A skeptical view on first‐person explanatory reasons and a normative account of our explanatory practices

Abstract There is a general agreement in the contemporary discussion on practical reasons that the reasons for which we act are able to explain our actions. These first‐person explanatory reasons, closely connected to motivating reasons, can be called, for ease of exposition, “agential reasons.” The acceptance of agential reasons largely relies on our ordinary practices of giving explanations. Based on some standard considerations about the notion of explanation and central cases of explanatory relationships already developed in the literature, I will cast some doubts on the idea that there are agential reasons as a subcategory of explanatory reasons for actions. I will then suggest that this skeptical suggestion on agential reasons need not embrace either an error theory of our explanatory practices or a psychological reading of them. Rather, I will propose an alternative normative account that I believe fits better with the explanatory interest underlying them.