The Structure of Action

(This is one of the essays to be included in a book examining the causes of day-to-day strife in the populations of modern democracies vying to live and assert the freedoms promised to them by systems of governance supposed and expected to represent them.) "If waste may be defined as all that is not being used for the growth and perpetuation of humanity, then health could be said to equate to all that is useful to this self-same objective. It could (...) be considered amiss to minimise such an expansive issue to that very simple definition; yet, recognising the simplicity and abiding by it at the individual level first and then at all levels in society requires acknowledgement, which, logically, should also trigger action." . (shrink)

This paper is about progressive aspect. We defend a new principle that we call ‘Progressive Specificity’: if you are Ving and to V is to X or to Y, then you are Xing or you are Ying. We offer six arguments for Progressive Specificity. We then suggest that those six arguments extend to the futurative progressive. We conclude by comparing Progressive Specificity to Conditional Excluded Middle. -/- .

An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument against source-compatibilism. I argue that, in cases of manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process of which it is a part. Specifically, I argue that causal processes involving direct manipulation fail to count as exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. In contrast, standard deterministic (...) causal processes do not involve heteromesial causal deviance and are agency-preserving. The upshot is that there is a relevant difference between a causal process involving direct manipulation by another agent and a deterministic causal process that involves no such intervention. If this is right, then Pereboom’s four-case argument does not pose a threat to source-compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Contemporary action theory is generally concerned with giving theories of action ontology. In this paper, we make the novel proposal that the standard view in action theory—the Causal Theory of Action—should be recast as a “model”, akin to the models constructed and investigated by scientists. Such models often consist in fictional, hypothetical, or idealized structures, which are used to represent a target system indirectly via some resemblance relation. We argue that recasting the Causal Theory as a model can not only (...) accomplish the goals of causal theorists, but also give the theory greater flexibility in responding to common objections. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...) desire is distinctive in being a matter of our affective response to imagined prospects. An examination of this idea yields the following thesis: I know what I want just in case the object pursued in anticipation of a certain pleasure actually yields the anticipated pleasure. (shrink)

In Piñeros Glasscock (2020) I presented a version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument against the Anscombean thesis that intentional action entails knowledge. I defend this argument from recent criticisms by Beddor and Pavese (2022) and Valaris (2021). I argue that contrary to what my past self and my critics suggest, the conclusion of this anti-luminosity argument does not rest on the existence of essentially intentional actions. The argument can be recast based on the humbler premise that agential cognition must represent actions (...) as intentional. I show that this claim is well motivated by precisely the considerations of control behind the objections. (shrink)

I develop an account of the nature of improvisation, as a distinctive form of temporally extended agency. In contrast to the standard view, which says that agents perform extended actions by means of planning them in advance, I argue that improvising involves planning one’s actions contemporaneously with their performance, or equivalently, planning these actions after one has already begun performing them. >> Improvisation is psychologically distinctive because it involves the adoption of backward-looking intentions, or retroplans, which represent the actions that (...) an agent has already performed as to-have-been performed under new descriptions, in relation to how these actions constitute parts of the larger action into which they are subsequently improvisationally incorporated. >> Improvisation is metaphysically distinctive because it involves exercising a special kind of diachronic agential control over the temporally extended action that one is performing. By means of continuing to act, as guided by a holistic improvised plan with backward-looking components, one can genuinely incorporate one’s previously-performed actions into a larger temporal whole, and thereby retroactively determine that these actions were (intentionally) performed under new descriptions. This is possible because of the temporally emergent metaphysical nature of the action-types that are improvisable. >> Improvisation is normatively distinctive because it enables new possibilities for temporally extended action, such as flexibly responding to unpredictable information in the course of acting and the retainment of a distinctive kind of self-curiosity during action. The progressive temporal structure of improvisation also raises a number of distinctive deliberative constraints that can be fruitfully modelled in general terms. >> Finally, improvisation is existentially distinctive, in the sense that an agent’s entire life can be understood as one grand-scale improvisational performance, where they gain existential unity and responsibility for the entire shape and meaning of their life by means of the successful improvisation of a self-constituting project over the course of their existence. Applying the account of the nature of improvisation at the level of a whole human life enables us to improv(is)e on existing existentialist and narrativist treatments of meaningful unity in life, and also to give a novel, systematic account of a series of existential crises and challenges. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...) little attention from philosophers since its inception in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention (2000, §47). However, I believe that essentially intentional actions can play an important role in an ontology of action. In my paper, I develop and argue for a variety of essentialism in the context of naive action theory, which I call naive essentialism. Naive essentialism is a two-fold thesis, which claims that (1) essentially intentional actions exist, and (2) that essentially intentional actions ground accidentally intentional actions. My paper has four parts. In the first part, I distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and unpack the relevant principles of naive action theory. Second, I present the grounding thesis that accidentally intentional actions are grounded in essentially intentional actions. Next, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. Lastly, I briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The upshot of my arguments is that essentially intentional actions form the metaphysical and explanatory bedrock in a naive ontology of action, and that there are good reasons for accepting a key premise in Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

