Abstract: Practical Reality is about the relation between the reasons why we do things and the reasons why we should. It claims that, in order to understand this relation, we have to abandon current conceptions of the reasons why we act—our motivating reasons, as they are commonly called—as mental states of ourselves. Belief/desire explanations of action, or even purely cognitive accounts in terms of beliefs alone, drive too great a wedge between the normative and the motivational. Instead, we have to understand a motivating reason as the sort of thing that could be a good reason, for instance, that the train is about to leave. This, rather than my belief that the train is about to leave, must be my reason for running. Motivating reasons are not mental states of the agent, but states of affairs.

Keywords: action, agency, Jonathan Dancy, explanation of action, externalism, Humeanism, internalism, motivating reasons, motivation, normative realism, normative reasons, philosophy, philosophy of mind, rationality, reasons, reasons for action