Presents an analogue of the Preface Paradox for intention, and discusses possible implications for the philosophy of action.

Offers a conciliatory solution to one of the central contemporary debates in the theory of rationality, the debate about the proper formulation of rational requirements. Introduces a novel conception of the “symmetry problem” for wide scope rational requirements, and sketches a theory of rational commitment as a response.

While logical theories of information attitudes, such as knowledge, certainty and belief, have flourished in the past two decades, formalization of other facets of rational behavior have lagged behind significantly. One intriguing line of research concerns the concept of intention. I will discuss one approach to tackling the notion within a logical framework, based on a database perspective.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

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)

[Opening paragraph:] Ontological realism or holism about social groups is the thesis that groups are composite material particulars. Social groups are entities over which we quantify in the set of our best descriptions and explanations of the social world. The realist explains that a group considered in its own right can be causally responsible for the production of events or states of affairs. We do more than just describe and furnish explanations of the phenomena of the social world. In our (...) ordinary discourse and in the arenas of policy formation, legislation and the administration of laws we make moral judgments of groups and seek to direct action toward them. Granted realism about groups the concern of the present paper is the sense in or extent to which we can talk literally of a group as such being morally responsible, and, in particular, of whether it is apt to make responsibility judgments of large groups such as nations. That is, whether a group considered as an entity in its own right can be the appropriate bearer of the full-blown ascription of moral responsibility. For when we talk of individuals being collectively responsible we seem to just pick out as the responsible party them as a group—the individual members regarded jointly or collectively as one unit. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new argument against inclusive legal positivism. As I show, any theory which permits morality to be a condition on legality cannot account for a core feature of legal activity, namely, that it is an activity of social planning. If the aim of a legal institution is to guide the conduct of the community through plans, it would be self-defeating if the existence of these plans could only be determined through deliberation on the merits. I (...) also argue that, insofar as inclusive legal positivism was developed as a response to Ronald Dworkin's critique of H. L. A. Hart's theory of law, it was founded on a mistake. For once we appreciate the role that planning plays in legal regulation, we will see that Dworkin's objection is based on a flawed conception of legal obligations and rights and hence does not present an objection that inclusive legal positivists were required to answer. (shrink)

It’s possible to accept or to reject a promise. According to a new proposal by Abraham Roth, accepting a promise involves intending that the promisee perform the promised action. According to Roth, this view is supported by rational symmetries between promissory acceptance and intention. Here, I show how these symmetries actually generate two problems for the view.

The moral of Buridan's Ass is that it can sometimes be rational to perform one action rather than another even though one lacks stronger reason to do so. Yet it is also commonly believed that it cannot ever be rational to believe one proposition rather than another if one lacks stronger reason to do so. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate a deep difference between epistemic and practical rationality. According to the view articulated here, the asymmetry should instead be (...) explained by the difference between rational intentions and rational actions. Thus, it turns out, Buridan's Ass-style cases do not indicate an asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality as such. (shrink)

A prevalent assumption is that normativity is a unity. In this paper I argue against this assumption by demonstrating the problems it poses to a well known answer to a well known problem for taking rationality to be normative. John Broome's normative requirement relation does indeed avoid that problem, but insofar as the relation is supposed to offer a general characterisation of the normativity of rationality, it fails. It fails because it cannot capture an important aspect of the normativity of (...) rationality, that it is available to guide us. I show that if we distinguish two kinds of normativity it need not fail in this way. (shrink)

The concept of free will states that when more than one alternative is available to an individual, he/she chooses freely and voluntarily to render an action in any given context. A question arises, how do human beings choose to perform an action in a given context? What happens to an individual who compels him/her to choose an action out of many alternatives? The behaviorists state that free will guides individuals to choose an action voluntarily. Therefore, he/she is morally responsible for (...) his/her voluntary actions. This paper attempts to answer whether a person’s action is an outcome of his/her ‘moral luck’ or ‘designated cerebral cortex processes’? While answering this question the paper examines the relation between principle of causality and free will of a person. It analyses what causes free will. It elucidates use of free will for decision-making process(es), and the relation between human beings’ actions and their moral responsibility. This paper concludes that human beings are conscious of their free will. Free will decides their actions; therefore, they are morally responsible for their voluntary actions. This paper argues that free will is an emergent property of ‘immaterial soul’. (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).

