1. Moral Expressivism

A key argument for non-cognitivism in meta-ethics starts with the combination of the Humean theory of motivation and moral motivational internalism:

The Humean theory of motivation is taken as an analytic claim about the nature of cognitive states and non-cognitive pro-attitudes, paradigmatically about the nature of belief and desire. Beliefs represent the world but on their own do not lead to action; desires are non-representational states that lead to action. The Humean theory of motivation is deeply entrenched. For instance, it underpins the idea that beliefs and desires have different directions of fit: the first have a world to mind direction of fit (they aim to ‘fit’ the world by representing it), whereas the latter have a mind to world direction of fit (they aim to make the world ‘fit’ them by changing it).Footnote ² It also underpins the Davidsonian account of intentional action-explanation in terms of beliefs and desires.Footnote ³

Moral motivational internalism is a theory about the role played by moral judgments in our mental and practical lives. It starts with the observation that people are motivated to act according to their moral judgments and results in the idea that it is their moral judgments themselves that motivate them in acting.Footnote ⁴ That we are motivated to act according to our moral judgments – in a strong, reliable or stable fashion – is taken to be a robust datum; and according to many, moral motivational internalism is the best explanation of this datum. If you judge that you ought not to eat meat, then the fact that you are motivated not to eat meat should be explained in terms of your judgment itself, rather than further desires you may or may not have with regard to eating meat. In a slightly regimented form, this can be put as follows:

The people at issue here are intended to be rational and strong-willed; those whose motivation is not defeated by mental illness, apathy or akrasia. The moral judgment only ‘somewhat’ motivates because it can be defeated by competing demands or norms that override motivation in a particular context. For instance, my motivation not to eat meat might be defeated by a desire not to starve or not to break norms of etiquette.Footnote ⁶

One key piece of evidence for motivational internalism is the fact that people undergo a change in their motivation if they change their moral views even when all other motivational states are kept equal.Footnote ⁷ While motivational externalists, who believe that the link between judgment and motivation is extrinsic or contingent, could explain this in terms of a change of view causing a change of desire and motivation, internalists think that the link has to be more direct.Footnote ⁸

By contrast, one key argument against motivational internalism, discussed in section 5.4, concerns the possibility of amoralism. The amoralist is someone who endorses a moral judgment, is rational and strong-willed, but does not feel motivated in the least to act according to that judgment, even when other things are equal. Internalists are committed to saying that the amoralist is a kind of conceptual impossibility: the amoralist is ultimately irrational or incompetent (in lacking mastery of key normative concepts) or insincere in their moral judgments.Footnote ⁹ Someone who judges that they ought not to eat meat but, other things being equal, is not motivated not to eat meat is either irrational or insincere or incompetent. Externalists by contrast can explain the amoralist as someone who, while competently making the relevant normative judgment, simply lacks the desire to act accordingly.

Given the Humean theory of motivation and moral motivational internalism, an argument for moral non-cognitivism might go as follows:

There are different ways in which non-cognitivists might articulate what moral judgments are: ‘pure’ non-cognitivists take them to be not at all cognitive, containing no belief element, as stated in (d).Footnote ¹⁰ ‘Hybrid’ non-cognitivists take them to be partly cognitive, comprising both a cognitive and a non-cognitive element. Thus, hybrid variants of (d) might be obtained as follows from (a) and (b):

Expressivism is a thesis about the semantics for natural language, according to which the role of language is essentially that of expressing mental attitudes. Some statements are descriptive in that they express cognitive states such as beliefs; others are prescriptive, in that they express non-cognitive states such as desires, intentions, praises or disapprovals.Footnote ¹¹ Expressivism can serve to articulate moral non-cognitivism as follows.Footnote ¹² Your judgment that you ought not to eat meat is conventionally tied to a non-cognitive attitude. A standard expressivist view identifies the content of ‘ought’ with the mental state of intending. Thus your judgment that you ought not to eat meat is tied to your intention not to eat meat; and this attitude should be appealed to in order to articulate its meaning, which then serves to explain why the moral judgment motivates: intentions are motivating. For instance, on Allan Gibbard's non-cognitive expressivist semantics, ‘ought’ picks out a state of intending or planning.Footnote ¹³ On his view, your judgment that you ought not to eat meat expresses a ‘hyper plan’ not to eat meat: roughly, a plan to reject eating meat in all circumstances in which the issue arises.Footnote ¹⁴

