Being Biased and Knowing How to Reason

ABSTRACT This essay explains how reasoning is action and not reflex. It then uses that theory to explain one form of knowing how to reason. Reasoning is thinking biased by knowledge. Drawing on Louise Antony's emphasis on bias as critical for dealing with underdetermination in induction, I show that underdetermination confronts all forms of reasoning, including deduction. Reasoning must be biased if it is to emerge from action underdetermination. The bias framework recasts the concept of taking, as advocated by Paul Boghossian, in terms of biased reasoning. This philosophical hypothesis is supported by empirical work demonstrating how beliefs bias attention. The paper then reveals a psychological‐epistemic structure that is actualized whenever an agent reasons. The agent's knowledge, implicit or explicit, resolves underdetermination, and the underlying structure that integrates knowledge with capacities for thinking constitutes the agent's knowing how to reason.