Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in (...) this paper is that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge – either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how). (shrink)

Amy saves a man from drowning despite the risk to herself, because she is moved by his plight. This is a quintessentially supererogatory act: an act that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Beth, on the other hand, saves a man from drowning because she wants to get her name in the paper. On this second example, opinions differ. One view of supererogation holds that, despite being optional and good, Beth’s act is not supererogatory because she is not (...) praiseworthy; the other agrees that Beth is not praiseworthy but holds that her act is nevertheless supererogatory because, while supererogatory actions are generally performed by praiseworthy agents, an individual need not be praiseworthy for their act to be supererogatory. In this paper, I raise a problem for this latter position, which I shall call the Anti-Motivation View of supererogation. While the Anti-Motivation View rejects the claim that the agent’s motivations are important, it accepts that the agent’s intentions are. Thus, this view assumes that a clear, coherent distinction can be drawn between intentions and motivations in the context of supererogation. This distinction is often attributed to Mill; however, his original discussion reveals an inconsistency. Consider Clara, who saves a man from drowning because she wants to torture him later. According to Mill, Clara’s act is not morally good; those who follow Mill will have to accept that it is therefore not supererogatory. Mill asserts that Clara’s act differs from Amy’s and Beth’s not just in motivation but also in intention. I question this explanation and demonstrate that the distinction between motivation and intention is not as clear as the Anti-Motivation View has supposed and that the gap between the Anti-Motivation View and the alternative Praise-Based View is either much greater or much smaller than previously thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that a popular account of intentions can be extended to beliefs. Beliefs are stable all-out states that allow for planning and coordination in a way that is tractable for cognitively limited creatures like human beings. Scepticism is expressed that there is really anything like credences as standardly understood.

In the literature of collective intentions, the ‘we-intentions’ that lie behind cooperative actions are analysed in terms of individual mental states. The core forms of these analyses imply that all Nash equilibrium behaviour is the result of collective intentions, even though not all Nash equilibria are cooperative actions. Unsatisfactorily, the latter cases have to be excluded either by stipulation or by the addition of further, problematic conditions. We contend that the cooperative aspect of collective intentions is not a property of (...) the intentions themselves, but of the mode of reasoning by which they are formed. We analyse collective intentions as the outcome of team reasoning, a mode of practical reasoning used by individuals as members of groups. We describe this mode of reasoning in terms of formal schemata, discuss a range of possible accounts of group agency, and show how existing theories of collective intentions fit into this framework. (shrink)

What are the most detailed descriptions under which subjects intend to perform bodily actions? According to Pacherie (2006), these descriptions may be found by looking into motor representations—action representations in the brain that determine the movements to be performed. Specifically, for any motor representation guiding an action, its subject has an M‐intention representing that action in as much detail. I show that some M‐intentions breach the constraints that intentions should meet. I then identify a set of intentions—motor intentions—that represent actions (...) in as much detail as some motor representations while meeting the constraints that intentions should meet. (shrink)

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing on an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ (...) account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier. (shrink)

The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis and conclude (...) that it is supported neither by the existing literature nor by their own experiments, whose results I did not replicate, and that the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’ is not the best available account of the ‘Knobe Effect’. (shrink)

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

In this article I will begin by discussing recent criticism, by Mauro Antonelli and Werner Sauer, of the ontological interpretation of Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality, as formulated by i.a. Roderick Chisholm. I will then outline some apparent inconsistencies of the positions advocated by Antonelli and Sauer with Brentano’s formulations of his theory in several works and lectures. This new evaluation of (unpublished) sources will then lead to a sketch of a new approach to Brentano’s theory of intentionality. Specifically, it (...) will be argued that the notion of “intentional object” is inherently and un- avoidably ambiguous in every act of external perception, due to the fact that we can only have improper intentions directed at the external world. (shrink)