Hybrid versions of non-cognitive expressivism can also be developed so as to articulate the kind of hybrid non-cognitivism sketched above. On these semantics, moral statements are partly descriptive and partly non-descriptive: moral terms, such as ‘ought’, express both descriptive concepts or properties and pro-attitudes.Footnote ¹⁵

This sketch of moral motivational internalism, moral non-cognitivism and the kind of non-cognitive expressivism (henceforth: ‘expressivism’) that can be tied to them, will suffice as background to our discussion of Carroll's Regress, logical non-cognitivism and logical expressivism.

2. Carroll's Regress

Carroll's Regress seems to suggest that elementary deductive reasoning is impossible: we cannot reason from premises to conclusion of simple valid arguments. This is plainly absurd. Below is a version of the Regress that Carroll offers in a letter to the Editor of Mind, George Stout, dated August 25 1894.Footnote ¹⁶ Carroll had submitted his article and Stout had asked for clarifications. Carroll offers a brief statement of the Regress, which is helpful for the present discussion because it ties it clearly to normative notions and in particular to that of obligation. It helps make perspicuous why Carroll's Regress might be interpreted as a regress that supports a kind of logical expressivism. Here is what Carroll writes:

We can then interpret Carroll's Regress, as a regress about normativity, as follows.Footnote ¹⁷ Suppose that I am a rational agent considering an obvious, simple, argument in Modus Ponens, whose premises and conclusion are neither wrong nor repugnant, in a transparent context, etc. To make it clearly an argument in Modus Ponens, rather than an argument in Universal Modus Ponens, as in the letter, consider the following, as our sample argument:

1. (i) If it is day, it is light;

2. (ii) It is day;

   Therefore:

3. (iii) It is light.

What is assumed in the Regress is that, given the validity of this argument, the normative situation is the following: if I grant (i) and (ii), I am thereby obliged to grant (iii).

The puzzle seems to arise from the fact that I fail to recognize, and be moved by, this obligation because there is something that I fail to see or accept that would enable me to do so. On this interpretation, the challenge is to articulate what a subject who recognises this obligation – and is moved by it – sees or accepts, that makes them reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii).

The Regress appears to offer a suggestion about this: what someone sees or accepts that makes them reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii) is a conditional proposition (a ‘sequence’), such as (Cond):

It is widely agreed amongst commentators that this suggestion is a bad one – and rightly so.Footnote ¹⁹ It triggers the Regress: adding (Cond) as a premise is an invitation to add yet another conditional as a premise with (i), (ii) and (Cond) as antecedents and (iii) as consequent.

More precisely, it is widely agreed that Carroll makes two mistakes: first, he suggests that this conditional (Cond) would be the right sort of thing to consider for someone who is not moved by the obligation to reason from (i) and (i) to (iii); second, he invites us to add (Cond) as a premise to the original argument. Thus it seems that to block Carroll's Regress we should appeal to something different from the conditional (Cond), which merely states a logical fact. We should appeal to something that cannot become a premise in one's reasoning and that has the right kind of relation to our obligation to reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii).

3. A Two-Fold Proposal to Block Carroll's Regress

How do we move beyond this negative diagnosis and block Carroll's Regress? A natural thought is to replace (Cond) with a principle that would tell thinkers what to do with their premises; let us call it a ‘logical principle of reasoning’.Footnote ²⁰ The normative undertone of the Regress in terms of obligation invites us to state this principle in terms of ought. A candidate that flows from the structure of Regress is (Ought):

The thought is that if someone accepted (Ought), they would be better placed to reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii) than if they accepted (Cond).Footnote ²¹

Why is that? After all, (Ought) is just another conditional. Why then isn't it just like accepting another premise? Here, a thought that has attracted many can be put in a slogan: Logic Makes the Mind Move. Roughly, the thought is that my accepting or knowing a principle such as (Ought) is having a type of knowledge that encompasses the idea that my accepting the premises: makes me ‘move’ or ‘travel’ to the conclusion; or ‘generates’ my acceptance of the conclusion; or ‘guides’ me to the conclusion; or ‘compels’ me to accept the conclusion.Footnote ²²