Argues that practical irrationality is akin to moral culpability: it is defective practical thought which one could legitimately have been expected to avoid. It is thus a mistake to draw too tight a connection between failure to be moved by reasons and practical irrationality (as in a certain kind of "internalism"): one's failure may be genuine, but not culpable, and therefore not irrational.

What is it to "value" something, in the semi-technical sense of the term that Gary Watson establishes? I argue that valuing something consists in caring about it. Caring involves not only emotional dispositions of the sort that Agnieszka Jaworska has elaborated, but also a distinctive cognitive disposition – namely, a (defeasible) disposition to believe the object cared about to be a source of agent-relative reasons for action and for emotion. Understood in this way, an agent's carings have a stronger claim (...) to "speak for" her as her values than do other attitudes that have been proposed for this role. In particular, an agent's carings establish more robust psychological continuities and cross-temporal connections than do self-governing policies of the sort that Michael Bratman has described; and they forge diachronic coherence not just in her deliberation and action, as self-governing policies do, but also in her cognitive and emotional life. An agent's carings thus help to constitute her identity as a temporally persisting subject . Self-governing policies are at best ersatz -values, which an agent may choose to adopt when she finds that her proper values – her cares – leave her course underdetermined. (shrink)

Invasive neural devices offer novel prospects for motor rehabilitation on different levels of agentive behavior. From a functional perspective, they interact with, support, or enable human intentional actions in such a way that movement capabilities are regained. However, when there is a technical malfunction resulting in an unintended movement, the complexity of the relationship between the end user and the device sometimes makes it difficult to determine who is responsible for the outcome – a circumstance that has been coined as (...) “responsibility gap” in the literature. So far, recent accounts frame this issue around the theme of control but more work is needed to explore the complicated terrain of assigning responsibility for neural device-mediated actions from this control perspective. This paper aims at contributing to this tendency by offering more fine-grained distinctions of how that control capacity is facilitated by the machine and how it can be exercised by the end user. This results in a novel framework that depicts an in-depth exploration of the control aspect of responsibility in a way that incorporates the diversity of relationships between neurotechnologies, the various conditions they treat, and the individual end user’s experience. (shrink)

Benjamin Libet’s work paved the way for the neuroscientific study of free will. Other scientists have praised this research as groundbreaking. In philosophy, the reception has been more negative, often even dismissive. First, I will propose a diagnosis of this striking discrepancy. I will suggest that the experiments seem irrelevant, from the perspective of philosophy, due to the way in which they operationalize free will. In particular, I will argue that this operational definition does not capture free will properly and (...) that it is based on a false dichotomy between internal and external causes. However, I will also suggest that this problem could be overcome, as there are no obvious obstacles to an operationalization of free will that is in accord with the philosophical conception of free will. (shrink)

Morality and rationality are both normative: the moral claim “you ought to help others” is a genuine normative judgment, as well as the rational maxim “you ought to brush your teeth twice a day”. But it seems that there is a crucial difference these two judgments. In the first part of this paper, I argue that this difference is to be understood as a difference between two kinds of normativity: demanding and recommending normativity. But the crucial task is, of course, (...) to explain the difference. In the second part of this paper, I suggest that metaethical expressivists can provide a good explanation: by extending the analysis of ordinary (non-normative) demands and recommendations to normative judgments, they can formulate a convincing account that captures the key differences between morality and rationality. (shrink)

The propositional attitudes are attitudes such as believing and desiring, taken toward propositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that the Prime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about the propositional attitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mind works.

Intentions matter. They have some kind of normative impact on our agency. Something goes wrong when an agent intends some end and fails to carry out the means she believes to be necessary for it, and something goes right when, intending the end, she adopts the means she thinks are required. This has even been claimed to be one of the only uncontroversial truths in ethical theory. But not only is there widespread disagreement about why this is so, there is (...) widespread disagreement about in what sense it is so. In this paper I explore an underdeveloped answer to the question of in what sense it is so, and argue that resolving an apparent difficulty with this view leads to an attractive picture about why it is so. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that joint action permits a certain degree of luck. The cases I have in mind exhibit the following structure: each participant believes that the intended ends of each robustly support the joint action. This belief turns out to be false. Due to lucky circumstances, the discordance in intention never becomes common knowledge. However, common knowledge of the relevant intentions would have undermined the joint action altogether. The analysis of such cases shows the extent to which (...) common knowledge of the participants’ intentions can be harmful to joint action. This extends a recent line of research that has questioned the necessity of common knowledge in joint action. (shrink)

Internalists face the following challenge: what is it about an agent's internal states that explains why only these states can play whatever role the internalist thinks these states are playing? Internalists have frequently appealed to a special kind of epistemic access that we have to these states. But such claims have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds. I will argue that internalists needn't appeal to any kind of privileged access claims. Rather, internalist conditions are important because of the (...) way in which we expect them to act as causal mediators between states of the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and actions on the other. (shrink)

We argue that intentions are beliefs—beliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of one’s practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a strong form of cognitivism because we identify intentions with beliefs, rather than maintaining (...) that beliefs are entailed by intentions or are components of them. (shrink)

We propose a unified theory of intentions as neural processes that integrate representations of states of affairs, actions, and emotional evaluation. We show how this theory provides answers to philosophical questions about the concept of intention, psychological questions about human behavior, computational questions about the relations between belief and action, and neuroscientific questions about how the brain produces actions. Our theory of intention ties together biologically plausible mechanisms for belief, planning, and motor control. The computational feasibility of these mechanisms is (...) shown by a model that simulates psychologically important cases of intention. (shrink)

We take self‐governance or autonomy to be a central feature of human agency: we believe that our actions normally occur under our guidance and at our command. A common criticism of the standard theory of action is that it leaves the agent out of his actions and thus mischaracterizes our autonomy. According to proponents of the endorsement model of autonomy, such as Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman, the standard theory simply needs to be supplemented with the agent's actual endorsement of (...) his actions in order to make room for our autonomy. I argue that their proposal fails and that a more substantive enrichment of the standard theory is called for. (shrink)

In the Philosophy of Sport literature, play has been widely conceived, in whole or part, as an autotelic activity; that is, an activity pursued for intrinsic factors. I examine several versions of the conception of play as an autotelic activity. Given these different accounts, I raise the question whether the concept of autotelic play is tenable. I examine three possibilities: (i) accept the concept of autotelic play and reject the possibility of satisfying the conditions for play activities; (ii) accept the (...) concept and acknowledge that play refers to a range of activities ranging from the purely autotelic to something less; and, (iii) reject the definition of play as an autotelic activity and redefine play. I argue that the third option is the best avenue for constructing a viable account of play. In defending this third option, I argue that play activities are value laden, that the value of play is an empirical matter, and that the effect of motivating reasons on behavior is the basis for determining which motivating reasons count as intrinsic or extrinsic. I conclude that the weight of the arguments suggest we would be well-served to redefine and move beyond the notion of autotelic play. (shrink)

The peculiarity of the relationship between philosophy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been evidenced since the advent of AI. This paper aims to put the basis of an extended and well founded philosophy of AI: it delineates a multi-layered general framework to which different contributions in the field may be traced back. The core point is to underline how in the same scenario both the role of philosophy on AI and role of AI on philosophy must be considered. Moreover, this (...) framework is revised and extended in the light of the consideration of a type of multiagent system devoted to afford the issue of scientific discovery both from a conceptual and from a practical point of view. (shrink)

According to what I call the reductive standard-causal theory of agency, the exercise of an agent's power to act can be reduced to the causal efficacy of agent-involving mental states and events. According to a non-reductive agent-causal theory, an agent's power to act is irreducible and primitive. Agent-causal theories have been dismissed on the ground that they presuppose a very contentious notion of causation, namely substance-causation. In this paper I will assume, with the proponents of the agent-causal approach, that substance-causation (...) is possible, as I will argue against that theory on the ground that it fails as a theory of agency. I will argue that the non-reductive agent-causal theory fails to account for agency, because it fails to account for agential control: it cannot explain why the stipulated irreducible relation between the agent and an action constitutes the agent's exercise of control over the action. This objection, I will argue, applies to the agent-causal theory in particular, and to the non-reductive approach in general. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's ballet musical The Red Shoes is concerned with topics surrounding phenomenology, action, and embodied agency, and that it exploits resources that are uniquely cinematic in order to “do philosophy.” I argue that the film does philosophy in two ways. First, it explicates a phenomenological model of action and agency. Second, it addresses itself to the philosophical question of whether an individual's non-reflective movements – those that are not the result (...) of deliberation or practical reasoning – are properly understood to be actions attributable to her as her own. (shrink)