Accepting a promise is normatively significant in that it helps to secure promissory obligation. But what is it for B to accept A’s promise to φ? It is in part for B to intend A’s φ-ing. Thinking of acceptance in this way allows us to appeal to the distinctive role of intentions in practical reasoning and action to better understand the agency exercised by the promisee. The proposal also accounts for rational constraints on acceptance, and the so-called directedness of promissory (...) obligation. Finally, the proposal, conjoined with Cognitivism about intentions, addresses recent criticism of Scanlon’s expectation-based view of promissory obligation. (shrink)

A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called “Interface Problem”. First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of motor (...) representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a “content-preserving causal process” taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work. (shrink)

This paper introduces and argues for contrastivism about intentions. According to contrastivism, intention is not a binary relation between an agent and an action. Rather, it is a ternary relation between an agent, an action, and an alternative. Contrastivism is introduced via a discussion of cases of known but (apparently) unintended side effects. Such cases are puzzling. They put pressure on us to reject a number of highly compelling theses about intention, intentional action, and practical reason. And they give (...) rise to a puzzle about rather than constructions such as ‘I intend to φ rather than ψ’: In side effect cases it can seem wrong to claim that the subject intends to φ, yet acceptable to claim that they intend to φ rather than ψ. This cries out for explanation. Contrastivism provides a unified response to all of these problems. (shrink)

This paper defends the Intention Account of Inquiry. On this account, inquiry is best understood by appeal to a ‘question-directed intention’ (QDI), an intention to answer a question broadly construed. This account’s core commitments help meet recent challenges plaguing extant approaches to characterizing inquiry. First, QDIs are the type of mental state central to inquiry, not attitudes like curiosity or wonder. Second, holding a QDI towards a question and acting in service of it constitutes the start of inquiry. Third, controversial (...) norms which mandate a rational inquirer's ignorance towards the answer to her question can be reformulated and defended by appeal to rational constraints on intention. Fourth, instrumental pressures inquirers face are the standard pressures of plan-rationality. In defending these theses, I show that the Intention Account provides compelling explanations to standing challenges, in ways competitors cannot. It does so by advancing understanding of how our epistemic and practical agency are intertwined. (shrink)

Philosophers are divided on whether it is possible to intend believed-impossible outcomes. Several thought experiments in the action theory literature suggest that this is conceptually possible, though they have not been tested in ordinary social cognition. We conducted three experiments to determine whether, on the ordinary view, it is conceptually possible to intend believed-impossible outcomes. Our findings indicate that participants firmly countenance the possibility of intending believed-impossible outcomes, suggesting that it is conceptually possible to intend to do something that one (...) believes is impossible. (shrink)

Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to (...) a specification of the properties these intentions need to have in order to be genuine commitments. I then show how a structure of conditional intentions with these properties settles a collection of agents on engaging in social interactions that display all the features typically associated with shared agency. (shrink)

This chapter presents Davidson’s account of intentional action and intention. Davidson initially discusses intentional action in relation to the explanation and the ontology of action. His earlier view equates acting intentionally with being caused to act by a pair of appropriately related mental states (a pro-attitude and an instrumental belief) and denies the existence of intentions as distinct mental states. Later, in his account of weakness of will, Davidson offers a more complex account of practical deliberation in terms (...) of evaluative judgments. Finally, in "Intending", Davidson discusses intentions for future action and argues that intentions are all-out evaluative judgments, reversing his earlier position about the non-existence of intentions as distinct and irreducible mental states. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the various ways in which intentions can be said to be conditional, with particular attention to the internal conditions on the intentions’ content. I will first consider what it takes to carry out a conditional intention. I will then discuss how the distinctive norms of intention apply to conditional intentions and whether conditional intentions are a weaker sort of commitments than the unconditional ones. This discussion will lead to the idea of what I call (...) the ‘deep structure’ of intentions. Roughly, this is the idea that the conditional nature of our intentions is only partially made explicit in the expressions we use to communicate our intentions and in the explicit form of our thinking about and reasoning with them. Most conditions that qualify our intentions are part of a deep functional structure that can be evinced by observing the actual psychological functioning of intentions and by considering the rational requirements that they engage. I will argue that the deep structure of intentions is characteristically conditional. Genuinely unconditional intentions are only limiting instances of conditional intentions and their contribution to agency can only be understood in light of this fact. I will conclude by showing that the characteristic conditional structure of intentions is intimately related to distinctive features of human agency, especially to its unity over time. (shrink)

