: Radical meta-normative skepticism is the view that no standard, norm, or principle has objective authority or normative force. It does not deny that there are norms, standards of correctness, and principles of various kinds that render it possible that we succeed or fail in measuring up to their prerogatives. Rather, it denies that any norm has the status of commanding with objective authority, of giving rise to normative reasons to take seriously and follow its demands. Two powerful transcendental arguments (...) challenge this view. First, skepticism is said to be self-defeating: Settling what to accept, and in particular whether to accept skepticism, appears to be a reason-guided enterprise. How can skeptics coherently support their view by citing reasons in their favor after they just rejected them throughout? Second, there is the practical-deliberative version, most recently developed by David Enoch: We are essentially deliberative creatures. Yet deliberation appears to require that there are correct answers in the form of normative reasons to our practical questions. Thus confidence in the sensible nature of deliberation should inspire confidence in reasons. The essay undermines both transcendental arguments by demonstrating, first, how to support skepticism without deserting its tenets, and, second, how to deliberate in skeptical fashion. (shrink)

According tothe rationality thesis, the possession of propositional attitudes is inextricably tied to rationality. How in this context should we conceive of rationality? In one sense, being rational is contrasted with being non-rational, as when human beings are described as rational animals. In another sense, being rational is contrasted with being irrational. I shall call rationality in this latter senseevaluative rationality. Whatever else it might involve, evaluative rationality surely has to do with satisfying requirements of rationality such as, presumably, the (...) following:(1) That one avoid inconsistency in beliefs.(2) That one not adopt new beliefs unless what one knows entails or is evidence for the truth of those beliefs.(3) That one not have φing as a goal yet do nothing necessary for one to φ. (Means/end requirement.). (shrink)

The central topic of this paper is to study joint intention to perform a joint action or to bring about a certain state. Here are some examples of such joint action: You and I share the plan to carry a heavy table jointly upstairs and realize this plan, we sing a duet together, we clean up our backyard together, and I cash a check by acting jointly with you, a bank teller, and finally we together elect a new president for (...) our country. In these cases the participants can be said to have a joint intention jointly or as a group to carry the table upstairs: the content of the intention involves our performing something together and the pronoun “we” refers to us, viz. you and me and the possible other participants considered together. When we jointly intend to carry the table, each of us can be said to.. (shrink)

This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an attribution (...) of belief is, in a certain sense, an assertion on the believer’s behalf and an attribution of desire is, in a certain sense, a command on the desirer’s behalf. In terms of this conception of the attribution of beliefs and desires, we can begin to understand how attributions of beliefs and desires can be explanatory, although we still cannot expect the attribution of beliefs and desires to generate predictions based on an assumption of rationality. Finally, the reality of beliefs and desires is likened to the reality of money; it is the reality of things governed by objective norms. (shrink)

Are groups ever capable of bearing responsibility, over and above their individual members? This chapter discusses and defends the view that certain organized collectives – namely, those that qualify as group moral agents – can be held responsible for their actions, and that group responsibility is not reducible to individual responsibility. The view has important implications. It supports the recognition of corporate civil and even criminal liability in our legal systems, and it suggests that, by recognizing group agents as loci (...) of responsibility, we may be able to avoid “responsibility gaps” in some cases of collectively caused harms for which there is a shortfall of individual responsibility. The chapter further asks whether the view that certain groups are responsible agents commits us to the view that those groups should also be given rights of their own and gives a qualified negative answer. (shrink)

Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement- based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claims that the theory the author advocates can extend (...) to legal statements and disputes, and shares some important features with Toh’s (2011) idea that legal statements express shared acceptance of norms. The chapter proposes that a contextualist semantics for legal statements paired with the pragmatic communication of implicatures that express shared acceptances of norms, achieves the same goal that Toh aims at. (shrink)

Die Einleitung unseres Kapitels bietet eine grundsäzliche Charakterisierung der Soziologie und zeichnet einige wichtige historische Entwicklungslinien der Philosophie der Soziologie (PdS) nach. Im Hauptteil werden zentrale ontologische sowie ausgewählte explanatorische Themen der PdS vorgestellt. Im Schlussteil sollen einige aktuelle Diskussionen umrissen werden.

