Argues for a causal-psychological account of acting for reasons. This view is distinguished from a more ambitious causal theory of action, clarified as far as possible, and motivated—against non-reductive, teleological, and behaviourist alternatives—on broadly metaphysical grounds.

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 we cannot form beliefs at will without failure of attention or logical confusion. The explanation builds on Williams' argument in "Deciding to Believe," attempting to resolve some well-known difficulties. The paper ends with tentative doubts about the idea of judgement as intentional action.

The Ontological Square is a categorial scheme that combines two metaphysical distinctions: that between types (or universals ) and tokens (or particulars ) on the one hand, and that between characters (or features ) and their substrates (or bearers ) on the other hand. The resulting four-fold classification of things comprises particular substrates, called substances , universal substrates, called kinds , particular characters, called modes or moments , and universal characters, called attributes . Things are joined together in facts by (...) primitive ontological ties or nexus . This article describes a logic that is meant to capture the basic intuitions behind the Ontological Square. Given a minimal correspondence between atomic logical form and ontological structure, the commitment to nexus as a distinct ontological category entails a rehabilitation of copulae as ties of predication. Thus, the Logic of the Ontological Square is a copula calculus rather than a predicate calculus; its soundness and completeness can be established with respect to a model akin to a so-called first-order semantics for standard second-order logic. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that the neuroscience of action is, in practice or in principle, incapable of touching debates in action theory and moral psychology. The role of desires in action, the existence of basic actions, and the like are topics that must be sorted out by philosophers alone: at least at present, and perhaps by the very nature of the questions. This paper examines both philosophical and empirical arguments against the relevance of neuroscience to such questions and argues that neither (...) succeeds. In practice, there is already a stable body of findings from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology that warrants attention. And as a matter of principle, the ‘causal map’ of action production derivable from these findings requires the study of action theorists and moral psychologists because every such philosopher has commitments to the shape of this causal map: commitments that might be in conflict with reality. (shrink)

This paper sketches a right-maker account of normative practical reasons along functionalist lines. The approach is contrasted with other similar accounts, in particular John Broome's analysis of reasons as explanations of oughts.

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

According to G.E.M. Anscombe, an agent’s knowledge of his own intentional actions differs from his knowledge of his unintended behaviors as well as the knowledge others can have of what he intentionally does, in being secured “without observation”. I begin by posing a problem for any conception of this theory according to which non-observational knowledge must be independent of sense-perception, and criticize several recent attempts to get around the problem. Having done this, I develop an alternative account of non-observational knowledge (...) according to which its special character consists in the particular causal role of an agent’s self-awareness in bringing his intentional actions about. (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)

To desire is to be in a particular state of mind. It is a state of mind familiar to everyone who has ever wanted to drink water or desired to know what has happened to an old friend, but its familiarity does not make it easy to give a theory of desire. Controversy immediately breaks out when asking whether wanting water and desiring knowledge are, at bottom, the same state of mind as others that seem somewhat similar: wishing never to (...) have been born, preferring mangoes to peaches, craving gin, having world conquest as one's goal, having a purpose in sneaking out to the shed, or being inclined to provoke just for the sake of provocation. These varied states of mind have all been grouped together under the heading of ‘pro attitudes’, but whether the pro attitudes are fundamentally one mental state or many is disputed. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of action agree on the following claims. Firstly, the possibility of deviant or wayward causal chains poses a serious problem for the standard-causal theory of action. Secondly, we can distinguish between different kinds of deviant causal chains in the theory of action. In particular, we can distinguish between cases of basic and cases of consequential deviance. Thirdly, the problem of consequential deviance admits of a fairly straightforward solution, whereas the possibility of basic deviance constitutes a separate and (...) difficult problem that requires its own solution. I will argue that the problem of basic deviance is no more troublesome than the problem of consequential deviance, as a solution to the former is implicit in the standard solution to the latter. (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)

I explore a type of computational social simulation known as artificial societies. Artificial society simulations are dynamic models of real-world social phenomena. I explore the role that these simulations play in social explanation, by situating these simulations within contemporary philosophical work on explanation and on models. Many contemporary philosophers have argued that models provide causal explanations in science, and that models are necessary mediators between theory and data. I argue that artificial society simulations provide causal mechanistic explanations. I conclude that (...) in their current form, these simulations are based on methodologically individualist assumptions that could limit their potential scope of social explanation. (shrink)