Psychological attitudes towards service and personal robots are selectively examined from the vantage point of psychoanalysis. Significant case studies include the uncanny valley effect, brain-actuated robots evoking magic mental powers, parental attitudes towards robotic children, idealizations of robotic soldiers, persecutory fantasies involving robotic components and systems. Freudian theories of narcissism, animism, infantile complexes, ego ideal, and ideal ego are brought to bear on the interpretation of these various items. The horizons of Human-robot Interaction are found to afford new and fertile (...) grounds for psychoanalytic theorizing beyond strictly therapeutic contexts. (shrink)

In his recent book Attempts, Gideon Yaffe suggests that attempts should be criminalized because of a principle he dubs the “Transfer Principle.” This principle holds that if a particular form of conduct is legitimately criminalized, then the attempt to engage in that form of conduct is also legitimately criminalized. Although Yaffe provides a powerful defense of the Transfer Principle, in this paper I argue that Yaffe’s argument for it ultimately does not succeed. In particular, I formulate two objections to Yaffe’s (...) argument for the Transfer Principle. First, I argue that a basic assumption about criminalization, on which Yaffe’s argument crucially depends, is incomplete, and Yaffe’s own attempt to supplement it undermines his argument for the Transfer Principle. Second, I argue that Yaffe’s argument does not properly account for the fact that those who merely attempt a crime and those who complete it might sometimes be responding to reasons in different ways. Accordingly, I conclude that Yaffe has not succeeded in establishing the truth of the Transfer Principle. (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)

Since the automation revolution of our technological era, diverse machines or robots have gradually begun to reconfigure our lives. With this expansion, it seems that those machines are now faced with a new challenge: more autonomous decision-making involving life or death consequences. This paper explores the philosophical possibility of artificial moral agency through the following question: could a machine obtain the cognitive capacities needed to be a moral agent? In this regard, I propose to expose, under a normative-cognitive perspective, the (...) minimum criteria through which we could recognize an artificial entity as a genuine moral entity. Although my proposal should be considered from a reasonable level of abstraction, I will critically analyze and identify how an artificial agent could integrate those cognitive features. Finally, I intend to discuss their limitations or possibilities. (shrink)

Gareth Evans has observed that one merely needs to ‘look outward’ to discover one’s own beliefs. This observation of what has become known as belief ‘transparency’ has formed a basis for a cluster of views on the nature of introspection. These views may be well suited to account for our introspective access to beliefs, but whether similar transparency-based accounts of our introspective access to mental states other than belief can be given is not obvious. The question of whether a transparency-based (...) account can be generalized beyond beliefs is part of the larger issue whether introspection of different mental states can receive broadly the same account—whether introspection is unified. My aim is to examine one particularly thorough attempt at generalizing a transparency-based account of introspection due to Alex Byrne. I argue that the resulting view does not offer a unified account of introspection, even across a handful of mental states. In doing so, I highlight two difficulties most views on introspection that try to offer a unified account would have to face, even if they are not based in belief transparency. The subsequent move away from introspective unification has ramifications for several other philosophical debates, such as the architecture of the mind and our rationality. (shrink)

People sometimes knowingly undermine the achievement of their own goals by, e.g., playing the lottery or borrowing from loan sharks. Are these agents acting irrationally? The standard answer is “yes.” But, in a recent award-winning paper, Jennifer Morton argues “no.” On her view, the norms of practical reasoning an agent ought to follow depend on that agent’s resource context (roughly, how rich or poor they are). If Morton is correct, the orthodox view that the same norms of practical rationality apply (...) to all agents needs revision. I argue that Morton’s arguments fail on empirical and philosophical grounds. What’s at stake? If Morton is correct, poverty relief agencies ought to re-design their incentives so resource-scarce agents can rationally respond to them. If I’m correct, resource-scarce agents do act irrationally in the cases under discussion, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying so. Instead of declaring them rational, we should try to understand the causes of their irrational behavior and help them better succeed by their own lights. (shrink)

This article explores self-esteem as an episodic self-conscious emotion. Episodic self-esteem is first distinguished from trait self-esteem, which is described as an enduring state related to the subject’s sense of self-worth. Episodic self-esteem is further compared with pride by claiming that the two attitudes differ in crucial respects. Importantly, episodic self-esteem—but not pride—is a function of social esteem: in episodic self-esteem, the subject evaluates herself in the same way in which others evaluate her. Furthermore, social esteem elicits episodic self-esteem if (...) the values at the basis of the others’ evaluation are shared by the subject. Such sharing of values suggests that only the evaluations of those others that the subject frames as her in-group members are relevant to episodic self-esteem. (shrink)

This paper shows how we can plausibly extend the guise of the good thesis in a way that avoids intellectualist challenge, allows animals to be included, and is consistent with the possibility of performing action under the cognition of their badness. The paper also presents some independent arguments for the plausibility of this interpretation of the thesis. To this aim, a teleological conception of practical attitudes as well as a cognitivist account of arational desires is offered.

