Although some still advance reductive accounts of emotions—according to which they fall under a more familiar type of mental state—contemporary philosophers tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state. Agreeing with this claim, however, is compatible with attempting to find commonalities between emotions and better understood things. According to the advocates of the so-called ‘perceptual analogy’, thinking of emotion in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding even though emotion may not be reducible to (...) ordinary perception. In this paper, I spell out and motivate a different analogy—that between emotion and action—an analogy which I think can do some important theoretical work. In particular, it constitutes a theoretically fruitful way to think about core aspects of emotions and might in fact be employed to provide a better account of certain aspects of emotions than the one based on the perceptual analogy. Emotions might not be a matter of seeing the world a certain way, but a matter of behaving internally in response to it. In a slogan form: Emotion is the inward counterpart of bodily movement. (shrink)

According to a widely endorsed claim, intentional action is brought about by an agent’s desires in accordance with these desires’ respective motivational strength. As Jay Wallace has argued, though, this “hydraulic model” of the aetiology of intentional action has a serious flaw: it fails to leave room for genuine deliberative agency. Drawing on recent developments in the debate on self-control, the article argues that Wallace’s criticism can be addressed once we combine the hydraulic model with a so-called “divided mind” account (...) of self-control. (shrink)

Emotional responses to fiction are part of our experience with art and media. Some of these responses (“fictional emotions”) seem to be directed towards fictional entities—entities that we believe do not exist. Some philosophers argue that fictional emotions differ in nature from other emotional responses. (cf. Walton in J Philos 75(1):5–27, 1978, Mimesis as make-believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990, Walton, in: Hjort, Laver (ed.) Emotion and the arts, Oxford University, New York, 1997; Currie in The nature of fiction, Cambridge (...) University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Stecker in Br J Aesthet 51(3):295–308, 2011) The claim is supposed to be supported among others by ‘the argument from action.’ In contrast to genuine emotions, proponents of this argument claim, fictional emotions do not motivate their bearers to act. (cf. Yanal in Paradoxes of emotion and fiction, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1999; Lamarque in Br J Aesthet 21(4):291–304, 1981; Carroll in The philosophy of horror: or, paradoxes of the heart, Routledge, London, 1990; Currie 1990; Walton 1978, 1990; Suits in Pac Philos Q 87(3):369–386, 2006; Friend, in: Kind (ed.) The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination, Routledge, New York, 2016) This claim grounds in what may appear to be an obvious fact: that viewers and readers of are not led to act by their fictional emotions. It is certainly true that viewers and readers of fiction do not form intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional entities. In contrast to the proponents of the argument from action, I will argue that the lack of any such intentions can be explained only with reference to intending’s doxastic conditions, conditions that are unsatisfied in the fictional scenario. Decisively, this explanation does not refer to the motivational force of the agent’s emotions; indeed, it doesn’t refer to emotions at all. Thus, the lack of intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional objects provides no support for the claim that fictional emotions are no genuine emotions. (shrink)

Epiphenomenalism denies some or all putative cases of mental causation. The view is widely taken to be absurd: if a theory can be shown to entail epiphenomenalism, many see that as a reductio of that theory. Opponents take epiphenomenalism to be absurd because they regard the view as undermining the evident agency we have in action and precluding substantial self-knowledge. In this paper, I defend epiphenomenalism against these objections, and thus against the negative dialectical role that the view plays in (...) philosophy of mind. I argue that nearly in all cases where a theory implies one kind of epiphenomenalism, it is an epiphenomenalism of a non-problematic kind, at least as far as issues about agency and self-knowledge are concerned. There is indeed a problematic version of epiphenomenalism, but that version is not relevant to the debates where its apparent absurdity is invoked. (shrink)

Theories based on Frankfurt’s (Am Philos Q 15(2):157–162, 1978) view of action have recently been developed to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. What these theories share is that they aim to distinguish between actions and mere bodily movements without appealing to psychological states as causes. Instead, agents have guidance control over their actions. In this paper I argue that the versions of the theory that have been proposed are problematic. I propose to pay attention to Frankfurt’s other claim (...) instead: that actions and mere bodily movements are inherently different. I argue that Anscombe’s approach to action does take this inherent distinction seriously, and is able to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. (shrink)

