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  1. The causal efficacy of mental states.Peter Menzies - 2003 - In Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action. Imprint Academic. pp. 195--223.
    You are asked to call out the letters on a chart during an eyeexamination: you see and then read out the letters ‘U’, ‘R’, and ‘X’. Commonsense says that your perceptual experiences causally control your calling out the letters. Or suppose you are playing a game of chess intent on winning: you plan your strategy and move your chess pieces accordingly. Again, commonsense says that your intentions and plans causally control your moving the chess pieces. These causal judgements are as (...)
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  • Dretske on explaining behavior.Kirk A. Ludwig - 1996 - Acta Analytica 11:111-124.
    Fred Dretske has recently argued, in a highly original book and a series of articles, that action explanations are a very special species of historical explanation, in opposition to the traditional view that action explanations cite causes of actions, which are identical with bodily movements. His account aims to explain how it is possible for there to be a genuine explanatory role for reasons in a world of causes, and, in particular, in a world in which we have available in (...)
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  • Mental causation from the top-down.William Jaworski - 2006 - Erkenntnis 65 (2):277-299.
    Dual-attribute theories are alleged to face a problem with mental causation which commits them to either epiphenomenalism or overdetermination – neither of which is attractive. The problem, however, is predicated on assumptions about psychophysical relations that dual-attribute theorists are not obliged to accept. I explore one way they can solve the problem by rejecting those assumptions.
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  • Mentality and causality.John Heil - 1992 - Topoi 11 (1):103-110.
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  • Mental causation: Compulsion by reason.Bill Brewer - 1995 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69:237-253.
    The standard paradigm for mental causation is a person’s acting for a reason. Something happens - she intentionally φ’s - the occurrence of which we explain by citing a relevant belief or desire. In the present context, I simply take for granted the following two conditions on the appropriateness of this explanation. First, the agent φ’s _because_ she believes/desires what we say she does, where this is expressive of a _causal_ dependence.1 Second, her believing/desiring this gives her a _reason_ for (...)
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  • Van Gulick’s solution of the exclusion problem revisited.Janez Bregant - 2004 - Acta Analytica 19 (33):83-94.
    The anti-reductionist who wants to preserve the causal efficacy of mental phenomena faces several problems in regard to mental causation, i.e. mental events which cause other events, arising from her desire to accept the ontological primacy of the physical and at the same time save the special character of the mental. Psychology tries to persuade us of the former, appealing thereby to the results of experiments carried out in neurology; the latter is, however, deeply rooted in our everyday actions and (...)
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  • The causal relevance of the mental.Louise Antony - 1991 - Mind and Language 6 (4):295-327.
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  • Non-reductive materialism and the spectrum of mind-body identity theories.Andrew Kernohan - 1988 - Dialogue 27 (3):475-88.
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  • Functionalism, causation and causal relevance.Kirk A. Ludwig - 1998 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 4.
    causal relevance, a three-place relation between event types, and circumstances, and argue for a logical independence condition on properties standing in the causal relevance relation relative to circumstances. In section 3, I apply these results to show that functionally defined states are not causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which they are defined. In section 4, I extend this result to what that output in turn causes and to intervening mechanisms. In section 5, I examine (...)
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  • Objectivism and interaction: A reaction to Margolis.May Brodbeck - 1966 - Philosophy of Science 33 (September):287-292.
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  • Anomalous monism.Steven Yalowitz - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Semantic determinants and psychology as a science.Steven Yalowitz - 1998 - Erkenntnis 49 (1):57-91.
    One central but unrecognized strand of the complex debate between W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson over the status of psychology as a science turns on their disagreement concerning the compatibility of strict psychophysical, semantic-determining laws with the possibility of error. That disagreement in turn underlies their opposing views on the location of semantic determinants: proximal (on bodily surfaces) or distal (in the external world). This paper articulates these two disputes, their wider context, and argues that both are fundamentally misconceived. (...)
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  • The impossibility of psycho-physical laws.David Brooks - 1980 - Philosophical Papers 9 (October):21-45.
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  • Causes and causal explanations: Davidson and his critics.Neil Campbell - 2003 - Philosophia 31 (1-2):149-157.
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  • The content of intentions.Elisabeth Patherie - 2000 - Mind and Language 15 (4):400-432.
    I argue that in order to solve the main difficulties confronted by the classical versions of the causal theory of action, it is necessary no just to make room for intentions, considered as irreducible to complexes of beliefs and desires, but also to distinguish among several types of intentions. I present a three-tiered theory of intentions that distinguishes among future-directed intentions, present-directed intentions and motor intentions. I characterize each kind of intention in terms of its functions, its type of content, (...)
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  • There is no escape from philosophy: Collective intentionality and empirical social science.Antti Saaristo - 2006 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (1):40-66.
    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 (...)