We study shared intentions in what we call “loose groups”. These are groups that lack a codified organizational structure, and where the communication channels between group members are either unreliable or not completely open. We start by formulating two desiderata for shared intentions in such groups. We then argue that no existing account meets these two desiderata, because they assume either too strong or too weak an epistemic condition, that is, a condition on what the group members know and believe (...) about what the others intend, know, and believe. We propose an alternative, pooled knowledge, and argue that it allows formulating conditions on shared intentions that meet the two desiderata. (shrink)

Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the (...) main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated. (shrink)

This paper argues, by attention to the category of sub-intentional agency, that many conceptions of the nature of agency are 'over-mentalised', in that they insist that an action proper must be produced by something like an intention or a reason or a desire. Sub-intentional actions provide counterexamples to such conceptions. Instead, it is argued, we should turn to the concept of a two-way power in order to home in on the essential characteristics of actions.

This paper offers an analysis of the logical form of plural action sentences that shows that collective actions so ascribed are a matter of all members of a group contributing to bringing some event about. It then uses this as the basis for a reductive account of the content of we-intentions according to which what distinguishes we-intentions from I-intentions is that we-intentions are directed about bringing it about that members of a group act in accordance with a shared plan.

The book presents the first comprehensive survey of limits of the intentional control of action from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together leading scholars from philosophy, psychology, and the law to elucidate this theoretically and practically important topic from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. It provides reflections on conceptual foundations as well as a wealth of empirical data and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers alike. Among the authors: Clancy Blair, Todd S. Braver, Michael (...) W. Cole, Anika Fäsche, Maayan Davidov, Peter Gollwitzer, Kai Robin Grzyb, Tobias Heikamp, Gabriele Oettingen, Rachel McKinnon, Nachschon Meiran, Hans Christian Röhl, Michael Schmitz, John R. Searle, Gottfried Seebaß, Gisela Trommsdorff, Felix Thiede, J. Lukas Thürmer, Frank Wieber. (shrink)

Procreative obligations are often discussed by evaluating only the consequences of reproductive actions or omissions; less attention is paid to the moral role of intentions and attitudes. In this paper, I assess whether intentions and attitudes can contribute to defining our moral obligations with regard to assisted reproductive technologies already available, such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and those that may be available in future, such as reproductive genome editing and ectogenesis, in a way compatible with person‐affecting constraints. I propose (...) the parent–child relationship argument, which is based on the moral distinction between creating and parenting a child. Hence, I first argue that intentions and attitudes can play a role in defining our moral obligations in reproductive decisions involving PGD. Second, I maintain that if we accept this and recognize reproductive genome editing and ectogenesis as person‐affecting procedures, we should be committed to arguing that prospective parents may have moral reasons to prefer reproduction via such techniques than via sexual intercourse. In both cases, I observe an extension of our procreative responsibility beyond what is proposed by the consequentialist person‐affecting morality. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the publicity of literary works should play in determining which view one accepts.

While much has been written about the functional profile of intentions, and about their normative or rational status, comparatively little has been said about the subjective authority of intention. What is it about intending that explains the ‘hold’ that an intention has on an agent—a hold that is palpable from her first-person perspective? I argue that several prima facie appealing explanations are not promising. Instead, I maintain that the subjective authority of intention can be explained in terms of the inner (...) structure of intention. In adopting an intention the agent comes to see herself as criticizable depending on whether she executes the intention. This allows us to explain in first-personal terms why the agent becomes disposed to act and deliberate in ways that are characteristic of intention. As intention-formation involves profound changes to reflexive evaluative attitudes, this is the ‘Self-Evaluation’ view of the subjective authority of intention. (shrink)