According to a consensus view in philosophy, “deciding” and “intending” are synonymous expressions. Researchers have recently challenged this view with the discovery of a counterexample in which ordinary speakers attribute deciding without intending. The aim of this paper is to investigate the strengths and limits of this discovery. The result of this investigation revealed that the evidence challenging the consensus view is strong. We replicate the initial finding against consensus and extend it by utilizing several new measures, materials, and procedures. (...) Together this evidence strongly suggests that “deciding” is not synonymous with “intending” in ordinary language and that the consensus view should be rejected. (shrink)

This article argues that such large-scale cases of crowd behavior as the Mexican Wave ( La Ola) constitute forms of shared intentionality which cannot be explained solely with the use of the standard intentionalistic ontology. It claims that such unique forms of collective intentionality require a hybrid explanatory lens in which an account of shared goals, intentions, and other propositional attitudes is combined with an account of the motor psychology of collective agents. The paper describes in detail the intentionalistic ontology (...) of La Ola and discusses the conditions of cooperation it meets. The discussion allows the author to defend the view that large-scale collective intentionality can be based on automaticity to a significant degree: to properly understand such phenomena like La Ola, the idea of probabilistically interpreted decisions and propensities to act should give way to the automatic aspects of behavior. This paves the way for future studies in the philosophy of action to fully recognize the role of automatic performances at the level of collective actions just as they do for individual actions. (shrink)

The leading reductive approaches to shared agency model that phenomenon in terms of complexes of individual intentions, understood as plan-laden commitments. Yet not all agents have such intentions, and non-planning agents such as small children and some non-human animals are clearly capable of sophisticated social interactions. But just how robust are their social capacities? Are non-planning agents capable of shared agency? Existing theories of shared agency have little to say about these important questions. I address this lacuna by developing a (...) reductive account of the social capacities of non-planning agents, which I argue supports the conclusion that they can enjoy shared agency. The resulting discussion offers a fine-grained account of the psychological capacities that can underlie shared agency, and produces a recipe for generating novel hypotheses concerning why some agents do not engage in shared agency. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of action, the existence of intentional and unintentional action is relatively uncontroversial. What is controversial is whether there exists a third kind of action—action that is neither intentional nor unintentional. This third kind of action is known in the literature as non-intentional action. In this paper, I develop a pair of arguments in favor of non-intentional action. More specifically, I argue that non-intentional action exists in the form of lucky and side-effect acts.

For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in the primary visual cortex: a ventral, perception-related ‘conscious’ stream and a dorsal, action-related ‘unconscious’ stream. They furthermore maintain that the perceptual and memory systems in the ventral stream are relatively shielded from the action system in the dorsal stream. In recent years, this view has come under scrutiny. Evidence points to two overlapping action pathways: a (...) dorso-dorsal pathway that calculates features of the object to be acted on, and a ventro-dorsal pathway that transmits stored information about skilled object use from the ventral stream to the dorso-dorsal pathway. This evidence suggests that stored information may exert significantly more influence on visually guided action than hitherto assumed. I argue that this, in turn, supports the notion of skilled automatic action that is nonetheless agential. My focus here will be on actions influenced by implicit biases (stereotypes/prejudices). Action that is biased in this way, I argue, is in an important sense intentional and agential. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a novel view of the coherence (or structural) requirements on belief and intention, according to which they are not norms, but rather principles describing how your belief and intention operate. I first argue, on the basis of the unintelligibility of some relevant attitudes-reports, that there are conditions under which you simply do not count as believing or intending unless your beliefs and intentions satisfy the requirements: the conditions under which all of your relevant attitudes are (...) occurrent or activated. I then argue that you are subject to a coherence requirement only if your relevant attitudes are all activated, for you are not necessarily subject to the charge of irrationality in violating a coherence requirement when your attitudes are not all activated. If so, however, you satisfy the coherence requirements whenever you are subject to them, which makes it plausible that the “requirements” should be seen as descriptive principles about belief and intention. [*published with open access]. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed the mass distribution and adoption of smart home systems and devices powered by artificial intelligence systems ranging from household appliances like fridges and toasters to more background systems such as air and water quality controllers. The pervasiveness of these sociotechnical systems makes analyzing their ethical implications necessary during the design phases of these devices to ensure not only sociotechnical resilience, but to design them for human values in mind and thus preserve meaningful human control over (...) them. This paper engages in a conceptual investigations of how meaningful human control over smart home devices can be attained through design. The value sensitive design (VSD) approach is proposed as a way of attaining this level of control. In the proposed framework, values are identified and defined, stakeholder groups are investigated and brought into the design process and the technical constraints of the technologies in question are considered. The paper concludes with some initial examples that illustrate a more adoptable way forward for both ethicists and engineers of smart home devices. (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)