Essentially intentional actions are kinds of action that can only be done intentionally. Essentialism is the view that essentially intentional actions exist. Accidentalism is the view that essentialism is false. In my thesis, I develop and argue for naïve essentialism, a species of essentialism based on Michael Thompson’s naïve action theory. First, I present key features of naïve action theory and the broader Anscombean tradition, distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and provide an argument for the existence of essentially (...) intentional actions. Second, I respond to three objections to my argument. Third, I argue that accidentalism is a reductive approach to action and faces some standard problems to such approaches. Fourth, I present three noteworthy implications of my defense of essentialism for the philosophy of mind and action. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the ontology of action about whether actions are processes, events, relations, or sui generis entities. This paper focuses on the process view, the view that actions are processes. I challenge it in two ways. First, I argue that some actions are not processes because their performance need not be associated with or accompanied by a process. Second, I critically discuss three main arguments that have been advanced to support the process view. My view, the (...) pluralist view, is that process-theorists are right to hold that certain actions are processes, but wrong to maintain that every action is a process: activities are processes, acts are not, and some acts are composed of a process whereas others are not. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...) at least some aspects of the reason-responsiveness theories. Moreover, by treating practical knowledge and practical understanding as gradable no-tions, the paper offers a strategy to respond to enduring objections against cognitivism about intention, control, and autonomy. (shrink)

Unlike Western philosophers, classical Buddhist thinkers largely remained silent about socio-political issues and did not develop explicit frameworks for theorizing them. The present article reconstructs a Buddhist account of shared action based on select passages from works by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. It outlines the structure of individual action, according to Vasubandhu, and identifies three conditions that need to be satisfied for a joint activity to take place. This model, I suggest, is reductive in seeing joint action as an (...) aggregation of individual actions, and it differs from Western treatments of shared agency in several respects. Primarily, Vasubandhu’s paradigm rests on an extended structure of action, it is guided by an internalist standard of moral evaluation that emphasizes the consequences of shared actions for the acting members, and it is centrally concerned with how individuals can extricate themselves from social entanglements and gain control over their actions. (shrink)

In erkenntnistheoretischen Zusammenhängen hat sich für praktisches Wissen seit Ryle die Unterscheidung zwischen propositionalem knowing that und nicht-propositionalem knowing how etabliert. In der Handlungstheorie wird praktisches Wissen dagegen als ein im Handeln selbst als Wissen wirksames Wissen verstanden. Umstritten ist nach wie vor wie die Besonderheit dieser Wissensform angemessen zu erfassen ist. Der Band nimmt die Thematik des praktischen Wissens auf, indem unterschiedliche Diskussionsstränge zu diesem Begriff in historischer und systematischer Orientierung aus Handlungstheorie, Metaethik und Erkenntnistheorie zusammengeführt werden. Die Beiträge (...) wollen das Konzept eines praktischen Wissens hinsichtlich seiner Potentiale und weiterer Forschungsfragen erschließen und dabei als essentiell für die Grundlagen der praktischen Philosophie herausstellen. (shrink)