Philosophers of action of different persuasions have suggested that there is a tight connection between the phenomenon of intending and the phenomena of “being settled on” and of “settling” a course of action. For many, this connection supports an important constraint on intention: one may only intend what one takes one’s so intending as settling. Traditionally, this has been understood as a doxastic constraint on intention: what one takes one’s intention as settling is what one believes one’s so intending as (...) settling. This paper proposes an alternative conception of such a constraint. The idea is to conceive of it in terms of the attitude of reliance, rather than of belief. The aim of the paper is three-fold: to clarify the connection between intending to act and the phenomena of being settled on and of settling a course of action, to provide support for the reliance conception of the cited constraint, and to show that this conception drives a wedge in the familiar dispute, between doxastic and conative accounts of intention, as to whether intending to act necessarily involves the belief that one will so act. (shrink)

Agents have powers to bring about change. Do agents have normative powers to bring about normative change directly? This chapter distinguishes between direct normative change and descriptive and institutional changes, which may indirectly be normatively significant. This article argues that agents do indeed have the powers to bring about normative change directly. It responds to a challenge claiming that all normativity is institutional and another claiming that exercises of normative powers would violate considerations of supervenience. The article also responds to (...) a challenge - generalizing Kent Hurtig’s recent challenge about consent - which states that exercises of normative powers are valid only in cases that do not matter - they never bring about a “normative transformation” of what the agent overall ought to do. It turns out that consent is normatively transformative in some cases, but the main contribution of exercises of normative powers is at the contributory level not that of overall oughts. Invalid exercises of normative powers are void of any normative effects. Rational agents as possessors of normative powers are not merely responsive to pre-existing normative reasons, but they can also create normative reasons. A “responsive” view of rational agency sees us as being able to track existing normative reasons and make descriptive changes (on which normative changes supervene). The “creative” view of rational agency sees us as being able not only to construct institutions but also to create normative reasons directly. The chapter concludes that agents are both responsive and creative. (shrink)

While it is well recognized that many everyday consumer behaviors, such as purchases of sweatshop goods, come at a cost to the global poor, it has proven difficult to argue that even knowing, repeat contributors are somehow morally complicit in those outcomes. Some recent approaches contend that marginal contributions to distant harms are consequences that consumers straightforwardly should have born in mind, which would make consumers seem reckless or negligent. Critics reasonably reply that the bad luck that my innocent purchase (...) contributes distantly to harm provides insufficient grounds for moral blame; moreover, such distant and seemingly inevitable collective effects are not by themselves obvious reasons for agents to refrain from acting. Granting these criticisms, I argue that the harm that agents do through knowing contributions to distant collective harm actually builds on the morally sparse agential phenomenology of everyday purchases and decisions: contributors who knowingly disregard distant harms, rather than being reckless or negligent about consequences they should have foreseen, very directly perpetuate the moral invisibility and the lack of recognition from which the global poor generally suffer. This provides agents with clearer moral reasons to refrain from knowing participation in unstructured collective harms, and clearer reason to bear them in mind in acting. (shrink)

In this article, I first elaborate and refine the Principle of Intention Agglomeration (PIA), which was introduced by Michael Bratman as “a natural constraint on intention”. According to the PIA, the intentions of a rational agent should be agglomerative. The proposed refinement of the PIA is not only in accordance with the spirit of Bratman’s planning theory of intention as well as consistency constraints for intentions rooted in the theory, but also reveals some deep rationales of practical rationality regarding resource-limited (...) agents. Then I defend the PIA against various objections and counterexamples, showing that the refined PIA survives attacks based on both conceptual analyses and psychological considerations. (shrink)

Richard Scheer has recently argued against what he calls the 'mental state' theory of intentions. He argues that versions of this theory fail to account for various characteristics of intention. In this essay we reply to Scheer's criticisms and argue that intentions are mental states.

