Abstract

States and defends the second principle of rationalism, The Rationalist Dependence Thesis, which holds that the rational truth‐conduciveness of any given transition to which a thinker is entitled is to be philosophically explained in terms of the nature of the intentional contents and states involved in the transition. The second principle, therefore, explains what it means for a transition to lead to true judgements in ‘a distinctive way characteristic of rational transitions’: if the reliability of that transition can be seen to follow from the nature of those contents and states, then the transition is one to which the thinker is entitled. The remainder of Ch. 2 elucidates and paves the way for the author's argument for the Rationalist Dependence Thesis: the author identifies two tasks for a rationalist to support the thesis for content‐endorsing transitions, namely to show why the content of perceptual entitling states will tend to be true and to show why the transition to the judgement of the content made rational by the entitling perceptual state is truth‐conducive when the entitling state has a correct content. The first task is judged to be the greater challenge and three levels of the entitlement relation are distinguished from one another, each level differing from the others in terms of generality and explanatory power.