An enkratic agent is someone who intends to do A because she believes she should do A. Being enkratic is usually understood as something rationality requires of you. However, we must distinguish between different conceptions of enkratic rationality. According to a fairly common view, enkratic rationality is solely a normative requirement on agency: it tells us how agents should think and act. However, I shall argue that this normativist conception of enkratic rationality faces serious difficulties: it makes it a mystery (...) how an agent's thinking and acting can be guided by the enkratic requirement, which, as I shall further argue, is something that an adequate conception of enkratic rationality must be able to explain. This, I suggest, motivates exploring a different account of enkratic rationality. On this view, enkratic rationality is primarily a constitutive requirement on agency: it is a standard internal to agency, i.e., a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agential powers well. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine an account of instrumental reasoning recently put forth by John Broome. His key suggestion is that anyone who engages in reasoning about his intentions also believes that he will do what he intends to do and that combined with a belief about necessary means this creates rational pressure towards believing that one will take the necessary means. I argue that Broome’s model has three significant problems; his key premise is false—the sincere expression of an intention (...) does not entail the belief that one will successfully execute that intention; his account yields a model of instrumental reasoning that is uncomfortably reflective; he seems unable to explain the rational pressure towards taking necessary means that arises directly from having an end and an instrumental belief. All three problems, I argue, are a consequence of Broome’s inadequate position on what it is to intend to do something. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to (...) do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible. (shrink)

This paper offers two competing accounts of normative requirements, each of which purports to explain why some—but not all—requirements are normative in the sense of being related to normative reasons in some robust way. According to the reasons-sensitive view, normative requirements are those and only those which are sensitive to normative reasons. On this account, normative requirements are second-order statements about what there is conclusive reason to do, in the broad sense of the term. According to the reasons-providing view—which I (...) attribute to John Broome—normative requirements are those and only those which constitute or provide normative reasons. I argue that the reasons-providing view is susceptible to two serious objections. First, the view generates an explanatory gap. Secondly, the view is implausible. I argue that these two objections give us reason to prefer the reasons-sensitive view of normative requirements over the reasons-providing view. (shrink)

Since it is hard to see how subjective rationality could be normative, a humbler, purely evaluative account of rationality’s importance has been suggested: rationality is a non-moral virtue, and rational action is good so far as it reveals that an agent ‘functions well’. This paper argues, however, that even this fallback position is threatened by ‘eccentric billionaire’ scenarios: sometimes, flouting purported coherence standards of rationality is maximally virtuous. In defense of the virtue account, I argue that a novel view of (...) rational constraints is called for: rationality requires a certain form of higher-order coherence – as considerations about instrumental coherence can show. (shrink)

Suppose that you do not do what you have previously decided to do. Are you to be charged with irrationality? A number of otherwise divergent theories of practical rationality hold that by default, you are; there are rational pressures, it is claimed, that favor the long-term stability and eventual execution of distal intentions. The article challenges this view by examining how these purported pressures can be spelled out. Is intention a normative commitment to act? Are intentions reasons for action – (...) or at least for retaining one's intention until the time to act has come? Or is the rationality of ‘doing as you decide’ governed by diachronic wide-scope norms, as Michael Bratman and John Broome suggest? All of these approaches are shown to raise severe problems, which suggests a more modest view: diachronic pressures on intending are at each point in time confined to the very next instant. (shrink)

One fairly common view about practical reason has it that whether you have a reason to act is not determined by what you know, or believe, or are justified in believing. Your reasons are determined by the facts. Perhaps there are two kinds of reasons, and however it goes with motivating reasons, normative reasons are determined by the facts, not your take on the facts. One fairly common version of this view has it that what's reasonable for you to do (...) is determined by what you know or believe. Any view that drives this kind of wedge between reasons and rationality is inherently unstable. I argue against this view, criticize the arguments typically presented in its favor, and sketch an alternative. (shrink)

In part I of this paper, I argue that #MeToo testimony increases epistemic value for the survivor qua hearer when experiences like hers are represented by others; for society at large when false but dominant narratives about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women are challenged and replaced with true stories; and for the survivor qua teller when her true story is believed. In part II, I argue that the epistemic significance of #MeToo testimony compels us to consider the tremendous (...) and often unappreciated costs to the individual tellers, and the increased credibility they are owed in virtue thereof. (shrink)

Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing 'detaching problems' by their failure to license modus ponens. I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems. I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for 'ought'. The semantics for 'ought' that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an end-relational theory (...) of normativity with a comparative probabilistic semantics for 'ought' provides a more satisfactory solution. (shrink)

The requirements of rationality are fundamental in practical and theoretical philosophy. Nonetheless, there exists no correct account of what constitutes rational requirements. This paper attempts to provide a correct constitutive account of ‘rationality requires’. I argue that rational requirements are grounded in ‘necessary explanations of subjective incoherence’, as I shall put it. Rationality requires of you to X if and only if your rational capacities, in conjunction with the fact that you not-X, explain necessarily why you have a non-maximal degree (...) of subjective coherence. (shrink)

A recent view in contemporary epistemology holds that practical reasoning is governed by an epistemic norm. Evidence for the existence of this norm is provided by the ways in which we assess our actions and reasoning on the basis of whether certain epistemic conditions are satisfied. Philosophers disagree on what this norm is—whether it is knowledge, justified belief or something else. Nobody however challenges the claim that practical reasoning is governed by such a norm. I argue that assuming the existence (...) of an epistemic norm of practical reasoning is neither the only nor the best way to accommodate the available data. I introduce and defend an alternative account that avoids the assumption. According to this account, the relevant epistemic assessments of action and reasoning are instrumental assessments relative to the regulation conditions of a non-epistemic norm. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relation between epistemic reasons and the subject’s epistemic perspective. It tackles the questions of whether epistemic reasons are dependent on the perspective of the subject they are reasons for, and if so, whether they are dependent on the actual or the potential perspective. It is argued that epistemic reasons are either independent or minimally dependent on the subject’s epistemic perspective. In particular, I provide three arguments supporting the conclusion that epistemic reasons are not dependent on (...) the subject’s actual perspective. Furthermore, I show that variants of these arguments apply against popular views holding that epistemic reasons depend on the subject’s potential perspective, such as the view that epistemic reasons are facts that one is in a position to know. (shrink)

Collective dilemmas have attracted widespread interest in several social sciences and the humanities including economics, sociology and philosophy. Since Hardin’s intuitive example of the Tragedy of the Commons, many real-world public goods dilemmas have been analysed with a wide ranging set of possible and actual solutions. The plethora of solutions to these dilemmas suggests that people make different kinds of decision in different situations. Rather than trying to find a unifying kind of reasoning to capture all situations, as the paradigm (...) of rationality has done, this article develops a framework of agent decision-making for social simulation, that takes seriously both different kinds of decision making as well as different interpretations of situations. The Contextual Action Framework for Computational Agents allows for the modelling of complex social phenomena, like dilemma situations, with relatively simple agents by shifting complexity from an agent’s cognition to an agent’s context. (shrink)

Two epistemic principles are Knowledge Exclusion and Belief Exclusion. Knowledge Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent knows that p, then she does not believe that ∼p, and Belief Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent believes that q, then she does not believe that ∼q. Many epistemologists find it reasonable to reject the latter principle and accept the former. I argue that this is in fact not reasonable by proposing (...) a case in which an agent can use that she has contradictory beliefs towards a proposition as decisive evidence for that proposition. A natural response is that this case conflicts with common assumptions about the relation between knowledge, contradictory beliefs and rationality. I reply by drawing ideas from Lasonen-Aarnio’s remarks on unreasonable knowledge to explain why these common assumptions do not threaten my argument. (shrink)

Is there any distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of “instrumental rationality”? Recently, Joseph Raz (2005) has argued that instrumental rationality is a “myth”. In this essay, I shall give some qualified support to Raz’s position: as I shall argue, many philosophers have indeed been seduced by certain myths about instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, Raz’s conclusion is too strong. Instrumental rationality is not itself a myth: there really is a distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of “instrumental (...) rationality”. -/- In the first two sections of this essay, I shall start by giving a rough intuitive description of the phenomenon that seems to me the best candidate for the label “instrumental rationality”. As we shall see, this rough description gives us reason to reject some of the myths that surround instrumental rationality. Then in the rest of this essay, I shall try to give a more precise general specification of this phenomenon. In Sections 3 and 4, I shall consider what has been said about instrumental rationality by several other philosophers. Identifying what is missing in these other philosophers’ accounts will help me to develop my own positive specification, which I shall present in Sections 5 and 6. (shrink)

