Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of decision, it is unclear how agents can be thought to exercise control over what they decide at the moment of (...) deciding. I note that this problem might motivate a non-actional view of deciding?a view that decisions are not actions, but are instead passive events of intention acquisition. For without an understanding of how an agent might exercise control over what is decided at the moment of deciding, we lack a good reason for maintaining commitment to an actional view of deciding. However, I then offer the required account of how agents exercise control over decisions at the moment of deciding. Crucial to this account is an understanding of the relation of practical deliberation to deciding, an understanding of skilled deliberative activity, and the role of attention in the mental action of deciding. (shrink)

In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort (...) of problem can be overcome if one realizes that the agent herself, as an irreducible substance, is the true originator of her actions. I’ll present arguments that favor this view. Event-causalists have countered that if the agent identifies with some of the inner states that play the self-determining causal role in bringing about the action, then it is as though the action was directly caused by herself. I’ll object that this is not a distinctive aspect of free agency. Agent-causalism has been criticized from most naturalistically inclined fronts, and it must address risks of implausibility, contradiction and unintelligibility. Even though I’ll acknowledge these challenges, I’ll still argue that libertarian free will cannot be defended by any reductionist alternative, and that agent-causalism does not conflict with contemporary science but only with some of its unproven assumptions. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness (...) or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated in even the most intelligent nonhuman animals, thus we should suspend our judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their actions while further questioning the recent insistence on developing an animal morality. (shrink)

Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility – (...) which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

Does the fact that humans are vulnerable, needy and dependent beings play an important role in Kantian ethics? It is sometimes claimed that it cannot and does not. I argue that it can and does. I distinguish between broad (all persons are vulnerable) and narrow (only some persons are vulnerable) senses of vulnerability, and explain the role of vulnerability in both senses in Kantian ethics. The basis of this argument is to show that the core normative focus of Kantian ethics (...) is on the dignity that human beings have in virtue of their capacity for rational agency. This implies that the empirical conditions under which human beings can acquire, sustain, exercise, and develop their rational capacities are of core moral importance in Kantian ethics. This explains why human vulnerabilities, including the vulnerability of human bodies, are important in Kantian ethics, since rational capacities in human agents (and the bodies those rational capacities depend upon) are highly vulnerable in all persons (vulnerability in the broad sense) and especially vulnerable in some sub-groups of persons (vulnerability in the narrow sense). (shrink)

A promising but underexplored view about normative reasons is contrastivism, which holds that considerations are fundamentally reasons for things only relative to sets of alternatives. Contrastivism gains an advantage over non-contrastive theories by holding that reasons relative to different sets of alternatives can be independent of one another. But this feature also raises a serious problem: we need some way of constraining this independence. I develop a version of contrastivism that provides the needed constraints, and that is independently motivated by (...) the widespread idea that reasons involve the promotion of various kinds of objectives. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of normative practical reasoning. Reasoning of this type includes at least one normative belief and it has a practical conclusion (roughly, a conclusion about what to do). The principal question I am interested in is whether this type of practical reasoning can be logically conclusive. This issue has received remarkably little philosophical discussion despite the central role this reasoning plays in our everyday discourse about action and in the resolution of ethical problems. I distinguish three (...) kinds of normative reasons. Quasi -normative reasoning, I maintain in Section 1, can only be valid if it is in fact theoretical reasoning, despite appearance to the contrary. In Section 2, I argue that there are two kinds of genuine normative reasoning (purely normative reasoning and hybrid reasoning) that can be logically conclusive. This article also shows that practical arguments are non-trivially ambiguous (which has been largely ignored in the literature) because they can at the same time express different pieces of practical reasoning that have a different logical status. (shrink)

I question the widespread assumption that when we act for reasons we know what our reasons are. I argue that an agent may act in ignorance, or partial ignorance, regarding his or her reasons, and an action involving ignorance of this sort may still qualify as done for reasons. I conclude from here that we need to develop a suitable new model of action for reasons, and I proceed to offer such a model. Briefly, I argue that an action qualifies (...) as done for reasons when the agent performing that action possesses a reasons explanation of it and is (at least partly) motivated to act by the fact he possesses such an explanation. The crucial point is that the agent may not be motivated – not even in part – by the content of the reasons that constitute the explanation in question. (shrink)

