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The problem of action

In Alfred R. Mele (ed.), The philosophy of action. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 157-62 (1997)

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  1. Hijacking Epistemic Agency - How Emerging Technologies Threaten our Wellbeing as Knowers.John Dorsch - 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 Aaai/Acm Conference on Ai, Ethics, and Society 1.
    The aim of this project to expose the reasons behind the pandemic of misinformation (henceforth, PofM) by examining the enabling conditions of epistemic agency and the emerging technologies that threaten it. I plan to research the emotional origin of epistemic agency, i.e. on the origin of our capacity to acquire justification for belief, as well as on the significance this emotional origin has for our lives as epistemic agents in our so-called Misinformation Age. This project has three objectives. First, I (...)
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  • Self-realization through Confucian learning: a contemporary reconstruction of Xunzi's ethics.Siu-Fu Tang - 2016 - Albany: State University of New York Press.
    Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s moral thought is considered in light of the modern focus on self-realization. Self-Realization through Confucian Learning reconstructs Confucian thinker Xunzi’s moral philosophy in response to the modern focus on self-realization. Xunzi (born around 310 BCE) claims that human xing (“nature” or “native conditions”) is without an ethical framework and has a tendency to dominate, leading to bad judgments and bad behavior. Confucian ritual propriety (li) is needed to transform these human native conditions. Through li, people become self-directing: (...)
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  • Action and Agency in Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Critique.Justin Nnaemeka Onyeukaziri - 2023 - Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy (Philippine e-journal) 24 (1):73-90.
    The objective of this work is to explore the notion of “action” and “agency” in artificial intelligence (AI). It employs a metaphysical notion of action and agency as an epistemological tool in the critique of the notion of “action” and “agency” in artificial intelligence. Hence, both a metaphysical and cognitive analysis is employed in the investigation of the quiddity and nature of action and agency per se, and how they are, by extension employed in the language and science of artificial (...)
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  • A Teleofunctionalist Solution to the Problem of Deviant Causal Chains of Actions.Jakob Roloff - 2022 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy (3-4):247-261.
    Donald Davidson’s causal theory of actions states that actions must be rationalized and caused by a belief-desire-pair. One problem of such a causal theory are cases of deviant causal chains. In these cases, the rationalized action is not caused in the right way but via a deviant causal chain. It therefore intuitively seems to be no action while all conditions of the causal theory are met. I argue that the problem of deviant causal chains can be solved by adding a (...)
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  • How to perform a nonbasic action.Mikayla Kelley - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1).
    Some actions we perform “just like that” without taking a means, e.g., raising your arm or wiggling your finger. Other actions—the nonbasic actions—we perform by taking a means, e.g., voting by raising your arm or illuminating a room by flipping a switch. A nearly ubiquitous view about nonbasic action is that one's means to a nonbasic action constitutes the nonbasic action, as raising your arm constitutes voting or flipping a switch constitutes illuminating a room. In this paper, I challenge this (...)
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  • Explicating Agency: The Case of Visual Attention.Denis Buehler - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):379-413.
    How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...)
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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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  • Joint Attention and Communication.Rory Harder - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (10):3796--3834.
    Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...)
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  • (1 other version)Planning, time, and self-governance: replies to Andreou, Tenenbaum, and Velleman.Michael E. Bratman - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (9):926-936.
    ABSTRACT These are replies to critical discussions by Chrisoula Andreou, Sergio Tenenbaum, and J. David Velleman of my Planning, Time, and Self-Governance: Essays in Practical Rationality. I explain important differences between my appeal to a grounding role of the end of diachronic self-governance and Velleman’s view that ‘intelligibility is [the] constitutive aim of action.’ And I discuss both Velleman’s Quine-inspired conception of norms of plan rationality and his comments on methodology in the philosophy of action. In response to Tenenbaum, I (...)
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  • Reasoning and its limits.David Jenkins - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9479-9495.