Recent work on rationality has been increasingly attentive to “coherence requirements”, with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their normative status (e.g., whether there is necessarily reason to comply with them). Yet there is little to no work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative requirements genuine (...) and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which of the requirements are genuine and which aren’t? This paper tries to offer an account that answers these questions. On my account, the incoherence of a set of attitudinal mental states is a matter of its being (partially) constitutive of the mental states in question that, for any agent that holds these attitudes jointly, the agent is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give up at least one of the attitudes. (shrink)

Philosophical perplexity about intention begins with its appearance in three guises: intention for the future, as when I intend to complete this entry by the end of the month; the intention with which someone acts, as I am typing with the further intention of writing an introductory sentence; and intentional action, as in the fact that I am typing these words intentionally. As Elizabeth Anscombe wrote in a similar context, ‘it is implausible to say that the word is equivocal as (...) it occurs in these different cases’ and from the fact that ‘we are tempted to speak of “different senses” of a word which is clearly not equivocal, we may infer that we are pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept which it represents’ (Anscombe 1963, p. 1). (shrink)

What motivates the benevolent or charitable agent is regard for another’s good or well-being, but talk about regard for others’ good or well- being is simply talk about benevolence or charity in different terms. Yet Hume clearly holds that the regard for another’s good is a motive to produce benevolent acts that is distinct from a sense of their benevolence. So what is the difference? ‘Well’, one might say, ‘intuitively, rights are very different from wellbeing.’ Yes indeed. And that, I (...) shall contend, is Hume’s point. My general contention is that Hume’s discussion of justice is in fact an attack on that concept of rights we think of as having motivated the American and French revolutions, a concept that is still (deplorably in my view) prevalent. I think the very fact that it is so prevalent and so sanctified by its position in the American Constitution has blinded most readers to the power and plausibility of Hume’s attack, which I shall try to defend. (shrink)

According to a widely extended conception, people display weakness of the will when they act freely and intentionally against their own judgment regarding what is best. However, there is another conception according to which persons display weakness of the will when they act against their reasonable intentions. On the basis of this conception focused on intentions, my objective is to specify two conditions of rationality in order to characterize actions against reasonable intentions as cases of irrationality. On the one hand, (...) I demonstrate the extent to which intentions can be reasonable. Only in this case can an action that goes against an already formed intention be actually irrational. According to my thesis, intentions can only be reasonable when they identify our best reasons, and this can become evident only if intentions can be judged. On the other hand, I explain the extent to which a person intending to pursue a reasonable end might possibly not establish the means necessary to achieve that end. Thus, a person displays weakness of the will only when he or she establishes an end to be pursued but not the means to achieve said end. In this respect, I explain that the means needed to achieve a complex end are vague. Therefore, a person displays weakness of the will when it is neither true nor false that the means selected actually achieve the established end. (shrink)

This is a short introductory article. I focus on three questions: What is instrumental rationality? What are the principles of instrumental rationality? Could instrumental rationality be all of practical rationality?

Sometimes we make mistakes, even when we try to do our best. When those mistakes are about normative matters, such as what is required, this leads to a puzzle. This puzzle arises from the possibility of misleading evidence about what rationality requires. I argue that the best way to solve this puzzle is to distinguish between two kinds of evaluation: requirement and appraisal. The strategy I defend connects three distinct debates in epistemology, ethics, and normativity: the debate over how our (...) theories of epistemic rationality should accommodate misleading evidence, the debate over the relationship between complying with requirements and deserving particular appraisals, and the debate over whether normative ignorance can excuse. Part 1 shows how three apparently plausible claims about epistemic rationality generate a puzzle when agents have misleading evidence about what rationality requires. Part 2 solves this puzzle by distinguishing between evaluations of requirement and appraisal and rejecting the idea that one is required to conform to the Enkratic Principle. I argue instead that complying with the Enkratic Principle provides defeasible evidence that the agent should be positively appraised. One of the consequences of this solution is that false normative beliefs can sometimes excuse agents from negative appraisal they would otherwise deserve for violating requirements. Part 3 defends the view that false normative belief can sometimes excuse against the rival views that false normative belief always excuses, and that false normative belief never excuses. I argue that false normative belief can sometimes excuse violations of requirements, when it is the case that the agent has done what it is reasonable to expect of her. (shrink)

Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response (...) to wrongdoing, there is both instrumental and non-instrumental value in ensuring that those who face similar moral predicaments reason about these predicaments, and the appropriate responses to them, together. Hypocrisy is wrong because it hampers our ability to realise that value. And hypocrites lose standing to blame for a similar reason. Standing depends on the value of particular people engaging in an accountability procedure together, a value which the hypocrite forestalls, by failing to acknowledge wrongdoing in the course of blaming. This account of a duty to blame non-hypocritically helps unpack the relationship between hypocrisy and a range of other defects in a person’s standing. It also responds to a central sceptical challenge to the wrongness of hypocritical blaming. The challenge is that accurate hypocritical blaming can’t be wrong because it is morally good, and indeed is morally better than not blaming others at all. My response: hypocritical blaming is wrong, not because it is morally worse than not blaming at all, but because it is second-best, i.e. worse than non-hypocritical blaming, which enables mutual deliberation about wrongdoing. (shrink)

This article focuses on both daily forms of weakness of will as discussed in the philosophical debate and psychopathological phenomena as impairments of decision making. We argue that both descriptions of dysfunctional decision making can be organized within a common theoretical framework that divides the decision making process in three different stages: option generation, option selection, and action initiation. We first discuss our theoretical framework, focusing on option generation as an aspect that has been neglected by previous models. In the (...) main body of this article, we review how both philosophy and neuropsychiatry have provided accounts of dysfunction in each decision-making stage, as well as where these accounts can be integrated. Also, the neural underpinnings of dysfunction in the three different stages are discussed. We conclude by discussing advantages and limitations of our integrative approach. (shrink)

Some of our reasons for action are grounded in the fact that the action in question is a means to something else we have reason to do. This raises the question as to which principles govern the transmission of reasons from ends to means. In this paper, we discuss the merits and demerits of a liberal transmission principle, which plays a prominent role in the current literature. The principle states that an agent has an instrumental reason to whenever -ing is (...) a means for him to do what he has intrinsic reason to do. We start by discussing the objection that this principle implies counterintuitive reason statements. We argue that attempts to solve this “too many reasons problem” by appealing to pragmatic strategies for debunking intuitions about so-called negative reason existentials are questionable. Subsequently, we discuss three important arguments in favor of Liberal Transmission, and argue that they fail to make a convincing case for this principle. In the course of the discussion, we also provide alternative, less liberal transmission principles. We argue that these alternative principles allow us to accommodate those phenomena that seem to support Liberal Transmission while avoiding its problems. (shrink)

This thesis justifies the need for and develops a new integrated model of practical reasoning and argumentation. After framing the work in terms of what is reasonable rather than what is rational (chapter 1), I apply the model for practical argumentation analysis and evaluation provided by Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) to a paradigm case of unreasonable individual practical argumentation provided by mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (chapter 2). The application shows that by following the model, Breivik is relatively easily able (...) to conclude that his reasoning to mass murder is reasonable – which is understood to be an unacceptable result. Causes for the model to allow such a conclusion are identified as conceptual confusions ingrained in the model, a tension in how values function within the model, and a lack of creativity from Breivik. Distinguishing between dialectical and dialogical, reasoning and argumentation, for individual and multiple participants, chapter 3 addresses these conceptual confusions and helps lay the foundation for the design of a new integrated model for practical reasoning and argumentation (chapter 4). After laying out the theoretical aspects of the new model, it is then used to re-test Breivik’s reasoning in light of a developed discussion regarding the motivation for the new place and role of moral considerations (chapter 5). The application of the new model shows ways that Breivik could have been able to conclude that his practical argumentation was unreasonable and is thus argued to have improved upon the Fairclough and Fairclough model. It is acknowledged, however, that since the model cannot guarantee a reasonable conclusion, improving the critical creative capacity of the individual using it is also of paramount importance (chapter 6). The thesis concludes by discussing the contemporary importance of improving practical reasoning and by pointing to areas for further research (chapter 7). (shrink)