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

Dreyfus presents Todes's (2001) republished Body and World as an anticipatory response to McDowell (1994) which shows how preconceptual perception can ground conceptual thought. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken on this point: Todes's claim that perceptual experience is preconceptual presupposes an untenable account of conceptual thought. I then show that Todes nevertheless makes two important contributions to McDowell's project. First, he develops an account of perception as bodily second nature, and as a practical-perceptual openness to the world, which constructively (...) develops McDowell's view. Second, and more important, this account highlights the practical and perceptual dimension of linguistic competence. The result is that perception is conceptual "all the way down" only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual and practical "all the way up". This conjunction of McDowell and Todes on the bodily dimensions of discursive practice also vindicates Davidson's and Brandom's criticisms of McDowell's version of empiricism. (shrink)

This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in “I regretted it every time I had dinner with him.” Sentences of this kind display what I call a ‘matching effect’; they are true if every event in the denotation oftime I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form “There are at least as many As as Bs.” The difficulties of giving a (...) compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema “For every A there is a B” and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions. (shrink)

Michael Smith's recent defence of the theory shows promise, in that it captures the most common reasons for accepting a Humean view. But, as I will argue, it falls short of vindicating the view. Smith's argument fails, because it ignores the role of rationality conditions on the ascription of motivating reason explanations. Because of these conditions, we must have a theory of rationality before we choose a theory of motivation. Thus, we cannot use Humean restrictions on motivation to argue for (...) a particular conception of rationality. I will not directly criticize using a Humean conception of rationality to defend a Humean theory of motivation. For my argument implies that such criticism must come more directly, as argument over the substantive content of rationality. (shrink)

Doxastic involuntarists have paid insufficient attention to two debates in contemporary epistemology: the permissivism debate and the debate over norms of assertion and belief. In combination, these debates highlight a conception of belief on which, if you find yourself in what I will call an ‘equipollent case’ with respect to some proposition p, there will be no reason why you can’t believe p at will. While doxastic involuntarism is virtually epistemological orthodoxy, nothing in the entire stock of objections to belief (...) at will blocks this route to doxastic voluntarism. Against the backdrop of the permissivism debate and the literature on norms of belief and assertion, doxastic involuntarism emerges as an article of faith, not the obvious truth it’s usually purported to be. (shrink)

In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ‘radical quotation’ requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if interpreters (...) make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible. (shrink)

To explain an intentional action one must exhibit the agent’s reasons. Donald Davidson famously argued that the only clear way to understand action explanation is to hold that reasons are causes. Davidson’s discussion conflated two issues: whether reasons are causes and whether reasons causally explain intentional action. Contemporary work on explanation and normativity help disentangle these issues and ground an argument that intentional action explanations cannot be a species of causal explanation. Interestingly, this conclusion is consistent with Davidson’s conclusion that (...) reasons are causes. In other words, reasons are causes, but rationalizing explanations are not causal explanations. Key Words: action theory • explanation • causal explanation • rationality • Donald Davidson. (shrink)

Sensorimotor psychology studies the mental processes that control goal-directed bodily motion. Recently, sensorimotor psychologists have provided empirically successful Bayesian models of motor control. These models describe how the motor system uses sensory input to select motor commands that promote goals set by high-level cognition. I highlight the impressive explanatory benefits offered by Bayesian models of motor control. I argue that our current best models assign explanatory centrality to a robust notion of mental representation. I deploy my analysis to defend intentional (...) realism, to rebut eliminativism and instrumentalism regarding mental representation, and to explore the relation between intentionality and normativity. (shrink)

Hamblin's Action-State Semantics provides a sound philosophical foundation for understanding the character of the imperative. Taking this as our inspiration, in this paper we present a logic of action, which we call ST, that captures the clear ontological distinction between being responsible for the achievement of a state of affairs and being responsible for the performance of an action. We argue that a relativised modal logic of type RT founded upon a ternary relation over possible worlds integrated with a basic (...) tense logic captures intuitions of the Hamblinian model of imperatives. The logic implements a direct mapping of each of Hamblin's key concepts: strategies, partial strategies and wholehearted satisfaction. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to show that the subject-matter of ontology is richer than one might have thought. Our route will be indirect. We will argue that there are circumstances under which standard first-order regimentation is unacceptable, and that more appropriate varieties of regimentation lead to unexpected kinds of ontological commitment.

