Does rationality require us to take the means to our ends? Intuitively, it seems clear that it does. And yet it has proven difficult to explain why this should be so: after all, if one is pursuing an end that one has decisive reason not to pursue, the balance of reasons will presumably speak against one's taking the means necessary to bring that end about. In this paper I propose a novel account of the instrumental requirement which addresses this problem. (...) On the view I develop, the instrumental requirement is normative not because agents have reasons to comply with it, but because it is anormative standardintrinsic to intentional action—i.e., it is a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agency well. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...) of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. (shrink)

According to the standard view in philosophy, intentionality is the mark of genuine action. In psychology, human cognition and agency are now widely explained in terms of the workings of two distinct systems (or types of processes), and intentionality is not a central notion in this dual-system theory. Further, it is often claimed, in psychology, that most human actions are automatic, rather than consciously controlled. This raises pressing questions. Does the dual-system theory preserve the philosophical account of intentional action? How (...) much of our behavior is intentional according to this view? And what is the role of consciousness? I will propose here a revised account of intentional action within the dual-system framework, and we will see that most of our behavior can qualify as intentional, even if most of it is automatic. An important lesson will be that philosophical accounts of intentional action need to pay more attention to the role of consciousness in action. (shrink)

According tothe rationality thesis, the possession of propositional attitudes is inextricably tied to rationality. How in this context should we conceive of rationality? In one sense, being rational is contrasted with being non-rational, as when human beings are described as rational animals. In another sense, being rational is contrasted with being irrational. I shall call rationality in this latter senseevaluative rationality. Whatever else it might involve, evaluative rationality surely has to do with satisfying requirements of rationality such as, presumably, the (...) following:(1) That one avoid inconsistency in beliefs.(2) That one not adopt new beliefs unless what one knows entails or is evidence for the truth of those beliefs.(3) That one not have φing as a goal yet do nothing necessary for one to φ. (Means/end requirement.). (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive (...) exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection. (shrink)

Ever since John Perry's developments in the late 70s, it is customary among philosophers to take de se contents as essentially tied to the explanation of action. The target explanation appeals to a subject-specific notion of de se content capable of capturing behavioural differences in central cases. But a subject-specific de se content leads us, I argue, to a subject-specific notion of intentional action that prevents basic forms of generalisation. Although this might be seen as a welcome revision of our (...) pre-theoretical conceptions, I propose, instead, a strategy to circumvent this rather unexpected result: to reject subject-specific de se contents in favour of subject-specific ways of thinking that do not enter into the content of one's attitudes. (shrink)

Skilled activity, such as shaving or dancing, differs in important ways from many of the stock examples that are employed by action theorists. Some critics of the causal theory of action contend that such a view founders on the problem of skilled activity. This paper examines how a causal theory can be extended to the case of skilled activity and defends the account from its critics.

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

We are reliable about logic in the sense that we by-and-large believe logical truths and disbelieve logical falsehoods. Given that logic is an objective subject matter, it is difficult to provide a satisfying explanation of our reliability. This generates a significant epistemological challenge, analogous to the well-known Benacerraf-Field problem for mathematical Platonism. One initially plausible way to answer the challenge is to appeal to evolution by natural selection. The central idea is that being able to correctly deductively reason conferred a (...) heritable survival advantage upon our ancestors. However, there are several arguments that purport to show that evolutionary accounts cannot even in principle explain how it is that we are reliable about logic. In this paper, I address these arguments. I show that there is no general reason to think that evolutionary accounts are incapable of explaining our reliability about logic. (shrink)

Abstract The goal of this chapter is to provide an opinionated overview of the psychologically based account of personal identity and the role of agency within such an account. I describe the essential points of the psychological criterion of personal identity. Then, I discuss how the psychological criterion is related to the Reductionist View of personal identity and whether it is committed to what Derek Parfit names the Extreme Claim. I further discuss how the agency-based views of personal identity can (...) be accommodated within Derek Parfit’s psychologically based view of personal identity. I end the chapter by discussing how an agency-based view, as most notably developed by Christine Korsgaard, could be used to vindicate practical concerns that are traditionally related to personal identity. (shrink)

Let us take an example that Bernard Williams (1981: 102) made famous. Suppose that you want a gin and tonic, and you believe that the stuff in front of you is gin. In fact, however, the stuff is not gin but petrol. So if you drink the stuff (even mixed with tonic), it will be decidedly unpleasant, to say the least. Should you choose to drink the stuff or not?