For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers pay close attention to normative problems. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two other seminal figures in this development: H.L.A. Hart (...) and John Rawls. We show that all three thinkers tend to assume that there is but one type of normativity within the realm of social institutions – roughly, the sort of normativity that is involved in following the results of chess – and that they thereby neglect features that are of crucial significance for an adequate understanding of social reality. (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)

Can computer systems ever be considered moral agents? This paper considers two factors that are explored in the recent philosophical literature. First, there are the important domains in which computers are allowed to act, made possible by their greater functional capacities. Second, there is the claim that these functional capacities appear to embody relevant human abilities, such as autonomy and responsibility. I argue that neither the first (Domain-Function) factor nor the second (Simulacrum) factor gets at the central issue in the (...) case for computer moral agency: whether they can have the kinds of intentional states that cause their decisions and actions. I give an account that builds on traditional action theory and allows us to conceive of computers as genuine moral agents in virtue of their own causally efficacious intentional states. These states can cause harm or benefit to moral patients, but do not depend on computer consciousness or intelligence. (shrink)

The psychological literature now differentiates between two types of psychopath:successful (with little or no criminal record) and unsuccessful (with a criminal record). Recent research indicates that earlier findings of reduced autonomic activity, reduced prefrontal grey matter, and compromised executive activity may only be true of unsuccessful psychopaths. In contrast, successful psychopaths actually show autonomic and executive function that exceeds that of normals, while having no difference in prefrontal volume from normals. We argue that many successful psychopaths are legally responsible for (...) their actions, as they have the executive capacity to choose not to harm (and thus are legally rational). However, many unsuccessful psychopaths have a lack of executive function that should at least partially excuse them from criminal culpability. Although a successful psychopath's increased executive function may occur in conflict with, rather than in consonance with their increased autonomic activity - producing a cognitive style characterized by self deception and articulate-sounding, but unsound reasoning - they may be capable of recognizing and correcting their lack of autonomic data, and thus can be held responsible. (shrink)

John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital shifted the focus of current thought on capital and economic development to the cultural and conceptual ideas that underpin market economies and that are taken for granted in developed nations. This collection of essays assembles 21 philosophers, economists, and political scientists to help readers understand these exciting new theories.

Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason (...) for that action out of a different set of alternatives. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive science suggests that conscious thought plays a much less central role in the production of human behavior than most think. Partially on the basis of this work, Peter Carruthers has advanced the claim that humans never consciously decide to act. This claim is of independent interest for action theory, and its potential truth poses a problem for theories of free will and autonomy, which often take our capacity to consciously decide to be of central importance. In (...) this article, I examine the nature of conscious deciding and I argue that Carruthers fails to establish the claim that humans never consciously decide to act. (shrink)

To have free will is to have what it takes to act freely. When an agent acts freely—when she exercises her free will—what she does is up to her. A plurality of alternatives is open to her, and she determines which she pursues. When she does, she is an ultimate source or origin of her action. So runs a familiar conception of free will.

A promising recent approach for understanding complex phenomena is recognition of anticipatory behavior of living organisms and social organizations. The anticipatory, predictive action permits learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence. I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, adaptation or learning imply overly passive roles of anticipatory agents, and that a fictionalist standpoint reflects the core of anticipatory behavior better than representational or future references. Cognizing beings enact not just their models of the world, but own make-believe existential agendas as (...) well. Anticipators embody plausible scripts of living, and effectively assume neo-Kantian or pragmatist perspectives of cognition and action. It is instructive to see that anticipatory behavior is not without mundane or loathsome deficiencies. Appreciation of ferally fictionalist anticipation suggests an equivalence of semiosis and anticipation. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two conflations which frequently appear within the philosophy of history and other fields concerned with action explanation. The first of these, which I call the Conflating View of Reasons, states that the reasons for which we perform actions are reasons why (those events which are) our actions occur. The second, more general conflation, which I call the Conflating View of Action Explanation, states that whatever explains why an agent performed a certain action explains why (that event (...) which was) her action occurred. Both conflations ignore the fact that there are at least two distinct objects that legitimately qualify as objects of action explanation2. As Jennifer Hornsby (1993) has previous suggested, one thing we might wish to explain is ‘why did A do what she did?’ another is, ‘why did the event of her doing it occur?’ -/- I shall argue that when these two views are combined they give rise to a futile debate about explanation in the philosophies of history and the social sciences, and to an almost identical debate in moral psychology and the philosophy of mind. In so doing, I shall also examine a proposed distinction between explaining a phenomenon, and rendering it intelligible. I conclude by distinguishing between four different objects of historical understanding, each of which is to be understood in the light of the aforementioned distinctions between event and thing done, and explanation and intelligibility. (shrink)

Deliberation incompatibilism is the view that an agent being rational and deliberating about which of (mutually excluding) actions to perform, is incompatible with her believing that there exist prior conditions that render impossible the performance of either one of these actions. However, the main argument for this view, associated most prominently with Peter van Inwagen, appears to have been widely rejected by contemporary authors on free will. In this paper I argue first that a closer examination of van Inwagen's argument (...) shows that the standard objections are based on a misunderstanding of the notion of ‘deliberation’ presupposed in this argument. Second, I attempt to strengthen the case for deliberation incompatibilism by offering a different argument in its support. (shrink)

To desire is to be in a particular state of mind. It is a state of mind familiar to everyone who has ever wanted to drink water or desired to know what has happened to an old friend, but its familiarity does not make it easy to give a theory of desire. Controversy immediately breaks out when asking whether wanting water and desiring knowledge are, at bottom, the same state of mind as others that seem somewhat similar: wishing never to (...) have been born, preferring mangoes to peaches, craving gin, having world conquest as one's goal, having a purpose in sneaking out to the shed, or being inclined to provoke just for the sake of provocation. These varied states of mind have all been grouped together under the heading of ‘pro attitudes’, but whether the pro attitudes are fundamentally one mental state or many is disputed. (shrink)

The naturalistic voluntary control (VC) theory explains free will and consciousness in terms of each other. It is central to free voluntary control of action that one can control both what one is conscious of, and also what one is not conscious of. Furthermore, the specific cognitive ability or skill involved in voluntarily controlling whether information is processed consciously or unconsciously can itself be used to explain consciousness. In functional terms, it is whatever kind of cognitive processing occurs when a (...) conscious state is voluntarily chosen. This leads to a bivalent view of cognitive processing in which there is voluntary choice either of non-routine (conscious) or routine (unconscious) kinds of processing. On this VC account, consciousness could not exist without its being possible to voluntarily choose a non-routine kind of processing. (shrink)

Abstract. The analysis of legal statements that are made from an "internal point of view" must distinguish statements where legal obedience is accepted from statements where legal obedience is only assumed. Statements that are based on accepted obedience supply reasons for action, but statements where obedience is merely assumed can never provide reasons for action. It is argued in this paper that John Searle neglects this distinction. Searle claims that a statement from the internal point of view provides the speaker (...) with reasons for actions that are "self-sufficient" in the sense that they are independent of the speaker's beliefs and desires. This claim is mistaken. A statement that is based on assumed obedience is self-sufficient, but does not give reasons for action. A statement that is based on accepted obedience gives reasons for action, but these reasons are not self-sufficient. (shrink)

Alston, Searle, and Williamson advocate the restrictive model of assertion , according to which certain constitutive assertoric norms restrict which propositions one may assert. Sellars and Brandom advocate the dialectical model of assertion , which treats assertion as constituted by its role in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Sellars and Brandom develop a restrictive version of the dialectical model. I explore a non-restrictive version of the dialectical model. On such a view, constitutive assertoric norms constrain how one (...) must react if an interlocutor challenges one's assertion, but they do not constrain what one should assert in the first place. I argue that the non-restrictive dialectical perspective can accommodate various linguistic phenomena commonly taken to support the restrictive model. 1. (shrink)

