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This paper asks whether and how an artefact, such as a robot, could be considered a citizen. In doing so, it approaches questions of political freedom and artefacts. Three key notions emerge in the discussion: discursivity, embodiment and recognition. Overall, discussion of robot citizenship raises technical, political and philosophical problems. Whereas machine intelligence is hotly debated, machine citizenship is less so. However, much research and activity is underway that seeks to create robot companions, capable of meaningful and intimate relationships with (...) |
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The dissertation criticizes two analogical applications of Darwinism to the spheres of mind and culture: the Darwinian approach to creativity and memetics. These theories rely on three basic analogies: the ontological analogy states that the basic ontological units of culture are so-called memes, which are replicators like genes; the origination analogy states that novelty in human creativity emerges in a "blind" Darwinian manner; and the explanatory units of selection analogy states that memes are "egoistic" and that they can spread independently (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, EarlyView. |
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I make a case for the thesis that no one can refrain from trying to attain the object of his or her currently strongest desire. I arrive there by defending an argument by Peter van Inwagen for a relatively mild conclusion about the way desires limit our abilities, and by arguing that if van Inwagen’s conclusion is correct, and correct for his reasons, so is my bolder thesis. I close with replies to objections, such as the objection that it is (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Akratic actions are often being thought to instantiate a paradigmatic self-control failure. . If we suppose that akrasia is opposed to self-control, the question is how akratic actions could be free and intentional. After all, it would seem that it is only if an action manifests self-control that it can count as free. My plan is to explore the relation between akrasia and self-control. The first section presents what I shall call the standard conception, according to which akrasia and self-control (...) |
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The overriding question in contemporary philosophy is as follows: We now have a reasonably well-established conception of the basic structure of the universe. But it is not at all easy to reconcile the basic facts we have come to know with a certain conception we have of ourselves, derived in part from our cultural inheritance but mostly from our own experience. Various aspects of this question are examined, concerning consciousness, intentionality, language, rationality, free will, society and institutions, politics, and ethics. |
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Abstract The specter of the ?group mind? or ?collective subject? plays a crucial and fateful role in the current debate on collective intentionality. Fear of the group mind is one important reason why philosophers of collective intentionality resort to individualism. It is argued here that this measure taken against the group mind is as unnecessary as it is detrimental to our understanding of what it means to share an intention. A non-individualistic concept of shared intentionality does not necessarily have to (...) |
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We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against (...) |
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This article elaborates on Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics, exploring the plausibility of his claim that each praxis has its own appropriate set of virtues. The exploration will be applied to wh... |
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The specter of the ‘group mind’ or ‘collective subject’ plays a crucial and fateful role in the current debate on collective intentionality. Fear of the group mind is one important reason why philosophers of collective intentionality resort to individualism. It is argued here that this measure taken against the group mind is as unnecessary as it is detrimental to our understanding of what it means to share an intention. A non-individualistic concept of shared intentionality does not necessarily have to get (...) |
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The ‘value-free ideal’ has been called into question for several reasons. It does not include “epistemic values”—viewed as characteristic of ‘good science’—and rejects the so-called ‘contextual’, ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘non-epistemic’ values—all of them personal, moral, or political values. This paper analyzes a possible complementary argument about the dubitable validity of the value-free ideal, specifically focusing on social sciences, with a two-fold strategy. First, it will consider that values are natural facts in a broad or ‘liberal naturalist’ sense and, thus, a legitimate (...) |
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According to Sosa, knowledge is apt belief, where a belief is apt when accurate because adroit. Sosa :465–475, 2010; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) adds to his triple-A analysis of knowledge, a triple-S analysis of competence, where a complete competence combines its seat, shape and situation. Much of Sosa’s influential work assumes that epistemic agents are individuals who acquire knowledge when they hit the truth through exercising their own individual skills in appropriate shapes and situations. This paper (...) |
