ABSTRACT:Biological, brain, and behavioral sciences offer strong and growing support for the virtue ethics account of moral judgment and ethical behavior in business organizations. The acquisition of moral agency in business involves the recognition, refinement, and habituation through the processes of reflexion and reflection of a moral sense encapsulated in innate modules for compassion, hierarchy, reciprocity, purity, and affiliation adaptive for communal life both in ancestral and modern environments. The genetic and neural bases of morality exist independently of institutional frameworks (...) and social structures. The latter not only shape moral behaviors within circumscribed limits, they also imply a plurality and compartmentalization of roles which may enable or impede the habituation of virtue. Becoming a virtuous agent entails the practical refinement of predispositionsin situas a member of a community of practitioners rather than entailing a normative ethical educational project seeking an intellectual resolution of abstract moral questions. (shrink)

A common line of thought in contemporary metaethics is that certain facts about the evolutionary history of humans make moral realism implausible. Two of the most developed evolutionary cases against realism are found in the works of Richard Joyce and Sharon Street. In what follows, I argue that a form of moral realism that I call proper-function moral realism can meet Joyce and Street's challenges. I begin by sketching the basics of proper-function moral realism. I then present what I take (...) to be the essence of Street's and Joyce's objections, and I show how proper-function realism answers them. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the parts of psychological game theory dealing with preference, as illustrated by team reasoning, and supports the conclusion that these theoretical notions do not contribute above and beyond existing theory in understanding social interaction. In particular, psychology and games are already bridged by a comprehensive, formal, and inherently psychological theory, interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut 1978; Kelley et al. 2003), which has been demonstrated to account for a wide variety of social interaction phenomena.

Globalization, with its undisputed benefits, also presents complex moral challenges that business leaders cannot ignore. Some of this moral complexity is attributable to the scope and nature of specific issues like climate change, intellectual property rights, economic inequity, and human rights. More difficult aspects of moral complexity are the structure and dynamics of human moral judgment and the amplified universe of global stakeholders with competing value claims and value systems whose interests must be considered and often included in the decision-making (...) process. While managing moral challenges is considered in management literature to be a legitimate and crucial function of business leadership, the complexity of moral challenges in a globalized business culture stretches the managerial capacities of individuals who rely on a personal moral compass and their own wisdom traditions of philosophy or religion for guidance. The Global Moral Compass introduces an expanded epistemic value framework as an aid to understanding and managing moral complexity in a globalized business culture. (shrink)

Neuroscientific claims have a significant impact on traditional philosophy. This essay, focusing on the field of moral neuroscience, discusses how and why philosophy can contribute to neuroscientific progress. First, viewing the interactions between moral neuroscience and moral philosophy, it becomes clear that moral philosophy can and does contribute to moral neuroscience in two ways: as explanandum and as explanans. Next, it is shown that moral philosophy is well suited to contribute to moral neuroscience in both of these two ways in (...) the context of the problem of ecological validity. Philosophy can play the role of an agent for ecological validity, since traditional philosophy shapes and reflects part of our social reality. Finally, based on these arguments, I tentatively sketch how a Kantian account of moral incentive can play this role. (shrink)

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the (...) act/omission distinction. In all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed. (shrink)

In his well-known 1994 work Descartes’ Error, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes his work with patients suffering from damage to the prefrontal cortex, a center of emotion processing in the brain. The accidents or strokes that had caused this damage had spared these patients’ “higher” cognitive faculties: their short- and long-term memories, abstract reasoning skills, mathematical aptitude, and performance on standard IQ tests were completely unimpaired. They were also perfectly healthy physically, with no apparent motor or sensory disabilities. Nonetheless, these (...) patients had been brought to Damasio’s attention as a physician because, despite their apparent lack of physical or cognitive impairment, they .. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Neuroethics, the study of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying ethical decision-making, is a growing field of study. In this review, we identify and discuss four themes emerging from neuroethics research. First, ethical decision-making appears to be distinct from other types of decision-making processes. Second, ethical decision-making entails more than just conscious reasoning. Third, emotion plays a critical role in ethical decision-making, at least under certain circumstances. Lastly, normative approaches to morality have distinct, underlying neural mechanisms. On the basis of (...) these themes, we draw implications for research in business ethics and the practice of ethics training. (shrink)