John Searle has recently developed a theory of reasons for acting that intends to rescue the freedom of the will, endangered by causal determinism, whether physical or psychological. To achieve this purpose, Searle postulates a series of "gaps" that are supposed toendowthe self with free will. Reviewing key steps in Searle's argument, this article shows that such an undertaking cannot be successfully completed because of its solipsist premises. The author argues that reasons for acting do not have a subjective, I-ontology (...) but a first-person plural, Weontology that better accounts for agency and responsibility. Key Words: free will • agency • reasons for acting • ontology. (shrink)

To promise someone to do something is to commit oneself to that person to do that thing, but what does that commitment consist of? Some think a promissory commitment is an obligation to do what’s promised, and that while promising practices facilitate the creation of promissory obligations, they are not essential to them. I favor the broadly Humean view in which, when it comes to promises (and so promissory obligations), practices are of the essence. I propose the Practice Reason Account (...) of promises, according to which a promise is basically to give oneself a self-interested practice reason to do what’s promised. One achieves this feat by invoking self-enforcing independent practice rules thanks to which one’s doing what’s promised preserves one’s promissory trust(worthiness) and promising power. However, nothing in this account supports the Hume-Rawls claim that promise-keeping or promise-breaking is right just when and because it conforms to practice rules that are justified by their good- or right-making properties. (shrink)

The central philosophical task posed by conventions is to analyze what they are and how they differ from mere regularities of action and cognition. Subsidiary questions include: How do conventions arise? How are they sustained? How do we select between alternative conventions? Why should one conform to convention? What social good, if any, do conventions serve? How does convention relate to such notions as rule, norm, custom, practice, institution, and social contract? Apart from its intrinsic interest, convention is important because (...) philosophers frequently invoke it when discussing other topics. A favorite philosophical gambit is to argue that, perhaps despite appearances to the contrary, some phenomenon ultimately results from convention. Notable candidates include: property, government, justice, law, morality, linguistic meaning, necessity, ontology, mathematics, and logic. (shrink)

To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that (...) when our intentions are not under our own control, we suffer from self-alienation. What conditions must be satisfied in order to ensure that we govern ourselves when we act? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question. (shrink)

According to what I call the reductive standard-causal theory of agency, the exercise of an agent's power to act can be reduced to the causal efficacy of agent-involving mental states and events. According to a non-reductive agent-causal theory, an agent's power to act is irreducible and primitive. Agent-causal theories have been dismissed on the ground that they presuppose a very contentious notion of causation, namely substance-causation. In this paper I will assume, with the proponents of the agent-causal approach, that substance-causation (...) is possible, as I will argue against that theory on the ground that it fails as a theory of agency. I will argue that the non-reductive agent-causal theory fails to account for agency, because it fails to account for agential control: it cannot explain why the stipulated irreducible relation between the agent and an action constitutes the agent's exercise of control over the action. This objection, I will argue, applies to the agent-causal theory in particular, and to the non-reductive approach in general. (shrink)

The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelling model of the role of motivating reasons in first-person practical deliberation and third-person action explanations. So after first introducing (...) some assumptions about the nature of agency in section one, I will turn to articulating and defending this account of motivating reasons in sections two through four of the paper. Section five then provides some background on the Humean theory before I argue directly against it in section six and critically examine the leading arguments for the view in section seven. Given limitations of space, however, I save the task of developing a positive anti-Humean view for another occasion. (shrink)