I identify and characterize the kind of personal-level control-structure that is most relevant for skilled action control, namely, what I call, “practical intention”. I differentiate between practical intentions and general intentions not in terms of their function or timing but in terms of their content. I also highlight a distinction between practical intentions and other control mechanisms that are required to explain skilled action. I’ll maintain that all intentions, general and practical, have the function specifying, sustaining, and structuring action but (...) that several functions that have been attributed to proximal intentions are actually implemented by other control mechanisms that are not themselves best identified as intentions. Specifically, I will claim that practical intentions do not initiate, monitor, specify or guide the fine-grained, online, kinematic aspects of action. Finally, I suggest that the way in which practical and general intentions should be differentiated is in terms of their content, where general intentions specify the overall goal, outcome, or end of an action as it is conceived of by the agent at a time, and practical intentions determine the means to that end. I conclude by providing empirical evidence to support this way of characterizing the intentions that “interface” with the mechanisms of motor control. Though this discussion has repercussions for action in general, I will limit my discussion to cases of skill. (shrink)

One can intend the actions of others, even when one believes such actions are not under one’s control. Call the objects of intentions “ends”; the ends that consist of other people’s actions “social”; and the ends that consist of things one believes one cannot control “recalcitrant”. The thesis, then, is that one can intend recalcitrant social ends. I present a positive argument in favor of this idea, and then argue against some purported conditions on the possible content of intentions that (...) would rule out the possibility of intending such ends. The positive argument is the following: intentions are realized by a certain cluster of dispositions. One can come to be so disposed towards recalcitrant social ends. So one can come to be disposed toward such ends in the manner that realizes an intention. So one can intend recalcitrant social ends. The conditions against which I argue are known in the literature as the Own Action Condition, the Control Condition, and the Settle Condition. I present cases where, intuitively, agents genuinely intend ends that would be ruled out by these conditions. (shrink)

In this paper, in line with the general framework of value-sensitive design, we aim to operationalize the general concept of “Meaningful Human Control” in order to pave the way for its translation into more specific design requirements. In particular, we focus on the operationalization of the first of the two conditions investigated: the so-called ‘tracking’ condition. Our investigation is led in relation to one specific subcase of automated system: dual-mode driving systems. First, we connect and compare meaningful human control with (...) a concept of control very popular in engineering and traffic psychology, and we explain to what extent tracking resembles and differs from it. This will help clarifying the extent to which the idea of meaningful human control is connected to, but also goes beyond, current notions of control in engineering and psychology. Second, we take the systematic analysis of practical reasoning as traditionally presented in the philosophy of human action and we adapt it to offer a general framework where different types of reasons and agents are identified according to their relation to an automated system’s behaviour. This framework is meant to help explaining what reasons and what agents play a role in controlling a given system, thereby enabling policy makers to produce usable guidelines and engineers to design systems that properly respond to selected human reasons. In the final part, we discuss a practical example of how our framework could be employed in designing automated driving systems. (shrink)

Nonreductive physicalism states that actions have sufficient physical causes and distinct mental causes. Nonreductive physicalism has recently faced the exclusion problem, according to which the single sufficient physical cause excludes the mental causes from causal efficacy. Autonomists respond by stating that while mental-to-physical causation fails, mental-to-mental causation persists. Several recent philosophers establish this autonomy result via similar models of causation :1031–1049, 2016; Zhong, J Philos 111:341–360, 2014). In this paper I argue that both of these autonomist models fail on account (...) of the problem of Edwards’s Dictum. However, I appeal to foundational principles of action theory to resuscitate mental-to-mental causation in a manner that is consistent with the models of causation endorsed by these autonomists. (shrink)