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts as (...) a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Michael Bratman’s account of stability in his planning theory of intention. Future-directed intentions should be stable, or appropriately resistant to change, over time. Bratman claims that the norm of stability governs both intentions and plans. The aim of this article is to critically enrich Bratman’s account of stability by introducing plasticity as an additional norm of planning. I construct plasticity as a kind of stability of intentions which supplements Bratman’s notion of “reasonable stability.” Unlike the (...) latter, plasticity applies mainly to cases in which plan states are abandoned without reconsideration. I focus on the intra-theoretical problems of PTI and elucidate: the distinction between future-directed intentions and plans, the conceptual difference between stability and inertia, which is only implicit in PTI, and the role of the environment of the planner, which has a vestigial role in Bratman’s work. I also defend my incorporation of pl... (shrink)

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where ‘theory of mind’ and moral judgment meet. Preschool children’s judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side-effect is brought about 'on purpose' when the side-effect itself is morally bad but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of ‘on-purpose’ (as opposed to purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentional action (...) are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative — even in preschoolers — challenges current understanding. Young children’s judgments regarding foreseen side-effects depend upon whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side-effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the ‘theory of mind’ concept, NOT CARE THAT P, children show the side-effect effect.idea.. (shrink)

There has been much debate regarding the 'double-effect' of sedatives and analgesics administered at the end-of-life, and the possibility that health professionals using these drugs are performing 'slow euthanasia.' On the one hand analgesics and sedatives can do much to relieve suffering in the terminally ill. On the other hand, they can hasten death. According to a standard view, the administration of analgesics and sedatives amounts to euthanasia when the drugs are given with an intention to hasten death. In this (...) paper we report a small qualitative study based on interviews with 8 Australian general physicians regarding their understanding of intention in the context of questions about voluntary euthanasia, assisted suicide and particularly the use of analgesic and sedative infusions (including the possibility of voluntary or non-voluntary 'slow euthanasia'). We found a striking ambiguity and uncertainty regarding intentions amongst doctors interviewed. Some were explicit in describing a 'grey' area between palliation and euthanasia, or a continuum between the two. Not one of the respondents was consistent in distinguishing between a foreseen death and an intended death. A major theme was that 'slow euthanasia' may be more psychologically acceptable to doctors than active voluntary euthanasia by bolus injection, partly because the former would usually only result in a small loss of 'time' for patients already very close to death, but also because of the desirable ambiguities surrounding causation and intention when an infusion of analgesics and sedatives is used. The empirical and philosophical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Single-use plastic (SUP) bags at supermarkets have detrimentally exacerbated the plastic waste and dump in landfills. Reusable shopping bags are a feasible solution to alleviate plastic production and consumption, particularly in an emerging economy. The study examined the intention to use reusable shopping bags instead of SUP bags, driven by personal norms and planning behavior. Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analysis was employed on a dataset of 536 Vietnamese consumers. The study found that instead of obligation, voluntary contribution to reduce plastic (...) bag pollutant is predominant. Findings also indicate that enhancing public awareness and knowledge regarding environmental protection is significantly important. Some demographic characteristics, such as age, education, members in household, and incomes also moderate the relationship between driving factors and intentions. Finally, this study prescribes some policy implications and practical solutions to reduce and gradually restrict SUP in Vietnam. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe held that acting intentionally entails knowing (in a distinctively practical way) what one is doing. The consensus for many years was that this knowledge thesis faces decisive counterexamples, the most famous being Donald Davidson’s carbon copier case, and so should be rejected or at least significantly weakened. Recently, however, a new defense of the knowledge thesis has emerged: provided one understands the knowledge in question as a form of progressive judgement, cases like Davidson’s pose no threat. In this (...) paper, I argue that this neo-Anscombean maneuver fails because it is founded on an untenable conception of the difference between intentional and merely lucky success. More specifically, the neo-Anscombean view conflates merely lucky success with subjectively surprising success. Unlike the former, subjectively surprising success may well be intentional, for it may well be the result of an exercise of knowledge-how. After sketching an alternative view that better captures the intuitive contrast between lucky and intentional success, I argue that the conflation of surprising and merely lucky success owes to a tacit commitment to the thesis that knowing how entails knowing that one knows how. This thesis is not only false, but distortive of the explanatory role of knowledge-how. This result, in turn, tells us something important about what practical knowledge cannot be. (shrink)