What is self-control and how does the concept of self-control relate to the notion of will-power? A widespread philosophical opinion has been that the notion of will-power does not add anything beyond what can be said using other motivational notions, such as strength of desire and intention. One exception is Richard Holton who, inspired by recent research in social psychology, has argued that will-power is a separate faculty needed for persisting in one's resolutions, what he calls 'strength of will'. However, (...) he distinguishes strength of will from self-control. In this paper I argue that will-power is essential also to a certain form of self-control. I support this claim by arguments showing that the traditional philosophical accounts of self-control run into difficulties because they pay insufficient attention to will-power as an independent source of motivation. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to prove the consistency of libertarianism. We examine the example of Jane, who deliberates at length over whether to vacation in Colorado (C) or Hawaii (H), weighing the costs and benefits, consulting travel brochures, etc. Underlying phenomenological deliberation is an indeterministic neural process in which nonactual motor neural states n(C) and n(H) corresponding to alternatives C and H remain physically possible up until the moment of decision. The neurophysiological probabilities pr(n(C)) and pr(n(H)) evolve continuously (...) according to the different weights Jane's judgement attaches to C and H at different times during the deliberation. The overall process is indeterministic, since Jane's exact judgemental weighting would vary slightly were the process to be repeated from the same initial conditions. The weighting is however rational, and entirely under Jane's control. This controlled, rational, indeterministic process shows that libertarianism is a consistent philosophical thesis. (shrink)

Recently, much attention has been paid to ‘rational requirements’ and, especially, to what I call ‘rational requirements of formal coherence as such’. These requirements are satisfied just when our attitudes are formally coherent: for example, when our beliefs do not contradict each other. Nevertheless, these requirements are puzzling. In particular, it is unclear why we should satisfy them. In light of this, I explore the conjecture that there are no requirements of formal coherence. I do so by trying to construct (...) a theory of error for the idea that there are such requirements. (shrink)

The controversy about intentional explanation of action concerns how these explanations work. What kind of model allows us to capture the dependency or relevance relation between the explanans, i.e. the beliefs and desires of the agent, and the explanandum, i.e. the action? In this paper, I argue that the causal mechanical model can do the job. Causal mechanical intentional explanations consist in a reference to the mechanisms of practical reasoning of the agent that motivated the agent to act, i.e. to (...) a causally relevant set of beliefs and desires. Moreover, the causal mechanical model can provide in efficient and unproblematic applications, unlike action explanations using ceteris paribus laws or counterfactuals. The drawback of the latter models of explanation is their modal requirement: the explanans must mention or implies sufficient and/or necessary conditions for the explanandum. Such a requirement is too strong when it comes to intentional explanation of action. (shrink)

The phenomenology of agency has, until recently, been rather neglected, overlooked by both philosophers of action and philosophers of consciousness alike. Thankfully, all that has changed, and of late there has been an explosion of interest in what it is like to be an agent. 1 This burgeoning field crosses the traditional boundaries between disciplines: philosophers of psychopathology are speculating about the role that unusual experiences of agency might play in accounting for disorders of thought and action; cognitive scientists are (...) developing models of how the phenomenology of agency is generated; and philosophers of mind are drawing connections between the phenomenology of agency and the nature of introspection, phenomenal character, and agency itself. My aim in this paper is not to provide an exhaustive survey of this recent literature, but to provide a.. (shrink)

Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible to act in some (...) other way. I suggest that intuitions about the AP condition arise when we face ‘close calls,’ situations in which, after deliberating, we still do not know what we really want to do. Indeed, several incompatibilists suggest such close calls are necessary for free will. I challenge this suggestion by describing a ‘confident agent’ who, after deliberating, always feels confident about what to do (and can then control her actions accordingly). Because she maximally satisfies the DC condition, she does not face close calls, and the intuition that the AP condition is essential for free will does not seem to apply to her. I conclude that intuitions about the importance of the AP condition rest on our experiences of close calls and arise precisely to the extent that our deliberations fail to arrive at a clear decision. I then raise and respond to several objections to this thought experiment and its relevance to the free will debate. (shrink)

