A Linking Belief is Not Essential for Reasoning

In reasoning, you acquire a new conclusion attitude on the basis of premise attitudes. It is commonly thought that an essential feature of reasoning is that you have a linking belief, which is a belief that the premises imply the conclusion. This chapter shows that a linking belief is not essential for reasoning. A genuinely essential feature of reasoning is that you acquire the conclusion attitude by following a rule. A linking belief may be a necessary feature of theoretical reasoning, because it may be a consequence of having the disposition to follow a rule. But it is not essential for reasoning, which is to say that it does not contribute to making the process reasoning. For other sorts of reasoning including practical reasoning, a linking belief is not even necessary.