The paper aims to give an account of practical knowledge by outlining a hylomorphic and conceptualist account of intentional action in analogy to McDowell's conceptualist account of experience. On this view, practical concepts provide the ideal or formal structure that unifies a manifold of bodily movements into a single intentional action, and hence intentional actions are structured conceptually. -/- - §1 sets out the basic features of this view in contrast to a common dualistic or two-component view of practical knowledge, (...) as an "inner" mental state with propositional content that functions as the efficient cause of some bodily movement in the "external" world, and introduces the claim that practical knowledge is the constitutive form of intentional action. - §2 illustrates the hylomorphic unity of concept and movement in action, and thus (contra Dreyfus) the corporeality of practical reason, by means of an account of practical concept formation, on which both the formation and tradition of practical concepts take place in bodily movement iself. - §3 elucidates the concept of a self-conscious disposition or rational capacity for action, actualizations of which are characterized by a syllogistic structure that accounts for both the explanation and the justification of action and thereby renders intelligible in what sense practical judgment is internal to acting itself. - Skillful exercises of such capacities express a knowledge-how that manifests itself in practical representations. §4 characterizes representations of this kind as a perceptually situated recognition of a practical pattern that amounts to the imaginative anticipation of a movement form by which the agent determines their next steps; a practical perception of the agent's particular situation that is both normative and motivational for them. - §5 starts by developing an identity theory of practical truth, on which the conceptual content of a (true) practical judgment is numerically identical with the formal structure of a (good) action, and concludes with explaining the unity of four features commonly attributed to practical knowledge, viz. that it is at the same time descriptive, normative, causally productive, and non-observational (or self-conscious). (shrink)

The brewer and the yeast: why brewing beer sheds light on the philosophical debate about the boundaries of human agency.

ABSTRACT It’s often assumed, especially in discussions of free will and moral responsibility, that unavoidable actions are possible. In recent years, however, several philosophers have questioned that assumption. Their views are considered here, and the possibility of unavoidable actions is defended and then applied to issues in action theory and in the literature on moral responsibility.

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe (...) play. -/- Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief—which he terms religious “credence”—is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance. -/- It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith. [Abstract writing credit: book editor Andrew Kinney, HUP]. (shrink)

Beau Branson rounds out the previous two chapters, by exploring the doctrine of inseparable operations ad extra in the writings of St Gregory of Nyssa. This doctrine says that all the activities of the three hypostases of the Trinity, at least insofar as they relate to things outside of (“ad extra”) the Trinity, are not only qualitatively identical but numerically identical. Importantly, Branson focuses his attention on Gregory’s theory of action and the individuation of events that emerges from his theological (...) defense of the doctrine of inseparable operations ad extra. Through a heavy engagement with contemporary metaphysics, Branson shows that Gregory’s philosophy of action is not only coherent, anticipating current trends in the ontology of actions and events, but may provide novel solutions to longstanding problems in this field. (shrink)

Donald Davidson’s causal theory of actions states that actions must be rationalized and caused by a belief-desire-pair. One problem of such a causal theory are cases of deviant causal chains. In these cases, the rationalized action is not caused in the right way but via a deviant causal chain. It therefore intuitively seems to be no action while all conditions of the causal theory are met. I argue that the problem of deviant causal chains can be solved by adding a (...) teleofunctionalist condition. This condition requires that the belief-desire pair that rationalizes an action must cause that action in a selection-historically normal way. I try to show that this additional condition drops counterintuitive cases of deviant causal chains out of the class of actions while being flexible enough to classify such cases as actions in which causal detours are intuitively permissible. (shrink)

The traditional problem of free will has reached an impasse; we are unlikely to see progress without rethinking the terms in which the problem had been cast. Our approach offers an alternative to the standard terms of the debate, by developing an authorially parameterized approach articulated within a two-dimensional semantics for temporal predicates.

