Since philosophy follows science in the modern age. Macmurray holds, the emergence of psychology demands a reformulation of the theory of the Self. In the past physics has led to a substance view of the self and biology to a theory of the self as organism; psychology, as a science of human behavior forms the groundwork for a metaphysics of agency which includes the theoretical and the organic, but as derivative, not as primary modes. These Gifford Lectures (...) are provocative and persuasive, and their historical arguments are subtle and illuminating.--J. F. D. (shrink)

Much of classical Hindu thought has centered on the question of self: what is it, how does it relate to various features of the world, and how may we benefit by realizing its depths? Attempting to gain a conceptual foothold on selfhood, Hindu thinkers commonly suggest that its distinctive feature is consciousness (caitanya). Well-worn metaphors compare the self to light as its awareness illumines the world of knowable objects. Consciousness becomes a touchstone to recognize the presence of a (...) self. A rock is insentient, void of consciousness, and purely an object. Selves, however, are loci of awareness and thus subjects. Some schools, most notably classical Sāṁkhya and Advaita Vedānta, take this approach to its furthest conclusion: consciousness is not only unique to the self, but is the fundamental feature of selfhood. Other putative features of the self—feelings, memories, moral responsibility, and importantly, agency (kartṛtva)—are taken to be the impositions of insentient matter (prakṛti) or symptoms of primordial illusion (avidyā). Against this position, Nyāya defends a more robust notion of selfhood, placing qualities like desire, aversion, volition, and moral responsibility alongside cognition as the self’s distinctive qualities. These various aspects of selfhood come together neatly when we consider agency. An agent performs intentional actions under her volition, which is triggered by her own cognitive and affective states. Her volitional acts further generate moral consequences which she must bear, and which are, in the Indian context, embodied in the form of karmic merit and demerit. For Nyāya, agency is, therefore, a special expression of the self’s different capacities and potentialities, which coherently binds them together. Nyāya’s view is an important contribution to Indian theories of self as it is a counterpoint to what we may call exclusively cognitive accounts of selfhood in other influential Hindu schools, as noted above. The first half of this paper will consider Nyāya’s conception of agency in relation to selfhood. The second half will discuss Nyāya’s arguments with other Hindu schools—specifically Sāṁkhya—in support of the thesis that the self must be an agent as well as a knower. (shrink)

At the heart of Macmurray's work is his attempt to reverse the proposition of philosophy of the modern period that posits the self as thinker withdrawn from action and essentially isolated from the world about which it reflects. Macmurray labored to recast the role of philosophy in the service of a more fulfilling and basic personal communion with others, with the world, and ultimately with God. Indeed, it can be said that Macmurray's philosophy is really a philosophy of community—a (...) philosophy that relates to many contemporary philosophical and religious concerns, as well as having a bearing on current historical/sociological, political, and feminist critiques of contemporary American society. (shrink)

Much of classical Hindu thought has centered on the question of self: what is it, how does it relate to various features of the world, and how may we benefit by realizing its depths? Attempting to gain a conceptual foothold on selfhood, Hindu thinkers commonly suggest that its distinctive feature is consciousness (caitanya). Well-worn metaphors compare the self to light as its awareness illumines the world of knowable objects. Consciousness becomes a touchstone to recognize the presence of a (...) self. A rock is insentient, void of consciousness, and purely an object. Selves, however, are loci of awareness and thus subjects. Some schools, most notably classical Sāṁkhya and Advaita Vedānta, take this approach to its furthest conclusion: consciousness is not only unique to the self, but is the fundamental feature of selfhood. Other putative features of the self—feelings, memories, moral responsibility, and importantly, agency (kartṛtva)—are taken to be the impositions of insentient matter (prakṛti) or symptoms of primordial illusion (avidyā). Against this position, Nyāya defends a more robust notion of selfhood, placing qualities like desire, aversion, volition, and moral responsibility alongside cognition as the self’s distinctive qualities. These various aspects of selfhood come together neatly when we consider agency. An agent performs intentional actions under her volition, which is triggered by her own cognitive and affective states. Her volitional acts further generate moral consequences which she must bear, and which are, in the Indian context, embodied in the form of karmic merit and demerit. For Nyāya, agency is, therefore, a special expression of the self’s different capacities and potentialities, which coherently binds them together. Nyāya’s view is an important contribution to Indian theories of self as it is a counterpoint to what we may call exclusively cognitive accounts of selfhood in other influential Hindu schools, as noted above. The first half of this paper will consider Nyāya’s conception of agency in relation to selfhood. The second half will discuss Nyāya’s arguments with other Hindu schools—specifically Sāṁkhya—in support of the thesis that the self must be an agent as well as a knower. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the concept of a self-aware agent. In cognitive science agents are seen as embodied and interactively situated in worlds. We analyse the meanings attached to these terms in cognitive science and robotics, proposing a set of conditions for situatedness and embodiment, and examine the claim that internal representational schemas are largely unnecessary for intelligent behaviour in animats. We maintain that current situated and embodied animats cannot be ascribed even minimal self-awareness, and offer (...) a six point definition of embeddedness, constituting minimal conditions for the evolution of a sense of self. This leads to further analysis of the nature of embodiment and situatedness, and a consideration of whether virtual animats in virtual worlds could count as situated and embodied. We propose that self-aware agents must possess complex structures of self-directed goals; multi-modal sensory systems and a rich repertoire of interactions with their worlds. Finally, we argue that embedded agents will possess or evolve local co-ordinate systems, or points of view, relative to their current positions in space and time, and have a capacity to develop an egocentric space. None of these capabilities are possible without powerful internal representational capacities. (shrink)

