Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the philosophy of value by David Wiggins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).1

• Published in: Philosophy Vol. 97; no. 3; pp. 397 - 402
• Main Author: Chappell, Sophie Grace
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.07.2022
• Subjects: Algorithms; Essays; Ethics; Identity; Philosophy; Plato (427-347 BC); Reasoning; Reference (Semantic); Review; Truth; Values
• ISSN: 0031-8191; 1469-817X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0031819122000213

The project is to apply wider metaphysical and logical resources to a question that has been discussed in depth in the last two decades by, for example, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, Sydney Shoemaker, and Wiggins’ olim pupil Derek Parfit. On such calculative theories of practical reasoning – which have been around at least since Plato's Protagoras, 356b-e – there will be truth in practical matters, but no need for wisdom about them, simply because it is not an exercise of wisdom to get these calculations right; all that is needed is relevant information plus arithmetical technique. No theory, if it is to recapitulate or reconstruct practical reasoning even as well as mathematical logic recapitulates or reconstructs the actual experience of conducting or exploring deductive argument, can treat the concerns which an agent brings to any situation as forming a closed, complete, consistent system. (Wiggins, 1978, pp. 144–45)Given this lack of closedness, this ‘indefiniteness’ in ‘the matter of the practical’ (NVT p. 215), there is space for a kind of practical wisdom that outstrips mere truth, or knowledge, about the practical, in that it is more than simply knowing how to apply a measuring technique or an algorithm.