According to the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), genuine actions are individuated by their causal history. Actions are bodily movements that are causally explained by citing the agent’s reasons. Reasons are then explained as some combination of propositional attitudes – beliefs, desires, and/or intentions. The CTA is thus committed to realism about the attitudes. This paper explores current models of decision-making from the mind sciences, and argues that it is far from obvious how to locate the propositional attitudes in the (...) causal processes they describe. The outcome of the analysis is a proposal for pluralism: there are several ways one could attempt to map states like “intention” onto decision-making processes, but none will fulfill all of the roles attributed to the attitudes by the CTA. (shrink)

This paper argues for a deflationary account of trying on which ‘x tried to ϕ’ abbreviates ‘x did something with the intention of ϕ-ing’, where ‘did something’ is treated as a schematic verb. On this account, tryings are not a distinctive sort of episode present in some or all cases of acting. ‘x tried to ϕ’ simply relates some doing of x’s to a further aim x had, which may or may not have been achieved. Consequently, the analysis of ‘x (...) tried to ϕ’ adds nothing to our basic understanding of the nature of action or agency. The account handles examples of naked trying, trying without acting – for example, trying but failing to move when paralyzed – by construing ‘did something’ as a schematic verb for a broader class of purposive events than actions, subsuming inter alia the formation of intentions-in-action. It gives a technical sense to ‘doing with the intention of ϕ-ing’ so that it includes any doing that can be construed as for the purpose of executing the intention of ϕ-ing. This subsumes as a limiting case the formation of an intention-in-action to ϕ, which is for the purpose of executing that very intention. (shrink)

The Shape of Agency offers interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. The first part offers accounts of a collection of related phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behaviour, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition, and undermine the claims made by many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore fails as an account of intentional (...) action. The second part turns to modes of agentive excellence—ways that agents display quality of form—providing a novel account of skill, including an account of the ways that agents display more or less skill. Shepherd discusses the role of knowledge in skill, and concludes that while knowledge is often important, it is inessential. This leads to a discussion of the way that knowledge of action and knowledge of how to act informs action execution. Knowledgeable action includes a unique epistemic underpinning: in knowledgeable action, the agent has authoritative knowledge of what she is doing and how she is doing it when and because she is poised to control her action by way of practical reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between skill and sensitivity to reasons for action. I want to know to what degree we can explain the fact that the skilled agent is very good at performing a cluster of actions within some domain in terms of the fact that the skilled agent has a refined sensitivity to the reasons for action common to the cluster. The picture is a little bit complex. While skill can be partially explained by sensitivity to (...) reasons – a sensitivity often produced by rational practice – the skilled human agent, because imperfect, must navigate a trade-off between full sensitivity and a capacity to succeed. (shrink)

Schönau et al. (2021) identified four dimensions of agency (authenticity, privacy, self–trust, and responsibility) that may be influenced by the use of neurotechnologies, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) or brain–computer–interfaces (BCI). The Agency Map they proposed depicts the role of each dimension, and indicates how they may interact. The authors emphasize that a strength of their approach is that it allows to capture the agency dimensions that were previously seen as disconnected and independent as intricately interwoven parts of the (...) person’s experience. This intended unification may help to understand personal agency more fully in various contexts important in neuroethical considerations. However, what is missing in Schönau et al.’s analysis is the mechanism—the very link— by which these various dimensions can come together. As Zawadzki (2020) points out discussing his account of the self (PTS–moral aspects)—which also includes the agency dimensions indicated by Schönau et al. (both authenticity, and responsibility, but also autonomy)—what is crucial in order to unify these various dimensions is narrative. (shrink)