This paper constructs a theory according to which an intention is not a mental state but an action at a certain developmental stage. I model intention on organic life, and thus intention stands to action as tadpole stands to frog. I then argue for this theory by showing how it overcomes three problems: intending while merely preparing, not taking any steps, and the action is impossible. The problems vanish when we see that not all actions are mature. Just as some (...) frogs are immature frogs, some actions are immature actions. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit Gregory Kavka’s Toxin Puzzle and propose a novel solution to it. Like some previous accounts, mine postulates a tight link between intentions and reasons but, unlike them, in my account these are motivating rather than normative reasons, i.e. reasons that explain (rather than justify) the intended action. I argue that sensitivity to the absence of possible motivational explanations for the intended action is constitutive of deliberation-based intentions. Since ordinary rational agents display this sensitivity, when placed (...) in the toxin scenario they will believe that there is no motivational explanation for actually drinking the toxin and this is why they can’t form the intention to drink it in the first place. I thus argue that my Motivating-Explanatory Reason Principle correctly explains the toxin puzzle, thereby revealing itself as a genuine metaphysical constraint on intentions. I also explore at length the implications of my account for the nature of intention and rational agency. (shrink)

An important recent debate in the philosophy of action has focused on whether there is a persistence requirement on intention and, if there is, what its proper formulation should be. At one extreme, Bratman has defended what I call Strong Persistence, according to which it’s irrational to abandon an intention except for an alternative that is better supported by one’s reasons. At the other extreme, Tenenbaum has argued that there isn’t a persistence requirement on intention at all. In the middle, (...) philosophers like Broome, Ferrero, and Paul have defended persistence requirements with varying degrees of stringency while agreeing that Bratman’s proposed requirement is too strong. In this paper I side with Bratman in defending Strong Persistence. I argue, however, that Bratman’s own argument in favor of it is defective and an easy prey to the multiple objections that have been leveled against it. I thus offer in its place a “first-personally addressed constitutivist argument” whose aim is to show to the minimally reflective agent the kind of commitment involved in deciding and forming an intention in situations of incomparability—which are taken to be the litmus test for persistence requirements—and the persistence rational requirement governing it. Along the way I respond to the objections against Strong Persistence and explain why my argument represents an improvement over Bratman’s. (shrink)

What I shall do in this paper is to propose an analysis of ‘Agent P tries to A’ in terms of a subjunctive conditional, that avoids some of the problems that beset most alternative accounts of trying, which I call ‘referential views’. They are so-named because on these alternative accounts, ‘P tries to A’ entails that there is a trying to A by P, and therefore the expression ‘P’s trying to A’ can occur in the subject of a sentence and (...) be used to refer to a particular, namely an act or event of trying. A conditional account such as mine avoids having to answer questions about those alleged particulars, for example their location and their causal relation to physical actions, or alternatively their identity to physical actions. In brief, the analysis I propose eschews any need to quantify over any sort of trying particulars. I both clarify the proposal and deal with five possible objections to it: metaphysically impossible actions: cases of finking and reverse-cycle finking; the empirical emptiness of preventers and blockers; proximate intentions and trying; and alleged explanatory loss. (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 study intentions of the form, that is, intentions with a we-content, and their role in interpersonal coordination. I focus on the notion of epistemic support for such intentions. Using tools from epistemic game theory and epistemic logic, I cast doubt on whether such support guarantees the other agents' conditional mediation in the achievement of such intentions, something that appears important if intentions with a we-content are to count as genuine intentions. I then formulate a stronger version (...) of epistemic support, one that does indeed ensure the required mediation, but I then argue that it rests on excessively strong informational conditions. In view of this I provide an alternative set of conditions that are jointly sufficient for coordination in games, and I argue that these conditions constitute a plausible alternative to the proposed notion of epistemic support. (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.