This article argues that the tradition within the individualism-holism debate of importing arguments from the micro–macro discussion in other disciplines significantly has hampered our understanding of the “individual-social” relationship. While, for example, the “neural-mental” and “atomic-molecular” links represent empirical “gives rise to” relationships, in the social sciences the micro–macro link is a purely analytical “qualifies as” type of relationship. This disanalogy is important, since it has significant implications for the individualism-holism debate: it implies a phenomenally monist social ontology and it (...) disqualifies the notion of social macro causation. (shrink)

A good account of the agnostic attitude of Suspending Judgement should explain how it can be rendered more or less rational/justified according to the state of one's evidence – and one's relation to that evidence. I argue that the attitude of suspending judgement whether p constitutively involves having a belief; roughly, a belief that one cannot yet tell whether or not p. I show that a theory of suspending that treats it as a sui generis attitude, wholly distinct from belief, (...) struggles to account for how suspension of judgement can be rendered more or less rational (or irrational) by one's evidence. I also criticise the related idea that suspension essentially requires an 'Inquiring Attitude'. I show how a belief-based theory, in contrast, neatly accounts for the rational and epistemic features of suspending and so neatly accounts for why an agnostic has a genuine neutral opinion concerning the question whether p, as opposed to simply having no opinion. (shrink)

Human action theory, with its emphasis on intentions and reasons, does little to enhance our understanding of the actions of nonhuman animals. Many animal (and human) actions are directed to objects in the world, including other animals. The notion of directedness can be analysed without attributing intentions or reasons to the agent. An action is directed to object X if and only if: (1) the agent singles out X, either by orientation or by selective performance of the action in the (...) presence of X; (2) the agent recognizes X as a suitable object; and (3) the goal of the action is that X should be in a certain relation to the agent or to some other object. The goal of an action is not necessarily attributable to the agent as the agent's goal in acting. Moreover, an agent can have a goal in acting without understanding how the action achieves the goal. The usefulness of the concept of directed action in the study of animal communication is illustrated with examples from the recent ethological literature. (shrink)

A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalready know how to act in order to reach somepredefined result? A (...) crucial element in the solutionof these puzzles consists in making explicit thecontingency between mental acts and mentaloperations, parallel to the contingency betweenphysical acts and bodily movements. The paper finallydiscusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mentalacts; it is shown that the capacity to refer tooneself is not a necessary condition of the successfulexecution of mental acts. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to apply the general idea of contextualism, as a theory of knowledge attribution, to the very specific case of testimony and trust characterized as being the procedure of the attribution of knowledge (and sincerity) to the informant. In the first part, I argue in favor of evidentialism, a viewpoint that takes epistemically responsible trust as a matter of evidence. In the second part, I consider the question of how strong an evidential basis has to (...) be for epistemically responsible trust. I have briefly registered two main tendencies in contemporary debates regarding trust and testimony: (i) the non-unitary character of our trust; (ii) and the requirement for a refinement of evidential standards. In short, I argue in favor of the stance that any ‘undiscriminatory generalization’ (both Redian or anti-reductivist and Humean or reductivist) concerning epistemically responsible trust is a kind of inappropriate theoretical idealization, and that a certain theoretical reconciliation has to be offered. Finally, in the third part, I propose trust-contextualism as the viewpoint that optimally harmonizes both our intuitive and theoretical requirements about epistemically responsible trust. (shrink)

According to the Particularist Theory of Events, events are real things that have a spatiotemporal location. I argue that some events do not have a spatial location in the sense required by the theory. These events are ordinary, nonmental events like Smith’s investigating the murder and Carol’s putting her coat on the chair. I discuss the significance of these counterexamples for the theory.