    Reasoning is naturally understood as something which we actively do—as a kind of action. However, reflection on the supposed limits to the extent to which it is up to us how our reasoning unfolds is often taken to cast doubt on this idea. I argue that, once articulated with care, challenges to the idea that reasoning is a kind of action can be seen to trade on problematic assumptions. In particular, they trade on assumptions which could be used to rule (...)
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  • Mental action.Antonia Peacocke - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (6):e12741.
    Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to (...)
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  • Agential capacities: a capacity to guide.Denis Buehler - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):21-47.
    In paradigm exercises of agency, individuals guide their activities toward some goal. A central challenge for action theory is to explain how individuals guide. This challenge is an instance of the more general problem of how to accommodate individuals and their actions in the natural world, as explained by natural science. Two dominant traditions–primitivism and the causal theory–fail to address the challenge in a satisfying way. Causal theorists appeal to causation by an intention, through a feedback mechanism, in explaining guidance. (...)
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  • A regulative theory of basic intentional omissions.Philippe A. Lusson - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8399-8421.
    The folk picture of agency suggests that human beings have basic agency over some of their omissions. For example, someone may follow through on a decision never to support a political party without doing anything in order to make themselves omit. A number of features appear to signal their agency: the omission is not just called intentional, it is also seen as an achievement and explained in terms of the reasons for the decision. Some philosophers have tried to debunk the (...)
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  • Unconscious perception and central coordinating agency.Joshua Shepherd & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3869-3893.
    One necessary condition on any adequate account of perception is clarity regarding whether unconscious perception exists. The issue is complicated, and the debate is growing in both philosophy and science. In this paper we consider the case for unconscious perception, offering three primary achievements. First, we offer a discussion of the underspecified notion of central coordinating agency, a notion that is critical for arguments that purportedly perceptual states are not attributable to the individual, and thus not genuinely perceptual. We develop (...)
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  • Skilled Guidance.Denis Buehler - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (3):641-667.
    Skilled action typically requires that individuals guide their activities toward some goal. In skilled action, individuals do so excellently. We do not understand well what this capacity to guide consists in. In this paper I provide a case study of how individuals shift visual attention. Their capacity to guide visual attention toward some goal (partly) consists in an empirically discovered sub-system – the executive system. I argue that we can explain how individuals guide by appealing to the operation of this (...)
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  • Default Hypotheses in the Study of Perception: A Reply to Phillips.Jacob Berger & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4):206-219.
    Some theorists have recently raised doubts about much of the experimental evidence purporting to demonstrate the existence of unconscious perception. In our (2019) in this journal, we argued some of these considerations are not decisive. Phillips (forthcoming a) replies thoughtfully to our paper, concluding that he is unconvinced by our arguments. Phillips maintains that the view that perception is invariably conscious remains, as he puts it, the “default” hypothesis both within the folk understanding and experimental study of perception. There is (...)
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  • Group Action Without Group Minds.Kenneth Silver - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2):321-342.
    Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...)
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  • The skill of self-control.Juan Pablo Bermúdez - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6251-6273.
    Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained control processes required to select, revise and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Pain Experiences and Their Link to Action: Challenging Imperative Theories.Sabrina Coninx - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (9-10):104-126.
    According to pure imperativism, pain experiences are experiences of a specific phenomenal type that are entirely constituted by imperative content. As their primary argument, proponents of imperativism rely on the biological role that pain experiences fulfill, namely, the motivation of actions whose execution ensures the normal functioning of the body. In the paper, I investigate which specific types of action are of relevance for an imperative interpretation and how close their link to pain experiences actually is. I argue that, although (...)
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  • Modest Sociality, Minimal Cooperation and Natural Intersubjectivity.Michael Wilby - 2020 - In Anika Fiebich (ed.), Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. Springer. pp. 127-148.
    What is the relation between small-scale collaborative plans and the execution of those plans within interactive contexts? I argue here that joint attention has a key role in explaining how shared plans and shared intentions are executed in interactive contexts. Within singular action, attention plays the functional role of enabling intentional action to be guided by a prior intention. Within interactive joint action, it is joint attention, I argue, that plays a similar functional role of enabling the agents to act (...)