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.

Much of the literature on practical authority concerns the authority of the state over its subjects—authority to which we are, as G. E. M. Anscombe says, subject “willy nilly”. Yet many of our “willy” (or voluntary) relationships also seem to involve the exercise of practical authority, and this species of authority is in some ways even more puzzling than authority willy nilly. In this paper I argue that voluntary authority relies on a form of voluntary obligation that is akin (in (...) some respects) to the kind of obligation one undertakes in making a promise. Voluntary authority depends, that is, on the possibility of taking on certain obligations more or less at will. It is generated through an interpersonal transaction that involves a directed act of deference, on one side, paired with appropriate uptake of that deference, on the other. Deference, in the relevant sense, should be understood as a normative power that is exercised when agents transfer deliberative discretion to others, undertaking directed obligations to treat others’ directives as content-independent and peremptory reasons. Voluntary authority, thus understood, is both grounded in and constrained by the equal moral authority or autonomy of the participants, since only autonomous agents have the standing to defer in a normatively significant way. (shrink)

Emotional responses to fiction are part of our experience with art and media. Some of these responses (“fictional emotions”) seem to be directed towards fictional entities—entities that we believe do not exist. Some philosophers argue that fictional emotions differ in nature from other emotional responses. (cf. Walton in J Philos 75(1):5–27, 1978, Mimesis as make-believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990, Walton, in: Hjort, Laver (ed.) Emotion and the arts, Oxford University, New York, 1997; Currie in The nature of fiction, Cambridge (...) University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Stecker in Br J Aesthet 51(3):295–308, 2011) The claim is supposed to be supported among others by ‘the argument from action.’ In contrast to genuine emotions, proponents of this argument claim, fictional emotions do not motivate their bearers to act. (cf. Yanal in Paradoxes of emotion and fiction, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1999; Lamarque in Br J Aesthet 21(4):291–304, 1981; Carroll in The philosophy of horror: or, paradoxes of the heart, Routledge, London, 1990; Currie 1990; Walton 1978, 1990; Suits in Pac Philos Q 87(3):369–386, 2006; Friend, in: Kind (ed.) The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination, Routledge, New York, 2016) This claim grounds in what may appear to be an obvious fact: that viewers and readers of are not led to act by their fictional emotions. It is certainly true that viewers and readers of fiction do not form intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional entities. In contrast to the proponents of the argument from action, I will argue that the lack of any such intentions can be explained only with reference to intending’s doxastic conditions, conditions that are unsatisfied in the fictional scenario. Decisively, this explanation does not refer to the motivational force of the agent’s emotions; indeed, it doesn’t refer to emotions at all. Thus, the lack of intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional objects provides no support for the claim that fictional emotions are no genuine emotions. (shrink)

How do rational agents coordinate in a single-stage, noncooperative game? Common knowledge of the payoff matrix and of each player's utility maximization among his strategies does not suffice. This paper argues that utility maximization among intentions and then acts generates coordination yielding a payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium. ‡I thank the audience at my paper's presentation at the 2006 PSA meeting for many insightful points. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211; e-mail: [email protected].

Groups of people perform acts. For example, a committee passes a resolution, a team wins a game, and an orchestra performs a symphony. These collective acts may be evaluated for rationality. Take a committee’s passing a resolution. This act may be evaluated not only for fairness but also for rationality. Did it take account of all available information? Is the resolution consistent with the committee’s past resolutions? Standards of collective rationality apply to collective acts, that is, acts that groups of (...) people perform. What makes a collective act evaluable for rationality? What methods of evaluation apply to collective acts? This paper addresses these two questions. Collective rationality is rationality’s extension from individuals to groups. The paper’s first few sections review key points about rationality. They identify the features of an individual’s act that make it evaluable for rationality and distinguish rationality’s methods of evaluating acts directly and indirectly controlled. This preliminary work yields general principles of rationality for all agents, both individuals and groups. Applying the general principles to groups answers the paper’s two main questions about collective rationality. (shrink)