In The illusion of conscious will , Daniel Wegner offers an exciting, informative, and potentially threatening treatise on the psychology of action. I offer several interpretations of the thesis that conscious will is an illusion. The one Wegner seems to suggest is "modular epiphenomenalism": conscious experience of will is produced by a brain system distinct from the system that produces action; it interprets our behavior but does not, as it seems to us, cause it. I argue that the evidence Wegner (...) presents to support this theory, though fascinating, is inconclusive and, in any case, he has not shown that conscious will does not play a crucial causal role in planning, forming intentions, etc. This theory's potential blow to our self-conception turns out to be a glancing one. (shrink)

Many authors hold that we cannot have the kind of free will that we seem to have. This article spells out and defends that kind of free will. Most libertarians hold that a free action involves a probabilistic process at some stage. Like the compatibilists, I hold that this is not only not required for free will but even reduces or excludes freedom. But contrary to the compatibilist and contrary to most libertarians, I claim that free will requires that we (...) can bring about events that have no preceding cause. That is what our experience suggests, and there are no beliefs that contradict this and are justified. (shrink)

Here I will develop a naturalistic account of epistemic reflection and its significance for epistemology. I will first argue that thought, as opposed to mere information processing, requires a capacity for cognitive self-regulation. After discussing the basic capacities necessary for cognitive self-regulation of any kind, I will consider qualitatively different kinds of thought that can emerge when the basic capacities enable the creature to interiorize a form of social cooperation. First, I will discuss second-personal cooperation and the kind of thought (...) that emerges from its interiorization. Then, I will discuss third-personal cooperation and the kind of thought that emerges from its interiorization. We will see that epistemic reflection is the interiorized version of interpersonal argumentation, which is the epistemic component of third-personal cooperation. In developing this account, I will draw heavily on the work of Michael Tomasello and other cognitive scientists advocating the “social intentionality hypothesis”. However, I will show how work done in the defeasible reasoning tradition can provide us with a deeper explanation of some claims made by advocates of the social intentionality hypothesis. Additionally, we will see that work done on social intentionality can help us better understand the significance of knowledge and justification as understood by the defeasible reasoning tradition. We will see that the social intentionality hypothesis and the defeasible reasoning tradition are mutually illuminating. By drawing equally on both, I will provide a novel account of the foundations of knowledge. (shrink)

Are there are normative reasons to have – or refrain from having – certain emotions? The dominant view is that there are. I disagree. In this paper, I argue for Strong Eliminativism – the view that there are no reasons for emotions. My argument for this claim has two premises. The first premise is that there is a deliberative constraint on reasons: a reason for an agent to have an attitude must be able to feature in that agent’s deliberation to (...) that attitude. My argument for this premise is that in order to have reasons for an attitude, we need to be able to exhibit some relevant form of control over this attitude, and this relevant form of control is deliberative control. The second premise is that no one can deliberate to any emotion. My argument for this premise turns on the claim that there is no deliberative question that is settled by forming (or giving up) an emotion. I contend that this is so due to the well-known phenomenon of recalcitrant emotions: for any deliberative question that can be settled, there is no guarantee that the relevant emotional state will follow (or be revised). Strong Eliminativism follows from these two premises. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist framework. According (...) to my proposal, a free agent is _a causally powerful substance that emerges in an anomic way from her constitutive mental events_, downwardly constraining, selecting and, in this way, having control on them. As we shall see, this particular concept of agent causation not only makes sense of the deep insight behind agent libertarianism, but it also provides us with the resources to solve some of the main objections that have been raised against it. It is true that here I cannot develop a complete defense of the evidential credentials of emergentism. Still, even if the considerations that follow do not serve to convince detractors of agent causal libertarian accounts of free will, they do suggest that libertarian agent causation is more promising than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