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The article discusses the relationship between John Searle’s doctrine of naturalism and various forms of materialism and dualism. It is argued that despite Searle’s protestations, his doctrine is not substantially differ- ent from the epiphenomenalistic property dualism, except for the admis- sion, in his later works, of the existence of an irreducible non-Humean self. In particular, his recognition that consciousness is unique in having an irreducible first-person ontology makes his disavowal of property du- alism purely verbalistic. As for epiphenomenalism, Searle’s (...) |
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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 (...) |
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In this paper I attempt to refute the instrumental conception of practical reason, and thus defend a rationalist conception of practical reason. I argue that, far from merely playing an instrumental role, reason can be used by an agent to evaluate, that is, to approve or reject, final ends, which might be suggested by desires, and further to determine final ends independently of any desires, whether actual or potential, that the agent might have. My argument relies on an analysis of (...) |
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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 (...) |
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I shall elaborate more on the idea of anti-irrationalism proposed by the Polish analytic philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, a prominent member of the Lvov-Warsaw School of philosophy and logic. In my reading, anti-irrationalism stands in opposition not only to overt irrationalism, which is made clear by the term itself, but also to all forms of rationalism that tip toward something like worship of reason. Having characterized anti-irrationalism as it originally appeared in Ajdukiewicz’s works, I shall propose a certain reformulation of it, (...) |
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The aim of this paper is to propose a model for understanding the relation between substance and procedure in discourse ethics and deliberative democracy capable of answering the common charge that they involve an ‘empty formalism’. The expressive-elaboration model introduced here answers this concern by arguing that the deliberative practical rationality presupposed by discourse ethics and deliberative democracy involves the creation of a practical medium in which certain general basic ideas of solidarity, equality and freedom are expressed and elaborated in (...) |
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The turn from deterministic to probabilistic explanations has been used to argue that social science does not explain human action in ways that are incompatible with free will, since, according to some accounts of probabilism, causal factors merely influence actions without determining them. I argue that the notion of nondetermining causal influence is a multifaceted and problematic idea, which notably is unclear about whether the probability is objective or subjective, whether it applies to individual occurrences or merely to sets of (...) |
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There is a long tradition in philosophy and the social sciences that emphasizes the meaningfulness of human action. This tradition doubts or even negates the possibility of causal explanations of human action precisely on the basis that human actions have meaning. This article provides an argument in favor of methodological naturalism in the social sciences. It grants the main argument of the Interpretivists, that is, that human actions are meaningful, but it shows how a transformation of a "nexus of meaning" (...) |
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In recent decades, with advances in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences, the idea that patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our conscious control has increasingly gained traction and renewed interest in the age-old problem of free will. To properly assess what, if anything, these empirical advances can tell us about free will and moral responsibility, we first need to get clear on the following questions: Is consciousness necessary for free will? If so, what role or (...) |
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I offer two potential diagnoses of the behavioral norms governing post‐truth politics by comparing the view of language, communication, and truth‐telling put forward by David Lewis (extended by game theorists), and John Searle. My first goal is to specify the different ways in which Lewis, and game theorists more generally, in contrast to Searle (in the company of Paul Grice and Jurgen Habermas), go about explaining the normativity of truthfulness within a linguistic community. The main difference is that for Lewis (...) |
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Over the last few decades, philosophers and social scientists have applied the so-called powers ontology to the social domain. I argue that this application is highly problematic: many of the alleged powers in the social realm violate the intrinsicality condition, and those that can be coherently taken to be intrinsic to their bearers are arguably causally redundant. I end the paper by offering a diagnosis of why philosophers and social scientists have been tempted to think that there are powers in (...) |
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Many philosophers hold that phenomenally conscious experiences involve a sense of mineness, since experiences like pain or hunger are immediately presented as mine. What can be said about this mineness, and does acceptance of this feature commit us to the existence of a subject or self? If yes, how should we characterize this subject? This paper considers the possibility that, to the extent that we accept this feature, it provides us with a minimal notion of a subject of experience, and (...) |