In this chapter what I call the “backside” of habit is explored. I am interested in the philosophical implications of the physical and physiological processes that mediate, and which allow for what comes to appear as almost magic; namely the various sensorimotor associations and integrations that allows us to replay our past experiences, and to in a certain sense perceive potential futures, and to act and bring about anticipated outcomes – without quite knowing how. Thus, the term “backside” is meant (...) to refer both the actual mediation and the epistemic opacity of these backstage intermediaries that allow for the front stage magic. The question is if the epistemic complexities around sensorimotor mediation gives us valuable insights into the nature of human agency and further how it might begin to show us new ways to think of the mind as truly embodied yet not reducible to any finite body-as-object. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process (...) ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it. (shrink)

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

Mind wandering is typically operationalized as task-unrelated thought. Some argue for the need to distinguish between unintentional and intentional mind wandering, where an agent voluntarily shifts attention from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. We reveal an inconsistency between the standard, task-unrelated thought definition of mind wandering and the occurrence of intentional mind wandering (together with plausible assumptions about tasks and intentions). This suggests that either the standard definition of mind wandering should be rejected or that intentional mind wandering is an incoherent (...) category. Solving this puzzle is critical for advancing theoretical frameworks of mind wandering. (shrink)

This essay is my contribution to a symposium responding to several papers by Walter Benn Michaels that bring the work of Elizabeth Anscombe to bear on philosophical problems of artistic representation. In it, I take Benn Michaels's side in a dispute with Dominic McIver Lopes over the difference between Anscombe's view of intentional agency and that of Donald Davidson. I also critique Benn Michaels's reading of a difficult passage in section 29 of Anscombe's INTENTION, where she presents the famous case (...) in which "I shut my eyes and write something". There is also some discussion of the work of Robert Morris and the differing roles for intention in painting compared with photography. (Benn Michaels responds to my arguments elsewhere in the same issue.). (shrink)

This paper presents a dilemma which it has been alleged by Kim Frost must be faced by any defender of the notion of a two-way power and offers a solution to the dilemma which is distinct from Frost’s own. The dilemma is as follows: assuming that powers are to be individuated by what they are powers to do or undergo, then either there is a unified description of the manifestation-type which individuates the power, or there is not. If there is, (...) then two-way powers are revealed really to be one-way powers, after all. If there is not, then it is difficult to explain why the two-way power does not simply dissolve into a mere combination of two one-way powers. The paper offers an account of what a two-way power is that is distinct from the one Frost takes for granted, and argues that this different conception is the key to avoiding the dilemma. It is also argued that this alternative conception has several further advantages over its rival and also that it has no less of a claim than Frost’s notion to be prefigured in Aristotle’s original discussion. (shrink)

According to Kirk Ludwig, only primitive actions are actions in a primary and non-derivative sense of the term ‘action’. Ludwig takes this to imply that the notion of collective action is a façon de parler – useful perhaps, but secondary and derivative. I argue that, on the contrary, collective actions are actions in the primary and non-derivative sense. First, this is because some primitive actions are collective actions. Secondly, individual and collective composites of primitive actions are also actions in the (...) primary and non-derivative sense. Hence, individual action and collective action are ontologically on a par. Ludwig also exaggerates the contrast between individual and collective action by introducing a “sole agency requirement” in his account of the semantics of singular action sentences. However, sole agency is merely typically pragmatically implicated by singular action sentences, not entailed by them. If I say, “I turned on the light”, after we each flipped one of two switches that together turned on the light, then I might be misleading the audience, but what I say is true. Finally, I argue that, contra Ludwig, individuals often have “I-intentions” to bring about an event that can be satisfied even if there are co-agents who bring about the event in the same way. (shrink)

I focus on problems defining skill and a core theoretical dispute over whether skilled action is largely automatic or consciously controlled. The dominant view in philosophy and psychology has been that skills are automatic, but an emerging body of work suggests that conscious cognition plays a significant role.