Suppose you intend now to φ at some future time t. However, when t has come you do not φ. Something has gone wrong. This failing is not just a causal but also a normative failing. This raises the question how to characterize this failing. I discuss three alternative views. On the first view, the fact that you do not execute your intention to φ is blameworthy only if the balance of reasons pointed to φ-ing. The fact that you intended (...) to φ does not add to the reasons for φ-ing at t. On the second view, the fact that you do not execute your intention to φ is blameworthy because you violate a requirement of rationality. Both these views have in common that they deny that intending to φ at t creates a reason to φ at t. The third alternative, the one I defend, claims that you often create reasons to φ by intending to φ. (shrink)

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

On the one hand, it is commonly agreed that we make choices in which we are guided by a core of personal commitments, wishes, feelings, etc. that we take to express who we are. On the other, it is commonly agreed that some of these ‘existential’ choices constitute who we are. When confronting these two matters, the question of agency inevitably arises: Whether and in what sense can we choose ourselves? The paper will argue for a new perspective on existential (...) choice. (shrink)

In the Social Contract Rousseau gives what could be called a philosophical rule of recognition for law in Modernity: a law is law if and only if 'the whole people rules over the whole people'. Thus, he defines self-legislation as, at bottom, collective intentional action. I will first map out the speech act structure [LEX] underlying self-legislation on this account. In particular, I argue for a first person plural counterpart of the reflexive structure inherent to intentions generally: the notion of (...) a collective self. Then I take issue with Bratman's analysis of shared intentional activity in terms of mutuality, submitting that it misses out on the specifically political presupposition involved in 'doing something together'. I will show why 'mutuality' requires representation of the unity of a polity, and how this representation can take form without either external authority or mutual responsiveness. (shrink)

Let it be a network of voices... A network of voices that not only speak, but also struggle and resist for humanity.

This paper gives an up-to-date account of we-intentions and responds to some critics of the author’s earlier work on the topic in question. While the main lines of the new account are basically the same as before, the present account considerably adds to the earlier work. For one thing, it shows how we-intentions and joint intentions can arise in terms of the so-called Bulletin Board View of joint intention acquisition, which relies heavily on some underlying mutually accepted conceptual and situational (...) presuppositions but does not require agreement making or joint intention to form a joint intention. The model yields categorical, unconditional intentions to participate in the content of the we-intention and joint intention (viz. shared we-intention upon analysis). The content of a we-intention can be, but need not be a joint action. Thus a participant alone cannot settle and control the content of the intention. Instead the participants jointly settle the content and control the satisfaction of the intention. These and some other features distinguish we-intentions from “action intentions”, viz. intentions that an agent can alone settle and satisfy. The paper discusses weintentions (and other “aim-intentions”) from this perspective and it also defends the author’s earlier account against a charge of vicious circularity that has been directed against it. (shrink)

Mind reading (i.e. the ability to infer the mental state of another agent) is taken to be the main cognitive ability required to share an intention and to collaborate. In this paper, I argue that another cognitive ability is also necessary to collaborate: representing others’ and ones’ own goals from a third-person perspective (other-centred or allocentric representation of goals). I argue that allocentric mind reading enables the cognitive ability of goal adoption, i.e. having the goal that another agent’s achieve p (...) because and as long as another agent has that goal that p. Having clarified the relevance of mutual goal adoption for acting jointly, I argue that when an intention is shared between several agents, each individual has an intention in favour of the joint action and one in favour of a joint mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning is allocentric reasoning. Finally, I elaborate on the consequences of this view for the scientific study of human collaboration. (shrink)

In the paper, I distinguish the bottom-up strategy and the intentional stance strategy of analyzing group intentional states, and show that the thesis of distributed group subject of knowledge could be accommodated by either of them. Moreover, I argue that when combined with virtue reliabilism the thesis satisfactorily explains the phenomenon of group knowledge. To justify my argument, in the second part of the paper, I distinguish two accounts of justification pointing to conditions of group knowledge. The first, which I (...) call the belief-centered approach to group intentional states, determines the concept of group belief and group justificatory reason. The second, the process-centered approach represented by S. Orestis Palermos, employs the theory of virtue reliabilism and focuses on the group knowledge-conducive process. In the paper, I argue in favor of the latter as the internalism associated with the former appears to lack sufficient explanatory power. The theory of virtue epistemology runs into considerable difficulties when trying to deal with an extended epistemic subject composed of one individual and her cognitive artifact. In the two last parts of the paper, I consider the most important difficulties and argue that these obstacles are overcome once one adopts an approach combining virtue epistemology and the thesis of distributed group epistemic subject. (shrink)

The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for (...) continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”. (shrink)

According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joint action. The author offers a revision of Michael Bratman’s analysis of joint (...) intention that reflects the socio-cognitive abilities young children do have. This revision makes sense of joint action among young children and equally well explains simple joint actions involving adults. Key Words: collective intentionality • joint action • child’s theory of mind • joint attention. (shrink)

The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with Probability, by LeitgebHannes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 365.

In this paper, we investigate the effect described in the literature as the Group Knobe Effect, which is an asymmetry in ascription of intentionality of negative and positive side-effects of an action performed by a group agent. We successfully replicate two studies originally conducted by Michael and Szigeti, who observed this effect and provide empirical evidence of the existence of two related effects—Group Epistemic and Doxastic Knobe Effects—which show analogous asymmetry with respect to knowledge and belief ascriptions. We explain how (...) the existence of the Group Knobe Effect and its epistemic and doxastic counterparts affects the philosophical debate on collective agency and intentionality and supports the intuitiveness of realism about collective agency among laypeople. We also critically assess the reasoning presented by Michael and Szigeti in favor of the realist-collectivist interpretation of their results. We argue that a thorough analysis of both their data and our new findings shows a rather wide range of differing intuitions among laypeople regarding the status of groups as agents. These results show that while some laypeople may have realist-collectivist intuitions, the contrary realist-distrubutivist intuitions are also widespread and the claim that the majority of laypeople hold collectivist intuitions regarding group agency is unjustified. (shrink)

Intuitively, even very young children can act jointly. For instance, a child and her parent can build a simple tower together. According to developmental psychologists, young children develop theory of mind by, among other things, participating in joint actions like this. Yet many leading philosophical accounts of joint action presuppose that participants have a robust theory of mind. In this article, I examine two philosophical accounts of joint action designed to circumvent this presupposition, and then I proffer my own novel (...) account of what makes (at least some) interactions between very young children and others joint. I argue that children can take up without deliberation intentions with a joint content that have been transmitted to them by others. In doing so, children can come to share intentions with others, and by acting on these shared intentions they can come to act jointly, all without employing a robust theory of mind. (shrink)

In recent years, insurance companies have begun tracking their customers’ behaviors and price premiums accordingly. Based on the Market-Failures Approach as well as the Justice-Failures Approach, I provide an ethical analysis of the use of tracking technologies in the insurance industry. I focus on the use of telematics in car insurance and on the use of fitness tracking in life insurance. The use of tracking has some important benefits to policyholders and insurers alike: it reduces moral hazard and fraud, increases (...) actuarial fairness, and incentivizes safe behavior. These benefits, however, are outweighed by significant moral objections. First, the use of tracking technologies significantly undermines the fairness of the interaction between insurance companies and policyholders. Specifically, the use of tracking eliminates information asymmetries, but in such a way that favors insurers exclusively. Furthermore, tracked behaviors and the ability to choose to behave safely are highly correlated with other variables such as income. Therefore, tracking-based insurance relies on and exacerbates existing inequalities and injustices, which undermines the benefits that tracking is supposed to introduce. (shrink)

The paper will show how one may rationalize one-boxing in Newcomb's problem and drinking the toxin in the Toxin puzzle within the confines of causal decision theory by ascending to so-called reflexive decision models which reflect how actions are caused by decision situations (beliefs, desires, and intentions) represented by ordinary unreflexive decision models.

