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Must There Be Basic Action?

Noûs 47 (2):273-301 (2012)

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  1. The Instrumental Rule.F. I. X. Jeremy David - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (4):444-462.
    Properly understood, the instrumental rule says to take means that actually suffice for my end, not, as is nearly universally assumed, to intend means that I believe are necessary for my end. This alternative explains everything the standard interpretation can—and more, including grounding certain correctness conditions for exercises of our will unexplained by the standard interpretation.
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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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  • Trying without fail.Ben Holguín & Harvey Lederman - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-28.
    An action is agentially perfect if and only if, if a person tries to perform it, they succeed, and, if a person performs it, they try to. We argue that trying itself is agentially perfect: if a person tries to try to do something, they try to do it; and, if a person tries to do something, they try to try to do it. We show how this claim sheds new light on questions about basic action, the logical structure of (...)
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  • Aristotle on Action and Agency.Harry Sakari Alanen - 2022 - Dissertation, Oxford University
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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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  • The puzzle of learning by doing and the gradability of knowledge‐how.Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3):619-637.
    Much of our know-how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge-how comes in degrees, (...)
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  • Are basic actors brainbound agents? Narrowing down solutions to the problem of probabilistic content for predictive perceivers.George Britten-Neish - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (2):435-459.
    Clark (2018) worries that predictive processing accounts of perception introduce a puzzling disconnect between the content of personal-level perceptual states and their underlying subpersonal representations. According to PP, in perception, the brain encodes information about the environment in conditional probability density distributions over causes of sensory input. But it seems perceptual experience only presents us with one way the world is at a time. If perception is at bottom probabilistic, shouldn’t this aspect of subpersonally represented content show up in consciousness? (...)
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  • The shape of agency: Control, action, skill, knowledge.Joshua Shepherd - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The Shape of Agency offers interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. The first part offers accounts of a collection of related phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behaviour, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition, and undermine the claims made by many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore fails as an account of intentional (...)
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  • The Eclipse of Instrumental Rationality.Kurt Sylvan - 2020 - In Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. New York, NY: Routledge.
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  • The Intermediate Scope of Consciousness in the Predictive Mind.Francesco Marchi & Jakob Hohwy - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):891-912.
    There is a view on consciousness that has strong intuitive appeal and empirical support: the intermediate-level theory of consciousness, proposed mainly by Ray Jackendoff and by Jesse Prinz. This theory identifies a specific “intermediate” level of representation as the basis of human phenomenal consciousness, which sits between high-level non-perspectival thought processes and low-level disjointed feature-detection processes in the perceptual and cognitive processing hierarchy. In this article, we show that the claim that consciousness arises at an intermediate-level is true of some (...)
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  • Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency.Steffen Steinert, Christoph Bublitz, Ralf Jox & Orsolya Friedrich - 2019 - Philosophy and Technology 32 (3):457-482.
    Connecting human minds to various technological devices and applications through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) affords intriguingly novel ways for humans to engage and interact with the world. Not only do BCIs play an important role in restorative medicine, they are also increasingly used outside of medical or therapeutic contexts (e.g., gaming or mental state monitoring). A striking peculiarity of BCI technology is that the kind of actions it enables seems to differ from paradigmatic human actions, because, effects in the world are (...)
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  • Concepts and Action. Know-how and Beyond.David Löwenstein - 2020 - In Christoph Demmerling & Dirk Schröder (eds.), Concepts in Thought, Action, and Emotion: New Essays. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 181-198.
    Which role do concepts play in a person's actions? Do concepts underwrite the very idea of agency in somebody's acting? Or is the appeal to concepts in action a problematic form of over-intellectualization which obstructs a proper picture of genuine agency? Within the large and complicated terrain of these questions, the debate about know-how has been of special interest in recent years. In this paper, I shall try to spell out what know-how can tell us about the role of concepts (...)
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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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  • Equal treatment for belief.Susanna Rinard - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1923-1950.
    This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense (...)