While I will discuss below whether (Ought) is the right principle to invoke, to fix ideas, consider now a few examples of the Logic Makes the Mind Move view as it has been articulated within discussions of Carroll's Regress.Footnote ²³

This view is prominent in Gilbert Ryle's writing on Carroll's Regress, and his interpretation of the Regress as showing that knowing a basic logical principle such as (Ought) is a case of knowing how rather than knowing that: of practical knowledge rather than theoretical knowledge.Footnote ²⁴ (Cond)-as-a-granted-premise is merely a ‘railway ticket’: you can possess one but never travel – i.e. never travel from premises to conclusion. Knowing a logical principle of reasoning should be understood as a kind of knowledge that makes one travel from premises to conclusion. Thus, knowing a logical principle is, for Ryle, knowing how to reason from a certain set of premises to a conclusion, and this knowledge is ultimately to be construed as a set of dispositions. Such dispositions are not candidates to be the sort of things that can figure as premises in reasoning and they get us out of Carroll's Regress: in the relevant circumstances, when you have accepted the premises, you will simply reason to the conclusion.

More recently, some have appealed to the slogan as part as a discussion of the justification of basic logical principles. The thought here is that Carroll's Regress shows that justification for reasoning according to Modus Ponens cannot be inherited from explicit, cognitively accessible, propositional knowledge of Modus Ponens. Thus Paul Boghossian writes: ‘It must be possible simply to move between thoughts [w]ithout this movement being grounded in the thinker's justified belief about the rule used in the reasoning’.Footnote ²⁵ He suggests that: ‘[d]ispositions grounded in understanding make this movement possible. [R]ule-following [i]s a disposition to rule-conform under appropriately idealized circumstances’.Footnote ²⁶ That logic makes the mind move also underpins Boghossian's idea that reasoning can be blind in that someone may follow a logical principle in reasoning that they do not explicitly represent. This idea goes back to Wittgenstein, whom Boghossian refers to: ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly’.Footnote ²⁷ Boghossian thinks we can articulate the right kind of internalism that underpins logical knowledge in terms of blindness.Footnote ²⁸

Also concerned with the issue of justification, Patrice Phillie takes Carroll's Regress to be about ‘whether (or how) logic can make the mind move’ and, like Boghossian, he takes Carroll's Regress to be about the fact that certain internalist accounts of justification, whereby one has to have cognitive access to such propositional justification, cannot explain how logic makes the mind move.Footnote ²⁹ Rather, according to him, an internalist account of knowledge of Modus Ponens should be articulated in terms of the fact that the principle is constitutive of our ‘practice of inferring’ and so ‘it is impossible to reject it on rational grounds’.Footnote ³⁰ Logic makes the mind move on this picture because this movement is constitutive of rationality.

In his recent commentary on Carroll's Regress, Pascal Engel suggests that one key question posed by the Regress is that of ‘how can logic move the mind?’.Footnote ³¹ This question should be understood as that of how normative reasons are ‘able to move the mind in a particular way’,Footnote ³² and so as that of how logical principles of reasoning can motivate. Although he does not settle on a precise account of logical knowledge, he suggests that the Regress shows that knowledge of logical principles of reasoning cannot be propositional, if it is to be fit for this job; hence that it has to involve either logical concepts conceived as dispositions or some dispositional knowledge.Footnote ³³ Only then can logic make the mind move and get us out of Carroll's Regress.

Simon Blackburn takes the problem raised by the Regress to be about whether logic can ‘make the mind move’, or how to describe someone who always has ‘space to refrain from drawing the conclusion’.Footnote ³⁴ His view, explicitly presented as Humean, is that there has to be a movement of the will, which is not ‘under the control of fact or reason, [it] has to be given as a brute extra, if deliberation is ever to end by determining the will’. Blackburn is more interested in addressing issues to do with practical reasoning – the ‘Practical Tortoise’ – rather than theoretical reasoning, but I take it that, by reasonable extrapolation, we can understand him to offer the following kind of diagnosis of the Regress: the failure to reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii) (plus all the extra premises one might wish to add) is a form of akrasia and so judgments such as (Ought) must essentially be tied to desires to reason in certain ways.Footnote ³⁵

Let me elaborate on three aspects concerning the two-fold proposal just sketched – involving (Ought) and Logic Makes the Mind Move – that are important for the ensuing discussion.