This paper takes as its starting point the problem of characterizing, in a precise way, situations in which two people collaborate to achieve a common goal. It is suggested that collaboration is normally based on an apparently paradoxical state of mind which I call “mutual intention”. Mutual intention is a concept belonging to the same family as Lewis's and Schiffer's “mutual knowledge”. These concepts have the paradoxical feature that they require, for their definition, an infinite series of propositions of the (...) form X knows p, where X is a single agent and p is a proposition. The source of these infinite series is traced, and it is shown that they can be represented in a plausible and enlightening way by means of a recursive notation. Finally, three applications of the concept of “mutual intention” are given: in the semantic analysis of certain sentences with plural subjects; in the analysis of agreement and related speech acts; and in the clarification of the phenomenon of “implicit agreement”. (shrink)

This article claims that events, facts and states of affairs need to be differentiated. It takes as a starting point Chisholm’s claim that only his ontology of states of affairs explains effectively thirteen sentences related to propositions and events. He does this by reducing propositions and events to states of affairs. We argue that our ontology also solves those problems. We defend a hierarchized Platonist ontology that has concrete entities and abstract entities. The distinctions we propose allow us to explain (...) the pre-analytic data analyzed by Chisholm without reducing entities. We claim that our ontology provides a different way of explaining that data, and is, thus, promissory. (shrink)

Given the Sellarsian distinction between the space of causes and the space of reasons, the naturalist seeks to articulate how these two spaces are unproblematically related. In Mind and World (1996) John McDowell suggests that such a naturalism can be achieved by pointing out that we work our way into the space of reasons by the process of upbringing he calls Bildung. 'The resulting habits of thought and action', writes McDowell, 'are second nature' (p. 84). In this paper I expose (...) one implication of this remark, namely, that Bildung naturalism requires a conception of a type of action which is at once rational and habitual. Current orthodoxies in the philosophy of action prevent these two features from easily co-existing. Whilst various reconciliations are possible, I argue that only one keeps Bildung naturalism intact. This, however, commits the naturalist to a conception of reasons more radically external than any to be found in current literature, according to which the agent need have no conception of what her reasons are at the time of acting. This is what I call acting in the dark of reasons. One upshot for McDowell is that this conception of reasons may be in tension with some of his other claims. (shrink)

The problem of the time of a killing is often cited as providing grounds for rejecting the action identification thesis favoured by Anscombe and Davidson. In this paper I make three claims. First, I claim that this problem is a threat to the action identification thesis because of two assumptions the thesis makes: since the thesis takes actions to be a kind of doings, it has to assume that agents’ doings last as long as their actions and vice versa. Second, (...) I claim that not making both of these assumptions necessarily leads to another problem, the problem of the acting dead. This means that any theory of action has to choose its poison and face either one of these unresolved problems. Third, I claim that the solution to the problem of the time of a killing can be found by heeding linguistic arguments that ‘kill’ cannot mean ‘cause to die,’ as is commonly assumed, but instead has to have a more complex meaning. I discuss an alternative, more complex proposal and show how it allows us to keep the action identification thesis, fits colloquial usage of ‘kill’ and deals with the problem of the time of a killing. (shrink)

Two components of lay observers’ calculus of moral judgment are proximal intent (the actor’s mind is focused on performing the action) and distal intent (the actor’s mind is focused on the broader goal). What causes observers to prioritize one form of intent over the other? The authors observed whether construal level (Studies 1-2) and beliefs about free will (Studies 3-4) would influence participants’ sensitivity to the actor’s proximal versus distal intent. In four studies, participants read scenarios in which the actor’s (...) proximal and distal intent were independently manipulated. In Study 1, when only distal intent was present in the actor’s mind, participants rated the psychologically distant actor more responsible than the psychologically near actor. In Study 2, when only distal intent was in the actor’s mind, participants with a chronic high level of action identification rated the actor more responsible than did those with a low level of action identification. In both studies, when only proximal intent was in the actor’s mind, construal level did not predict judgments of responsibility. In Study 3, when only proximal intent was present in the actor’s mind, the more participants believed in free will, the more they rated the actor responsible. When only distal intent was in the actor’s mind, free will belief did not influence ratings of responsibility. In Study 4, the same pattern emerged when free will / determinism beliefs were manipulated and the actor performed a positive (life-saving) act. The authors discuss how these results shed new light on the literatures on moral reasoning and psycho-legal theory. (shrink)