Akrasia is a philosophical concept meaning the possibility to perform actions against one's best judgement. This contribution aims to clarify this phenomenon in terms of a social construction, stating it as a narrative configuration generated by an observer. The latter finds himself engaged in justifying a “problematic” line of action with regard to specific cultural beliefs referring to the self, the others and the behaviour. This paper intends to make explicit the assumptions underlying the traditional definitions of akrasia when, paradoxically, (...) an agent performs an action not in accordance with his/her best judgement. In the transition from modern to post-modern psychology, we here propose an interpretation of the phenomenon in psychological terms, envisaging akrasia as a narrative form functional to the identity processes and to the social dynamics of the structures of contemporary societies. Implications in the psychological practice will be taken into account. (shrink)

A popular argument form uses general theories of cognitive architecture to motivate conclusions about the nature of moral cognition. This paper highlights the possibility for modus tollens reversal of this argument form. If theories of cognitive architecture generate predictions for moral cognition, then tests of moral thinking provide feedback to cognitive science. In certain circumstances, philosophers' introspective attention to their own moral deliberations can provide unique data for these tests. Recognizing the possibility for this sort of feedback helps to illuminate (...) a deep continuity between the disciplines. (shrink)

The relationship between ethics and science has been discussed within the framework of continuity versus discontinuity theories, each of which can take several forms. Continuity theorists claim that ethics is a science or at least that it has deep similarities with the modus operandi of science. Discontinuity theorists reject such equivalency, while at the same time many of them claim that ethics does deal with objective truths and universalizable statements, just not in the same sense as science does. I propose (...) here a third view of quasi-continuity (or, equivalently, quasi-discontinuity) that integrates ethics and science as equal partners toward the uncovering of new knowledge. In this third way, a program envisioned by William James but made practicable only by contemporary scientific advancement, science can and must inform ethics at a deep level, and ethical theory— while going beyond science—cannot do without it. In particular, I identify four areas of ethics-science collaboration: neurobiological research into the basis of moral judgment, comparative anthropol- ogy, comparative evolutionary biology of primates, and game-theo- retical modeling. I provide examples within each of these fields to show how they link to ethical theories (including prescriptive work) and questions. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the light that a scientifically informed ethics can shed on some classical problems in moral theory, such as the relationships between rational- ity and selfishness, egoism and altruism, as well as the concept of social contract. A joint research program involving both philosophers and scientists is called for if we wish to move ethical theory into the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Flanagan (1991) was the first contemporary philosopher to suggest that a modularity of morals hypothesis (MMH) was worth consideration by cognitive science. There is now a serious empirically informed proposal that moral competence is best explained in terms of moral modules-evolutionarily ancient, fast-acting, automatic reactions to particular sociomoral experiences (Haidt & Joseph, 2007). MMH fleshes out an idea nascent in Aristotle, Mencius, and Darwin. We discuss the evidence for MMH, specifically an ancient version, “Mencian Moral Modularity,” which claims four innate (...) modules, and “Social Intuitionist Modularity,” which claims five innate modules. We compare these two moral modularity models, discuss whether the postulated modules are best conceived as perceptual/Fodorian or emotional/Darwinian, and consider whether assuming MMH true has any normative ethical consequences whatsoever. The discussion of MMH reconnects cognitive science with normative ethics in a way that involves the reassertion of the “is-ought” problem. We explain in a new way what this problem is and why it would not yield. The reason does not involve the logic of “ought,” but rather the plasticity of human nature and the realistic options to “grow” and “do” human nature in multifarious legitimate ways. (shrink)

In this article we critically review the neural mechanisms of moral cognition that have recently been studied via electroencephalography (EEG). Such studies promise to shed new light on traditional moral questions by helping us to understand how effective moral cognition is embodied in the brain. It has been argued that conflicting normative ethical theories require different cognitive features and can, accordingly, in a broadly conceived naturalistic attempt, be associated with different brain processes that are rooted in different brain networks and (...) regions. This potentially morally relevant brain activity has been empirically investigated through EEG-based studies on moral cognition. From neuroscientific evidence gathered in these studies, a variety of normative conclusions have been drawn and bioethical applications have been suggested. We discuss methodological and theoretical merits and demerits of the attempt to use EEG techniques in a morally significant way, point to legal challenges and policy implications, indicate the potential to reveal biomarkers of psychopathological conditions, and consider issues that might inform future bioethical work. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungFünfzehn Jahre nach ihrer Entstehung ist die Neuroethik ein internationales wissenschaftliches Feld mit enormer Dynamik. Innerhalb weniger Jahre wurden eigene Kongresse, Zeitschriften, Forschungsförderprogramme, Fachgesellschaften und Institute gegründet. Gleichwohl besteht erheblicher Dissens über die Definition und den Gegenstandsbereich dieses neuen Gebiets. Wir argumentieren hier für eine differenzierte Konzeption, wonach neben der Reflexion ethischer Probleme der Neurowissenschaft und ihrer überwiegend neurotechnologischen Anwendungen auch die ethische Reflexion neurowissenschaftlicher Forschung zur Moralität zur Neuroethik gehört. Dies umfasst zwar nicht neurowissenschaftliche oder neuropsychologische Studien zur Moralität, (...) wohl aber die Reflexion der Bedeutung dieser Forschung für die Ethik und das Recht. Wir geben einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Themen der Neuroethik, woraus deutlich wird, wie sehr in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen, auch jenseits von Medizin und Gesundheitswesen, neuroethische Fragen relevant sind. Das Potenzial der Neuroethik als eines neuen Wissenschaftsfeldes liegt darin, durch eine Verknüpfung neurophilosophischer und medizinethischer Themen sowie eine breite interdisziplinäre Vernetzung neue Antworten auf gesellschaftlich drängende Fragen zu finden. (shrink)

Given current studies in moral psychology and following recent cases of wrong behaviour occurred in elite sporting events ? e.g. the racist chants scandals in the English Premier League or the events following Mourinho's poke in the eye scandal ? I shall analyse the extent to which supporters' brain make-up is determining them to behave in an ?unfair way?. Yet this paper is not just a work on descriptive ethics, but a normative ethics work. Therefore, once I have developed the (...) ?psycho-biological account of sports supporters?, I shall explore whether or not a more virtuous account of sports supporting can be drawn. In order to fulfil this normative task I shall appeal to the concept of ?fair play?. The common view of fair play defines it as ?the act of abiding by the rules?. However, my account of fair play is more complex and it is based on the moral principle of respecting others. This is the reason why fair play is not just something related to athletes but to supporters as well. To conclude, I shall sketch the boundaries of fair-play-based supporting behaviour in order to propose some policies or strategies that can help us to promote a ?healthy? and virtuous behaviour among fans. (shrink)

In bioethics, the first decade of the twenty-first century was characterized by the emergence of interest in the ethical, legal, and social aspects of neuroscience research. At the same time an ongoing extension of the topics and phenomena addressed by neuroscientists was observed alongside its rise as one of the leading disciplines in the biomedical science. One of these phenomena addressed by neuroscientists and moral psychologists was the neural processes involved in moral decision-making. Today both strands of research are often (...) addressed under the label of neuroethics. To understand this development we recalled literature from 1995 to 2012 stored in the Mainz Neuroethics Database (i) to investigate the quantitative development of scientific publications in neuroethics; (ii) to explore changes in the topics of neuroethics research within the defined time interval; (iii) to illustrate the interdependence of different research topics within the neuroethics literature; (iv) to show the development of the distribution of neuroethics research on peer-reviewed journals; and (v) to display the academic background and affiliations of neuroethics Researchers ... (shrink)