First, what is required to block the Regress is that logic makes the mind move, where that means that there is no space for reflection or judgment between accepting the premises and drawing the conclusion: the movement is immediate. There is no gap between the relevance of the principle being salient (once the relevant premises have been accepted) and the issuing of the conclusion.Footnote ³⁶ While this is the case, the Logic Makes the Mind Move view is not one that says that such processes are sub-personal or sub-conscious. The Logic Makes the Mind Move slogan might suggest lack of agency, but this is not how the view is to be taken: reasoners know normative principles and it is these principles that guide or move them to intentional, reasoned, actions of reasoning; however this knowledge is such that the movement is immediate or unreflective. This latter requirement is what gets us out of the Regress.

Second, as some of the views sketched above suggest, it is widely thought that the best way of articulating knowledge of logical principles of reasoning is by construing it as a disposition, where that disposition does not comprise a propositional state – since propositions will end up as premises in our reasoning. For instance Boghossian writes: ‘In addition to this disposition to reason [according to Modus Ponens, MPP], it can also be a fact about S that he has the full-blown belief that MPP is necessarily truth-preserving [.] As a number of considerations reveal [note: e.g. Carroll's Regress] S's disposition to reason in accordance with MPP and his belief that MPP is truth-preserving are distinct kinds of state’.Footnote ³⁷ The Regress demands knowledge of Modus Ponens to be a different state from belief, not requiring explicit representation, if Modus Ponens is to make the mind move; dispositions seem to be apt to articulate such knowledge.Footnote ³⁸

Third, let us turn to the question of how to formulate logical principles of reasoning. Philosophers worried about Carroll's Regress think that such principles should be articulated in terms of obligation, and (Ought) can almost be read off the Regress. However, there are good reasons for thinking that (Ought) is in general too strong. These in part go back to Gilbert Harman's discussion of reasoning, where he expresses skepticism about the relation of logic to deductive reasoning, and particularly his discussion of belief revision.Footnote ³⁹ According to him, a principle such as (Ought) ascribes too strong a role to logical implication in deciding what to believe. Sometimes it is better to revise antecedent beliefs rather than draw the conclusions that follow from these beliefs. Thus suppose that I am doing my ironing with the radio in the background. Very absorbed in my task, I pay no attention to the radio and lose track of time. Suddenly I look at my watch and come to believe that it has just gone 6pm. I realize that if it has just gone 6pm, then the news is on. I pay attention to the radio and hear that it is not the news at all but already the programme that follows it. Here, it would not be rational for me to conclude that the news is on. Rather I should either revise my view that it has just gone 6pm or that the news is at 6pm. However, if I do this, then I am violating (Ought); so (Ought) cannot be the right principle associated with Modus Ponens.

While Harman's point is widely accepted, few share his skepticism about the project of articulating logical principles of reasoning associated with logical principles such as Modus Ponens. A standard way of accommodating change in view is to go for something roughly along the lines of the weaker wide-scope principle (Ought*):

(Ought*) allows for the case of change in view: revising my ‘premises’ rather than reasoning to the conclusion does not violate it. It is thus admittedly a better candidate to articulate the kind of obligation associated with Modus Ponens.Footnote ⁴⁰

Now, in a case of change in view, other things are not equal – a bit of evidence is acquired that defeats the appropriateness of the reasoning. However, the case that interests us is the case when other things are equal, that is to say, when nothing defeats your acceptance of the premises. What (Ought*) tells us is that in this case you are strictly required to accept the conclusion. This is the scenario that underpins the Logic Makes the Mind Move view. In a different context, this is what John Broome refers to as the Strictness Test for normative requirements.Footnote ⁴¹ According to him, the relation between believing the premises of a valid argument and believing its conclusion is strict when other things are equal and provided the logical entailment is readily recognizable. This gives rise to normative requirements (rather than weaker ‘normative recommendations’), such that if you believe the premises and not the conclusion, ‘you are definitely not entirely as you ought to be’; perhaps you are irrational.