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  • The normativity of the mental.Nick Zangwill - 2005 - Philosophical Explorations 8 (1):1-19.
    I describe and defend the view in a philosophy of mind that I call 'Normative Essentialism', according to which propositional attitudes have normative essences. Those normative essences are 'horizontal' rational requirements, by which I mean the requirement to have certain propositional attitudes given other propositional attitudes. Different propositional attitudes impose different horizontal rational requirements. I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this doctrine and argue for the weaker version. I explore the consequences for knowledge of mind, and I (...)
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  • Radical interpretation.David K. Lewis - 1974 - Synthese 23 (July-August):331-344.
    What knowledge would suffice to yield an interpretation of an arbitrary utterance of a language when such knowledge is based on evidence plausibly available to a nonspeaker of that language? it is argued that it is enough to know a theory of truth for the language and that the theory satisfies tarski's 'convention t' and that it gives an optimal fit to data about sentences held true, Under specified conditions, By native speakers.
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  • Teleofunctionalism and psychological explanation.Jason Bridges - 2006 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (4):359-372.
    Fred Dretske’s teleofunctional theory of content aims to simultaneously solve two ground-floor philosophical puzzles about mental content: the problem of naturalism and the problem of epiphenomenalism. It is argued here that his theory fails on the latter score. Indeed, the theory insures that content can have no place in the causal explanation of action at all. The argument for this conclusion depends upon only very weak premises about the nature of causal explanation. The difficulties Dretske’s theory encounters indicate the severe (...)
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  • Information, belief, and causal role.Paul G. Skokowski - 1999 - In Lawrence Moss, Gizburg S., Rijke Jonathaden & Maarten (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation Vol. CSLI Publications.
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  • Does Informational Semantics Commit Euthyphro's Fallacy?Jason Bridges - 2006 - Noûs 40 (3):522-547.
    In this paper, I argue that informational semantics, the most well-known and worked-out naturalistic account of intentional content, conflicts with a fundamental psychological principle about the conditions of belief-formation. Since this principle is an important premise in the argument for informational semantics, the upshot is that the view is self-contradictory??indeed, it turns out to be guilty of a sophisticated version of the fallacy famously committed by Euthyphro in the eponymous Platonic dialogue. Criticisms of naturalistic accounts of content typically proceed piecemeal (...)
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  • The depths and shallows of psychological externalism.Andrew Sneddon - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (3):393 - 408.
    This paper examines extant ways of classifying varieties of psychological externalism and argues that they imply a hitherto unrecognized distinction between shallow and deep externalism. The difference is between starting points: shallowly externalist hypotheses begin with the attribution of psychological states to individuals, just as individualistic hypotheses do, whereas deeply externalistic hypotheses begin with agent-environment interaction as the basis of cognitive processes and attribute psychological states to individuals as necessary for such interaction. The over-arching aim is to show how deep (...)
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  • On the metaphysics of internalism and externalism.Alberto Voltolini - 2005 - Disputatio 1 (18):1 - 24.
    In this paper, I explore the consequences of the thesis that externalism and internalism are (possibly, but as we will see not necessarily, opposite) metaphysical doctrines on the individuation conditions of a thought. If I am right, this thesis primarily entails that at least some naturalist positions on the ontology of the mind, namely the reductionistic ones, are hardly compatible with both externalism and a version of internalism so conceived, namely relational internalism. Indeed, according to both externalism and relational internalism, (...)
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  • Content, causation, and psychophysical supervenience.Joseph Owens - 1993 - Philosophy of Science 60 (2):242-61.
    There is a growing acceptance of the idea that the explanatory states of folk psychology do not supervene on the physical. Even Fodor (1987) seems to grant as much. He argues, however, that this cannot be true of theoretical psychology. Since theoretical psychology offers causal explanations, its explanatory states must be taxonomized in such a way as to supervene on the physical. I use this concession to invert his argument and cast doubt on the received model of folk psychological explanation (...)
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  • Fodor's modal argument.Frederick Adams - 1993 - Philosophical Psychology 6 (1):41-56.
    What we do, intentionally, depends upon the intentional contents of our thoughts. For about ten years Fodor has argued that intentional behavior causally depends upon the narrow intentional content of thoughts (not broad). His main reason is a causal powers argument—brains of individuals A and B may differ in broad content, but, if A and B are neurophysically identical, their thoughts cannot differ in causal power, despite differences in broad content. Recently Fodor (Fodor, 1991) presents a new 'modal' version of (...)
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  • False consciousness of intentional psychology.Katarzyna Paprzycka - 2002 - Philosophical Psychology 15 (3):271-295.
    According to explanatory individualism, every action must be explained in terms of an agent's desire. According to explanatory nonindividualism, we sometimes act on our desires, but it is also possible for us to act on others' desires without acting on desires of our own. While explanatory nonindividualism has guided the thinking of many social scientists, it is considered to be incoherent by most philosophers of mind who insist that actions must be explained ultimately in terms of some desire of the (...)