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 (...) V-ing, where the two disjuncts share no common state of intention. Instructive structural parallels to perceptual disjunctivism are pointed out, and the view is shown, unlike its rivals, to successfully extend to capture both prospective and present intention, thereby unifying the three different guises of intention. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I develop and defend a model of causation that allows for dualist mental causation in worlds where the physical domain is physically complete. In Part I, I present the dualist ontology that will be assumed throughout the thesis and identify two challenges for models of mental causation within such an ontology: the exclusion worry and the common cause worry. I also argue that a proper response to these challenges requires a thoroughly lightweight account of causation, i.e. an (...) account that allows for causes to be metaphysically distinct from the phenomena that produce or physically necessitate their effects. In Part II, I critically evaluate contemporary responses to these challenges from the philosophical literature. In particular, I discuss List and Stoljar’s criticism of exclusion worries, Kroedel’s alternative dualist ontology, concerns about the notion of causal sufficiency, and Lowe’s models of dualist mental causation. I argue that none of these proposals provide independent motivation for a thoroughly lightweight account of causation and therefore leave room for improvement. In the first four chapters of Part III, I develop a thoroughly lightweight model of causation, which builds on interventionist approaches to causation. First, I explain how so-called ‘holding fixed’-requirements in standard interventionist accounts stand in the way of dualist mental causation. I then argue that interventionist accounts should impose a robustness condition on causal correlations and that, with this condition in place, the ‘holding fixed’-requirements can be weakened such that they do allow for dualist mental causation. I dub the interventionist model with such weakened ‘holding fixed’-requirements ‘insensitive interventionism’, argue that it can counter the exclusion worry as well as the common cause worry, and explain under which circumstances it would predict there to be dualist mental causation. Importantly, these circumstances might, for all we know, hold in the actual world. In the final three chapters of Part III, I defend insensitive interventionism against some objections. I consider the objection that causation must be productive, the objection that causes must physically necessitate their effects, and the objection that insensitive interventionism is too permissive. I respond by drawing from the literature on causation by absences and on the relation between causation and fundamental physics. Overall, insensitive interventionism performs as well as standard interventionist accounts. I conclude that insensitive interventionism is a credible model of causation. (shrink)

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 (...) brought about by devices such as robotic arms, prosthesis, or other machines, and their execution runs through a computer directed by brain signals. In contrast to usual forms of action, the sequence does not need to involve bodily or muscle movements at all. A motionless body, the epitome of inaction, might be acting. How do theories of action relate to such BCI-mediated forms of changing the world? We wish to explore this question through the lenses of three perspectives on agency: subjective experience of agency, philosophical action theory, and legal concepts of action. Our analysis pursues three aims: First, we shall discuss whether and which BCI-mediated events qualify as actions, according to the main concepts of action in philosophy and law. Secondly, en passant, we wish to highlight the ten most interesting novelties or peculiarities of BCI-mediated movements. Thirdly, we seek to explore whether these novel forms of movement may have consequences for concepts of agency. More concretely, we think that convincing assessments of BCI-movements require more fine-grained accounts of agency and a distinction between various forms of control during movements. In addition, we show that the disembodied nature of BCI-mediated events causes troubles for the standard legal account of actions as bodily movements. In an exchange with views from philosophy, we wish to propose that the law ought to reform its concept of action to include some, but not all, BCI-mediated events and sketch some of the wider implications this may have, especially for the venerable legal idea of the right to freedom of thought. In this regard, BCIs are an example of the way in which technological access to yet largely sealed-off domains of the person may necessitate adjusting normative boundaries between the personal and the social sphere. (shrink)