In light of these remarks, the two-fold proposal, then, is this. First, what a subject who reasons from (i) and (ii) to (iii) relies on is their knowledge of (Ought*): when they have accepted (i) and (ii) and, other things are equal, they are strictly required to accept (iii). Second, Logic Makes the Mind Move: logical principles of reasoning such as (Ought*) are accepted or known in such a way that, when the premises have been accepted and other things are equal, one seamlessly, unreflectively, moves to the conclusion. This requires the acceptance or knowledge not to be a propositional state; a proposal that has been favoured is to construe such acceptance or knowledge as a disposition. Thus, if logic makes the mind move, then once I have accepted the premises, I will never be stuck, wondering which conditional of the form of (Cond) to accept as a premise to my reasoning. I will just reason to (iii).

4. Logical Expressivism

A natural way of articulating the two-fold proposal is in terms of motivational internalism: it is my very knowledge of (Ought*) that motivates me to reason to a conclusion (iii), once I have accepted (i) and (ii). My knowledge of (Ought*) is in this sense intrinsically motivational. If so, this puts us in the territory of the argument (a) – (d) of section 1, and it is then relatively easy to see how such logical motivational internalism leads to a kind of logical expressivism. So let us state the argument for logical non-cognitivism as follows, in a way that parallels the argument (a) – (d) for moral non-cognitivism:

I state claim (e), which flows from the Humean theory of motivation, in terms of cognitive states – rather than belief as I had done with argument (a) – (d) – since Carroll formulates his Regress in terms of ‘granting’ (Cond), and philosophers of logic typically focus on knowing logical principles of reasoning. Granting a proposition and propositional knowledge are cognitive, representational states.

While commentators on Carroll's Regress rarely explicitly pledge allegiance to the Humean theory of motivation (Blackburn being an exception), it is clearly there in the background as an implicit assumption: cognitive states are isolated from action in that they cannot motivate on their own. The assumption seems to be that cognitive states could not ever be anything else but premises in one's reasoning, or at any rate attitudes to premises in one's reasoning. This seems clearly to be Ryle's position and also Boghossian's, who rejects an articulation of knowledge of logical principles in terms that entail beliefs. Also, as I have stressed in section 3, sometimes Carroll's Regress is discussed in the context of internalist accounts of epistemic justification and the question of whether these accounts could apply to the justification logical principles of reasoning. The issue is often presented as a stark choice between internalist accounts, whereby we have explicit propositional justification for logical principles (on which regresses arise, and so action is impossible); and forms of reliabilism, on which justification is merely a matter of having reliable dispositions to reason (which make action possible but which fail to do justice to the way that knowing logic is meant to be rational or reasonable or epistemically responsible). Again, it is clearly presupposed that we need to rely on other states to explain the possibility of justified reasoning: cognitive states are not suitably related to action.

With the Humean theory in place in (e) and logical motivational internalism in (f), logical non-cognitivism follows. As with the argument (a) – (d), (e) – (h) can be rephrased in terms of mixed cognitive and pro-attitude states so as to accommodate mixed views, whereby knowing (Ought*) is partly descriptive and partly having a pro-attitude:

Non-cognitive expressivism is now one step away as the natural semantic way of articulating the non-cognitivism at issue. Conclusions such as (h) and (h*) can be tied to a theory of meaning for ‘ought’ or even ‘valid’. The thought would be that ‘ought’ should be given a non-descriptive semantics: perhaps tied to types of mental states such as intending or planning, which can then be thought of as kinds of dispositional state. This ‘ought’ is a logical or epistemic or rational ‘ought’ that concerns how to police logical transitions between beliefs. While we might think of this ‘ought’ as expressing a theoretical ought, there is a sense in which both the argument (a) – (d) and the argument (e) – (h) are about action, as (e) – (h) concerns actions of reasoning. So there is further commonality between the two kinds of motivational internalism.

On this interpretation then, Carroll's Regress is an instance of a puzzle about motivation against logical cognitivism. Logical cognitivism is here represented by the view that what I need to know to reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii) is a conditional such as (Cond), which I have to add as a premise to my argument.Footnote ⁴² The key problem is that my acceptance of (i) and (ii) together with my acceptance of (Cond) cannot be what moves or motivates me to accept the conclusion in (iii). The expressivist solution is to replace (Cond) by (Ought*); and rather than add (Ought*) as a premise, think of it as a principle, knowledge of which motivates me to accept (iii) once I have accepted (i) and (ii). Such knowledge is non-propositional otherwise, given the Humean picture, knowing (Ought*) would not be intrinsically motivational. That it is not fully propositional can perhaps be traced back to the concept ought, which should be given a non-descriptive semantics.