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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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  • Basic Knowledge First.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2017 - Episteme 14 (3):343-361.
    An infuential twenty-first century philosophical project posits a central role for knowledge: knowledge is more fundamental than epistemic states like belief and justification. So-called “knowledge first” theorists find support for this thought in identifying central theoretical roles for knowledge. I argue that a similar methodology supports a privileged role for more specific category of basic knowledge. Some of the roles that knowledge first theorists have posited for knowledge generally are better suited for basic knowledge.
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  • Rational Agency without Self‐Knowledge: Could ‘We’ Replace ‘I’?Luke Roelofs - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (1):3-33.
    It has been claimed that we need singular self-knowledge to function properly as rational agents. I argue that this is not strictly true: agents in certain relations could dispense with singular self-knowledge and instead rely on plural self-knowledge. In defending the possibility of this kind of ‘selfless agent’, I thereby defend the possibility of a certain kind of ‘seamless’ collective agency; agency in a group of agents who have no singular self-knowledge, who do not know which member of the group (...)
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  • The divisibility of basic actions.Kevin Lynch - 2017 - Analysis 77 (2):312-318.
    The notion of basic action has recently come under attack based on the idea that any putative basic action can always be divided into more basic sub-actions. In this paper it is argued that this criticism ignores a key aspect of the idea of basic action, namely, the ‘anything else’ part of the idea that basic actions are not done by doing anything else. This aspect is clarified, and it is argued that doing the sub-actions of which a putative basic (...)
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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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  • A Theory of Practical Meaning.Carlotta Pavese - 2017 - Philosophical Topics 45 (2):65-96.
    This essay is divided into two parts. In the first part (§2), I introduce the idea of practical meaning by looking at a certain kind of procedural systems — the motor system — that play a central role in computational explanations of motor behavior. I argue that in order to give a satisfactory account of the content of the representations computed by motor systems (motor commands), we need to appeal to a distinctively practical kind of meaning. Defending the explanatory relevance (...)
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  • Agency.Markus Schlosser - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and 'agency' denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality, the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by the agent’s mental states and events. From this, we obtain a standard conception and a standard theory of agency. There are (...)
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  • Action Unified.Yair Levy - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (262):65-83.
    Mental acts are conspicuously absent from philosophical debates over the nature of action. A typical protagonist of a typical scenario is far more likely to raise her arm or open the window than she is to perform a calculation in her head or talk to herself silently. One possible explanation for this omission is that the standard ‘causalist’ account of action, on which acts are analyzed in terms of mental states causing bodily movements, faces difficulties in accommodating some paradigmatic cases (...)
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  • Basic Activity.Jennifer Hornsby - 2013 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1):1-18.
    I present a view of activity, taking it that an agent is engaged in activity so long as an action of hers is occurring. I suggest that this view (a) helps in understanding what goes wrong in an argument in Thompson (2008) known sometimes as the ‘initial segment argument’, and (b) enables us to see that there could be an intelligible conception of what is basic when agents' knowledge is allowed into an account of that.
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  • Intentional action first.Yair Levy - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):705-718.
    The paper motivates a novel research programme in the philosophy of action parallel to the ‘Knowledge First’ programme in epistemology. It is argued that much of the grounds for abandoning the quest for a reductive analysis of knowledge in favour of the Knowledge First alternative is mirrored in the case of intentional action, inviting the hypothesis that intentional action is also, like knowledge, metaphysically basic. The paper goes on to demonstrate the sort of explanatory contribution that intentional action can make (...)
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  • Intention.Kieran Setiya - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Philosophical perplexity about intention begins with its appearance in three guises: intention for the future, as when I intend to complete this entry by the end of the month; the intention with which someone acts, as I am typing with the further intention of writing an introductory sentence; and intentional action, as in the fact that I am typing these words intentionally. As Elizabeth Anscombe wrote in a similar context, ‘it is implausible to say that the word is equivocal as (...)
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  • (1 other version)Action.George Wilson - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when (...)