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  • Externalism about mental content.Joe Lau - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way.
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  • Attitude ascription's affinity to measurement.Mitchell S. Green - 1999 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (3):323-348.
    The relation between two systems of attitude ascription that capture all the empirically significant aspects of an agents thought and speech may be analogous to that between two systems of magnitude ascription that are equivalent relative to a transformation of scale. If so, just as an objects weighing eight pounds doesnt relate that object to the number eight (for a different but equally good scale would use a different number), similarly an agents believing that P need not relate her to (...)
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  • The mysteries of desire: A discussion. [REVIEW]Abraham S. Roth - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 123 (3):273-293.
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  • Breaking the law of desire.Joshua Gert - 2005 - Erkenntnis 62 (3):295-319.
    This paper offers one formal reason why it may often be inappropriate to hold, of two conflicting desires, that the first must be weaker than, stronger than, or of the same strength as the second. The explanation of this fact does not rely on vagueness or epistemological problems in determining the strengths of desires. Nor does it make use of the problematic notion of incommensurability. Rather, the suggestion is that the motivational capacities of many desires might best be characterized by (...)
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  • The austere ideology of folk psychology.Terence Horgan - 1993 - Mind and Language 8 (2):282-297.
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  • Consciousness in act and action.Keith Hossack - 2003 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (3):187-203.
    This paper develops an account of consciousness in action. Both consciousness and action are related to knowledge. A voluntary action is defined as a volition, or something intentionally effected by means of such volitions. Volitions are conscious mental acts whose proper function is to make their content true. A mental act is the exercise of a power of mind and a conscious mental act is identical with knowledge of its own phenomenal character. This set of definitions elucidates the relations between (...)
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  • How to judge intentionally.Antonia Peacocke - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):330-339.
    Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model (...)
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  • The possibility of deliberate norm-adherence in AI.Danielle Swanepoel - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (2):157-163.
    Moral agency status is often given to those individuals or entities which act intentionally within a society or environment. In the past, moral agency has primarily been focused on human beings and some higher-order animals. However, with the fast-paced advancements made in artificial intelligence, we are now quickly approaching the point where we need to ask an important question: should we grant moral agency status to AI? To answer this question, we need to determine the moral agency status of these (...)
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  • Teleosemantics and the Epiphenomenality of Content.Eric Saidel - 2001 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 27:139-166.
    The naturalistically inclined philosopher of mind faces two related challenges: (1) show how mental content could be part of the natural world, and (2) show how content can be one of the factors responsible for producing (causing) behaviour, that is, show that content is not epiphenomenal. One might pursue the first goal with the intent of showing that mental content is epiphenomenal, but it is more likely that the philosopher concerned with showing how content can be naturalized also expects content (...)
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  • Betterness of permissibility.Benjamin Ferguson & Sebastian Köhler - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2451-2469.
    It is often assumed that morally permissible acts are morally better than impermissible acts. We call this claim Betterness of Permissibility. Yet, we show that some striking counterexamples show that the claim’s truth cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, even if Betterness of Permissibility is true, it is unclear why. Apart from appeals to its intuitive plausibility, no arguments in favour of the condition exist. We fill this lacuna by identifying two fundamental conditions that jointly entail betterness of permissibility: ‘reasons (...)
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  • Actions and questions.Lilian O’Brien - 2023 - Analysis.
    It has been widely accepted that intentional actions are “the actions to which “a certain sense of the question ‘why?’ is given application” (Anscombe 1957/2000: 9). But there are robust reasons for thinking that this claim is false. First, there are intentional actions for which such questions are unsound. We have good reasons for thinking that the questions are not “given application” in these cases. Second, when these questions are “given application” this is best explained, it is argued, not in (...)
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  • Moral understanding: From virtue to knowledge.Miloud Belkoniene - forthcoming - Noûs.
    This paper examines the nature of the specific grasp involved in moral understanding. After discussing Hills's ability account of that central component of moral understanding in light of problematic cases, I argue that moral grasp is best conceived of as a type of knowledge that is grounded in a subject's moral appreciation. I then show how and why the relevant notion of moral appreciation is connected to moral virtues and to one's affective and motivational engagement with moral reasons. Finally, I (...)
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  • Freedom in Uncertainty.Filippos Stamatiou - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Copenhagen
    This work develops a philosophically credible and psychologically realisable account of control that is necessary for moral responsibility. We live, think, and act in an environment of subjective uncertainty and limited information. As a result, our decisions and actions are influenced by factors beyond our control. Our ability to act freely is restricted by uncertainty, ignorance, and luck. Through three articles, I develop a naturalistic theory of control for action as a process of error minimisation that extends over time. Thus (...)
