It is a widely-held thesis that the content of intentions can be characterized in terms of the truth of a proposition. In this paper I try to reject this idea. First, I argue that, at least for ordinary cases of intention, there cannot be any proposition such that the intention is fulfilled if, and only if, such a proposition is true. After that, I propose an alternative account for the content of intentions. I argue that this content must ultimately involve (...) a particular acting by the agent. (shrink)

If emotions provide reasons for action through their intentional content, as is often argued, where does this leave the role of the affective element of an emotion? Can it be more than a motivator and have significant bearing of its own on our emotional actions, as actions done for reasons? One way it can is through reinforcing other reasons that we might have, as Greenspan argues. Central to Greenspan’s account is the claim that the affective discomfort of an emotion, as (...) a fact about the agent’s state of being, provides an additional normative reason to act to alleviate the state. This, I argue, is not correct, nor is it the best way to understand emotions as reason-reinforcers. In this paper, I thus do two things: I provide an examination of how and why the affect of emotion could provide reasons to act to alleviate it and I propose that the real way emotions reinforce reasons is through the way they orient our attention onto things that matter, registering them as salient. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

This article attempts to historically reconstruct the phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis in order to establish a new framework of understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice, given the need for a new phenomenological justification of psychoanalysis as a special intersubjective experience of the analyst-analysand interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of phenomenologically oriented psy- chotherapies emerged within Western psychiatry. All of them were more or less influenced or exist in polemics with psychoanalytic teaching and relied primarily on phenomenology (...) in its broadest sense. First of all, we should mention such eminent psychiatrists as Eugene Minkowski, who created the original project of phenomenological existential psychopathology, and also Ludwig Binswanger with his existential, or Dasein-analytical anthropology. All these attempts in one way or another correspond to the general attitude of phenomenology to the critique of psychologism, and ultimately to naturalism of any kind. Therefore, their critique of psychoanalysis is primarily destructive, and psychoanalysis itself serves as one of the distinct examples of naturalistic reductionism of the highest type. These all leads to the rejection of psychoanalytic theory and practice as scientific, that is, one that is based on the Newtonian and Cartesian mechanistic conception of nature, and therefore makes any anthropology impossible. That is why all the mentioned phenomenological projects of psychotherapy at one time or another positioned themselves as projects of philosophical anthropology in a therapeutic perspective. The latest attempts at the phenomenological discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as the rehabilitation of Kronfeld’s guidelines for the phenomenological justification of psychoanalytic experience. (shrink)

Дослідження спрямоване на окреслення взаємозв’язків теорії та практики арґументації і теорії ухвалення рішень. Фокус уваги спрямований на виявлення специфіки модусів мультимодальної арґументації, що передбачає послідовне розв’язання таких завдань: а) доповнити та уточнити дефініцію терміна «арґументація» у контексті застосування арґументів в процесі ухвалення рішень; б) розвести смислове поле термінів «переконувати» та «запевняти» в контексті само-арґументації (self-argumentation); в) висвітлити роль особистісних особливостей дієвця у процесі вибору; г) дослідити особливості вербальних та візуальних арґументів у процесі ухвалення рішень. Автор виходить із браку досліджень, присвячених (...) прикладному застосуванню теоретико-арґументативного наробку у процесі ухвалення рішень. Прийоми та методи арґументації пропонується розглянути крізь призму само-арґументації, де суб’єкт шукає підстави та надає докази для переконання і запевнення самого себе. Актуалізація цієї проблематики дає можливість залучити теоретичні здобутки філософії дії та активності, феноменології, когнітивних та комп’ютерних наук з метою розширення поля дослідження та виходу за окреслені дисциплінарні межі. Для розгляду теоретико-методологічної та джерельної бази дослідження був використаний системний підхід. Для порівняння арґументативних теорій та підходів були застосовані компаративний метод та метод аналогії. Автором обґрунтована необхідність прийняття до уваги теоретико-арґументативного наробку в контексті теорії ухвалення рішень. Дослідження на межі цих царин зумовлюють актуалізацію проблеми людини, як дієвця, як автора власних рішень, на шляху до яких постає необхідність пояснення та арґументації. Була висунута та обґрунтована гіпотеза щодо розгляду суб’єкта як одночасно адресанта і адресата в арґументативному процесі, що дало можливість підняти питання само-арґументації. У процесі останньої було проаналізовано місце різних модусів арґументації, зокрема вербального та візуального, а також наведено приклади сфер їхнього прикладного застосування. Наукові наробки в арґументативній царині відрізняються прикладним застосуванням. Уміння будувати, аналізувати та виокремлювати арґументи дають змогу не лише ретроспективно поглянути на арґументативний процес та допомогти обґрунтувати вже ухвалене рішення, але й надати перевагу певній альтернативі безпосередньо у ситуації вибору. Діалогічний характер арґументативного процесу можна тлумачити крізь призму само-арґументації, у процесі якої використовуються не лише вербальні, а й візуальні аргументи. На підставі розглянутих першоджерел продемонстровано, яким чином візуалізація інкорпорується в процес ухвалення рішень. (shrink)