The consensus in the philosophical literature on joint action is that, sometimes at least, when agents intentionally jointly φ, this is explicable by their intending that they φ, for a period of time prior to their φ-ing. If this be granted, it poses a dilemma. For agents who so intend either severally or jointly intend that they φ. The first option is ruled out by two stipulations that we may consistently make: (i) that at least one of the agents non-akratically (...) believes that, all things considered, the agents ought not to φ, and (ii) that an agent is akratic, if she intends a thing that she believes, all things considered, ought not to be done. But the second option seems to entail the existence of a mental state with multiple subjects, which, in turn, seems to commit us to the existence of a group mind modified by that state: an incautious posit to say the least. I resolve the dilemma by noting that ‘They jointly intend’ is indeterminate between ‘They intend, jointly’, which does indeed entail that some mental state is an intention with multiple subjects, and ‘Jointly, they intend’, which entails a weaker claim, viz. that some mental state or states is an intention with multiple subjects. I then sketch an account of how a plurality of mental states, distributed among subjects, might, collectively, do service as their intention that they φ. It makes novel use of notions of participation and of doing a thing jointly with others. A corollary is that either intentions are not attitudes towards propositions, or propositions are individuated more finely than is often assumed. (shrink)

For a view which grounds norms in the practices of a particular group, determining who is in that group will determine the scope of those norms. Such a view requires an account of what it is to be a member of the group subject to that practice. In this article, the author presents the beginnings of such an account, limiting his inquiry to discursive practices; we might characterize such practices as those which require, as a condition of participation, participants both (...) to exchange reasons with one another and to recognize that practice as a common source of reasons. The author argues that membership in such groups is constituted by the conjunction of shared discursive practices, common recognition of the authority of that practice, and commitments between members. In the case of discursive practices, these features of membership are inseparable. Key Words: practice • commitment • membership • discursive stance. (shrink)

To promise someone to do something is to commit oneself to that person to do that thing, but what does that commitment consist of? Some think a promissory commitment is an obligation to do what’s promised, and that while promising practices facilitate the creation of promissory obligations, they are not essential to them. I favor the broadly Humean view in which, when it comes to promises (and so promissory obligations), practices are of the essence. I propose the Practice Reason Account (...) of promises, according to which a promise is basically to give oneself a self-interested practice reason to do what’s promised. One achieves this feat by invoking self-enforcing independent practice rules thanks to which one’s doing what’s promised preserves one’s promissory trust(worthiness) and promising power. However, nothing in this account supports the Hume-Rawls claim that promise-keeping or promise-breaking is right just when and because it conforms to practice rules that are justified by their good- or right-making properties. (shrink)

Argues that, in acting for a reason, one takes that reason to explain one's action, not to justify it: reasons for acting need not be seen "under the guise of the good". The argument turns on the need to explain the place of "practical knowledge" - knowing what one is doing - in intentional action. A revised and expanded version of this material appears in Part One of "Reasons without Rationalism" (Princeton, 2007).

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???

The philosophy of mind encompasses a familiar set of topics: consciousness, intentionality, mental causation, emotion, whatever topics in psychology happen to capture our interest (concepts, mindreading . . .), and so on. There is a topic deserving of addition to this list, a topic that should be receiving regular attention from philosophers of mind but is not: practical rationality. The philosophy of mind bears directly upon what can be called the ‘meta-theory’ of practical rationality, and meta-theories of rationality likewise impose (...) constraints on the philosophy of mind. Philosophers of mind who do not engage with work on practical rationality risk developing theories that are blind to important theoretical demands. They also risk allowing ethicists—who have been at work on the meta-theory of practical rationality—to unilaterally set their theoretical agendas. It is therefore time to get to work. (shrink)