Ten years ago, one of us proposed a dynamic hierarchical model of intentions that brought together philosophical work on intentions and empirical work on motor representations and motor control (Pacherie, 2008). The model distinguished among Distal intentions, Proximal intentions, and Motor intentions operating at different levels of action control (hence the name DPM model). This model specified the representational and functional profiles of each type of intention, as well their local and global dynamics, and the ways in which they interact. (...) A core insight of the model was that action control is the result of integrated, coordinated activity across these levels of intention. Since the proposal of the model, empirical and theoretical works in philosophy and cognitive science have emerged that would seem to support and expand on this central insight. In particular, an updated understanding of the nature of sensorimotor processing and motor representations, as well as of how the different levels of intention and control interface and interact, allows for the further specification and precisification of the original DPM model. (shrink)

The distinction between intentional and unintentional discrimination is a prominent one in the literature and public discourse; intentional discriminatory actions are commonly considered particularly morally objectionable relative to unintentional discriminatory actions. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what the two types amount to, and what generates the moral difference between them. The paper develops philosophically-informed conceptualizations of the two types based on which the moral difference between them may be accounted for. On the suggested account, intentional discrimination is characterized (...) by the agent viewing the content of an underlying discriminatory belief as a consideration that counts in favor of her action. This, it is argued, amounts to endorsing the discriminatory belief, which generates the particular moral severity of intentional discrimination. (shrink)

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while the (...) first is not. And we also occasionally distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the ‘physical pain’ one feels in one’s body. So what can be meant by saying that pain is a mental state? Of course, it only takes a little reflection shows that this naive view is mistaken. Pain is a state of consciousness, or an event in consciousness, and whether or not all states of mind are conscious, it is indisputable that only minds, or states of mind, are conscious.2 But does the naive view tell us anything about the concept of pain, or the concept of mind? I think it does. In this paper, I shall give reasons for thinking that consciousness is a form of intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’. I shall claim that the consciousness involved in bodily sensations like pain is constituted by the mind’s direction upon the part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. Given this, it is less surprising that the naive view of pain says what it does: the apparent ‘physicality’ of pain is a consequence of confusing the object of the intentional state—the part of the body in which the pain is felt—with the state of being in pain. (shrink)

The phenomenon of intentional identity has bemused philosophical communities since Geach (1967). I argue that the phenomenon is ubiquitous and much more significant than previously acknowledged. The foundations of the problem are implicated in many other well-knownpuzzles, such as Kripke’s (1979) puzzles about beliefs. Thus, the need for a proper analysis is eminently pressing. I specify a template for generalizing intentional identity, identify the challenges involved, and argue that positing a level of representational entity in both philosophy of (...) mind and language(e.g., mental files) is a promising approach to tackling the problem across the board. (shrink)

How come we can represent Bigfoot even though Bigfoot does not exist, given that representing something involves bearing a relation to it and we cannot bear relations to what does not exist? This is the problem of intentional inexistence. This paper develops a two-step solution to this problem, involving an adverbial account of conscious representation, or phenomenal intentionality, and the thesis that all representation derives from conscious representation. The solution is correspondingly two-part: we can consciously represent Bigfoot because consciously (...) representing Bigfoot does not involve bearing a relation to Bigfoot, but rather instantiating a certain non-relational property of representing Bigfoot-wise; and we can non-consciously represent Bigfoot because non-consciously representing Bigfoot does not involve bearing a relation to Bigfoot, but rather bearing a relation to conscious representations of Bigfoot. (shrink)

This essay challenges some assumptions of prevalent theories of empathy. The empathizer, according to these theories, must have an emotion or a representation that matches the recipient’s emotion or representation. I argue that these conditions fail to account for important cases, namely surrogate and out-group empathy. In the course of this argument, I isolate some conceptual difficulties in extant models of cognitive empathy. In place of the matching theories,I propose an indexical model that (1) distinguishes virtual from real self-reference and (...) (2) replaces self–other distinctions with an epistemic condition. According to this account, empathy occurs when we index an intention to another person about whom we have the relevant knowledge or understanding. (shrink)