Much work in the philosophy of action in the last few decades has focused on the elucidation and justification of a series of purported norms of practical rationality that concern the presence or absence of intention in light of belief, and that demand a kind of structural coherence in the psychology of an agent. Examples of such norms include: Intention Detachment, which proscribes intending to do something in case some condition obtains, believing that such condition obtains, and not intending to (...) do that thing; Intention-Belief Consistency, which proscribes intending to do what you believe you will not do; Intention Consistency, which proscribes intending each of two ends you believe to be inconsistent; and Means-End Coherence, which proscribes intending an end and not intending the means you believe to be implied by your end. In this paper, I present a series of examples that show that these requirements are not genuine requirements of rationality. The reason for this is simple: these requirements concern the presence or absence of intention in light of all-out belief. Rational agents like us, however, do not, and in fact should not, always form or revise their intentions in light of what they all-out believe. When such agents do not form or revise their intentions in light of what they all-out believe, they need not be irrational if they do not conform to these requirements. (shrink)

There are few concepts as relevant as that of intentional action in shaping our sense of self and the interaction with the environment. At the same time, few concepts are so elusive. Indeed, both conceptual and neuroscientific accounts of intentional agency have proven to be problematic. On the one hand, most conceptual views struggle in defining how agents can adequately exert control over their actions. On the other hand, neuroscience settles for definitions by exclusion whereby key features of human intentional (...) actions, including goal-directness, remain underspecified. This paper reviews the existing literature and sketches how this gap might be filled. In particular, we defend a gradualist notion of intentional behaviour, which revolves around the following key features: autonomy, flexibility in the integration of causal vectors, and control. (shrink)

Sometimes you make a choice. Whether or not you made it was up to you. The choice was free. But how can this be? A scientific view of the world may leave no room for free choice. Free will literature continually explodes. Yet experts still focus on control or on a power to do otherwise. Sadly, they neglect another intuitive feature of free will: being an underived source or ultimate originator. When acting freely, one is a self-determined, self-directed, sole author (...) of change. Surprisingly, though the literature is replete with this pre-theoretic feature of free will, virtually no one makes rigorous use of it when constructing arguments. Equipped with fresh research, this book contends that agent-causation—currently an unpopular theory—deserves serious reconsideration. Only agent-causation accounts for ultimate origination, and popular objections fail under rigorous scrutiny. This book is tightly argued. It challenges and deepens recent advances in free will scholarship made by Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Randy Clarke, Stewart Goetz, Tim O’Connor, and others. (shrink)

Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe in der Handlungs- und Erkenntnistheorie. Folgende drei Fragen werden schwerpunktmäßig behandelt: a) Was für eine Art von Entität sind motivierende Gründe? b) Welche Beziehung besteht zwischen einer Handlung oder Einstellung und ihren motivierenden Gründen? c) Welche kognitiven Bedingungen gelten für die Zuschreibung motivierender Gründe?

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will (MIT Press, 2002). I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left out in Wegner’s account of (...) conscious will. This substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

Este texto tem como objetivo apresentar a principal motivação filosófica para se defender uma teoria causal da memória, que é explicar como pode um evento que se deu no passado estar relacionado a uma experiência mnêmica que se dá no presente. Para tanto, iniciaremos apresentando a noção de memória de maneira informal e geral, para depois apresentar elementos mais detalhados. Finalizamos apresentando uma teoria causal da memória que se beneficia da noção de veritação (truthmaking).

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.

I develop and argue for a novel theory of the mental state of identity confusion. I also argue that this mental state can corrupt the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication. Finally, I propose a theory according to which identity confusion should be treated as a the source of a new sort of linguistic performance error, similar to malapropism, slips of the tongue, and so-called intentional obfuscation (inducing false belief by manipulating language in specific ways). -/- Going into (...) a bit more detail, I start by arguing that contemporary analytic philosophy, and philosophy of language in particular, has been dominated by a ‘puzzle-driven’ methodology. This tradition, I claim, seeks to provide a coherent system for describing semantic features of all conceivable cases where a speaker is confused about the identity or distinctness of an object. On my view, identity confusion is a mental state of an agent who either believes falsely that a is identical to b or believes falsely that a is not identical to b. I show how many influential arguments in philosophy – e.g., Kripke on semantic reference and speaker’s reference – are invalidated because of false assumptions about the state of identity confusion. -/- More positively, I assume an ‘explanation-driven’ approach, combining strands in Gricean intentionalism and Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. On this view, confused speakers are ‘sub-optimal’: their mental state disrupts the proper function of the relevant singular terms in their idiolects. Furthermore, I flesh out a theoretically fruitful notion of ‘edenic reference,’ which idealizes away from confusion in defining the optimal or stabilizing function of singular terms. I argue that speakers must satisfy certain broadly cognitive constraints if their utterances are to play a role in explaining the maintenance of a practice of using a singular term in a linguistic community. (shrink)

