Suppose that you're lying in bed. You just woke up. But you're alert. Your mind is clear and you have no distractions. As you lie there, you think to yourself, ‘2 + 2 = 4.’ The thought just pops into your head. But, wanting to be sure of your mathematical insight, you once again think ‘2 + 2 = 4’, this time really meditating on your thought. Now suppose that you're sitting in an empty movie theatre. The lighting is normal (...) and the screen in front of you is blank. Then at some point an image of a peach is flashed on the screen. The image isn't up there for long. In fact, it's only on the screen for what seems like an instant—just long enough for you to see it. These two scenarios are a bit mundane. But, as I will show, reflection on them can yield significant results concerning the nature of persons and their persistence through time. First I will show that thought and perception have temporal constraints whereby your thinking or perceiving in the above scenarios implies that you exist through a temporally.. (shrink)

According to Millian Descriptivism, while the semantic content of a linguistically simple proper name is just its referent, we often use sentences containing such expressions “to make assertions…that are, in part, descriptive” (Soames 2008). Against this view, I show, following Ted Sider and David Braun (2006), that simple sentences containing names are never used to assert descriptively enriched propositions. In addition, I offer a diagnosis as to where the argument for Millian Descriptivism goes wrong. Once we appreciate the distinctive way (...) in which this account fails, we can better appreciate the very modest role that associated descriptive information plays in the pragmatics of proper names. (shrink)

Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued in the 1960’s and 1970’s that thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts – require special treatment, and advanced different accounts. In this paper I discuss Ernest Sosa’s approach to these matters. I first present his approach to singular or de re thought in general in the first section. In the second, I introduce the data that need to be explained, Perry’s and Lewis’s proposals, and Sosa’s own account, in relation to Perry’s, Lewis’s, (...) and his own views on de re thought. In the third section I present the account I prefer – a “token-reflexive” version of Perry’s original account that Perry himself came to adopt in reaction to Stalnaker’s criticisms. In the final section I take up Recanati’s recent arguments, from a viewpoint on de se thought very similar to Sosa’s, to the effect that such an account is in a good position to explain the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I argue there that that is not the case, and I conclude by suggesting that the token-reflexive account fits better both with the data and with Sosa’s Fregean take on de re thought in general. (shrink)

In this paper, I present one possible way of arguing for the theory of minimal self-consciousness, namely, by an argument by elimination. Central to the argument are the following two claims: a) If a theory of consciousness cannot explain first-person self-reference, then the theory is false, and b) An anonymity theory cannot explain first-person self-reference. Consequently, the anonymity theory is false.

We enjoy first-person authority with respect to a certain class of actions: for these actions, we know what we are doing just because we are doing it. This paper first formulates an epistemological principle that captures this authority in terms of trying to act in a way that one has the capacity to act. It then considers a case of effortful action – running a middle distance race – that threatens this principle. And proposes the solution of changing the metaphysics (...) of action: one can keep hold of the idea that we have first-person authority over what we are doing by adopting a disjunctive account of action. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

There are mental actions, and a number of epistemic attitudes involve activity. But can there be epistemic agency? I argue that there is a limit to any claim that we can be epistemic agents, which is that the structure of reasons for epistemic attitudes differs fundamentally from the structure of reasons for actions. The main differences are that we cannot act for the wrong reasons although we can believe for the wrong reasons, and that reasons for beliefs are exclusive in (...) a sense in which our reasons for actions are not. Epistemic agency is possible in the weak sense that we can be active, but not in the strong one in which we could have some elbow room for our epistemic reasons in reasoning leading to beliefs and other epistemic states. (shrink)

My concern is this paper is to consider the nature of obsessive thoughts with the aim of getting a clearer idea about the extent to which they are rightly identified as passive or as active. The nature of obsessive thoughts is of independent interest, but my concern with the question is also rooted in a general concern to map the extent of mental activity, and to defend the importance and centrality of a view of self-knowledge that appeals to agency. I (...) hold that much of our mental lives is active, and that the distinctive knowledge we have of our own minds is in many cases best explained by appealing to agency. Along with many others, I take knowledge of our actions and activities to be distinctive. We know our actions and activities in a way that we do not know anything else, and in a way that is distinctively and essentially self-conscious. (shrink)

Volitionalism is a theory of action motivated by certain shortcomings in the standard causal theory of action. However, volitionalism is vulnerable to the objection that it distorts the phenomenology of embodied agency. Arguments for volitionalism typically proceed by attempting to establish three claims: (1) that whenever an agent acts, she tries or wills to act, (2) that it is possible for volitions to occur even in the absence of bodily movement, and (3) that in cases of successful bodily actions the (...) relation between volition and bodily movement is causal. I defend an argument for the second of these claims from an objection by Thor Grünbaum, but I show that several volitionalist arguments for the third are not compelling. I then argue that the dual aspect theory of action provides a better account of the relationship between an agent’s volition and the bodily movements she makes when she acts, insofar as it has the same advantages over the standard story as volitionalism without being open to the phenomenological objection. I also defend the dual aspect theory from an objection by A.D. Smith. Finally, I show why the dual aspect theory of action is a better alternative to volitionalism than the theory of action recently put forward by Adrian Haddock. In order to avoid the phenomenological objection Haddock suggests a disjunctive account of bodily movements. While disjunctivism should be taken seriously in the philosophy of action, on the dual aspect theory it is the category of volition, rather than bodily movement, that should receive a disjunctive analysis. (shrink)