Hermann Lotze has truly said that “among all the errors of the human mind” the “strangest” is doubting its “own existence,” or regarding it “at second hand as the product of an external Nature” which can be known only “indirectly” while the mind knows itself directly. Yet this denial is found both in the Occident and in the Orient. Moreover, while in the latter it stems largely from an extreme form of idealism in terms of a reductionistic pantheism, in the (...) former it is almost altogether the result of an analytical, reductive naturalism. More specifically, in the West this impersonalistic tendency has really been the result of two movements which have merged in certain contemporary schools. (shrink)

Objecting to a restrictive view of morality that limits moral philosophy and religious ethics to what can be logically displayed, this essay seeks to expand our understanding of morality in a way that permits one to account for intentionality in the moral life. It claims that religion makes a contribution to our moral behavior beyond that of motivating one to be moral. The author argues that a right understanding of the relationship of thought and action is essential if we are (...) correctly to understand the relationship of religion and morality. He concludes that "story" and principles have interdependent roles to play in the full variety of our moral life. (shrink)

Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either (...) morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice. (shrink)

Lucy O'Brien argues that a satisfactory account of first-person reference and self-knowledge needs to concentrate on our nature as agents. Clearly written, with rigorous discussion of rival views, this book will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of mind and action.

In this paper, we outline a theory of the nature of self-directed agents. What is distinctive about self-directed agents is their ability to anticipate interaction processes and to evaluate their performance, and thus their sensitivity to context. They can improve performance relative to goals, and can, in certain instances, construct new goals. We contrast self-directedness with reactive action processes that are not modifiable by the agent, though they may be modified by supra-agent processes such as (...) populational adaptation or external design.Self-directedness lies at the nexus of issues concerning the evolution and nature of intentionality, intelligence, and agency. It provides some insight into the evolution of intelligence because it helps explain how organisms are able to manage variable interaction processes, e.g., a hunting strategy that varies with prey type, ground condition, and hunger level. Simple self-directed organisms like bumblebees manage variability in one or a few dimensions. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline a theory of the nature of self-directed agents. What is distinctive about self-directed agents is their ability to anticipate interaction processes and to evaluate their performance, and thus their sensitivity to context. They can improve performance relative to goals, and can, in certain instances, construct new goals. We contrast self-directedness with reactive action processes that are not modifiable by the agent, though they may be modified by supra-agent processes such as (...) populational adaptation or external design. (shrink)

The objective of this work is to demonstrate how cooperative sharers and uncooperative free riders can be placed in different groups of an electronic society in a decentralised manner. We have simulated an agent-based open and decentralised P2P system which self-organises itself into different groups to avoid cooperative sharers being exploited by uncooperative free riders. This approach encourages sharers to move to better groups and restricts free riders into those groups of sharers without needing centralised control. Our approach (...) is suitable for current P2P systems that are open and distributed. Gossip is used as a social mechanism for information sharing which facilitates the formation of groups. Using multi-agent based simulations we demonstrate how the adaptive behaviour of agents lead to self-organisation. We have tested with varying the gossip level and checked its impact in the system’s behaviour. We have also investigated the impact of false gossip in this system where gossip is the medium for information sharing which leads to self-organisation. (shrink)