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  • Practical Reason in Historical and Systematic Perspective.James Conant & Dawa Ometto (eds.) - 2023 - De Gruyter.
    The idea that there is a distinctively practical use of reason, and correspondingly a distinctively practical form of knowledge, unites many otherwise diverse voices in the history of practical philosophy: from Aristotle to Kant, from Rousseau to Marx, from Hegel to G.E.M. Anscombe, and many others. This volume gathers works by scholars who take inspiration from these and many other historical figures in order to deepen our systematic understanding of questions raised by their work that still are, or ought to (...)
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  • Knowing how, basic actions, and ways of doing things.Kevin Lynch - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (8):956-977.
    This paper investigates whether we can know how to do basic actions, from the perspective according to which knowing how to do something requires knowledge of a way to do it. A key argument from this perspective against basic know-how is examined and is found to be unsound, involving the false premise that there are no ways of doing basic actions. However, a new argument along similar lines is then developed, which contends that there are no ways of doing basic (...)
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  • Reconciling Practical Knowledge with Self-Deception.Eric Marcus - 2019 - Mind 128 (512):1205-1225.
    Is it impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it? The phenomenon of self-deceived agency might seem to show otherwise. Here the agent is not lying, yet disavows a correct description of her intentional action. This disavowal might seem expressive of ignorance. However, I show that the self-deceived agent does know what she's doing. I argue that we should understand the factors that explain self-deception as masking rather than negating the practical knowledge characteristic (...)
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  • Modeling practical thinking.Matthew Mosdell - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (4):445-464.
    Intellectualists about knowledge how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e, a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by (...)
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  • Naive Action Theory and Essentially Intentional Actions.Armand Babakhanian - 2024 - Southwest Philosophy Review 40 (1):229-237.
    In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...)
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  • Representation in action.Alec Hinshelwood - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that (...)
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  • Teleology and Basic Actions: A reading of the chapter on Teleology in Hegel's Subjective Logic in the terms of action theory.Maximilian Scholz - 2023 - Hegel Bulletin 44 (1):74-98.
    In this paper I argue that there is textual evidence that the chapter on Teleology in Hegel's Science of Logic, read under certain premises, also discusses something that in contemporary analytic philosophy is called a ‘basic action’. The three moments of Teleology—(a) ‘The Subjective Purpose’, (b) ‘The Means’ and (c) ‘The Realized Purpose’—can be interpreted as (a) a certain intentional content in the mind of a subject, which can be expressed in the form of an imperative, (b) the immediate taking (...)
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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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  • An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action.Annemarie Kalis & Dawa Ometto - 2019 - Topoi 40 (3):637-648.
    Much of the time, human beings seem to rely on habits. Habits are learned behaviours directly elicited by context cues, and insensitive to short-term changes in goals: therefore they are sometimes irrational. But even where habitual responses are rational, it can seem as if they are nevertheless not done for reasons. For, on a common understanding of habitual behaviour, agents’ intentions do not play any role in the coming about of such responses. This paper discusses under what conditions we can (...)
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  • Are Events Things of the Past?Julian Bacharach - 2021 - Mind 130 (518):381-412.
    A popular claim in recent philosophy of mind and action is that events only exist once they are over. This has been taken to have the consequence that many temporal phenomena cannot be understood ‘from the inside’, as they are unfolding, purely in terms of events. However, as I argue here, the claim that events exist only when over is incoherent. I consider two ways of understanding the claim and the notion of existence it involves: one that ties existence to (...)
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  • Stipulative Agency.Derek Lam - 2021 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 7. Oxford University Press. pp. 7-31.
    An agent’s knowledge of her own intentional actions (agential knowledge) is non-observational. Yet, intentional actions typically consist of happenings external to the agents. A theory is needed to explain how agents are warranted to form such beliefs independent of observation. This paper first argues for three desirable features of an ideal theory about agential knowledge. After showing that no existing theories possess all three, a novel theory that does is presented. According to this theory, agential knowledge is the same kind (...)
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  • The Instrumental Rule.Jeremy David Fix - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (4):444-462.