If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who (...) accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings. (shrink)

Abstract The specter of the ?group mind? or ?collective subject? plays a crucial and fateful role in the current debate on collective intentionality. Fear of the group mind is one important reason why philosophers of collective intentionality resort to individualism. It is argued here that this measure taken against the group mind is as unnecessary as it is detrimental to our understanding of what it means to share an intention. A non-individualistic concept of shared intentionality does not necessarily have to (...) get stuck with some collectivist super-agent. Rather, the specter of the group mind arises from a deep-seated ?Cartesian? preconception concerning intentionality, which we should try to overcome. *I am greatly indebted to Raimo Tuomela for his comments. Also, I wish to thank Michael Bratman, Fabienne Peter, Richard Raatzsch and Katrin Meyer. (shrink)

This paper analyzes three contrasting strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action, and draws parallels between them and similar strategies of scientific model-construction. Gricean modeling involves identifying primitive building blocks of intentional agency, and building up from such building blocks to prototypically agential behaviors. Analogical modeling is based on picking out an exemplary type of intentional agency, which is used as a model for other agential types. Theoretical modeling involves reasoning about intentional agency in (...) terms of some domain-general framework of lawlike regularities, which involves no detailed reference to particular building blocks or exemplars of intentional agency. Given the contrasting procedural approaches that they employ and the different types of knowledge that they embody, the three strategies are argued to provide mutually complementary perspectives on intentional agency. (shrink)

We present an inferentialist account of collective rationality and intentionality, according to which beliefs and other intentional states are understood in terms of the normative statuses attributed to, and undertaken by, the participants of a discursive practice—namely, their discursive or practical commitments and entitlements. Although these statuses are instituted by the performances and attitudes of the agents, they are not identified with any physical or psychological entity, process or relation. Therefore, we argue that inferentialism allows us to talk of collective (...) intentionality and agency without needing to posit the existence of any sort of collective psychology or mind. (shrink)

This article examines two empirical research traditions—experimental economics and the social identity approach in social psychology—that may be seen as attempts to falsify and verify the theory of collective intentionality, respectively. The article argues that both approaches fail to settle the issue. However, this is not necessarily due to the alleged immaturity of the social sciences but, possibly, to the philosophical nature of intentionality and intentional action. The article shows how broadly Davidsonian action theory, including Hacking’s notion of the looping (...) effect of the human sciences, can be developed into an argument for the view that there is no theory-independent true nature of intentional action. If the Davidsonian line of thought is correct, the theory of collective intentionality is, in a sense, true if we accept the theory. Key Words: collective intentionality • experimental economics • social identity theory • Donald Davidson • Ian Hacking • constructivism • action • agency • philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

We study shared intentions in what we call “loose groups”. These are groups that lack a codified organizational structure, and where the communication channels between group members are either unreliable or not completely open. We start by formulating two desiderata for shared intentions in such groups. We then argue that no existing account meets these two desiderata, because they assume either too strong or too weak an epistemic condition, that is, a condition on what the group members know and believe (...) about what the others intend, know, and believe. We propose an alternative, pooled knowledge, and argue that it allows formulating conditions on shared intentions that meet the two desiderata. (shrink)

In this paper I study two ways of transforming decision problems on the basis of previously adopted intentions, ruling out incompatible options and imposing a standard of relevance, with a particular focus on situations of strategic interaction. I show that in such situations problems arise which do not appear in the single-agent case, namely that transformation of decision problems can leave the agents with no option compatible with what they intend. I characterize conditions on the agents’ intentions which avoid such (...) problematic scenarios, in a way that requires each agent to take account of the intentions of others. (shrink)

In this paper I present a dynamic-epistemic hybrid logic for reasoning about information and intention changes in situations of strategic interaction. I provide a complete axiomatization for this logic, and then use it to study intentions-based transformations of decision problems.