Argues that, for Anscombe, 'practical knowledge' is only sometimes 'the cause of what it understands.' It is the formal cause when its object is 'formally the description of an executed intention.' Nor is such knowledge confined to the present progressive: we have practical knowledge of the future and the past.

The structure of this paper is as follows. My starting point is psychological flexibility (henceforth, PF) as it has been presented in psychology. Here I offer a synthetic view which embraces the most crucial aspects of flexibility, and describes its functional roles and underlying mechanisms. Secondly, I move my attention onto the field of current action theory and discuss two elementary concepts we commonly use when describing our actions: intention and desire. Of course, there are many “theories of desire” and (...) there is no point in trying (nor even the option) to discuss all of them under one heading. To show where the question of PF sneaks into the scene of action theory, I explore the idea of the resistance of desire, as proposed by Timo Airaksinen. The second concept to investigate at this stage is intention. As in the previous case, it is plain that there are plenty of accounts of intentions and there are many roles they play in the phenomenology of action. For the purposes of this paper, we need only something that can be interpreted as an approach to PF. Such an approach can be found in the idea of stability of intention or a plan, discussed famously by Michael Bratman. According to my interpretation, these two ideas, resistance of desire and stability of intention, allow to initially understand some important aspects of PF in action theory. To get a slightly more comprehensive view – and to supplement the outcomes gained on the grounds of the analyses of these two accounts – I introduce, in the third step, the concept of plasticity which comes from the so-called praxiology proposed by Tadeusz Kotarbiński (Lvov-Warsaw School). I try to show how this concept is still feasible and how it may enrich current philosophical accounts of agential flexibility. The strategy behind this stage of the paper is to enrich the Bratmanian approach to psychological stability. The last part of the paper contains some remarks on the philosophical outcome of the interdisciplinary approach to PF. (shrink)

Complex systems are to be seen as typically having multiple levels of organization. For instance, in the behavioural and cognitive sciences, there has been a long lasting trend, promoted by the seminal work of David Marr, putting focus on three distinct levels of analysis: the computational level, accounting for the What and Why issues, the algorithmic and the implementational levels specifying the How problem. However, the tremendous developments in neuroscience knowledge about processes at different scales of organization together with the (...) complexity of today cognitive theories suggest that there will hardly be only three levels of explanation. Instead, there will be many different degrees of commitments corresponding to the different granularities—from high-level (behavioural) models to low-level (neural and molecular) models of the cognitive research program. For instance, Bayesian approaches, that are usually advocated for formalizing Marr’s computational level and rational behaviour, have even been adopted to model synaptic plasticity and axon guidance by molecular gradients. As a result, we can consider the behavioural scientist as dealing with models at a multiplicity of levels. The purpose of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology is to promote an approach to the role of the levels and explanation and models which is of interest for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and philosophers of science. (shrink)

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 (...) received some renewed interest in the philosophy of action. Some philosophers even consider that ‘in current philosophy of action it is perhaps the most widely held view, at least regarding the immediate antecedents of action.’. (shrink)

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as (...) well as other defects of agency, explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action. (shrink)

Mercier & Sperber (M&S) argue for their argumentative theory in terms of communicative abilities. Insights can be gained by extending the discussion beyond human reasoning to rodent and robot navigation. The selection of arguments and conclusions that are mutually reinforcing can be cast as a form of abductive reasoning that I argue underlies the construction of cognitive maps in navigation tasks.

(2013). In the beginning was the doing: the premises of the practical syllogism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 303-321.

How do rational agents coordinate in a single-stage, noncooperative game? Common knowledge of the payoff matrix and of each player's utility maximization among his strategies does not suffice. This paper argues that utility maximization among intentions and then acts generates coordination yielding a payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium. ‡I thank the audience at my paper's presentation at the 2006 PSA meeting for many insightful points. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211; e-mail: [email protected].