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  • What Is Minimally Cooperative Behavior?Kirk Ludwig - 2020 - In Anika Fiebich (ed.), Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. Springer. pp. 9-40.
    Cooperation admits of degrees. When factory workers stage a slowdown, they do not cease to cooperate with management in the production of goods altogether, but they are not fully cooperative either. Full cooperation implies that participants in a joint action are committed to rendering appropriate contributions as needed toward their joint end so as to bring it about, consistently with the type of action and the generally agreed upon constraints within which they work, as efficiently as they can, where their (...)
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  • Alienation or regress: on the non-inferential character of agential knowledge.Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (6):1757-1768.
    A central debate in philosophy of action concerns whether agential knowledge, the knowledge agents characteristically have of their own actions, is inferential. While inferentialists like Sarah Paul hold that it is inferential, others like Lucy O’Brien and Kieran Setiya argue that it is not. In this paper, I offer a novel argument for the view that agential knowledge is non-inferential, by posing a dilemma for inferentialists: on the first horn, inferentialism is committed to holding that agents have only alienated knowledge (...)
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  • Agentive und andere Fähigkeiten: Bemerkungen zu Agents' Abilities von Romy Jaster.David Löwenstein - 2020 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 74 (3):448-453.
    Agents' Abilities ist ein Geschenk von einem Buch, das man nicht genug loben kann. Und deswegen versuche ich es erst gar nicht. Stattdessen beschränke ich mich auf einige konstruktiv-kritische Bemerkungen, die in zwei miteinander verbundenen Bereichen Perspektiven der Weiterentwicklung und Verfeinerung aufzeigen sollen.
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  • Motor imagery and action execution.Bence Nanay - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    What triggers the execution of actions? What happens in that moment when an action is triggered? What mental state is there at the moment of action-execution that was not there a second before? My aim is to highlight the importance of a thus far largely ignored kind of mental state in the discussion of these old and much-debated questions: motor imagery. While there have been a fair amount of research in psychology and neuroscience on motor imagery in the last 30 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mind‐wandering: A philosophical guide.Zachary C. Irving & Aaron Glasser - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (1):e12644.
    Philosophers have long been fascinated by the stream of consciousness – thoughts, images, and bits of inner speech that dance across the inner stage. Yet for centuries, such ‘mind‐wandering' was deemed private and thus resistant to empirical investigation. Recent developments in psychology and neuroscience have reinvigorated scientific interest in the stream of thought. Despite this flurry of progress, scientists have stressed that mind‐wandering research requires firmer philosophical foundations. The time is therefore ripe for the philosophy of mind‐wandering. Our review begins (...)
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  • Disjunctivism about intending.Yair Levy - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):161-180.
    The overwhelmingly predominant view in philosophy sees intending as a mental state, specifically a plan-like state. This paper rejects the predominant view in favor of a starkly opposed novel alternative. After criticizing both the predominant Bratman-esque view of intention, and an alternative view inspired by Michael Thompson, the paper proceeds to set out and defend the idea that acting with an intention to V should be understood disjunctively, as either one’s V-ing intentionally or one’s performing some kind of failed intentional (...)
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  • Exiting The Consequentialist Circle: Two Senses of Bringing It About.Paul Edward Hurley - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (2):130-163.
    Consequentialism is a state of affairs centered moral theory that finds support in state of affairs centered views of value, reason, action, and desire/preference. Together these views form a mutually reinforcing circle. I map an exit route out of this circle by distinguishing between two different senses in which actions can be understood as bringing about states of affairs. All actions, reasons, desires, and values involve bringing about in the first, deflationary sense, but only some appear to involve bringing about (...)
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  • Basic Action and Practical Knowledge.Will Small - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but mutually exclusive. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend (...)
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  • The Motivational Structure of Appreciation.Servaas van der Berg - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276):445-466.