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In this paper, I discuss phenomenological and logical characteristics of skilled behaviour in sport. The paper comprises two parts. The first describes phenomenological characteristics of skilled behaviour through Timothy Gallwey’s two playing modes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between abstract and concrete movement. The second logical part introduces the concept of intentionality and the distinction Sean Kelly makes between cognitive and motor intentionality. I discuss how this distinction fits the phenomenological characteristics established in the first part of the paper. My argument (...) |
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I will argue that close attention to deciding casts doubt on the simple view and the single phenomena view of intentional action. That is my thesis. My aim is much broader—to improve our understanding of deciding and of the bearing of the phenomenon of deciding on free will and moral responsibility. |
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The volitional theory of human action has formed a basis for a prominent account of voluntary behavior since at least Aquinas. But in the twentieth century the notions of will and volition lost much of their popularity in both philosophy and psychology. Gilbert Ryle’s devastating attack on the concept of will, and especially the doctrine of volition, has had lingering effects evident in the widespread hostility and skepticism towards the will and volition. Since the 1970s, however, the volitional theory has (...) |
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One usually makes assertions by means of uttering indicative sentences like “It is raining”. However, not every utterance of an indicative sentence is an assertion. For example, in uttering “I will be back tomorrow”, one might be making a promise. What is to make an assertion? C.S. Peirce held the view that “to assert a proposition is to make oneself responsible for its truth” (CP 5.543). In this thesis, I interpret Peirce’s view of assertion and I evaluate Peirce’s reasons for (...) |
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ABSTRACT: According to the Aristotelian Thesis, the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action. Critics argue against it by pointing to cases in which some interference or inability prevents the production of action, yet in which that interference or inability doesn’t impugn the success of an agent’s reasoning. Some of those critics suggest instead that practical reasoning concludes in an intention, while others suggest it concludes in a belief with normative content, such as a belief about what one has conclusive, (...) |
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Stephen Barker presents a novel approach to solving semantic paradoxes, including the Liar and its variants and Curry’s paradox. His approach is based around the concept of alethic undecidability. His approach, if successful, renders futile all attempts to assign semantic properties to the paradoxical sentences, whilst leaving classical logic fully intact. And, according to Barker, even the T-scheme remains valid, for validity is not undermined by undecidable instances. Barker’s approach is innovative and worthy of further consideration, particularly by those of (...) |
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In 1950 Alan Turing asked whether machines could think. This question has been vigorously debated since, and its relevance for machine intelligence, or even agency, continues to provoke interdisciplinary debate. In fact, Turing’s next step in his paper is to ask a far more nuanced question about imitation, which, we suggest, assumes a number of connections between intelligence, agency and the possibility of imitation. This paper will offer three key arguments against these assumptions, and in so doing make the following (...) |
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Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit”, synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity – irrespective of whether (...) |
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In this paper I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to φ only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to φ. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent to respond (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Voles are attracting attention because genetic variation at a single locus appears to have a profound impact on a complex social behavior, namely monogamy. After briefly reviewing the state of the most relevant scientific literature, I examine the way that this research gets taken up by the popular media, by scientists, and by the notable philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland and interpreted as having deeply revisionary implications for how we ordinarily understand ourselves as persons. We have all these big questions (...) |
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This paper champions the view (REG) that the concept of a normative reason for an agent S to perform an action A is that of an explanation why it would be good (in some way, to some degree) for S to do A. REG has numerous virtues, but faces some significant challenges which prompt many philosophers to be skeptical that it can correctly account for all our reasons. I demonstrate how five different puzzles about normative reasons can be solved by (...) |
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El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer un concepto de agente crítico que dialogue con una práctica democrática deliberativa, considerando qué significa el acto de dar razones. Para tal efecto, en este trabajo se discute, primero, qué significaría ser crítico o tender hacia la criticidad tanto autorreferente como hacia terceros. Esta sección está apoyada principalmente con ideas provenientes de la teoría de la argumentación y de la lógica informal. En segundo término, se aborda el concepto de democracia deliberativa a la (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |