Krista Lawlor – författare

"That attractive and unusual thing, a small book on a big subject...[Lawlor] writes wisely and imaginatively about what separates the virtue of reasonableness from the vices it can be confused with." —Nikhil Krishnan, New YorkerA leading philosopher explores what it means to be reasonable—and why it matters for the well-being of our society.Reasonableness plays many roles in our lives. In Anglo-American law, it is the yardstick for a wide range of behavior—the “reasonable-person standard” governs everything from contract enforcement to killing in self-defense. In politics, a state can maintain a liberal democracy only if its citizens are reasonable. In ordinary life, we hold each other accountable to reason: We criticize the unreasonable of bosses who demand too much of our time or of partners who make decisions without regard for our preferences.But what does it mean to be reasonable? Being reasonable is not the same as being rational. It is also different from being thoughtful. In Being Reasonable, Krista Lawlor argues that a reasonable person seeks to understand what is valuable. A reasonable person must be rational enough to figure out what is valuable and thoughtful enough to care about what other people find valuable, but rationality and thoughtfulness alone do not suffice to make one reasonable. Even an ideally rational and thoughtful person might fail to understand, or lack the concern to understand, what is valuable.Being Reasonable is the first comprehensive study of reasonableness. Lawlor provides an account of the nature of reasonableness and, further, explains how we manage to be reasonable. Humans discover what is valuable by listening to their emotions and by listening to each other. By taking command over our emotions, and by interacting attentively with others, we can live up to the standard set by society and law.

Claiming to know is more than making a report about one's epistemic position: one also offers one's assurance to others. What is an assurance? In this book, Krista Lawlor unites J. L. Austin's insights about the pragmatics of assurance-giving and the semantics of knowledge claims into a systematic whole. The central theme in the Austinian view is that of reasonableness: appeal to a 'reasonable person' standard makes the practice of assurance-giving possible, and lets our knowledge claims be true despite differences in practical interests and disagreement among speakers and hearers. Lawlor provides an original account of how the Austinian view addresses a number of difficulties for contextualist semantic theories, resolves closure-based skeptical paradoxes, and helps us to tread the line between acknowledging our fallibility and skepticism.

This book defends a novel theory of singular concepts, emphasizing the pragmatic requirements of singular concept possession and arguing that these requirements must be understood to institute traditions and policies of thought.