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 (...) attention. If we put these claims together, what we get is that one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action. (shrink)

In the simplest case, a proximal intention is an intention one has now to do something now. Recently, some philosophers have argued that proximal intentions do much less work than they are sometimes regarded as doing. This article rebuts these arguments, explains why the concept of proximal intentions is important for some scientific work on intentional action, and sketches an empirical approach to identifying proximal intentions. Ordinary usage of “intend” and the place of intention in folk psychology and scientific psychology (...) are discussed. (shrink)

Patrick Todd has recently fashioned a novel argument for incompatibilism, the Moral-Standing Zygote Argument. Todd considers much-discussed cases in which a manipulator causes an agent in a deterministic scenario to act morally wrongly from compatibilist-friendly conditions for freedom and moral responsibility. The manipulator, Todd contends, does not have the standing to blame the manipulated agent, and the best explanation for this is that incompatibilism is true. This is why the manipulated agent is not blameworthy. In this paper, I counter Todd (...) on behalf of the compatibilist, arguing that the best explanation for the manipulator's lack of moral standing to blame is due to the manipulator's intending to cause the manipulated agent to do wrong. (shrink)

Understanding the “intentionality” of mental phenomena is widely regarded as a key problem in philosophy of mind. Franz Brentano (along with his students, especially Edmund Husserl) is widely credited with bringing intentionality to philosophers’ attention. In early treatment by the Brentano school, intentionality is at least nominally understood as executed, brought about, or achieved in mental acts. And in the early 20th century, historians of psychology regarded this “act conception” of intentionality as integral for understanding the phenomenon. Yet the secondary (...) literature on Brentano and Husserl provides no clarification of mental acts as acts, and in contemporary philosophy, we have no workable account of what it could mean for intentionality to arise through mental acts. The main difficulty is that “act” is widely regarded as synonymous with “volitional personal action.” Since we as human agents certainly do not willfully bring about much of our own mental life, and since (on the standard analyses) all such volition presupposes intentionality, it is a mystery to work out what the act conception of intentionality could have amounted to. This dissertation is a systematic explication of the historical act concept of intentionality. Part I examines Brentano. I show that his early work on Aristotle’s psychology provides resources to think coherently about many mental phenomena as acts, even if they are not personal actions. However, I also show that Brentano’s mature psychology is not Aristotelian, at least insofar as it does not (and cannot) deploy an Aristotelian conception of mental acts. Part II examines Husserl. I show that Husserl’s mature transcendental phenomenology works with a robust and many-layered conception of mental acts, and that understanding intentionality as active is essential to the phenomenological viewpoint. Moreover, I argue that Husserl’s conception of mental acts can be viewed as a transcendentalized, neo-Aristotelian view. The results will be of special interest to historians of philosophy, but also have a much broader significance. Husserl’s view provides us with a model of what can be called an “internalist enactivism.” Any view along these lines represents a novel position that has not been articulated (or even considered) in contemporary debates. (shrink)

Discussions of Ryle’s regress argument against the “intellectualist legend” have largely focused on whether it is effective against a certain view about knowledge how, namely, the view that knowledge how is a species of propositional knowledge. This is understandable, as this is how Ryle himself framed the issue. Nevertheless, this focus has tended to obscure some different concerns which are no less pressing—either for Ryle or for us today. More specifically, I argue that a version of Ryle’s regress confronts any (...) view according to which the intelligence manifested in action must be inherited from purely inner mental causes. I recommend an alternative account of the metaphysics of intelligent action, which avoids this commitment. (shrink)

