RREXAM – Rational Reflection Examined

The project’s main goal is to critically assess the powers and limitations of rational reflection, where ‘rational reflection’ is understood as the human capacity of rationally improving one’s view with the help of a reflective grasp (self-knowledge) of one’s own attitudes, reasons, and cognitive processing. The views we endorse ‘on reflection’, as the saying goes, are the focus rather than non-reflective perceptual beliefs or intuitive beliefs that we form spontaneously. The relevant self-knowledge involved in rational reflection can but need not be arrived at by introspection. It can also stem from other sources, such as testimony, most importantly. Rational reflection is not reducible to mere introspection. There are then specific challenges to understanding how rational reflection can work, such as questions surrounding its role for the proper functioning of defeaters, critical reasoning, and mental self-regulation. Some contemporary empirical research about human meta-cognition also needs to be considered. In general, one should be careful not to fall prey to a naïve, overly optimistic assessment of our reflective capacities. Rational reflection is also fallible, just as first-order cognition. Yet there is good reason to think that rational reflection enables specific and significant achievements. The overall aim is to develop an account of rational reflection that is conceptually and empirically up-to-date and adequate. The project’s orientation is primarily foundational. Furthering our understanding of rational reflection, arguably a particularly complex aspect of the human mind that characterizes humans as persons, is the overall goal.