In order to be rational you need to know how to reason

Abstract

In Section 1, we make some preliminary remarks about the concept of epistemic permissibility, understood in terms of ex ante rationality. In Section 2, we argue that a certain epistemological view---one according to which ex ante rationality is solely a function of available reasons---is inadequate. In Sections 3-4 we will flesh out an alternative view about ex ante rationality, one according to which forming a certain belief is rational for a subject S only when S knows how to reason in a certain way. In Section 5 we explore some consequences of our view and we describe the main challenge that we must meet in future work.