Suppose you decide or promise to do something that you have evidence is difficult to do. Should you believe that you will do it? On the one hand, if you believe that you will do it, your belief goes against the evidence—since having evidence that it’s difficult to do it constitutes evidence that it is likely that you won’t do it. On the other hand, if you don’t believe that you will do it but instead believe, as your evidence suggests, (...) that it is likely that you will fail, your decision is not serious and your promise is not sincere. This problem—I call it the Epistemological Problem of Difficult Action—is a pressing philosophical problem that each of us faces. In this paper I consider several possible responses to it. I conclude that the right response is to say that we should believe against the evidence. Cases in which we decide or promise to do something that we have evidence is difficult to do are the best counterexamples to evidentialism. (shrink)

While philosophers of mind have devoted abundant time and attention to questions of content and consciousness, philosophical questions about the nature and scope of mental action have been relatively neglected. Galen Strawson’s account of mental action, arguably the most well-known extant account, holds that cognitive mental action consists in triggering the delivery of content to one’s field of consciousness. However, Strawson fails to recognize several distinct types of mental action that might not reduce to triggering content delivery. In this paper, (...) we argue that meditation provides a useful model for understanding a wider range of types of mental action than heretofore recognized. Conclusions yielded by two distinct bodies of current psychological research on meditation and cognition, and meditation and introspection, buttress meditation’s suitability for this role. (shrink)

The book, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (1995), by Alfred R. Mele, deals primarily with two main concepts, “self-control” and “individual autonomy,” and the relationship between them. The book is divided into two parts: (1) a view of self-control, the self-controlled person, and behaviour manifesting self-control, and (2) a view of personal autonomy, the autonomous person, and autonomous behaviour. Mele (Ibid.) defines self-control as the opposite of the Aristotelian concept of akrasia, or the contrary of akrasia, which implies weakness (...) of will, incontinence, or lack of self-control—the state of mind in which one acts against one’s better judgement. According to Mele, the concept of self-control can be approached from two perspectives: (a) how self-control affects human behaviour, and (b) how self-control-associated behavior can enhance our understanding of ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘autonomous behaviour’—personal autonomy requires self-control, and autonomous persons and autonomous behaviour are naturally found together. Therefore, I might say that self-control is essential to enhancing one’s autonomy. -/- In part I, we find an account of self-control where Mele argues that even an ideally self-controlled person might lack autonomy. In part II, Mele gives an explicit account of autonomy and explains what must be added to self-control to achieve autonomy. This is the pivotal claim made by Mele (dismantling the intuitively connected notions of self-control and autonomy). (shrink)

A good surgeon knows how to perform a surgery; a good architect knows how to design a house. We value their know-how. We ordinarily look for it. What makes it so valuable? A natural response is that know-how is valuable because it explains success. A surgeon’s know-how explains their success at performing a surgery. And an architect’s know-how explains their success at designing houses that stand up. We value know-how because of its special explanatory link to success. But in virtue (...) of what is know-how explanatorily linked to success? This essay provides a novel argument for the thesis that know-how’s special link to success is to be explained at least in part in terms of its being, or involving, a doxastic attitude that is epistemically alike propositional knowledge. It is argued that the role played by know-how in explaining intentional success shows that the epistemic differences between know-how and knowledge, if any, are less than usually thought; and that "revisionary intellectualism", the view that know-how is true belief that might well fall short of knowledge, is not really a stable position. If its explanatory link to success is what makes know-how valuable, an upshot of my argument is that the value of know-how is due, to a considerable extent, to its being, or involving, a kind of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

The judgement that provides the content of intention and coincides with the conclusion of practical reasoning is a normative judgement about what to do, and not, as Anscombe and McDowell argue, a factual judgement about what one is doing. Treating the conclusion of practical reasoning as expressing a recommendation rather than a verdict undermines McDowell’s argument; the special nature of practical reasoning does not preclude its conclusions being normative. Anscombe’s and McDowell’s claim that practical self-knowledge is productive of action may (...) be accommodated by identifying the content of practical knowledge not with the conclusion but with a premise of practical reasoning – a kind of practical reasoning that occurs within rather than before action. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that some intentional actions are not triggered by proximal intentions; i.e. there are actions which are intentional, but lack relevant proximal intentions in their immediate causal history. More specifically, I first introduce various properties of intentions. I then argue that some actions are triggered by mental states which lack properties typically ascribed to intentions, yet these actions are still intentional. The view that all intentional actions are triggered by proximal intentions is thus false.