    Properly understood, the instrumental rule says to take means that actually suffice for my end, not, as is nearly universally assumed, to intend means that I believe are necessary for my end. This alternative explains everything the standard interpretation can—and more, including grounding certain correctness conditions for exercises of our will unexplained by the standard interpretation.
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  • Knowing what you are doing: Action‐demonstratives in unreflective action.Markos Valaris - 2020 - Ratio 33 (2):97-105.
    Almost everything that we do, we do by doing other things. Even actions we perform without deliberation or conscious planning are composed of ‘smaller’, subsidiary actions. But how should we think of such subsidiary actions? Are they fully-fledged intentional actions (in the sense of things that we do for reasons) in their own right? In this paper I defend an affirmative answer to this question, against a recently influential form of scepticism. Drawing on a distinctive kind of ‘action-demonstrative’ representation, I (...)
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  • The Error Condition.Jeremy David Fix - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):34-48.
    The possibility of error conditions the possibility of normative principles. I argue that extant interpretations of this condition undermine the possibility of normative principles for our action because they implicitly treat error as a perfection of an action. I then explain how a constitutivist metaphysics of capacities explains why error is an imperfection of an action. Finally, I describe and defend the interpretation of the error condition which follows.
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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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  • Knowing what I have done.Matthias Haase - 2018 - Manuscrito 41 (4):195-253.
    The literature on agentive or practical knowledge tends to be focused on knowing what one is doing or what one is going to do. Knowing what one has done and has achieved thereby seems to be another matter. In fact, achievements are often taken to be beyond the ken of practical knowledge. I argue that this is a mistake. The intelligibility of the very idea of practical knowledge depends on the possibility of knowing one's achievements in the same manner. For (...)
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  • On not getting out of bed.Samuel Asarnow - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (6):1639-1666.
    This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my action that (...)
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  • Action as a form of temporal unity: on Anscombe’s Intention.Douglas Lavin - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5):609-629.
    The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive (...)
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  • On Humean Explanation and Practical Normativity.Graham Hubbs - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1):78-95.
    If Hume is correct that the descriptive and the normative are “entirely different” matters, then it would seem to follow that endorsing a given account of action-explanation does not restrict the account of practical normativity one may simultaneously endorse. In this essay, I challenge the antecedent of this conditional by targeting its consequent. Specifically, I argue that if one endorses a Humean account of action-explanation, which many find attractive, one is thereby committed to a Humean account of practical normativity, which (...)
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  • The libertarian predicament: a plea for action theory.Niels van Miltenburg & Dawa Ometto - 2019 - Synthese 196 (1):161-178.
    Libertarians in the contemporary free will debate find themselves under attack from two angles. They face the challenge of defending the necessity of indeterminism for freedom against the philosophical mainstream position of compatibilism. And second, they are increasingly forced to argue for the very possibility of indeterministic free will, in the face of the so-called luck objection. Many contemporary libertarians try to overcome the second problem by adopting the causal theory of action. We argue that this move at the same (...)
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  • Intention and Predicition in Means-End Reasoning.Stephen J. White - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3):251-266.
    How, if at all, does one's intention to realize an end bear on the justification for taking the means to that end? Theories that allow that intending an end directly provides a reason to take the means are subject to a well-known "bootstrapping" objection. On the other hand, "anti-psychologistic" accounts—which seek to derive instrumental reasons directly from the reasons that support adopting the end itself—have unacceptable implications where an agent faces multiple rationally permissible options. An alternative, predictive, role for intention (...)
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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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  • The paradox of the diffusiveness of power.Xiaoxing Zhang - 2017 - Synthese 194 (7):2489-2500.
    Although the topic of basic act is controversial, theorists of agency normally agree that complex performances are based on comparatively simple ones. To the extent that we can attribute powers to agents over various tasks, it is also plausible to suppose that our powers over complex tasks are based on powers over the simple. Chisholm once formulated this idea in terms of the principle of the diffusiveness of power. In the present paper, however, we shall argue that the principle which (...)
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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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