The paper gives an account of Rāmakaṇṭha’s (950–1000) contribution to the Buddhist–Brāhmaṇical debate about the existence or non-existence of a self, by demonstrating how he carves out middle ground between the two protagonists in that debate. First three points of divergence between the Brāhmaṇical (specifically Naiyāyika) and the Buddhist conceptions of subjectivity are identified. These take the form of Buddhist denials of, or re-explanations of (1) the self as the unitary essence of the individual, (2) the self (...) as the substance to which mental properties belong, (3) the self as the agent of both physical actions and cognitions. The difference of Rāmakaṇṭha’s position from both Nyāya and Buddhism is then elaborated. He posits a self, but not one that is an eternally unchanging substance, nor one that is anything other than consciousness. Hence his difference from Nyāya. He falls with Buddhism in holding that consciousness does not require anything other than itself to inhere in, but departs from Buddhism in holding that consciousness is not momentary but enduring. The guiding metaphor here is light, but light considered as a dynamic, qualitatively unchanging repetition of the action of illumination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 123-125 [Access article in PDF] The Self as Relatum in Life and Language Grant Gillett THE STUDY REPORTED by van Staden is extremely interesting to any psychological theorist influenced by Jacques Lacan because of Lacan's insistence that the unconscious is not only structured like a language but actually reflects and is produced by linguistic interactions between the subject and others.The distinction he (...) draws, on the basis of Frege's analysis of logical and grammatical structure, is not straightforwardly evident on a superficial inspection of the sentences concerned. It is also less clear than the agent-patient or subject-object distinction that one might look for on the basis of considering the action being performed. van Staden makes both of these points in the course of illustrating the relevant deep grammatical property on which the study turns. In doing so he engages with the subtle work on subject and object by Strawson (1959) who was one of the first, in the "descriptive metaphysics" of Individuals, to explore the resonance between what we might call (after Frege) "logical grammar" and the deep metaphysical structure of our thought. Strawson noted that the position of grammatical subject in a sentence was typically occupied by a particular or individual substance rather than the accident or property of a substance so that the subject predicate structure of language reflects a basic feature of our world picture whereby the world is seen to be populated by particular objects that instance universal features.Chomsky is the other player whose thought is important in this area in that he argues that we have an innate sense of deep structure, which allows us to disambiguate any sentence so as to reveal the state of affairs that is being represented. Thus we discern that what is denoted by "John loves Mary" is the same thought as that conveyed by "Mary is loved by John." van Staden focuses on something more general—the deep structure that expresses semantic relations or positions. This is not the same as the agent or the simply grammatical subject and van Staden calls it the owner of the relation involved as distinct from the accident of that relation. The terms are well chosen because ownership is a term a la mode in postmodern thought to express the relationship of a human being to the events and attributes associated with him or her. When we look at this subtle grammatological or semantic feature of language we see that the linguistic feature in question is the kind of thing that could easily be overlooked were it not for a post-Fregean analysis of the type van Staden offers.The content that van Staden identifies in relation to what is signified or represented by an utterance is difficult to characterize. It is not what Frege would call logical content in that it does not contribute to the truth value of any of the propositions concerned. It is also problematic to call it psychological content because it is not part of the conscious message conveyed by the utterance. Nevertheless, the study concerned raises [End Page 123] the possibility that it is psychic in a very significant way, which is best approached by considering the relationships between language and the unconscious.Chomsky is regarded as having defined a number of linguistic operations that take propositional or meaningful content and transform it into the form in which it is uttered. The relevant cognitive operations are usually regarded as being performed by the cognitive unconscious, which in some sense applies the rules of grammar to yield well-formed utterances on the basis of speaker intentions. In any event, nobody would seriously question the idea that there are unconscious operations that underpin the production of grammatically structured utterances.If we add to this the possibility that a more dynamic aspect to the unconscious has a role to play in the semantic content of our utterances, then a fruitful line of thought begins to emerge. The dynamic unconscious has to do with self-image and those influences that form the psyche... (shrink)

I argue that the dichotomous treatment of agency and free will is problematic because it rests on a Cartesian interpretation of self and world that many present-day thinkers take themselves to be denying. I do so in order to reconstruct the concept of human agency using the psychologies of American philosophers John Dewey and George Santayana. Identifying the self with the entire organism, as these thinkers do, allows for an importantly different sense of agency. In embracing an organismic (...) interpretation of the self, we achieve a more realistic yet mitigated sense of agency, where real responsibility for action is placed in a context of biological and environmental (including social, cultural, and historical) influences. (shrink)

