Donald Davidson brought to our attention deviant causal chains as a problem for causal theories of action. Consider Davidson's own example: " A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it (...) might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally. " The loosening of the hold on the rope is an action, according to a simple causal theory of action earlier developed by Davidson , if we can describe it in a way that renders it intentional under that description. Is there a way of describing the climber's loosening of his hold of the rope as intentional? Did he intentionally loosen his hold? Well, his loosening his hold is both rationalized and explained causally with reference to the beliefs and desires held by the climber. But there seems to be something wrong with the causal chain.Is there a simple fix? Could we not say that even if the loosening of the hold on the rope is caused by a desire held by the climber it is not caused by any proximate desire of the climber ? Or, to give a new twist to this well-known argument, could we not say that the loosening of the hold on the rope is not caused in a way that is responsive to the desire? This latter idea has recently been suggested by Markus E. Schlosser as a simple solution to the …. (shrink)

The paper begins with an objection to the Desire-Based Reasons Model. The argument from reason-based desires holds that since desires are based on reasons (first premise), which they transmit but to which they cannot add (second premise), they cannot themselves provide reasons for action. In the paper I investigate an attack that has recently been launched against the first premise of this argument by Ruth Chang. Chang invokes a counterexample: affective desires. The aim of the paper is to see if (...) there is a way to accommodate the counterexample to the first premise. I investigate three strategies. I first deal with the idea that the motivation for the premise may be the thesis that an action is intentional if and only if it is done under the guise of perceived reasons. This offers us a way of defending the premise: by showing that actions prompted by affective desires are not intentional. I, however, argue that this strategy is unworkable. This brings me to the second strategy. Here I consider the idea that the premise does not require a conscious normative thought on the part of the agent; in fact, it may not require any such thought, conscious or unconscious. I claim that this strategy too is a failure. Finally, the third approach builds normative judgment in the desire. This is the approach that I think works; in particular, recent work by Jennifer Hawkins may help us accommodate affective desires. The challenge of affective desires, I conclude, can be tackled. (shrink)

In garden-variety instances of intentional action, according to a popular account, agents intend to perform actions of particular kinds, their intentions are based on reasons so to act, and the intentions issue in appropriate behaviour. On this account, the reasons that give rise to our intentions are reasons for action. Interesting questions for this view are raised by cases in which an agent seemingly has a reason to intend to do something while having no reason to do it. Can such (...) reasons to intend issue in appropriate intentions? If so, can these intentions issue in corresponding intentional actions -- even though the agent has no reason to perform those actions? If these questions are properly given an affirmative answer, at least one popular thesis in the philosophy of action is false. One could not properly "define an intentional act as one which the agent does for a reason." A popular thesis about the explanation of intentional actions would be false as well -- namely, that explaining an intentional action (qua intentional) requires reference to reasons for action. My point of departure in this paper is a puzzle—Gregory Kavka's toxin puzzle(1983) -- in which agents seem to have an excellent reason to intend to A while having no reason at all to A. Generally, commentators on the puzzle have set their sights on questions about rational intentions. However, the puzzle raises difficult questions about intending itself and about the nature of intentional action. Showing that this is so is easy. Answering the question is more challenging. (shrink)

According to explanatory individualism, every action must be explained in terms of an agent's desire. According to explanatory nonindividualism, we sometimes act on our desires, but it is also possible for us to act on others' desires without acting on desires of our own. While explanatory nonindividualism has guided the thinking of many social scientists, it is considered to be incoherent by most philosophers of mind who insist that actions must be explained ultimately in terms of some desire of the (...) agent. In the first part of the paper, I show that some powerful arguments designed to demonstrate the incoherence of explanatory nonindividualism fail. In the second part of the paper, I offer a nonindividualist explanation of the apparent obviousness of belief-desire psychology. I argue that there are two levels of the intelligibility of our actions. On the more fundamental (explanatory) level, the question "Why did the agent do something?" admits a variety of folk-psychological categories. But there is another (formation-of-self) level, at which the same question admits only of answers that ultimately appeal only to the agent's own desires. Explanatory individualism results from the confusion of the two levels. (shrink)

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 (...) years or so, it is only recently that we start to understand the important role motor imagery plays in action initiation. And if, as these findings suggest, motor imagery plays an important role in action initiation, we can make progress not only in understanding action initiation in general but also in understanding what goes wrong in akratic actions and in relapse actions. Finally, this new picture of action-initiation also has far-reaching consequences for the relation between motivation and causation in naturalistic action-explanations. (shrink)

In this paper, I restrict the discussion to overt intentional action, intentional action that essentially involves peripheral bodily movement. My guiding question is this: If there is a specific motivational role that intention is plausibly regarded as playing in all cases of overt intentional action, in virtue of what feature(s) of intention does it play this role? I am looking for an answer that can be articulated in the terminology of intentionalist psychology.

Christine Tappolet posed a problem for alethic pluralism: either deny the truth of conjunctions whose conjuncts are from distinct domains of inquiry, or posit a generic global truth property thus making other truth properties redundant. Douglas Edwards has attempted to solve the problem by avoiding the horns of Tappolet's dilemma. After first noting an unappreciated consequence of Edwards's view regarding a proliferation of truth properties, I show that Edwards's proposal fails to avoid Tappolet's original dilemma. His response is not successful, (...) as it lets in a generic truth property through the ‘back door’. I conclude by briefly offering a new solution to the problem, and an alternative diagnosis of Tappolet's dilemma.1. Tappolet's dilemmaThe alethic pluralist ; Sher ; Wright ) contends that propositions from different domains can be true in different ways. Mixed conjunctions have conjuncts from different domains; consider for example, ‘1+1=2 and murder is wrong’. A pressing question for the pluralist: if each conjunct is true in a distinct way, in what way is the conjunction true? Tappolet argues, " [M]ixed conjunctions need to be true in a further way. … But then each conjunct has to be true in the same way. This is what follows from the truism that a conjunction is true if and only if its conjuncts are true. Hence the question arises again why this further way of being true is not the only one we need. " Edwards puts Tappolet's contention as a dilemma: either admit a generic truth property that can apply to all propositions, regardless of domain or deny that mixed conjunctions can be true. It is prima facie plausible that mixed conjunctions can be true. Moreover, admitting a generic truth property would seemingly undermine alethic pluralism by making other truth properties redundant.2. Edwards's solutionEdwards's solution attempts …. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to refute an intriguing argument of Hugh McCann's for the thesis that'S tried to A' entails 'S intended to A. I shall call this the strong intention thesis about trying, or SIT. SIT implies, as McCann observes, that even an agent who thinks that the probability of her A-ing is close to zero intends to A, provided only that she tries to A.