This paper investigates whether we can know how to do basic actions, from the perspective according to which knowing how to do something requires knowledge of a way to do it. A key argument from this perspective against basic know-how is examined and is found to be unsound, involving the false premise that there are no ways of doing basic actions. However, a new argument along similar lines is then developed, which contends that there are no ways of doing basic (...) actions in any sense that matters for acquiring knowledge-how. This requires coming to a deeper understanding of ways of doing things than has hitherto been sought, which should be useful for further theorizing in this area. It is concluded that analyses of knowing-how in terms of knowledge of ways are inconsistent with the common assumption that there is basic know-how. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but mutually exclusive. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend (...) on skill and basic action, but the latter pair are not themselves rationally structured: the movements a basic action comprises are not intentional actions, and they are not structured as means to an end. However, Michael Thompson and Douglas Lavin have argued that action that bears no inner rational structure is not intentional action at all, and that therefore there can be no such thing as basic action. In this paper, I argue that their critique shows that standard conceptions of basic action are indeed untenable, but not that we can do without an alternative. I develop an alternative conception of skill and basic action on which their basicness is not to be equated with simplicity: like deliberation and non-basic action, they are teleologically complex, but their complexity takes a different form. On this view, skill contrasts with deliberation—not because it is not a manifestation of practical reason, but because the two are specifically different manifestations of practical reason. (shrink)

Jennings and Nanay (this journal, 2016) argue against my claim that action entails attention by providing putative counterexamples to the claim that action entails a Many–Many Problem. This reply demonstrates that they have misunderstood the central notion of a pure reflex on which my argument depends. A simplified form of the argument from pure reflex to the Many–Many Problem as a necessary feature of agency is given, and putative counterexamples of action without attention are addressed. Attention is present in every (...) action. In passing, the reply discusses how we should assess intuitive claims about attention and mental processing, with emphasis on learning and the automatization of attention in its development as a skill. (shrink)

The paper discusses the category of one of the most fundamental expressions of agency, those movements of agents that are actions. There have been three dominant views of action since the 1960s: 1. the Causal Theory of Action, 2. the Tryings/Willings view, and 3. Agent Causation. These views claim that actions are: 1. events of bodily movements which have the right causes; 2. specific types of mental events causing events of bodily movements; 3. instances of the causal relationship between agents (...) and events of bodily movements. Among other arguments, a specific interpretation of the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs has been taken by defenders of the Tryings/Willings views and Agent Causation to support their main claims. The paper argues that these three views mischaracterise actions of bodily movements. It argues for this by highlighting some implausible claims and problems of the three views; by offering an interpretation of the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs that does not lend support to these views; and finally, by providing an alternative view of actions. This view is the Pluralist View according to which agents’ movements are the activations of agents’ abilities to move. (shrink)

According to the Guise of the Good, an agent only does for a reason what she sees as good. One of the main motivations for the view is its apparent ability to explain why action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent, for on this view, an action is intelligible just in case it seems good. This motivation has come under criticism in recent years. Most notably, Kieran Setiya has argued that merely seeing one’s action as good does (...) not suffice to make the action intelligible. In this paper, I show that this objection has bite only because the Guise of the Good’s theory of intelligibility has yet seen little sustained articulation. Properly understood, this theory holds that an action is intelligible to an agent only if it appears to them to possess some substantive evaluative property. I then argue that this response to the objection has a significant implication for contemporary Guise of the Good theories, for it shows that the currently ascendant version of the theory, the attitudinal theory, cannot avail itself of the intelligibility motivation. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

Aristotle’s typical procedure is to identify something's four causes. Intentional action has typically been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle’s typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to articulate a powerful theory of action unlike any other on (...) offer. (shrink)

A discussion of three central ideas in action theory; trying to act, doing or acting, one's action causing further consequences.