Intuitively, the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions is different from the knowledge of actions of other sorts, including those of other people and unintentional actions of one's own. But how are we to understand this phenomenon? Does it pertain to all actions, under every description under which they are known? If so, then how is this possible? If not, then how should we think about cases that are exceptions to this principle? This paper is a critical survey of recent (...) attempts to answer these questions. I consider views under three headings: "special source" views, which hold that the knowledge of one's intentional actions has a non-perceptual source; "special domain" views, which hold that some but not all aspects of one's intentional actions are known in a special way; and "special character" views, which hold that the knowledge of intentional actions is special not because of where it comes from, but because of some other respect in which it is different in kind from the knowledge of other things. (shrink)

In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which ‘non-voluntary’ just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging (...) is non-voluntary, I contend, because it is partially constituted by the exercise of a non-reason-governed skill. This skill, which I call ‘critical pop-out’, consists of an unreflective, often unconscious, ability to detect the kind of situations in which the reflective abilities that also partially constitute our acts of judging should be deployed. We are responsible for our judgments, I conclude, because in identifying such reflection-inviting situations, we reveal the kind of epistemic agents we are. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay (Sections I and II), I argue that Kierkegaard's work helps us to articulate and defend two basic requirements on searching for knowledge of one's own judgements: first, that searching for knowledge whether one judges that P requires trying to make a judgement whether P; and second that, in an important range of cases, searching for knowledge of one's own judgements requires attending to how one's acts of judging are performed. In the second part (...) of the essay (Sections III and IV), I consider two prima facie problems regarding this conception of searching for knowledge of one's own judgements. The first problem concerns how in general one can coherently try to meet both these requirements at once; the second, how in particular one can try to attend to one's own acts of judging. I show how Kierkegaard's work is alive to both these problems, and helps us to see how they can be resolved. (shrink)

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 (...) it occurs in these different cases’ and from the fact that ‘we are tempted to speak of “different senses” of a word which is clearly not equivocal, we may infer that we are pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept which it represents’ (Anscombe 1963, p. 1). (shrink)

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 (...) the person moves her head, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off her ear. Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but ‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that there is a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, in even the most minimal sense, seem to be essentially ‘active’. But, how can we explain what this property amounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fall in the category of the ‘active’ and which do not? (shrink)

This paper motivates a constraint on how to explain the “sense of agency” for conscious thinking. It argues that a prominent model fails to satisfy the constraint before sketching an alternative that does. On the alternative, punctate acts of conscious thinking, such as episodes of inner speech, are recognizable as our deeds because they are recognizable as parts of complex cognitive activities, which we know non-observationally in virtue of holding intentions to perform them.

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)

I argue for the view that some we-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification (IEM) relative to the first-person plural pronoun. To prepare the ground for this argument I defend an account of the semantics of ‘we’ and note the variety of different uses of that term. I go on to defend the IEM of a certain range of we-thoughts against a number of objections.

Inspired by Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’ – first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se – call for special treatment: we need to abandon one of two traditional assumptions on the contents needed to provide rationalizing explanations, their shareability or their absoluteness. Their arguments have been very influential; one might take them as establishing a new ‘effect’ – new philosophical evidence in need of being accounted for. This is (...) questioned by the skeptical arguments in recent work by Cappelen & Dever and Magidor, along lines that a few discrepant voices had already announced earlier. Skeptics content that the evidence does not really call for revising traditional theories of content. I will discuss their challenges – first and foremost, concerning action explanations – aiming to make the case that the ‘De Se effect’ is no illusion: de se attitudes require us to revise one of the two tenets of traditional views. (shrink)

The indexical word “I” has traditionally been assumed to be an overt analogue to the concept of self, and the best model for understanding it. This approach, I argue, overlooks the essential role of cognitive phenomenology in the mastery of the concept of self. I suggest that a better model is to be found in a different kind of representation: phenomenal concepts or more generally phenomenally grounded concepts. I start with what I take to be the defining feature of the (...) concept of self, namely its “super-reflexivity”: to use this concept is not just to think of oneself, but to think of oneself as the thinker of the present thought. I call this familiar observation the “Thinker Intuition”. I review some shortcomings of the indexical model of the concept of self, which is the classical account of the Thinker Intuition. I go on to propose a different account, the “phenomenal model”, according to which the concept of self is a phenomenally grounded concept, anchored in a generic kind of cognitive phenomenolog... (shrink)