A number of recent accounts of our first-person knowledge of our attitudes give a central role to transparency - our capacity to answer the question of whether we have an attitude by answering the question of whether to have it. In this paper I raise a problem for such accounts, by showing that there are clear cases of first-person knowledge of attitudes which are not transparent.

I argue that when perception plays a guiding role in intentional bodily action, it is a necessary part of that action. The argument begins with a challenge that necessarily arises for embodied agents, what I call the Many-Many Problem. The Problem is named after its most common case where agents face too many perceptual inputs and too many possible behavioral outputs. Action requires a solution to the Many-Many Problem by selection of a specific linkage between input and output. In bodily (...) action the agent perceptually selects, and in this way perceptually attends to, relevant information so as to guide the execution of specific movements. Since perceptual attention is a necessary part of solving the Many-Many Problem, it is a necessary part of bodily action. Indeed, the process of implementing a solution to the Many-Many Problem, as constrained by the agent's motivational state, just is the agent's performing an intentional bodily action in the relevant way. (shrink)

The Wide-Scope approach to instrumental reason holds that the requirement to intend the necessary means to your ends should be understood as a requirement to either intend the means, or else not intend the end. In this paper I explain and defend a neglected version of this approach. I argue that three serious objections to Wide-Scope accounts turn on a certain assumption about the nature of the reasons that ground the Wide-Scope requirement. The version of the Wide-Scope approach defended here (...) allows us to reject this assumption, and so defuse the objections. (shrink)

This paper offers a new model of belief by embedding the Peircean account of belief into a formal dialogue system that uses argumentation schemes for practical reasoning and abductive reasoning. A belief is characterised as a stable proposition that is derived abductively by one agent in a dialogue from the commitment set (including commitments derived from actions and goals) of another agent. On the model (to give a rough summary), a belief is defined as a proposition held by an agent (...) that (1) is not easily changed (stable), (2) is a matter of degree (held more or less weakly or strongly), (3) guides the goals and actions of the agent, and (4) is habitually or tenaciously held in a manner that indicates a strong commitment to defend it. It is argued that the new model overcomes the pervasive conflict in artificial intelligence between the belief-desire-intention model of reasoning and the commitment model. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis maintains that while minds may be centrally located in one?s brain-and-body, they are sometimes partly constituted by tools in our environment. Critics argue that we have no reason to move from the claim that cognition is embedded in the environment to the stronger claim that cognition can be constituted by the environment. I will argue that there are normative reasons, both scientific and ethical, for preferring the extended account of the mind to the rival embedded account. (...) nema. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that demonstratives, gradable adjectives, quantifiers, modals and other context‐sensitive expressions are intention‐sensitive: their semantic value on a given use is fixed by speaker intentions. The first aim of this paper is to defend Intentionalism against three recent objections, according to which speakers at least sometimes do not have suitable intentions when using supposedly intention‐sensitive expressions. Its second aim is to thereby shed light on the so far little‐explored question of which kinds of intentions can be semantically (...) relevant. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed in the philosophical literature that in order to acquire an intention, the agent has to settle a question of what to do in practical deliberation. Carruthers, P. has recently used this to argue that the acquisition of intentions can never be conscious even in cases where the agent asserts having the intention in inner speech. Because of that Carruthers also believes that knowledge of intentions even in first person cases is observational. This paper explores the challenge (...) Carruthers’ argument throws up for accounts that also rely on the notion of settling a question for intention acquisition, but who also want to maintain at the same time that knowledge of intentions in the first person case is not observational. (shrink)