The problem of the time of a killing concerns exactly when and where to locate our actions. It is a problem for many of our actions beyond killing, and there are versions of the problem that can be raised no matter where your theory locates actions in particular. To answer the problem, I claim that we should be guided to the referent of ‘the killing’ by examining the definition of ‘to kill.’ Once we have the correct definition, we can see (...) that there are several candidate events that might be the referent of ‘the killing,’ but that the definition does not determine which of them is the referent. So, I argue that it is indeterminate or vague which event is ‘the killing.’ This solution is general across many action verbs, appeals to a minimally controversial type of vagueness, avoids the unintuitive results of views that determinately locate killings, and is compatible with different views about the location of actions. In the concluding section, I show how appealing to vagueness is distinct from and superior to appealing to ambiguity. (shrink)

Process, Action, and Experience offers a radical new approach to the philosophy of mind and action, taking processes to be the central subject matter. An international team of contributors consider what kinds of things processes are, and explore the progressive nature of action and conscious experience.

Anyone wearing rose-tinted glasses might be forgiven if s/he comes to the conclusion that the world out there is rosier than it actually is. With his Fish Story, Sir Arthur Eddington warned us how analogous illusions might have happened in our models of the physical world. His allegory describes how observer characteristics can be inadvertently assigned to the systems being observed. If Eddington's conjecture is applicable, the most fundamental properties of nature will turn out to be the construction rules of (...) the observer who measures nature. Since no one exactly knows how the brain works and because it is the final measuring instrument that collapses the wave function at the end of von Neumann's measurement chain, it is likely that observer characteristics have been falsely attributed to physical reality and our theories of it. These errors may prevent us from understanding consciousness because they mask the actual operations of the psyche. Starting with Velmans' model of consciousness I analyse the role of cognitive models in the development of science. I then model how both the set-up of experiments and the interpretation of resulting data could be influenced to arrive at erroneous theories. Using examples I show how potential errors, due to our incomplete understanding of the conscious process, have crept into physics. These need to be corrected if we are to evolve a concept of physical reality that includes conscious experiences. (shrink)

Philosophers of action and perception have reached a consensus: the term ‘intentionality’ has significantly different senses in their respective fields. But Anscombe argues that these distinct senses are analogically united in such a way that one cannot understand the concept if one focuses exclusively on its use in one’s preferred philosophical sub-discipline. She highlights three salient points of analogy: (i) intentional objects are given by expressions that employ a “description under which;” (ii) intentional descriptions are typically vague and indeterminate; and (...) (iii) intentional descriptions may be false. I explore these three features as they apply to both perception and action and defend Anscombe’s view that the analogical concept of intentionality is a grammatical concept. That is, there are two distinctive linguistic/social practices that involve, respectively, a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ and a special sense of the question ‘What?’ To competently ask and answer the questions that constitute these practices not only reflects, but also conveys a grammatical understanding of intentionality’s basic, formal structure. (shrink)

Some of the things we do intentionally we do halfheartedly. I develop and defend an account of halfheartedness with respect to action on which one is halfhearted with respect to an action A if one’s overall motivation to A is weak. This requires getting clear on what it is to have some level of overall motivation with respect to an action, and on what it means to say one’s overall motivation is weak or strong. After developing this account, I defend (...) the claim that one key functional expression of halfhearted action is the possession of impaired control over the action in question. Finally, I elucidate a puzzle that sometimes arises with respect to halfhearted action. The puzzle arises when an agent’s commitment in acting conflicts with an agent’s acceptance of poor performance. (shrink)

The notion of an agent and the notion of a self are connected, for agency is one role played by the self. Millgram argues for a disunity thesis of agency on the basis of extreme incommensurability across some major life events. We propose a similar negative thesis about the self, that it is composed of relatively independent threads reflecting the different roles and different mind-sets of the person's life. Our understanding of those threads is based on theories of the narrative (...) construction of the self. Our disunity thesis is that there need be no overarching narrative that unifies those narrative threads. To explain how the threads hang together to produce coherent action, we make these positive claims: control normally switches smoothly and unconsciously between threads as circumstances require, within one thread there is likely to be acknowledgment of other threads, some situations require a temporary blending of threads, and some plans and policies reach across different threads and contribute to some coordination among them. Our account of a self provides an account of agency that has merits in comparison to Millgram's. Our narrative approach allows explanations of actions beyond rational deliberation. (shrink)