Non-cognitivism and expressivism are widespread views in the epistemology of logic. Many of their proponents are motivated by Carroll's Regress, but some are not. And not all so motivated also draw on worries to do with making the mind move and the kind of logical motivational internalism that I have outlined in section 3. Let me briefly mention three prominent views of this kind that ought to be set aside.

First, it is important to distinguish the logical expressivism at issue here from another view that is widespread in logic, which is tied to the semantics for the logical constants (e.g. ‘if, then’). On this kind of expressivism (which originates in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and has recently been developed by Robert Brandom), the logical constants do not simply represent (e.g. truth-functions) but are records of practices of reasoning – i.e. the meanings of the logical constants are given in pragmatic terms.Footnote ⁴³ This kind of expressivism has little to do with the Humean theory of motivation and motivational internalism, which here are tied to expressions such as ‘ought’; it also has little to do with Carroll's Regress but rather springs from specific semantic claims about the logical constants.

Second, according to Hartry Field, Carroll's Regress concerns the justification of basic logical principles, and shows that justification for the reasoning from (i) and (ii) to (iii) cannot come from (Cond) – or objective facts of validity.Footnote ⁴⁴ Justification for logical principles comprises normative, perspectival features, and indeed the mistake behind Carroll's Regress is to presuppose factualism about validity, which somehow will transmit objective justification to our logical beliefs. Generally, the aim of epistemology is not to transmit (objective) justification, but to evaluate methods of forming and retaining beliefs. The view, then, is anti-realist, and articulated as expressivist, although Field prefers to call it ‘evaluativism’. However, while it partly springs from an interpretation of Carroll's Regress, it is not driven by the concern to articulate how logic might make the mind move.

Crispin Wright also advocates a form of logical non-cognitivism, in part as a reaction to Carroll's Regress, which he takes to presuppose logical cognitivism: the view that we possess basic logical knowledge that can be given factual justification.Footnote ⁴⁵ His key thought is that we do not know basic logical principles because they are presupposed in – are a precondition of – any epistemic inquiry; we are simply rationally entitled to believe in basic logical principles. It is a mistake to try to justify putative propositional knowledge of such principles since we are pragmatically entitled to these prior to knowledge acquisition.Footnote ⁴⁶ Again, this form of non-cognitivism is not motivated by worries about making the mind move but more purely with the nature of justification of basic logical principles.

5. Against Logical Motivational Internalism

One way of attacking the argument offered in (e) – (h) is to argue against the Humean theory of motivation: it is to argue that fully cognitive states can be motivational, and are not isolated from action in this way. Indeed there are many accounts of belief or cognitive states according to which beliefs are intrinsically characterised in term of their connection to action.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, tempting as this is, I do not here attack the Humean theory of motivation. Nor do I criticise specific articulations of logical expressivism or discuss how the semantics of ought might work in the context of a principle such as (Ought*).

I focus instead on attacking the kind of logical motivational internalism that is informed by the Logic Makes the Mind Move view – the very motivation for the logical non-cognitivism that I have canvassed. I show that the case for logical motivational internalism is less compelling than that for moral motivational internalism. I first show that logical motivational internalism gets the source of motivation in reasoning wrong. I then restate the point in terms of motivating/explanatory reasons. Thirdly, I revisit the grounds for adopting (Ought*) as a logical principle of reasoning. Finally, I briefly discuss the logical analog of the amoralist – the alogicalist – and compare them to the akratic.

6. Logical Cognitivism and Carroll's Regress

It seemed that logical non-cognitivism coupled with logical expressivism offered an attractive picture of what it is to know a logical principle of reasoning – a picture that afforded a solution to Carroll's Regress construed as a puzzle against logical cognitivism. The key view underpinning this picture was logical motivational internalism, or the Logic Makes the Mind Move view, one of the two components of the two-fold proposal. This proposal is incorrect. As I have argued in section 5, logic does not make the mind move and so logical motivational internalism is not required to articulate that it does. If so, logical non-cognitivism and logical expressivism are unmotivated as ways of blocking the Regress. As I have argued, logical motivational internalism rests on the wrong account of the role that logical knowledge plays in our cognitive economies, as what moves us to draw conclusions from premises. This argument for logical motivational externalism is not yet an argument for logical cognitivism, but it paves the way for one.