I argue against the view that an agent’s knowledge of her own current action cannot in any way rely on perception for its justification. Instead, I argue that when it comes to an agent’s knowledge of her own object-oriented intentional action, the agent’s belief about what she is doing is partly justified by her perception of the object of action. I proceed by first proposing an account of such actions according to which the agent’s knowledge is partly justified by her (...) perception. I then discuss several of objections to my proposal. The most important objection is that I have only managed to show that perception plays an enabling role and not a justificatory role for the agent’s knowledge of her own intentional action. (shrink)

I present an account of how agents can know what they are doing when they intentionally execute object-oriented actions. When an agent executes an object-oriented intentional action, she uses perception in such a way that it can fulfil a justificatory role for her knowledge of her own action and it can fulfil this justificatory role without being inferentially linked to the cognitive states that it justifies. I argue for this proposal by meeting two challenges: in an agent's knowledge of her (...) action perception can only play an enabling role (and no justificatory role) for the agent's knowledge and if perception has a justificatory role, then the agent's knowledge must be inferential. (shrink)

Many philosophers categorise judgment as a type of action. On the face of it, this claim is at odds with the seeming fact that judging a certain proposition is not something you can do voluntarily. I argue that we can resolve this tension by recognising a category of non-voluntary action. An action can be non-voluntary without being involuntary. The notion of non-voluntary action is developed by appeal to the claim that judging has truth as a constitutive goal. This claim, when (...) combined with a conception of judging as a way of settling a question, explains both why judging is genuinely agential, and why it is nevertheless non-voluntary. (shrink)

Uncontroversially, individuals exercise agency in acting; can we say the same about believing? This paper argues that subjects do indeed exercise agency over their beliefs and provides an account by which this is possible. On my picture, self-awareness is fundamental to the nature of doxastic agency. Drawing on work in the philosophy of action, I argue that subjects exercise agency in performing mental actions that form and sustain their beliefs, where they are aware of these actions as part of reasoning (...) and exercising agency over their beliefs. (shrink)

In some of Plato’s early dialogues we find a concern with correctly ascertaining the contents of a particular kind of one’s own psychological states, cognitive states. Indeed, one of the achievements of the elenctic method is to facilitate cognitive self-knowledge. In the Alcibiades, moreover, Plato interprets the Delphic injunction, ‘know yourself’, as crucially requiring cognitive self-knowledge, and ending in knowing oneself as subject to particular epistemic norms. Epistemic authority for self-knowledge is, for Plato, conferred on the basis of correct application (...) of norms to cognitive self-ascriptions, and not confined to the first-personal perspective. This implies first-personal plural epistemic authority for self-knowledge. (shrink)

Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), d.

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and (...) the difficulties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the ‘self‐evaluative view’, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self‐ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self‐evaluative judgments to the case of others. (shrink)

What determines the reference of first-person thoughts—thoughts that one would express using the first-person pronoun? I defend a model on which our ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves do, in much the way that our ways of gaining knowledge of objects in the world determine the reference of perceptual demonstrative thoughts. This model—the Demonstrative Model of First-Person Thought—can be motivated by reference to independently plausible general principles about how reference is determined. But it faces a serious objection. There seems to (...) be an explanatory rival to it with a great deal of plausiblility. The rival is The Simple Rule Model, which says that first-person thoughts are governed by the simple rule that any token of one will be about the person whose token it is. I pinpoint a crucial unclarity in The Simple Rule Model, hinging on how we understand the notion of a rule, and argue that no version of the Simple Rule Model is both plausible and a genuine explanatory rival to the Demonstrative Model. I also provide an argument that the Demonstrative Model is extensionally adequate. (shrink)

While nurses can and do behave as intentional political agents, claims that nurses collectively do , should or must act to advance political objectives lack credibility. This paper challenges the coherence and legitimacy of political demands placed upon nurses. It is not suggested that nurses ought not to contribute to political discourse and activity. That would be foolish. However, the idea that nursing can own or exhibit a general political will is discarded. It is suggested that to protect and advance (...) political discussion, to aid explanatory adequacy and clarity, the form in which nursing associates itself with political claims merits critical appraisal. Thus significant numbers of nurses probably reject or disagree with many of the political claims that attach to them – claims often made on their behalf. More specifically, the individual beliefs and goals of nurses can be in conflict with the political pronouncements of nursing scholars and organizations . It is proposed that nurses need not share substantive normative beliefs/goals and, if this proposal holds, group descriptors such as ‘nurses’ and ‘nursing’ cannot meaningfully or easily attach to political claims. Shared value theory is linked to the fallacy of composition and the concept of collective ascription error is introduced to explore the implausibility of using group descriptors such as ‘nurses’ and ‘nursing’ to refer to the beliefs/goals of all nurses. (shrink)