According to a widespread, broadly Humean consensus, desires and other conative attitudes seem as such to be free from any normative constraints of rationality. However, rational subjects are also required to be attitude-coherent in ways that prima facie hold sway for desire. I here examine the plausibility of this idea by proposing several principlesfor coherent desire. These principles parallel principles for coherent belief and can be used to make a case for a kind of purely conative normativity. I consider several (...) objections to a principle for consistent desiring and reply to them. I conclude that, if attitude-coherence is a mark of rationality, the broadly Humean consensus must be rejected. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate etiological accounts of functions for the domain of technical artefacts. Etiological theories ascribe functions to items on the basis of the causal histories of those items; they apply relatively straightforwardly to the biological domain, in which neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory provides a well-developed and generally accepted background for describing the causal histories of biological items. Yet there is no well-developed and generally accepted theory for describing the causal history of artefacts, so the application (...) of etiological theories to the technical domain is hardly straightforward. In this paper we consider the transposition of etiological theories in general from the biological to the technical domain. We argue that a number of etiological theories that appear defensible for biology become untenable for technology. We illustrate our argument by showing that the standard etiological accounts of Neander and Millikan, and some recent attempts to improve on them, provide examples of such untenable theories. 1 Introduction 2 Desiderata for theories of functions 3 Etiological theories in general 3.1 Common core and divergent aims 3.2 Reproduction versus non-reproduction etiological theories 3.3 Intentionalist versus non-intentionalist etiological theories 4 Problems for etiological theories in the technical domain 5 The failure of existing reproduction theories 6 The failure of existing non-reproduction theories 7 Improving reproduction by hybridisation 8 Conclusions. (shrink)

Although the change of beliefs in the face of new information has been widely studied with some success, the revision of other mental states has received little attention from the theoretical perspective. In particular, intentions are widely recognised as being a key attitude for rational agents, and while several formal theories of intention have been proposed in the literature, the logic of intention revision has been hardly considered. There are several reasons for this: perhaps most importantly, intentions are very closely (...) connected with other mental states—in particular, beliefs about the future and the abilities of the agent. So, we cannot study them in isolation. We must consider the interplay between intention revision and the revision of other mental states, which complicates the picture considerably. In this paper, we present some first steps towards a theory of intention revision. We develop a simple model of an agent’s mental states, and define intention revision operators. Using this model, we develop a logic of intention dynamics, and then investigate some of its properties. (shrink)

According to current orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, intentional actions consist in intrinsically mindless bodily movements that stand in causal relations to appropriate mental states. This paper challenges this approach to intentional action, by arguing that there are not enough appropriate mental states around to ‘animate’ all of the bodily movements we intuitively count as intentional actions. In the alternative picture I suggest, the bodily movements that constitute our intentional actions are themselves to be thought of as cognitive events, (...) embodying our grasp of ways of acting. (shrink)

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

Does rationality require us to take the means to our ends? Intuitively, it seems clear that it does. And yet it has proven difficult to explain why this should be so: after all, if one is pursuing an end that one has decisive reason not to pursue, the balance of reasons will presumably speak against one's taking the means necessary to bring that end about. In this paper I propose a novel account of the instrumental requirement which addresses this problem. (...) On the view I develop, the instrumental requirement is normative not because agents have reasons to comply with it, but because it is a normative standard intrinsic to intentional action—i.e., it is a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agency well. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distincitons between collective production and collective authorship.

On the classical instrumental view, practical reason is an all-things-considered enterprise, concerned not merely with identifying and evaluating appropriate means to the realization of ends construed as uncriticizable, but also with coordinating achievement of their sum. The concept of a totality of ranked concerns is the cornerstone of the theory of utility. This paper discusses some of the ways that practical reasoning, on the ground, is not instrumental in this sense. The paper will demonstrate that some of what goes on (...) by way of practical reasoning on the ground involves a certain simple inference schema—to be called “imitative reasoning”—that involves mobilization of what has been alternately referred to as archetypes, scripts, stereotypes and schemas including most importantly self-schemas or self-concepts. Imitative reasoning, as the paper will argue, is especially hostile to deliberations that involve the sorts of tradeoffs that applications of utility theory routinely advise. It is therefore no expression or realization, however imperfect, of the notion of maximization. What is more, this framework routinely evokes as authoritative the norms of privilege, however removed from or irrelevant to the matter at hand, which might be as simple as where to go for dinner. For it is the basis of—among other things—class and race consciousness. Furthermore, it is highly subject to manipulation by the unscrupulous; such as, for example, by those who market consumer goods, especially to children. For this form of reasoning is employed so as to protect or enhance self-concepts: imitative reasoning is a form of motivated reasoning. Laying it out in schema form will shed light on the sort of reasoning processes that transpire in many cases of cognitive dissonance reduction. (shrink)