According to John Searle, default positions, i.e., those intelligibility and action presuppositions, are some departing points from which pre-reflective and pragmatic assumptions are made. Postulating such points helps us deal with certain perennial philosophical issues, by leaving them aside. These problems are the existence of the external world, truth and facts, “direct” perception, the meaning of words, and causality. In this article, we argue that those default positions described by Searle constitute a default humanity, and their absence would dehumanize us. (...) This is particularly relevant in a default position: cooperation, which is the basis of collective intentionality and the milestone of human civilization. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion on control has largely centred around control over our actions and beliefs. Yet this overlooks the question of whether we also have control over the reasons for which we act and believe. To date, the overriding assumption appears to be that we do not, and with seemingly good reason. We cannot choose to act for a reason and acting-for-a-reason is not itself something we do. While some have challenged this in the case of reasons for action, these claims (...) seem especially untenable regarding believing for a reason. And extending the scope of control in this way also faces the threat of regress. In the face of this orthodoxy, the present paper argues that we do in fact have control over both believing and acting for a particular reason. It also starts to develop an account of the way in which this would be possible. Given the broad importance of understanding control and agency, this paper bears on a number of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. (shrink)

Setting off from a familiar distinction in the philosophy of properties, this paper introduces a tripartite distinction between sparse causation, abundant causation and mere abundant causation. It is argued that the contrast between sparse and mere abundant causation allows us to resolve notorious philosophical issues having to do with negative causation, causation involving institutional properties and physical macro-causation in a way that is unified, intuitive and in line with scientific doctrines and practices.

Given the pervasiveness of AI systems and their potential negative effects on people’s lives (especially among already marginalised groups), it becomes imperative to comprehend what goes on when an AI system generates a result, and based on what reasons, it is achieved. There are consistent technical efforts for making systems more “explainable” by reducing their opaqueness and increasing their interpretability and explainability. In this paper, we explore an alternative non-technical approach towards explainability that complement existing ones. Leaving aside technical, statistical, (...) or data-related issues, we focus on the very conceptual underpinnings of the design decisions made by developers and other stakeholders during the lifecycle of a machine learning project. For instance, the design and development of an app to track snoring to detect possible health risks presuppose some picture or another of “health”, which is a key notion that conceptually underpins the project. We take it as a premise that these key concepts are necessarily present during design and development, albeit perhaps tacitly. We argue that by providing “justificatory explanations” about how the team understands the relevant key concepts behind its design decisions, interested parties could gain valuable insights and make better sense of the workings and outcomes of systems. Using the concept of “health”, we illustrate how a particular understanding of it might influence decisions during the design and development stages of a machine learning project, and how making this explicit by incorporating it into ex-post explanations might increase the explanatory and justificatory power of these explanations. We posit that a greater conceptual awareness of the key concepts that underpin design and development decisions may be beneficial to any attempt to develop explainability methods. We recommend that “justificatory explanations” are provided as technical documentation. These are declarative statements that contain at its simplest: (1) a high-level account of the understanding of the relevant key concepts a team possess related to a project’s main domain, (2) how these understandings drive decision-making during the life-cycle stages, and (3) it gives reasons (which could be implicit in the account) that the person or persons doing the explanation consider to have plausible justificatory power for the decisions that were made during the project. (shrink)

Eseji su nastali u 2003. i 2004. godini kao dio realizacije mojih istraživanja holizma identiteta i socijalne triangulacije (identitet - znanje - društvena ontologija) tokom rada na istraživačkim projektima Znanstveno-raziskovalneg središča Republike Slovenije, Koper. Istovremeno je rad na projektima u Sarajevu, u sklopu međunarodnih i domaćih aktivnosti koje je organiziralo Filozofsko društvo "Theoria ", bio poticajan za promišljanje nekih značajnih pitanja koja se odnose na rearanžiranje ambijenta životnog svijeta modernog čovjeka.

U ovom tekstu želim reüi nešto više o povezanosti ovih kognitivnih aspekata znanja i razumijevanja sa načinom na koji se tretira struktura objekta znanja u konstituiranju znanja i razumijevanja, odnosno identifikacije egzo-sistema i njihove endo-reprezentacije, unutar tri tipa racionalne konstrukcije: u klasičnom / ontološkom, u analitičkom / semantičkom i sistemskom / računarskom tipu identifikacije i reprezentacije.

The article is translated here from John R. Searle : What is an Institution? Journal of Institutional Economics (2005), 1: 1, 1–22 Printed in the United Kingdom, The JOIE Foundation, 2005.