Popular Frankfurt-style theories of autonomy hold that (i) autonomy is motivation in action by psychological attitudes that have ‘authority’ to constitute the agent's perspective, and (ii) attitudes have this authority in virtue of their formal role in the individual's psychological system, rather than their substantive content. I pose a challenge to such ‘psychologistic’ views, taking Frankfurt's and Bratman's theories as my targets. I argue that motivation by attitudes that play the roles picked out by psychologistic theories is compatible with radically (...) unintelligible behavior. Because of this, psychologistic views are committed to classifying certain agents as ‘autonomous’ whom we intuitively find to be dysfunctional. I then argue that a necessary condition for autonomy is that an agent's behavior is intelligible in a particular way: autonomy necessarily involves acting from a subjective practical perspective that is, in principle, minimally comprehensible to others – not simply in a causal sense, but in a substantive, socio-cultural sense. (shrink)

Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person's mental states and behaviors. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about secondperson interaction from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another's behavior. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namely, that theory of mind is our primary and pervasive (...) means for understanding other persons, go beyond both the phenomenological and the scientific evidence. I argue that the interpretation of "primary intersubjectivity" as merely precursory to theory of mind is inadequate. Rather, primary intersubjectivity, understood as a set of embodied practices and capabilities, is not only primary in a developmental sense, but is the primary way we continue to understand others in second-person interactions. (shrink)