This paper argues that the principles of instrumental rationality apply primarily to extended action through time. Most philosophers assume that rational requirements and principles govern in the first instance momentary mental states, as opposed to governing extended intentional actions directly. In the case of instrumental rationality, the relevant mental states or attitudes would typically be preferences, decisions, or intentions. In fact, even those who recognize the extended nature of our agency still assume that rational requirements apply primarily to mental states (...) at a moment in time. Such views try to do justice to the extended nature of our agency by postulating rational requirements that apply in the first instance to plans, policies, and intentions more generally. The paper focuses on the central case of requirements and reasons governing the reconsideration of intentions and argues that these requirements or reasons are either superfluous or invalid.I argue that a proper conception of instrumental reasoning that applies directly to actions turn out to have surprising consequences. In fact, this conception allows us to see that policies, projects and the like are best understood as instances of extended actions, and that the instrumental requirements that apply to projects and policies are exactly the same as the instrumental requirements that apply to ordinary extended actions. Finally, I argue that the resulting theory of instrumental rationality is a significant improvement over theories that rely on principles governing intentions. (shrink)

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective’s members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about (...) a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism. (shrink)

If group members aim to fulfill a collective obligation, they must act in such a way that the composition of their individual actions amounts to a group action that fulfills the collective obligation. We study a strong sense of joint action in which the members of a group design and then publicly adopt a group plan that coordinates the individual actions of the group members. We characterize the conditions under which a group plan successfully coordinates the group members' individual actions, (...) and study how the public adoption of a plan changes the context in which individual agents make a decision about what to do. (shrink)

Contemporary defenses of the doctrine of double effect are mainly focused on avoiding the absurdity charge raised by Judith Thomson (). There are two strategies proposed in the literature for refuting Thomson's argument. In this paper I argue that answering Thomson's challenge comes at a heavy price: while both versions of the DDE that are developed within these two strategies successfully avoid the absurdity charge, they also remain incomplete. Thomson's argument reveals that the proponents of the DDE can at best (...) provide a partial defense of the claim that intentions can be relevant to permissibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe acquisition of a skill, or knowledge-how, on the one hand, and the acquisition of a piece of propositional knowledge on the other, appear to be different sorts of epistemic achievements. Does this difference lie in the nature of the knowledge involved, marking a joint between knowledge-how and propositional knowledge? Intellectualists say no: All knowledge is propositional knowledge. Anti-intellectualists say yes: Knowledge-how and propositional knowledge are different in kind. What resources or methods may we legitimately and fruitfully employ to adjudicate (...) this debate? What is the right way to show the nature of the knowledge knowers know? Here too there is disagreement. I defend the legitimacy of the anti-intellectualist appeal to cognitive neuroscientific findings against a recent claim that anti-intellectualists conflate the scientific categories of procedural and declarative knowledge with the mental kinds of skill and propositional knowledge, respectively. I... (shrink)

Short abstract (98 words). Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given humans’ exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of (...) evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. (shrink)

Direct Perception is the view that we can see others' mental states, i.e. that we perceive others' mental states with the same immediacy and directness that we perceive ordinary objects in the world. I evaluate Direct Perception by considering whether we can see intentions, a particularly promising candidate for Direct Perception. I argue that the view equivocates on the notion of intention. Disambiguating the Direct Perception claim reveals a troubling dilemma for the view: either it is banal or highly implausible.

This paper concerns a recently discovered, puzzling asymmetry in judgments of whether an action is intentional or not (Knobe, Philosophical Psychology 16:309–324, 2003a ; Analysis 63:190–193, b ). We report new data replicating the asymmetry in the context of scenarios wherein an agent achieves an amoral or immoral goal due to luck. Participants’ justifications of their judgments of the intentionality of the agent’s action indicate that two distinct folk concepts of intentional action played a role in their judgments. When viewed (...) from this perspective, the puzzle disappears, although the asymmetry remains. (shrink)