It is by now a well-supported hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience that there exists a functional network for the moral appraisal of situations. However, there is a surprising disagreement amongst researchers about the significance of this network for moral actions, decisions, and behavior. Some researchers suggest that we should uncover those ethics [that are built into our brains ], identify them, and live more fully by them, while others claim that we should often do the opposite, viewing the cognitive neuroscience of (...) morality more like a science of pathology. To analyze and evaluate the disagreement, this paper will investigate some of its possible sources. These may include theoretical confusions about levels of explanation in cognitive science, or different senses of ‘morality’ that researchers are looking to explain. Other causes of the debate may come from empirical assumptions about how possible or preferable it is to separate intuitive moral appraisal from moral decisions. Although we will tentatively favor the ‘Set Aside’ approach, the questions outlined here are open areas of ongoing research, and this paper will be confined to outlining the position space of the debate rather than definitively resolving it. (shrink)

Can Artificial Intelligence be more effective than human instruction for the moral enhancement of people? The author argues that it only would be if the use of this technology were aimed at increasing the individual's capacity to reflectively decide for themselves, rather than at directly influencing behaviour. To support this, it is shown how a disregard for personal autonomy, in particular, invalidates the main proposals for applying new technologies, both biomedical and AI-based, to moral enhancement. As an alternative to these (...) proposals, this article proposes a virtual assistant that, through dialogue, neutrality and virtual reality technologies, can teach users to make better moral decisions on their own. The author concludes that, as long as certain precautions are taken in its design, such an assistant could do this better than a human instructor adopting the same educational methodology. (shrink)

Advocates of moral enhancement through pharmacological, genetic, or other direct interventions sometimes explicitly argue, or assume without argument, that traditional moral education and development is insufficient to bring about moral enhancement. Traditional moral education grounded in a Kohlbergian theory of moral development is indeed unsuitable for that task; however, the psychology of moral development and education has come a long way since then. Recent studies support the view that moral cognition is a higher-order process, unified at a functional level, and (...) that a specific moral faculty does not exist. It is more likely that moral cognition involves a number of different mechanisms, each connected to other cognitive and affective processes. Taking this evidence into account, we propose a novel, empirically informed approach to moral development and education, in children and adults, which is based on a cognitive-affective approach to moral dispositions. This is an interpretative approach that derives from the cognitive-affective personality system (Mischel and Shoda, 1995). This conception individuates moral dispositions by reference to the cognitive and affective processes that realise them. Conceived of in this way, moral dispositions influence an agent's behaviour when they interact with situational factors, such as mood or social context. Understanding moral dispositions in this way lays the groundwork for proposing a range of indirect methods of moral enhancement, techniques that promise similar results as direct interventions whilst posing fewer risks. (shrink)

This paper synthesises the research related to managing conflict of interests in professional accounting firms. The main purpose is to provide information about the current state of knowledge on this topic and to highlight the areas requiring further research. The extant research has been reviewed by developing a framework through the integration of Risk Management Framework by ISO 31000:2009 and the International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants. Specifically, literature has been classified across the establishment of context, assessment, treatment, control (...) and monitoring of conflict of interests. The literature reveals that there is a lack of understanding about how the conflict of interests operates at the level of an individual accounting professional. Addressing this gap will help to develop behavioural interventions for strengthening the professionals’ independence in fact and, thereby, facilitating the management of conflict of interests. The key message this synthesised research provides for professional accounting firms and the regulators is that, for effective management of conflict of interests, behavioural interventions should be informed by the professionals’ unconscious as well as their conscious cognitive processes. This study is the first one to view the conflict of interests in a professional accounting environment through the lens of behavioural risk management. Moreover, the framework adopted for reviewing the extant literature provides a comprehensive view of the issues surrounding the ineffective management of the conflict of interests. (shrink)

The past decade has seen major advances in cognitive, affective and social neuroscience that have the potential to revolutionize educational theories about learning. The importance of emotion and social learning has long been recognized in education, but due to technological limitations in neuroscience research techniques, treatment of these topics in educational theory has largely not had the benefit of biological evidence to date. In this article, I lay out two general, complementary findings that have emerged from the past decade of (...) neuroscience research on emotion and social processing, with a view to beginning a dialogue about the meaning of these findings for educational theory. First, emotion and cognition are intertwined, and involve interplay between the body and mind. Second, social processing and learning happen by internalizing our subjective interpretations of other people's beliefs, goals, feelings and actions, and vicariously experiencing aspects of these as if they were our own. Together, these two results from neuroscience could have important implications for the design of learning environments; to discover these will require reconciling established educational learning theories with the current neurobiological evidence. (shrink)

Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive (...) methods of philosophy and overcome the charge of “amateur psychology” by more consistently collaborating with the scientists they seek to emulate. It concludes that philosophers ought to collaborate with other academics in order to gain an experience-based understanding of the methods of other disciplines in addition to an understanding of the content of these disciplines. (shrink)

Scientific developments take place in a socio-political context but scientists often ignore the ways their innovations will be both interpreted by the media and used by policy makers. In the rush to neuroscientific discovery important questions are overlooked, such as the ways: (1) the brain, environment and behavior are related; (2) biological changes are mediated by social organization; (3) institutional bias in the application of technical procedures ignores race, class and gender dimensions of society; (4) knowledge is used to the (...) advantage of the powerful; and (5) its applications may reinforce existing structures of power that pose ethical questions about distributive justice. The case of crime, deception and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) shows the complexity, and the political and ethical challenges that confront those who seek to use neuroscience to explain the etiology of crime, and who base policy on its findings. An ethically grounded neuroscience needs to take account of existing structures of power and difference, and to develop a public neuropolitical consciousness that ensures that those subject to risk by the application of science and technology are participants in the decision-making processes involving the implementation of policies that affect them. (shrink)

the term as used by sunstein seeks to bring together various traditions. however, there are significant differences between uses of the term in the cognitive and the social psychological research, and these differences are accompanied by very distinct evidential criteria. we suggest the term should refer to processes, which means that further evidence is required.

If our choices make us who we are, then what does that mean when these choices are made in the human-machine interface? Developing a clear understanding of how human decision making is influenced by automated systems in the environment is critical because, as human-machine interfaces and assistive robotics become even more ubiquitous in everyday life, many daily decisions will be an emergent result of the interactions between the human and the machine – not stemming solely from the human. For example, (...) choices can be influenced by the relative locations and motor costs of the response options, as well as by the timing of the response prompts. In drift diffusion model simulations of response-prompt timing manipulations, we find that it is only relatively equibiased choices that will be successfully influenced by this kind of perturbation. However, with drift diffusion model simulations of motor cost manipulations, we find that even relatively biased choices can still show some influence of the perturbation. We report the results of a two-alternative forced-choice experiment with a computer mouse modified to have a subtle velocity bias in a pre-determined direction for each trial, inducing an increased motor cost to move the cursor away from the pre-designated target direction. With queries that have each been normed in advance to be equibiased in people’s preferences, the participant will often begin their mouse movement before their cognitive choice has been finalized, and the directional bias in the mouse velocity exerts a small but significant influence on their final choice. With queries that are not equibiased, a similar influence is observed. By exploring the synergies that are developed between humans and machines and tracking their temporal dynamics, this work aims to provide insight into our evolving decisions. (shrink)

Our present moral traits are unable to provide the level of large-scale co-operation necessary to deal with risks such as nuclear proliferation, drastic climate change and pandemics. In order to survive in an environment with powerful and easily available technologies, some authors claim that we need to improve our moral traits with moral enhancement. But this is prone to produce paradoxical effects, be self-reinforcing and harm personal identity. The risks of moral enhancement require the use of a safety framework; such (...) a framework should guarantee practical robustness to moral uncertainty, empirical adequacy, correct balance between dispositions, preservation of identity, and be sensitive to practical considerations such as emergent social effects. A virtue theory can meet all these desiderata. Possible frameworks incorporate them to variable degrees. The social value orientations framework is one of the most promising candidates. (shrink)