How is it that we think and refer in the first-person way? For most philosophers in the analytic tradition, the problem is essentially this: how two apparently conflicting kinds of properties can be reconciled and united as properties of the same entity. What is special about the first person has to be reconciled with what is ordinary about it. The range of responses reduces to four basic options. The orthodox view is optimistic: there really is a way of reconciling these (...) apparently contradictory properties as contained within the same thing. The heretical views are pessimistic and content to be so: there is no such way, and that is because there is simply nothing to reconcile – because there is really nothing special about what is in question; or there is really nothing ordinary about it; or there is really nothing …. (shrink)

The Self-Evidencing Agent offers a unique method for addressing difficult philosophical questions. Self-evidencing occurs when an agent uses their model of the world and of themselves to explain what they observe in the world and in themselves, such that those observations become evidence for their model – the more agents explain, the more they self-evidence. This book argues that there is good reason to cast an agent’s existence itself in terms of self-evidencing, and (...) that if we begin from this as a first principle, then we can make better sense of who and what we are, of how we engage in diverse ways with the world, and what matters to us. Self-evidencing can help situate attention, action, and perception. It also furnishes compelling approaches to decision-making and rationality, the self, of preferences and values. It can build bridges to consciousness, and even on to free will, and to meaning and wisdom. (shrink)

This paper examines Kant’s conception of the self as subject, to show that it points to an understanding of the self as embodied. By considering ways in which the manifold of representations can be unified, different notions of self are identified through the subjective perspectives they define. This involves an examination of Kant’s distinction between subjective and objective unities of consciousness, and the notion of empirical unity of apperception in the first Critique, as well as the discussion (...) of judgements of perception and judgements of experience in the Prolegomena. If this identifies the self as subject through its embodied perspective, it leaves open the question of the self’s existence. The paper proposes an interpretation of Kant’s brief statements on this matter which provides grounds for an existence claim that extends to the embodied self. This suggests considering Kant’s view of the certainty of one’s existence as involving a feeling of self, albeit in a specifically Kantian form drawing on the transcendental unity of apperception. This feeling of self introduces a practical dimension that supports the claim that any determination of the self as subject has to be practical, namely as free agent subject to inclinations, insofar as he is embodied. (shrink)

This paper sketches an account that explains the elusive subjective quality of 'enduring substantiality' of the phenomenal self. It integrates a recent predictive processing account of the self by Chris Letheby and Philip Gerrans with key ideas of Michael Graziano's attention schema theory of consciousness. Similarly to the attention schema theory, the present account posits an internal model of ongoing attentional processing that supports attentional control. In terms of predictive processing, it is a dynamic model of precision estimates (...) that represents the salience of features, objects, and internal and external processes. The apparent substantiality of the self is then explained by a structural feature of this salience model: it binds different dimensions of salience by representations of higher-order dimensions of salience. The result of this salience binding is a phenomenally transparent 'salience object', which is represented as a cause of widespread changes in precision estimates, and results in a form of epistemic self-control. Phenomenologically, this goes along with the experience of the self as an attentional agent, and in this way creates the origin of our consciously experienced first-person perspective: I attend, I am. (shrink)

How is it that we think and refer in the first-person way? For most philosophers in the analytic tradition, the problem is essentially this: how two apparently conflicting kinds of properties can be reconciled and united as properties of the same entity. What is special about the first person has to be reconciled with what is ordinary about it . The range of responses reduces to four basic options. The orthodox view is optimistic: there really is a way of reconciling (...) these apparently contradictory properties as contained within the same thing. The heretical views are pessimistic and content to be so: there is no such way, and that is because there is simply nothing to reconcile – because there is really nothing special about what is in question; or there is really nothing ordinary about it; or there is really nothing …. (shrink)

The ‘seeds’ Thoughts proposed by YU Youngmo and HAM Sukhun may each be summed up by propositions expressed in “People are a May-fly seed” and “Seeds embody the eternal sense”. They used “seed” to refer to humans or people on the one hand and placed the notion of seed in the holistic context of the Eastern Asian tradition on the other. Then, I seek to connect the anthropological notion and the holistic notion via cheng(誠) or integration. Zhungyong-The Doctrine of the (...) Mean, one of 4 Confucian texts, says that the ultimate integration(至誠) is to reflect the total nature of objects involved (盡性) so that it will show that self realization and all other realizations are one and not two(成己成物) and it will ultimately reach the stage of holiness(聖). Important elements of cheng intentionality can be read out of the two thinker’s various conceptual aspects. YU’s interpretation of history to be internalistic, his view of Hangul(Korean written language) as a revelational medium, his hermeneutics of Christian God as the emptiness cannot be understood on the dichotomous model of human-nature. HAM’s seed holism, his beliefs that humans’s minds are the heavenly mind and that all things under the heaven should come to be unified are best to be understood on the model of cheng intentionality of integration. (shrink)

