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  1. (1 other version)Abilities and Obligations: Lessons from Non-agentive Groups.Stephanie Collins - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3375-3396.
    Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusions is (...)
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  • Does Success Entail Ability?David Boylan - 2021 - Noûs 56 (3):570-601.
    This paper is about the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue the status of Success is highly puzzling: when we focus on past instances of actually successful action, Success is very compelling; but it is in tension with the idea that true ability claims require an action be in the agent's control. I make the above tension precise by considering the logic of ability. I argue Success is appealing because it is classically equivalent to two (...)
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  • Unable to Do the Impossible.Anthony Nguyen - 2020 - Mind 129 (514):585-602.
    Jack Spencer has recently argued for the striking thesis that, possibly, an agent is able to do the impossible—that is, perform an action that is metaphysically impossible for that person to perform. Spencer bases his argument on (Simple G), a case in which it is impossible for an agent G to perform some action but, according to Spencer, G is still intuitively able to perform that action. I reply that we would have to give up at least four action-theoretical principles (...)
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  • Indeterministic Choice and Ability.Ishtiyaque Haji & Ryan Hebert - 2018 - The Journal of Ethics 22 (2):191-203.
    The problem of luck is advanced and defended against libertarian theories of responsibility-enabling ability. An outline of an account of ability is articulated to explore some features of the sort of ability moral responsibility requires. The account vindicates the luck objection and suggests a novel puzzle: Libertarianism is structurally barred from answering the problem of luck because responsibility requires, but inherently lacks, an explanation from reason states to actions that preserves reliability of connection between responsibility-grounding reasons-sensitivity and action.
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  • Ability, modality, and genericity.John Maier - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):411-428.
    Accounts of ability in the philosophical literature have tended to be modal ones: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she does in certain non-actual scenarios. In contrast, a prominent account of ability ascriptions in the recent semantics literature appeals to genericity: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she generally manages to do. The latter account resolves some long-standing problems for modal accounts, but encounters problems of its own. I propose a (...)
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  • Agentive Modals.Matthew Mandelkern, Ginger Schultheis & David Boylan - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (3):301-343.
    This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...)
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  • Reasoning with protocols under imperfect information.Eric Pacuit & Sunil Simon - 2011 - Review of Symbolic Logic 4 (3):412-444.
    We introduce and study a PDL-style logic for reasoning about protocols, or plans, under imperfect information. Our paper touches on a number of issues surrounding the relationship between an agent’s abilities, available choices, and information in an interactive situation. The main question we address is under what circumstances can the agent commit to a protocol or plan, and what can she achieve by doing so?
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  • Can I kill my younger self? Time travel and the retrosuicide paradox.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2009 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (4):520-534.
    If time travel is possible, presumably so is my shooting my younger self ; then apparently I can kill him – I can commit retrosuicide. But if I were to kill him I would not exist to shoot him, so how can I kill him? The standard solution to this paradox understands ability as compossibility with the relevant facts and points to an equivocation about which facts are relevant: my killing YS is compossible with his proximity but not with his (...)
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  • What time travelers may be able to do.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 150 (1):115 - 121.
    Kadri Vihvelin, in "What time travelers cannot do" (Philos Stud 81: 315-330, 1996), argued that "no time traveler can kill the baby who in fact is her younger self, because (V1) "if someone would fail to do something, no matter how hard or how many times she tried, then she cannot do it", and (V2) if a time traveler tried to kill her baby self, she would always fail. Theodore Sider (Philos Stud 110: 115-138, 2002) criticized Vihvelin's argument, and Ira (...)
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  • Arguments for incompatibilism.Kadri Vihvelin - 2003/2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...)
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  • Ability and cognition: A defense of compatibilism.Tomis Kapitan - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 63 (August):231-43.
    The use of predicate and sentential operators to express the practical modalities -- ability, control, openness, etc. -- has given new life to a fatalistic argument against determinist theories of responsible agency. A familiar version employs the following principle: the consequences of what is unavoidable (beyond one's control) are themselves unavoidable. Accordingly, if determinism is true, whatever happens is the consequence of events in the remote past, or, of such events together with the laws of nature. But laws and the (...)
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  • I Believe I Can φ.Matthew Mandelkern, Ginger Schultheis & David Boylan - 2015 - In Thomas Brochhagen, Floris Roelofsen & Nadine Theiler (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium. pp. 256-265.
    We propose a new analysis of ability modals. After briefly criticizing extant approaches, we turn our attention to the venerable but vexed conditional analysis of ability ascriptions. We give an account that builds on the conditional analysis, but avoids its weaknesses by incorporating a layer of quantification over a contextually supplied set of actions.
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  • Action and ability.Mark A. Brown - 1990 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 19 (1):95 - 114.
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  • (1 other version)Abilities and Obligations: Lessons from Non-agentive Groups.Stephanie Collins - 2022 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3375-3396.
    Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusions is (...)
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  • Ability, action, and context.Richmond H. Thomason - unknown
    This paper proposes a formalization of ability that is motivated in part by linguistic considerations and by the philosophical literature in action theory and the logic of ability, but that is also meant to match well with planning formalisms, and so to provide an account of the role of ability in practical reasoning. Some of the philosophical literature concerning ability, and in particular [Austin, 1956], suggests that some ways of talking about ability are context-dependent. I propose a way of formalizing (...)
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  • On the logic of ability.Mark A. Brown - 1988 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 17 (1):1 - 26.
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  • Formalizing the semantics of derived words.Richmond H. Thomason - unknown
    I believe that this approach leads to a wider problem that brings together elements of linguistics and philosophy in an illuminating way. But the single case study that I provide here, while it may be suggestive, does not go far enough to make a good case for the more general point. This paper is extracted from a larger collection of documents, and is intended to motivate and illustrate the ideas.
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  • The logic of resources and capabilities.Marta Bílková, Giuseppe Greco, Alessandra Palmigiano, Apostolos Tzimoulis & Nachoem Wijnberg - 2018 - Review of Symbolic Logic 11 (2):371-410.
    We introduce the logic LRC, designed to describe and reason about agents’ abilities and capabilities in using resources. The proposed framework bridges two—up to now—mutually independent strands of literature: the one on logics of abilities and capabilities, developed within the theory of agency, and the one on logics of resources, motivated by program semantics. The logic LRC is suitable to describe and reason about key aspects of social behaviour in organizations. We prove a number of properties enjoyed by LRC and (...)
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  • Ability and action.Richmond H. Thomason - unknown
    This is part of a larger project that is motivated in part by linguistic considerations and by the philosophical literature in action theory and the logic of ability, but that is also meant to suggest ways in which planning formalisms could be modified to provide an account of the role of ability in planning and practical reasoning.
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  • A dynamic logic of action.Brigitte Penther - 1994 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 3 (3):169-210.
    The paper presents a logical treatment of actions based on dynamic logic. This approach makes it possible to reflect clearly the differences between static and dynamic elements of the world, a distinction which seems crucial to us for a representation of actions.Starting from propositional dynamic logic a formal system (DLA) is developed, the programs of which are used to model action types. Some special features of this system are: Basic aspects of time are incorporated in DLA as far as they (...)
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