Rational choice theory enjoys unprecedented popularity and influence in the behavioral and social sciences, but it generates intractable problems when applied to socially interactive decisions. In individual decisions, instrumental rationality is defined in terms of expected utility maximization. This becomes problematic in interactive decisions, when individuals have only partial control over the outcomes, because expected utility maximization is undefined in the absence of assumptions about how the other participants will behave. Game theory therefore incorporates not only rationality but also common (...) knowledge assumptions, enabling players to anticipate their co-players' strategies. Under these assumptions, disparate anomalies emerge. Instrumental rationality, conventionally interpreted, fails to explain intuitively obvious features of human interaction, yields predictions starkly at variance with experimental findings, and breaks down completely in certain cases. In particular, focal point selection in pure coordination games is inexplicable, though it is easily achieved in practice; the intuitively compelling payoff-dominance principle lacks rational justification; rationality in social dilemmas is self-defeating; a key solution concept for cooperative coalition games is frequently inapplicable; and rational choice in certain sequential games generates contradictions. In experiments, human players behave more cooperatively and receive higher payoffs than strict rationality would permit. Orthodox conceptions of rationality are evidently internally deficient and inadequate for explaining human interaction. Psychological game theory, based on nonstandard assumptions, is required to solve these problems, and some suggestions along these lines have already been put forward. Key Words: backward induction; Centipede game; common knowledge; cooperation; epistemic reasoning; game theory; payoff dominance; pure coordination game; rational choice theory; social dilemma. (shrink)

Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive (...) methods of philosophy and overcome the charge of “amateur psychology” by more consistently collaborating with the scientists they seek to emulate. It concludes that philosophers ought to collaborate with other academics in order to gain an experience‐based understanding of the methods of other disciplines in addition to an understanding of the content of these disciplines. (shrink)

Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author finds most salient but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Geography, gender, (...) and elite status all turn out to be associated with the virtues and values associated with the deceased. (shrink)

In this article I ask what recent moral psychology and neuroscience can and can’t claim to have discovered about morality. I argue that the object of study of much recent work is not morality but a particular kind of individual moral judgment. But this is a small and peculiar sample of morality. There are many things that are moral yet not moral judgments. There are also many things that are moral judgments yet not of that particular kind. If moral things (...) are various and diverse, then empirical research about one kind of individual moral judgment doesn’t warrant theoretical conclusions about morality in general. If that kind of individual moral judgment is a peculiar and rare thing, then it is not obvious what it tells us about other moral things. What is more, it is not obvious what its theoretical importance is to begin with—that is, why we should care about it at all. In light of these arguments, I call for a pluralism of methods and objects of inquiry in the scientific investigation of morality, so that it transcends its problematic overemphasis on a particular kind of individual moral judgment. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the philosophical relevance of empirical research on moral cognition. It distinguishes three central aims of normative ethical theory: understanding the nature of moral agency, identifying morally right actions, and determining the justification of moral beliefs. For each of these aims, the chapter considers and rejects arguments against employing cognitive scientific research in normative inquiry. It concludes by suggesting that, whichever of the central aims one begins from, normative ethics is improved by engaging with the science of moral (...) cognition. (shrink)

How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations in (...) cognitive neuroscience (Bennett & Hacker’s philosophical, conceptual analysis; Marr’s three levels of explanation; Neural Correlates of Consciousness research; mechanistic explanation), defending ‘mechanistic explanation’ as a method that provides the necessary tools for integrating interdisciplinary insights into human action. Furthermore, a dynamic, explanatory mechanism allows the assessment of the impact of learning and development on expert action in a valuable way that other methods don’t. Part II continues by scrutinizing several cognitive neuroscientific theories of learning and development (neuroconstructivism; dual-processing theories; simulation theory; extended mind/cognition hypothesis), arguing for the complex interactions between different types of processing and different action representations involved in expert action performances. Moreover, according to our discussion of a particular ‘simulation theory’ these interactions can be influenced in several ways with the use of language, allowing an agent to configure a specific action representation for performance at a later stage. The results of Parts I and II are then applied in Part III to a parallel discussion of philosophical analyses of intentional action (discussing i.a. Frankfurt, Bratman, Pacherie and Ricoeur) and cognitive neuroscientific insights in it. Both approaches are found to converge in emphasizing the importance for an expert to develop stable patterns of actions that comply maximally not only with his intentions, but also with his motor expertise and with situational conditions. Consequently, his actions – automatic, or not – rely on this ‘sculpted space of actions’. (shrink)