Oh, good. That clarification makes things much better.
But there are still situations where you can believe a normative “for many reasons”. The most important is probably that you can have many reasons to support something as well as to oppose it. For example, there may be five strong arguments to vote Demopublican, and only four equally strong arguments to vote Republicrat. In this case, if you ask me why I’m voting Demopublican, I’d have to say “for many reasons”. Might sound like splitting hairs, but I think lots of real world cases fall into this category.
Another caveat is that this only applies to “randomly generated” alternatives. If I had to choose between a battle plan devised by a brilliant general, versus a battle plan devised by a moron, there would probably be “many reasons” to prefer the general’s, and I would keep finding more the harder I looked. All of these would come back to one reason—“it was designed by a brilliant general”, but the reason would be a fact about the plan that’s inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know how the plan was designed, not a fact within the plan that could be discovered by looking it over. Again, may sound like splitting hairs, but a lot of real human issues could fall into this category, like using scientific versus alternative medicine.
Oh, good. That clarification makes things much better.
But there are still situations where you can believe a normative “for many reasons”. The most important is probably that you can have many reasons to support something as well as to oppose it. For example, there may be five strong arguments to vote Demopublican, and only four equally strong arguments to vote Republicrat. In this case, if you ask me why I’m voting Demopublican, I’d have to say “for many reasons”. Might sound like splitting hairs, but I think lots of real world cases fall into this category.
Another caveat is that this only applies to “randomly generated” alternatives. If I had to choose between a battle plan devised by a brilliant general, versus a battle plan devised by a moron, there would probably be “many reasons” to prefer the general’s, and I would keep finding more the harder I looked. All of these would come back to one reason—“it was designed by a brilliant general”, but the reason would be a fact about the plan that’s inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know how the plan was designed, not a fact within the plan that could be discovered by looking it over. Again, may sound like splitting hairs, but a lot of real human issues could fall into this category, like using scientific versus alternative medicine.