Intentional sampling methods are non-probabilistic procedures that select a group of individuals for a sample with the purpose of meeting specific prescribed criteria. Intentional sampling methods are intended for exploratory research or pilot studies where tight budget constraints preclude the use of traditional randomized representative sampling. The possibility of subsequently generalize statistically from such deterministic samples to the general population has been the issue of long standing arguments and debates. Nevertheless, the intentional sampling techniques developed in this (...) paper explore pragmatic strategies for overcoming some of the real or perceived shortcomings and limitations of intentional sampling in practical applications. (shrink)

Suppose that you intend to go to the theater. Are you therein intending the unconditional proposition that you go to the theater? That would seem to be deeply irrational; after all, you surely do not intend to go if, for instance, in the next instant an earthquake is going to devastate the city. What we intend we do not intend ‘no matter what,’ it is often said. But if so—how can anyone ever rationally intend simply to perform an action of (...) a certain kind? In response to the puzzle, a ‘conditionality’ view of intention has emerged: the contents of everyday intentions are claimed to be fraught with hidden conditional clauses. The paper argues that such claims are radically unmotivated: even unconditional intentions have only limited inferential import and hence contrast sharply with a ‘no matter what’ stance. The point is established by examining relevant patterns of reasoning from unconditional to conditional intentions. (shrink)

Background: This article addressed one of the issues of research ethics that is called the nature of plagiarism coupled with involvement of intention. By definition, plagiarism is the attribution of others’ works to one’s own. This may be done intentionally and/or unintentionally. Some researchers believe that intention is not involved in the nature of plagiarism and an author who forgets to make references to the used sources has committed plagiarism since this forgetfulness has led to the attribution of others’ work (...) to one’s own. In contrast, some experts call such a person a wrongdoer, not a plagiarist. Conclusion: By likening this problem to the issue of involvement of intention in telling a lie, the author separates two kinds of plagiarism: act-plagiarism and agent-plagiarism. The intention does not involve in the act-plagiarism (to be an act an instance of plagiarism), but it is involved in the agent-plagiarism (to call someone plagiarist). As a result, an author who forgets to make reference is not a plagiarist, but his/her act is an instance of plagiarism. Keywords: Intention, Plagiarism, Intentional Plagiarism, Unintentional Plagiarism. (shrink)

Joshua Stuchlik’s /Intention and Wrongdoing/ provides a rigorous, comprehensive defense of the coherence of double-effect reasoning and its importance to moral philosophy. The book is essential reading for anyone doing research into double-effect reasoning or adjacent topics in philosophy and theology. It is accessible enough to be read by graduate students or advanced undergraduates, and will also be beneficial to specialists in the area. It ought to set the agenda for future research on these topics.

The problem of weakness of the will is often thought to arise because of an assumption that freely, deliberately and intentionally doing something must correspond to the agent's positive evaluation of doing that thing. In contemporary philosophy, a very common response to the problem of weakness has been to adopt the view that free, deliberate action does not need to correspond to any positive evaluation at all. Much of the support for this view has come from the difficulties the denial (...) of it has been thought to give rise to, both with respect to giving an account of weakness, as well as explaining the future-directed nature of intentions. In this paper I argue that most of these difficulties only arise for one particular version of the view that free, deliberate action must correspond to a positive evaluation, a version associated with Donald Davidson's account of weakness. However, another version of this view is possible, and I argue that it escapes the standard objections to the Davidsonian account. (shrink)

Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one’s intention appropriately causing a motion of one’s body, placing the latter as (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She argues that children acquire the concept KNOWS before they acquire BELIEVES, building on this (...) alleged developmental priority of knowledge to establish its conceptual priority. I start by taking a closer look at Nagel’s argument, canvassing extant objections to do both with the empirical adequacy of her claims and their philosophical implications. Doing so allows me in the second part of the paper to draw lessons that inform the construction of a revamped parallel argument for the priority of ACTS INTENTIONALLY. (shrink)