Besides showing that logical motivational internalism is incorrect, the discussion also reveals the following about interpreting Carroll's Regress as a regress concerning normativity, motivation and cognitivism. First, the Regress operates with the wrong normative undertone if it suggests that we articulate the normativity of logical principles of reasoning in terms of (Ought). At least (Ought*) is required and, as I have suggested in section 5, it is an open question whether we should really think of logic as itself normative or only so by association with epistemic notions such as belief, truth or knowledge.

Second, the Regress wrongly invites us to seek a solution internal to logic as it were. This is initially manifest with the appeal to (Cond). If someone does not reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii), it is first suggested we add (Cond) as a premise – we appeal to a further logical fact to address our logical problem, thus seeking a solution internal to logic. In this sense, appeal to (Ought)/(Ought*), together with the Logic Makes the Mind Move view, is still seeking a solution internal to logic: through appealing to normative and psychological facts of motivation essentially tied to those logical facts.

Not only is it mistaken to seek a solution internal to logic, but there is also a simpler picture available, which brings in factors external to logic, such as our cognitive and practical goals. It seems that a proper explanation of why we engage in reasoning has to factor these in. This in itself makes the logical case quite different from the moral one, as, crudely put, it is natural to think of morality not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Carroll's Regress as a puzzle about motivation might thus be better interpreted as a problem of failure to act on one's practical or theoretical goals.

Finally, let me sketch a cognitivist way to address Carroll's Regress. At the end on section 2, I alluded to the fact that it is widely agreed that Carroll makes two mistakes. First, he suggests that the conditional (Cond) would be the right sort of thing to consider for someone who is not moved by the obligation to reason from (i) and (ii) to (iii). Second, he invites us to add (Cond) as a premise to the original argument from (i) and (ii) to (iii). While this diagnosis is right, this should not lead us to make the presupposition that any proposition offered as the right thing to consider would eo ipso act as a premise in one's reasoning. We can agree that (Cond) is not the right thing to consider, because it is neither about entailment nor about reasoning or norms. But the failure of (Cond) as the right thing to consider should not be taken to signal the failure of any proposition to be the right thing to consider. This would require further argument. Furthermore, from the mistaken proposal of adding (Cond) as a premise we should not infer that any acceptance (knowledge, belief) of a proposition is to be characterised as acceptance of a premise. This too would require further argument. To my knowledge these arguments have not been properly articulated, and Carroll's Regress has simply been taken as having provided that argument or as having been suggestive enough. But I do not see that it has.

The case for logical cognitivism crucially rests on there being propositional knowledge of logical principles, where these are not premises in reasoning, but rather play another role in our cognitive economies. In the example of Lucy's birthday, I could not reason the way I do if I did not know Modus Ponens. Yet, Modus Ponens is not a premise in my reasoning, nor is it what motivates me to reason. What then? In that example, I conclude the true proposition that I had better hide the presents now. Knowing this truth is useful to me. My knowledge of Modus Ponens enables me to arrive at that truth. This suggests that the best way to think of knowledge of Modus Ponens is as knowledge that enables reasoning, or enables reaching certain goals, rather than as knowledge that motivates to reason. This does not require non-cognitivism about knowing Modus Ponens unless we insist that all cognitive states inevitably turn out to be premises or attitudes to premises. But more importantly, once this knowledge is not tied to action in the way the view that logic makes the mind move seemed to require, but is recognised to have this different role in our cognitive economies, there is less pressure to go non-cognitivist.Footnote ⁵⁴

Finally, then, I suggest the following articulation of logical cognitivism: knowing that P, and if P, then Q together entail Q, is knowing a proposition that enables reasoning.Footnote ⁵⁵ This knowledge is necessary for reasoning – it makes it possible for reasoning to occur – but is (typically) not part of it; it is (typically) not a premise in reasoning. More precisely: knowing Modus Ponens requires being acquainted with a fact of entailment, a fact that enables us to engage in certain actions of reasoning, namely those that suit our epistemic and practical goals.Footnote ⁵⁶