RÉSUMÉDes travaux récents par Joseph Raz, Niko Kolodny et Sergio Tenenbaum suggèrent qu'il n'existe aucune contrainte normative propre aux intentions. De telles contraintes seraient un mythe. Selon eux, il est possible d'articuler la rationalité des intentions sans postuler que l'intention est un état mental. Je soutiens que nous pouvons aussi comprendre la nature descriptive des intentions sans postuler que l'intention est un état mental. Tout comme l'idée selon laquelle il y aurait des contraintes normatives propres aux intentions, ce postulat est (...) aussi un mythe. L'intention est plutôt une action accompagnée de certaines sous-actions caractéristiques et jouant un rôle de coordination. (shrink)

What is the difference between an intended consequence and a foreseen unavoidable consequence? The answer, I argue, turns on the exercise of knowhow knowledge in the process that led to the consequence. I argue for this using a theory according to which acting intentionally is acting as a reason. I show how this gives us a more promising explanation of the difference than the dominant explanations, according to which acting intentionally is acting for a reason.

Consider the following object, where, depending on how you are viewing this paper, the object may be a series of ink markings, a portion of a matrix of pixels through or from which light is emitted, etc.,augeLet’s call the object ‘Shape’. Is Shape a word token? If so, what word type is it a token of? Given how words are traditionally individuated, the Spanish, “auge”—meaning, apogee or peak—the French, “auge”—meaning, basin or bowl—and the German, “auge”—meaning, eye, are different words. So, (...) if Shape is a word token, is it a token of the Spanish, “auge”, the French, “auge”, the German, “auge”, or some combination of the three? Generalizing beyond Shape and ink markings/matrices of pixels as a potential medium for word tokens, when does something, f—e.g., some utterance, inscription, manual gesture, etc.—constitute a token of a word type, w, as opposed to some other word type, w *, or no word at all? In this paper, I motivate and place Central Question in the nascent and burgeoning subfield of the metaphysics of words. I argue that what makes something, f, a token of a word type, w, is that the process of generating f is explained and guided by one’s knowledge of w, e.g., one’s semantic, syntactic, morphophonological/orthographic, knowledge of w stored in one’s mental lexicon. (shrink)

Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Non-cognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls Non-Inferential Weak Cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders.

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)