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  • Routines: towards the Complexity of Organizational Intentionality.Piotr Tomasz Makowski - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4):1059-1080.
    The paper explores the topic of organizational routines from a philosophical vantage point to see how the philosophy of action may help improve its understanding in organizational research. The main goal is to show the distinctive complexity of the intentional picture of routines. In this respect, the paper clarifies the interrelations between psychological habits and routines and describes similarities and differences between them. It also highlights the special place of mindfulness as a psycho-cognitive mechanism of action meta-control in intentional explanations (...)
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  • Why Reasons May Not Be Causes.Julia Tanney - 1995 - Mind and Language 10 (1‐2):105-128.
    This paper considers Davidson's (1963) arguments for construing reasons as causes and attempts to show that he has failed to provide positive reasons for introducing causation into his analysis of rationalizing explanation. I consider various ways of spelling out his intuition that something is missing from explanation if we consider only the justificatory relation between reasons and action, and I argue that to the extent that there is anything missing, it should not be provided by construing reasons as causes. What (...)
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  • Teleofunctionalism and Psychological Explanation.Jason Bridges - 2006 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (4):403-421.
    Fred Dretske’s teleofunctional theory of content aims to simultaneously solve two ground-floor philosophical puzzles about mental content: the problem of naturalism and the problem of epiphenomenalism. It is argued here that his theory fails on the latter score. Indeed, the theory insures that content can have no place in the causal explanation of action at all. The argument for this conclusion depends upon only very weak premises about the nature of causal explanation. The difficulties Dretske’s theory encounters indicate the severe (...)
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  • Philosophy of science (Wissenschaftstheorie) in Finland.Jaakko Hintikka - 1970 - Zeitschrift Für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 1 (1):119-132.
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  • Belief, Credence, and Moral Encroachment.Elizabeth Jackson & James Fritz - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1387–1408.
    Radical moral encroachment is the view that belief itself is morally evaluable, and that some moral properties of belief itself make a difference to epistemic rationality. To date, almost all proponents of radical moral encroachment hold to an asymmetry thesis: the moral encroaches on rational belief, but not on rational credence. In this paper, we argue against the asymmetry thesis; we show that, insofar as one accepts the most prominent arguments for radical moral encroachment on belief, one should likewise accept (...)
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  • The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...)
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  • Semantic gaps and protosemantics.Benj Hellie - 2019 - In J. Acacio de Barros & Carlos Montemayor (eds.), Quanta and Mind: Essays on the Connection Between Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness. Springer Verlag.
    Semantic gaps between physical and mental discourse include the 'explanatory', 'epistemic' (Black-and-White Mary), and 'suppositional' (zombies) gaps; protosemantics is concerned with what is fundamental to meaning. Our tradition presupposes a truth-based protosemantics, with disastrous consequences for interpreting the semantic gaps: nonphysicalism, epiphenomenalism, separatism. Fortunately, an endorsement-based protosemantics, recentering meaning from the world to the mind, is technically viable, intuitively more plausible, and empirically more adequate. But, of present significance, it makes room for interpreting mental discourse as expressing simulations: this blocks (...)
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  • Intention: Hyperintensional Semantics and Decision Theory.David Elohim - manuscript
    This paper argues that the types of intention can be modeled both as modal operators and via a multi-hyperintensional semantics. I delineate the semantic profiles of the types of intention, and provide a precise account of how the types of intention are unified in virtue of both their operations in a single, encompassing, epistemic space, and their role in practical reasoning. I endeavor to provide reasons adducing against the proposal that the types of intention are reducible to the mental states (...)
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  • What levels of explanation in the behavioural sciences?Giuseppe Boccignone & Roberto Cordeschi (eds.) - 2015 - Frontiers Media SA.
    Complex systems are to be seen as typically having multiple levels of organization. For instance, in the behavioural and cognitive sciences, there has been a long lasting trend, promoted by the seminal work of David Marr, putting focus on three distinct levels of analysis: the computational level, accounting for the What and Why issues, the algorithmic and the implementational levels specifying the How problem. However, the tremendous developments in neuroscience knowledge about processes at different scales of organization together with the (...)
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  • Radical interpretation, scepticism, and the possibility of shared error.Joshua Rowan Thorpe - 2019 - Synthese 196 (8):3355-3368.
    Davidson argues that his version of interpretivism entails that sceptical scenarios are impossible, thus offering a response to any sceptical argument that depends upon the possibility of sceptical scenarios. It has been objected that Davidson’s interpretivism does not entail the impossibility of sceptical scenarios due to the possibility that interpreter and speaker are in a shared state of massive error, and so this response to scepticism fails. In this paper I show that the objection from the possibility of shared error (...)
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  • Psa 2018.Philsci-Archive -Preprint Volume- - unknown
    These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018.
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