Michael Thompson recently advanced a “naïve action theory” as an alternative to the “sophisticated” accounts of action displayed by ordinary folk psychology. In what follows I defend the plausibility of intentional psychology and folk psychological explanations. I do this in two ways. First I question that naïve explanations are more naïve than the ones provided by folk psychology and suggest that the latter are phenomenologically prior to the former. Second, I focus on the role of intentionality in deliberation and (...) action planning, suggesting that folk psychology provides a better answer than naïve theory to the question of what makes actions intentional. (shrink)

An important module in the Belief-Desire-Intention architecture for artificial agents (which builds on Michael Bratman's work in the philosophy of action) focuses on the task of intention reconsideration. The theoretical task is to formulate principles governing when an agent ought to undo a prior committed intention and reopen deliberation. Extant proposals for such a principle, if sufficiently detailed, are either too task-specific or too computationally demanding. I propose that an agent ought to reconsider an intention whenever some incompatible prospect is (...) sufficiently valuable along some dimension that can be assessed at zero or near-zero computational cost. (shrink)

Is there, or should there be, any place in contemporary philosophy of mind for the concept of an intentional object? Many philosophers would make short work of this question. In a discussion of what intentional objects are supposed to be, John Searle...

How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer’s original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we examined intuitions about artifact categorization among the Shuar, a hunter-horticulturalist society in the Amazon region of Ecuador. We (...) used a forced-choice method similar to previous studies, but unlike these studies, our scenarios involved artifacts that would be familiar to the Shuar. We also incorporated a community condition to examine the possible effect of community consensus on how artifacts are categorized. The same scenarios were presented to university student participants in the UK. Across populations and conditions, participants tended to categorize artifacts in terms of a creator’s intent as opposed to a differing current use. This lends support to the view that the design stance may be a universal feature of human cognition. However, we conclude with some thoughts on the limitations of the present method for studying artifact concepts. (shrink)

How should we punish criminal offenders? One prima facie attractive punishment is administering a mandatory neurointervention—interventions that exert a physical, chemical or biological effect on the brain in order to diminish the likelihood of some forms of criminal offending. While testosterone-lowering drugs have long been used in European and US jurisdictions on sex offenders, it has been suggested that advances in neuroscience raise the possibility of treating a broader range of offenders in the future. Neurointerventions could be a cheaper, and (...) more effective method of punishment. They could also be more humane. Nevertheless, in this paper we provide an argument against the use of mandatory neurointerventions on offenders. We argue that neurointerventions inflict a significant harm on an offender that render them a morally objectionable form of punishment in a respect that incarceration is not. Namely, it constitutes an objectionable interference with the offender’s mental states. However, it might be thought that incarceration also involves an equally objectionable interference with the offender’s mental states. We show that even if it were the case that the offender is harmed to the same extent in the same respect, it does not follow that the harms are morally equivalent. We argue that if one holds that intended harm is more difficult to justify than harm that is unintended but merely foreseen, this means neurointerventions could be morally objectionable in a significant respect that incarceration is not. (shrink)

For Putnam in "Representation and Reality", there cannot be any intentional science, thus dooming cognitive science. His argument is that intentional concepts are functional, and that functionalism cannot explain anything because "everything has every functional organization", providing a proof. Analyzing his proof, we find that Putnam is assuming an ideal interpreting subject who can compute effortlessly and who is not intentional. But the subject doing science is a human being, and we are not that way. Therefore, in (...) order to save cognitive science, we propose to replace the ideal subject with a real and intentional human subject, and we propose to model intentionality by using a problem theory which is an intuitionist set theory where the resolving subject is a computing device. We are intentional because we are living beings, where life is the intention of not to die, so we are embodied intentions designed by evolution. We are real and then we have to compute our resolutions to the survival problem, and fortuitously we are computationally Turing complete, so our language is complete and then full and self referable. In summary, evolutionary subjectivism modeled as problem solving by computing should save cognitive science. Or, in other words, we are proposing to update Kant with Darwin and Turing. (shrink)

Discusses the old problem of how to characterize apparently intentional states that appear to lack objects. In tandem with critically discussing a recent proposal by Tim Crane, I develop the line of reasoning according to which talking about intentional objects is really a way of talking about intentional states—in particular, it’s a way of talking about their satisfaction-conditions.