I examine an intuitive property of folk-psychological explanations I call self-sufficiency. I argue that individualism cannot honor this property and work toward distilling an account of psychological explanation that does honor it, given some fairly standard assumptions. In doing so, my preference for an Externalist individuation of intentional state will emerge unambiguously. The assumptions I rely on are fairly standard but not uncontroversial. Yet not always do I attempt to defend them from objections. My goal is an account of folk (...) psychology consistent with our every-day practices rather than the deduction of an idealized psychology from first principles. I conclude with some applications offered as evidence that the goal was achieved. (shrink)

Lethal organ donation is a hypothetical procedure in which vital organs are removed from living donors, resulting in their death. An important objection to lethal organ donation is that it would infringe the prohibition on doctors intentionally causing the death of patients. I present a series of arguments intended to undermine this objection. In a case of lethal organ donation, the donor’s death is merely foreseen, and not intended.

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer (...) from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

In a famous passage in her book, Intention , Professor G. E. M. Anscombe argues that we can only render intelligible the idea of someone wanting a thing if we know under what aspect the person sees the thing as desirable. The wanted thing must be characterized by the wanter as desirable in some respect. ‘[What] is required for our concept of “wanting”’, she says, ‘is that a man should see what he wants under the aspect of some good’ . (...) And furthermore, ‘the good conceived by the agent to characterize the thing must really be one of the many forms of good’ . Thus, while the object of desire need only be conceived as good by the wanter, and need not be really good, this can only be because the object does not have the desirable character the wanter believes it to have, not because the character supposed to be desirable is not really so. Desire cannot but be for one of the real forms of good. (shrink)

Theories based on Frankfurt’s (Am Philos Q 15(2):157–162, 1978) view of action have recently been developed to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. What these theories share is that they aim to distinguish between actions and mere bodily movements without appealing to psychological states as causes. Instead, agents have guidance control over their actions. In this paper I argue that the versions of the theory that have been proposed are problematic. I propose to pay attention to Frankfurt’s other claim (...) instead: that actions and mere bodily movements are inherently different. I argue that Anscombe’s approach to action does take this inherent distinction seriously, and is able to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

Though there has been much debate about whether Abelard's ethics are dangerously subjective or surprisingly absolutist, one thing is unanimous: they are intentionalist. The goal of this article is to parse out what should be meant by this claim, distancing his ethical account from the popular Kantian appraisal. Though much of the secondary literature on Abelard likens him to Kant, I argue that this is mistaken. For Abelard, an agent's intentions are informed by their affections—whether carnal or spiritual. This becomes (...) clear when contextualizing Abelard's use of intentio with a view to his Commentary on Romans. Using the account of intention I suggest—one nuanced by Abelard's own theological commitments and biblical exegesis—it will be clear that Abelard's ethics is not a case for the moral neutrality of the passions nor an ethic of pure reason. (shrink)

The guiding question for this essay is: who is the learner? The aim is to examine and criticize one answer to this question, sometimes referred to as the theory of the learning brain, which suggests that the explanation of human learning can be reduced to the transmitting and storing of information in the brain’s formal and representational architecture, i.e., that the brain is the learner. This essay will argue that this answer is misleading, because it cannot account for the way (...) people strive to learn in an attempt to lead a good life as it misrepresents the intentional life of the mind, which results in its counting ourselves out of the picture when it attempts to provide a scientific theory of the learning process. To criticize the theory of the learning brain, this essay will investigate its philosophical foundation, a theory of mind called cognitivism, which is the basis for the cognitive sciences. Cognitivism is itself built on three main tenets: mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy. Each of these tenets will be criticized in turn, before the essay turns to criticize the theory of the learning brain itself. The focus of this essay is, in other words, mainly negative. The hope is that this criticism will lay the groundwork for an alternative view of mind, one that is better equipped to give meaningful answers to the important questions we have about what it means to learn, i.e., what we learn, how we do it and why. This alternative will emphasize the holistic and intentional character of the human mind, and consider the learning process as an intentional activity performed, not by isolated brains, but by people with minds that are extended, embodied, enacted and embedded in a sociocultural and physical context. (shrink)