Normative concepts have a special taste, which many consider to be proof that they cannot be reductively analyzed into entirely nonnormative components. This paper demonstrates that at least some intuitively normative concepts can be reductively analyzed. I focus on so-called ‘hypothetical imperatives’ or ‘anankastic conditionals’, and show that the availability of normative readings of conditionals is determined by features of grammar, specifically features of tense. Properly interpreted, these grammatical features suggest that these deontic modals are analyzable in terms of conditional (...) necessity with a certain temporal structure. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus, long maintained by Derek Parfit, that there is an important distinction between what we have reason to do on the one hand, and what it is rational for us to do on the other. Philosophers are now realising that there is a conceptual distinction between rationality and normativity. Given this distinction, it thus becomes a substantive question whether rationality is genuinely normative; that is, whether there is any reason to do what rationality requires. While some (...) philosophers have argued that we sometimes have reason to do what rationality requires, it is notoriously difficult to show that there are always universal and categorical reasons to do what rationality requires. But if it is not the case that there are always universal and categorical reasons to do what rationality requires, then rationality is not genuinely normative.This dissertation offers a vindication of the normativity of rationality. I maintain that there is a robust relation between rational requirements and normative reasons. In arguing for this claim, I develop what I call the reasons-sensitive view of rationality, according to which rational requirements are normative verdicts: they are second-order claims about what there is conclusive reason of rationality to do. This view explains why there are always universal and categorical reasons to be rational. So while we may not always have most reason to do what it is rational for us to do, there is always some reason—reasons of rationality—to do what it is rational for us to do. I then show how this reasons-sensitive view addresses and responds to what I diagnose to be the major sources of skepticism about the normativity of rationality. (shrink)

Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...) view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim. (shrink)

Some of the opponents of desire-based views of normativity seek to undermine them by arguing that even the existence of instrumental normativity (reasons to pursue the means to your ends) entails the existence of a desire-independent rational norm, the instrumental norm. Once we grant the existence of one such norm, there seems to be no principled reason for not allowing others. I clarify this alleged norm, identifying two criteria that any satisfactory candidate must meet: reasonable expectation and possible violation. Some (...) interpretations meet the first criterion and others meet the second, but there are no interpretations that meet both. After surveying the interpretations of Sidgwick, Hampton, and Korsgaard, I suggest that there is no instrumental norm of reason. The final section offers an alternative, desire-based account of instrumental normativity, on which individual normative requirements to pursue means derives from each individual desire for an end. (shrink)

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’¹ When we say that someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason (...) not to, one that wins out against any opposing reasons such as those touting benefits to him of ignoring others’ concerns. (shrink)

As Kant claimed in the Groundwork, and as the idea has been developed by Korsgaard 1997, Bratman 1987, and Broome 2002. This formulation is agnostic on whether reasons for ends derive from our desiring those ends, or from the relation of those ends to things of independent value. However, desire-based theorists may deny, against Hubin 1999, that their theory is a combination of a principle of instrumental transmission and the principle that reasons for ends are provided by desires. Instead, they (...) may say, there is just one principle, a principle of, if you will, instrumental transmutation: if one desires the end, then one has reason to take the means. See the discussion of General Production, in section 8, for a doubt about this. (shrink)

The theory of choice receives formal treatment in decision theory, game theory and substantial parts of economics. However there is cause for concern that the formal treatment of the subject has advanced beyond the substantive grounds on which it relies. For, the formal theories fundamentally rely on a concept of preference, which is itself lacking a viable substantive interpretation. Indeed the challenges to the substantive interpretation of ‘preference’ threaten to undermine the standard arguments used to justify the completeness and transitivity (...) conditions on which Preference Theories rely. This discussion will explore whether a conception of rationality, anchored in a larger conception of practical reasoning, can justify the completeness and transitivity conditions. Specifically, this dissertation will draw on recent developments in philosophy of law, action theory and ethics to enumerate a conception of practical reasoning that takes reasons to be the basic normative concept. It will then seek to offer an account of rationality that is distinct from, but complementary to, the role of reasons. And from this foundation develop an account of preferences that includes many of the characteristics of standard accounts, yet is situated within this broader context. From this vantage point, the discussion will explore possible justifications for the completeness and transitivity conditions. Ultimately, it will be argued that both can be justified – though with different force – in specified domains. While the discussion will primarily focus on the justification of the completeness and transitivity conditions, it is in part motivated by the goal of exploring the connections between the treatment of choice in the distinct fields associated with Preference Theories and action theory broadly defined. In so doing, the hope is to suggest that there is promise in drawing together formal and substantive treatments of choice which is deserving of greater attention. (shrink)

A discussion of L.A. Paul's 'Transformative Experience' from an Author Meets Critics session at the 2015 Pacific APA.

Then you have a look around, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality.