality typically applied to conclusions of reasoning. The resulting abstract framework reveals deep structural similarities among such varied intellectual pursuits as determining the significance of a historical artifact, deciding on a person’s guilt in court, deliberating about a philosophical problem, or searching for a mathematical proof. It can help us make progress on difficult philosophical questions, such as how we should respond to misleading higher-order evidence, how we should formally model logical learning, and how confident we can rationally be in our own philosophical positions.