This contribution provides interdisciplinary analysis of expressions of austerity-policies. It is argued that expressions of austerity-policies are meaningful if and only if intended addressees’ psychological states are adequately attuned and conceptual preconditions for implementation met. Furthermore, it is argued that if addressees are suitably psychologically attuned and preconditions met, utility will, by definition, be maximised and successful economical recovery enjoyed in equal measure among austerity-implementors. The paper is divided into five sections. In the first section the political scene is set (...) in which austerity-policies are expressed and terminology introduced. In the second section expressions of austerity-policies are dissected and analysis of reference conditions of such expressions provided. The third section reviews conceptual analysis of intending and acting together and relates it to jointly implementing austerity-policies. In the fourth section economical rationale behind expressions of austerity-policies is evaluated with reference to what in economical theory is called team-reasoning theory. It is concluded, in section five, that given suitably psychologically attuned implementors of austerity-policies, expressions of austerity-policies are economically rational. But we should be sceptical about their economical motivation: if the people whose actions are meant to implement austerity-policies are distinct from the people whose intentions are meant to be carried out, then it might appear, in the long run, that the former bear a burden for the better of the latter. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than on the attitudes of agents. An account (...) of representation must explain how such objective standards of correctness are introduced in human practices: one must explain how the world gets to have a say in what is correct in human discursive practices. Roughly, my proposal is that human discursive practices become responsive to the way things are by virtue of involving practical interactions with the world. The outcomes of these interactions depend on the way the world is and the evaluation of such outcomes contributes to determining which moves within the practice count as correct. Due to our practical engagement with the environment, thus, the world gets to constrain discursive practices. In order to flesh out my proposal, I develop a practice-based characterization of intentional or representational content. On this sort of approach, expressing intentional contents is seen as a matter of playing a certain role in relevant practices, rather than as a matter of engaging in some word-world relation. The expression of content, thus, is explained in terms of use. In particular, I adopt an inferentialist perspective, according to which discursive moves express contents because of their role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. I investigate how practical engagement with the environment introduces friction with the world in these practices of giving and asking for reasons. One of the main conclusions reached in the dissertation is that defeasibility is an essential feature of objective representational practices – so that attributions of representational correctness are revisable in an open-ended way. The discussion of defeasible reasoning – and of the way in which defeasibility shapes human representational practices – is a central point of this dissertation. (shrink)

According to Millian Descriptivism, while the semantic content of a linguistically simple proper name is just its referent, we often use sentences containing such expressions “to make assertions…that are, in part, descriptive” (Soames 2008). Against this view, I show, following Ted Sider and David Braun (2006), that simple sentences containing names are never used to assert descriptively enriched propositions. In addition, I offer a diagnosis as to where the argument for Millian Descriptivism goes wrong. Once we appreciate the distinctive way (...) in which this account fails, we can better appreciate the very modest role that associated descriptive information plays in the pragmatics of proper names. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into the relation between mind and language from different perspectives, split up into three interrelated but still, for the most part, self-standing parts. Parts I and II are concerned with the question how thought is affected by language while Part III investigates the scope covered by mind and language respectively. Part I provides a reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous Private Language Argument in order to apply the rationale behind this line of argument to the relation (...) between mind and language. This argumentative strategy yields the conclusion that reasoning – an important type of thought – is constitutively dependent on language possession and is therefore not available to non-linguistic creatures. This result is achieved by considering the preconditions for reasoning – given that it is a rule-governed activity – and eliminating competitors to language for providing reasoners with what it takes to reason. Part II provides a critical outlook on the wide and highly heterogeneous field of linguistic relativity theories. It is argued that no kind of linguistic relativity whatsoever follows from the conclusion of Part I – i.e., the claim that reasoning is constitutively dependent on having a language. While Part II does not provide a conclusive argument against the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it is argued that endorsement of linguistic relativity theories often rests on a mistaken assumption to the effect that language and culture are interwoven in a way which makes it impossible to separate culture and language, as well as their respective studies. This assumption is undermined by providing examples of languages which clearly predate their culture or do not even have a culture at all. So, the assumption that language and culture are inextricably intertwined is refuted by way of counterexample. Part III provides an in-depth examination of the Principle of Expressibility – prominently endorsed and formulated by John Searle – which claims that whatever can be thought can also be said. The domains of what can be thought and of what can be said are considered in set theoretic terms in order to determine whether one is contained in the other, so that everything we can think can also be adequately communicated. After thorough study of interpretative issues regarding the Principle of Expressibility and consideration of the most pressing potential counterexamples to the principle, we can conclude that we have good reason to believe in the truth of the Principle of Expressibility. In conclusion, the achieved results are related back to prominent positions in the discussion about thought and language which already make their appearance in the very beginning of this investigation. The final chapter of this dissertation reminds us that eminent figures in philosophy have often taken a wrongheaded perspective on the relation between language and thought, so that language has frequently appeared to be an impediment to thought. We can, however, confidently conclude that language, on the contrary, is by far our most apt means for thought and that reasoning would not even be possible without the resources language provides. (shrink)

The central fact in the delineation of radical behaviorism is its conceptual avoidance of propositional content. This eschewal of the intentional stance sets it apart not only from cognitivism but from other non-behaviorisms. Indeed, the defining characteristic of radical behaviorism is not that it avoids mediating processes per se but that it sets out to account for behavior without recourse to propositional attitudes. Based, rather, on the contextual stance, it provides definitions of contingency-shaped, rule-governed verbal and private behaviors which are (...) non-intentional. However, while the account provided by radical behaviorism fulfills the pragmatic criteria of prediction and control of its subject matter, it has problems of explanation that stem from the failure of radical behaviorist interpretation to address the personal level of analysis, to provide for the continuity of behavior, and to show how its accounts can be delimited in the face of causal equifinality. This leaves gaps in its explanation that radical behaviorists choose either to ignore or to fill with the very intentional locutions that they formally abhor but which I argue are essential. As a result, many psychologists who style themselves radical behaviorists have already moved beyond radical behaviorism as a philosophy of science. They have done so primarily as a result of adopting the language of intentional psychology in order to explain behavior; where they have not done this, they have resorted to the unscientific assumption that somewhere there is a learning history that explains their data. While it is indeed the case that a learning history precedes all operant behavior, the explanatory gap that is revealed by the search for this unobtainable information reveals the inescapability of intentionality. Hence, psychologists, including radical behaviorists, are right to employ it. The challenge is to understand why this is so and to celebrate rather than denigrate the resulting extension of behavioral science. In this response, I first raise and seek to answer two questions: what is radical behaviorism, and what is intentional explanation? I go on to discuss the incompleteness of radical behaviorism. There follows a summary of the argument with respect to intentional behaviorism and super-personal cognitive psychology. And, finally, I bring the discussion back to Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who initiated so much of it. (shrink)

In any given day, I do many things. I perspire, digest and age. When I walk, I place one foot ahead of the other, my arms swinging gently at my sides; if someone bumps into me, I stumble. Perspiring, digesting, aging, placing my feet, swaying my arms and stumbling are all things I do, in some sense. Yet I also check my email, teach students and go to the grocery store. Those sorts of doings or behaviors seem distinctive; they are (...) things I do intentionally. -/- What exactly is an intentional action? How does it differ from other things we do? -/- In this essay, I motivate and sketch an answer to those questions. On this view, an intentional action is a behavior that essentially alters what the actor is rationally accountable for, what she is rationally permitted or obliged to do, think, or feel. On this view, acting intentionally essentially involves a normative expectation that one has reasons for what one does. I call this view Normative Functionalism. -/- I begin in §2 by presenting a different, somewhat intuitive and popular view of intentional action, the so-called Causal Theory of Action. While that view does seem plausible, I allege that it doesn’t seem to accommodate the apparent fact that actors are accountable for their intentional actions. That motivates Normative Functionalism, which I sketch in §3. I conclude in §4 by offering an interim assessment of the discussion. (shrink)

Intention, intentional action, and the connections between them are central topics of the philosophy of action, a branch of the philosophy of mind. One who regards the subject matter of the philosophy of mind as having at its core some aspect of what lies between environmental input to beings with minds and behavioural output may be inclined to see the philosophy of action as concerned only with the output end of things. That would be a mistake. Many intentional actions depend (...) for their development on the processing of input — both from the environment and from the body. (shrink)