Reasons and Grounds: A Proof-Theoretical Investigation

Abstract The key idea of this paper is that grounds are a special kind of reasons, so their logic is part of the logic of reasons. We outline a natural deduction calculus that provides a basic formal characterization of reasons and enables us to obtain some distinctive and relatively uncontentious principles about grounds. Then we show that the calculus outlined is consistent and decidable, which we take to be an interesting result in its own right.