    On a widely held view in aesthetics, appreciation requires disinterested attention. George Dickie famously criticized a version of this view championed by the aesthetic attitude theorists. I revisit his criticisms and extract an overlooked challenge for accounts that seek to characterize appreciative engagement in terms of distinctive motivation: at minimum, the motivational profile such accounts propose must make a difference to how appreciative episodes unfold over time. I then develop a proposal to meet this challenge by drawing an analogy between (...)
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  • Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience.Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal & Andrew Sims (eds.) - 2019 - Leiden: Brill.
    This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.
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  • Perception is not all-purpose.Bence Nanay - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 17):4069-4080.
    I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: one’s perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action and one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s perceptual (...)
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  • Agency, Teleological Control and Robust Causation.Marius Usher - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):302-324.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • The Logical Structure of Intentional Anonymity.Michał Barcz, Jarek Gryz & Adam Wierzbicki - 2019 - Diametros 16 (60):1-17.
    It has been noticed by several authors that the colloquial understanding of anonymity as mere unknown-ness is insufficient. This common-sense notion of anonymity does not recognize the role of the goal for which the anonymity is sought. Starting with the distinction between the intentional and unintentional anonymity (which are usually taken to be the same) and the general concept of the non-coordinatability of traits, we offer a logical analysis of anonymity and identification (understood as de-anonymization). In our enquiry, we focus (...)
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  • Legal Agreements and the Capacities of Agents.Andrei Buckareff - 2014 - In Law and the Philosophy of Action. Brill. pp. 195-219.
    Most work at the intersection of law and the philosophy of action focuses on criminal responsibility. Unfortunately, this focus has been at the expense of reflecting on how the philosophy of action might help illuminate our understanding of issues in civil law. In this essay, focusing on Anglo-American jurisprudence, we examine the conditions under which a party to a legal agreement is deemed to have the capacity required to be bound by that agreement. We refer to this condition as the (...)
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  • Consequentialism and the Standard Story of Action.Paul Hurley - 2018 - The Journal of Ethics 22 (1):25-44.
    I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which (...)
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  • Intending, acting, and doing.Luca Ferrero - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (sup2):13-39.
    I argue that intending and acting belong to the same genus: intending is a kind of doing continuous in structure with intentional acting. Future-directed intending is not a truly separate phenomenon from either the intending in action or the acting itself. Ultimately, all intentions are in action, or better still, in extended courses of action. I show how the intuitive distinction between intending and acting is based on modeling the two phenomena on the extreme and limiting cases of an otherwise (...)
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  • Knowledge as a Thick Concept: New Light on the Gettier and Value Problems.Brent G. Kyle - 2011 - Dissertation, Cornell University
    I argue that knowledge is a particular kind of concept known as a thick concept. Examples of thick concepts include courage, generosity, loyalty, brutality, and so forth. These concepts are commonly said to combine both evaluation and description, and one of the main goals of this dissertation is to provide a new account of how a thick concept combines these elements. It is argued that thick concepts are semantically evaluative, and that they combine evaluation and description in a way similar (...)
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  • Embodied Agency.Hong Yu Wong - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (3):584-612.
    Is bodily awareness a condition on bodily action? I approach this question by weaving an argument based on considerations from action theory, the phenomenology of embodied agency, and from the psychology and neuroscience of action. In this paper, I discuss two accounts on which bodily awareness is a condition on bodily action. The first is an influential philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy, which claims that bodily awareness is necessary for the online control of bodily action. I argue that there are empirical (...)
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  • Basic Actions Reloaded.Santiago Amaya - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (9):e12435.
    In this article, I examine recent debates concerning the existence and the nature of basic actions. The discussion is structured around four theses, with which Arthur Danto introduced basic actions to contemporary theorists. The theses concern (i) the relationship between agency and causality, (ii) the distinction between basic and complex actions, (iii) the regress argument for basic actions, and (iv) the structure of practical knowledge in the light of these actions.
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  • Thinking, Acting, Considering.Daniel Muñoz - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2):255-270.