The dominant account of agency takes actions to be brought about and guided by intentions that represent the agent's performance of the action. Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative view that denies intentions are essential for action. He holds instead that the agent's activity is brought about by her apprehension of her environment, without the need for any intervening thoughts that represent her performance of it. I argue that two considerations advanced in favour of the thesis that human cognition is embodied are (...) in tension with the dominant account of agency, and speak in favour of Merleau-Ponty's view. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of the Simple View, the claim that someone intentionally φs only if the person intends to φ. To do this, I raise a problem for Bratman’s classic argument (1984, 1987) against it. The problem brings into focus an evaluative dimension behind the View, whose recognition allows for an improved version of it. With this improved version, I then go on to answer other criticisms that have been raised to it.

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 (...) intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting. (shrink)

This article defends the idea that causal relations between reasons and actions are wholly irrelevant to the explanatory efficacy of reason-explanations. The analysis of reason-explanations provided in this article shows that the so-called “problem of explanatory force” is solved, not by putative causal relations between the reasons for which agents act and their actions, but rather by the intentions that agents necessarily have when they act for a reason. Additionally, the article provides a critique of the principal source of support (...) for the thesis that reason-explanations are causal explanations, namely, Davidson's argument in “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” It is shown that Davidson's argument for this thesis rests crucially on two mistakes: his definition of intentional action and his ontological prejudice against intentions. (shrink)

Contextualist accounts of free will recently proposed by Hawthorne and Rieber imply that the same action can be both free and unfree (depending on the attributor's context). This paradoxical consequence can be avoided by thinking of contexts not as constituted by arbitrary moves in a conversation, but rather by (relatively stable) social practices (such as the practices of attributing responsibility or of giving scientific explanations). The following two conditions are suggested as each necessary and jointly sufficient for free will: (i) (...) the agent is able to form considered practical judgements and to act accordingly, and (ii) the agent (or some agent‐involving event) is the original cause of her actions. A contextualist reformulation of the second condition is developed according to which only contexts in which responsibility is attributed are relevant for the kind of original causation required for free will, which allows for a non‐relativist contextualism about free will. (shrink)

Un grand nombre de problèmes dont traite aujourd'hui la théorie de la décision reposent sur des problématiques qui appartiennent à des approches philosophiques, méthodologiques et théoriques fort différentes et dont l'auteur deChoix rationnel et vie publiquedéplore à juste titre l'absence d'unité intrinsèque. En effet, les racines de la théorie contemporaine du choix rationnel ont des ramifications dans trois traditions philosophiques qui ont été maintenues sans entretenir de contacts: théories philosophiques de l'action d'Aristote à Hume, à Kant et à la philosophie (...) analytique de l'action de Davidson; la théorie du conflit de Hobbes à David Gauthier; la théorie de la justice (d'inspiration utilitariste qui a profondément marqué la pensée économique du XXesiècle). Ces branches ont entretenu des interactions sporadiques, mais ces relations n'ont jamais été exploitées systématiquement. Le travail que présente l'auteur est une première tentative dans cette direction, du moins en langue française. (shrink)

This paper features Derk Pereboom’s replies to commentaries by Victor Tadros and Saul Smilansky on his non-retributive, incapacitation-focused proposal for treatment of dangerous criminals; by Michael McKenna on his manipulation argument against compatibilism about basic desert and causal determination; and by Alfred R. Mele on his disappearing agent argument against event-causal libertarianism.

We provide an account of chimpanzee-specific agency within the context of philosophy of action. We do so by showing that chimpanzees are capable of what we call reason-directed action, even though they may be incapable of more full-blown action, which we call reason-considered action. Although chimpanzee agency does not possess all the features of typical adult human agency, chimpanzee agency is evolutionarily responsive to their environment and overlaps considerably with our own. As such, it is an evolved set of capacities (...) for goal-directed behavior, which solves problems that chimpanzees naturally encounter. Thus, it ought not be understood as a deficient instance of human agency. (shrink)