    According to a familiar (alleged) requirement on practical reason, one must believe a proposition if one is to take it for granted in reasoning about what to do. This paper explores a related requirement, not on thinking but on acting—that one must accept a goal if one is to count as acting for its sake. This is the acceptance requirement. Although it is endorsed by writers as diverse as Christine Korsgaard, Donald Davidson, and Talbot Brewer, I argue that it is (...)
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  • Ryle on the Explanatory Role of Knowledge How.Will Small - 2017 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5 (5).
    Contemporary discussions of knowledge how typically focus on the question whether or not knowing how to do ϕ consists in propositional knowledge, and divide the field between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists. This way of framing the issue is said to derive from Gilbert Ryle. I argue that this is a misreading of Ryle, whose primary interest in discussing knowledge how was not epistemological but rather action-theoretical, whose argument against intellectualism has for this reason been misunderstood and underestimated, and whose positive view (...)
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  • I’m just sitting around doing nothing: on exercising intentional agency in omitting to act.Andrei A. Buckareff - 2018 - Synthese 195 (10):4617-4635.
    In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while (...)
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  • Know-how as Competence. A Rylean Responsibilist Account.David Löwenstein - 2017 - Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
    What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...)
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  • Agent causation as a solution to the problem of action.Michael Brent - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (5):656-673.
    My primary aim is to defend a nonreductive solution to the problem of action. I argue that when you are performing an overt bodily action, you are playing an irreducible causal role in bringing about, sustaining, and controlling the movements of your body, a causal role best understood as an instance of agent causation. Thus, the solution that I defend employs a notion of agent causation, though emphatically not in defence of an account of free will, as most theories of (...)
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  • Can I Only Intend My Own Actions?Luca Ferrero - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. (1) 70-94.
    In this paper, I argue against the popular philosophical thesis---aka the ‘own action condition’---that an agent can only intend one’s own actions. I argue that the own action condition does not hold for any executive attitude, intentions included. The proper object of intentions is propositional rather than agential (‘I intend that so-and-so be the case’ rather than ‘I intend to do such-and-such’). I show that, although there are some essential de se components in intending, they do not restrict the content (...)
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  • IX—Perceptual Activity and Bodily Awareness.Louise Richardson - 2015 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2pt2):147-165.
    Bodily awareness is a kind of perceptual awareness of the body that we do not usually count as a sense. I argue that that there is an overlooked agential difference between bodily awareness and perception in the five familiar senses: a difference in what is involved in perceptual activity in sight, hearing, touch taste and smell on the one hand, and bodily awareness on the other.
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  • Actions and accidents.David Horst - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3):300-325.
    In acting intentionally, it is no accident that one is doing what one intends to do. In this paper, I ask how to account for this non-accidentality requirement on intentional action. I argue that, for systematic reasons, the currently prevailing view of intentional action – the Causal Theory of Action – is ill-equipped to account for it. I end by proposing an alternative account, according to which an intention is a special kind of cause, one to which it is essential (...)
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  • Self-expression: a deep self theory of moral responsibility.Chandra Sripada - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1203-1232.
    According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...)
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  • Obligation and Aspect.Benj Hellie - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):398-449.
    ‘Fred must open the door’ concerns Fred’s obligations. This obligative meaning is turned off by adding aspect: ‘Fred must have opened/be opening/have been opening the door’ are one and all epistemic. Why? In a nutshell: obligative ’must’ operates on procedural contents of imperative sentences, epistemic ‘must’ on propositional contents of declarative sentences; and adding aspect converts procedural into propositional content.
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  • Mind-wandering is unguided attention: accounting for the “purposeful” wanderer.Zachary C. Irving - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):547-571.
    Although mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts, it is seldom discussed in philosophy. My paper brings these neglected thoughts into focus. I propose that mind-wandering is unguided attention. Guidance in my sense concerns how attention is monitored and regulated as it unfolds over time. Roughly speaking, someone’s attention is guided if she would feel pulled back, were she distracted from her current focus. Because our wandering thoughts drift unchecked from topic to topic, they are unguided. One motivation (...)
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