This paper is not so much concerned with the question under which circumstances self-defense is justified, but rather with other normative features of self-defense as well as with the source of the self-defense justification. I will argue that the aggressor’s rights-forfeiture alone – and hence the liberty-right of the defender to defend himself – cannot explain the intuitively obvious fact that a prohibition on self-defense would wrong victims of attack. This can only be explained by conceiving (...) of self-defense also as a claim-right. However, I will also argue that a claim-right cannot ground the self-defense justification either. Rather, what grounds the self-defense justification and its particular strength and scope is the fact that self-defense is an act-specific agent-relative prerogative: a defender is allowed to give particularly grave weight to his interest in engaging in self-defense, which distinguishes self-defense from most other acts. This is not the same as saying that he has a right or a liberty to engage in self-defense. Thus, self-defense, understood as a normative concept, is a claim-right, a liberty-right, and an act-specific agent-relative prerogative. (shrink)

Consequentialism is often criticized for rendering morality too pervasive. One somewhat neglected manifestation of this pervasiveness is the obligatory self-benefit objection. According to this objection, act-consequentialism has the counterintuitive result that certain self-benefitting actions turn out, ceteris paribus, to be morally obligatory rather than morally optional. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, I consider and reject four strategies with which consequentialists might answer the obligatory self-benefit objection. Despite the apparent consequentialist credentials of these answers, none (...) of these strategies is adequate because each fails to justify agents failing to benefit themselves when benefiting themselves would be otherwise required by the imperative that overall good meet a certain threshold. Second, I argue that no plausible consequentialist response to this objection is forthcoming because consequentialism denies the central axiological fact propelling this objection, namely, that the self possesses a normative architecture relating the self as agent and self as patient. This architecture, I propose, justifies the option not to benefit oneself. (shrink)

The central argument of this paper is that compatibilist theories that understand human agent causation as self-determination are consistent with, and can accommodate, important insights from evolutionary and developmental psychology. Agent causation is nothing more than the non-mysterious self-determining capability of persons, understood as embodied, emergent ontological entities whose nature is not fixed due to their uniquely evolved and developed capabilities of language use, cultural construction, self-consciousness and self-understanding, and moral concern. Relevant arguments of (...) Dennett and Searle are adapted to fit within the author's own emergentist, developmental theorizing that treats the self-determining capability of persons as arising within relevant biophysical and sociocultural contexts without being reducible to these contexts. Persons are self-determining in ways that require explanation not only in terms of materialistic efficient causal explanations appropriate to our evolved biophysical nature, but also in terms of final purposive explanations appropriate to our emergence as culture- capable, self-reflective agents, and formal explanations consistent with our evolved and developed nature as particular bio-cultural hybrids. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether in a society where the use of artificial agents is pervasive, these agents should be recognized as having rights like those we accord to group agents. This kind of recognition I understand to be at once social and legal, and I argue that in order for an artificial agent to be so recognized, it will need to meet the same basic conditions in light of which group agents are granted such recognition. I then (...) explore the implications of granting recognition in this manner. The thesis I will be defending is that artificial agents that do meet the conditions of agency in light of which we ascribe rights to group agents should thereby be recognized as having similar rights. The reason for bringing group agents into the picture is that, like artificial agents, they are not self-evidently agents of the sort to which we would naturally ascribe rights, or at least that is what the historical record suggests if we look, for example, at what it took for corporations to gain legal status in the law as group agents entitled to rights and, consequently, as entities subject to responsibilities. This is an example of agency ascribed to a nonhuman agent, and just as a group agent can be described as nonhuman, so can an artificial agent. Therefore, if these two kinds of nonhuman agents can be shown to be sufficiently similar in relevant ways, the agency ascribed to one can also be ascribed to the other—this despite the fact that neither is human, a major impediment when it comes to recognizing an entity as an agent proper, and hence as a bearer of rights. (shrink)

Alfred Mele’s Autonomous Agents offers a penetrating treatment of autonomy. Understood as an actual condition of self-rule, autonomy is nested within the range of freedom concepts often associated with discussions of moral responsibility. In part 1 of his two-part Autonomous Agents, Mele attempts to capture autonomy by exploring the upper reaches of self-control, where self-control is understood as the opposite of akrasia, that is, weakness of will. It is Mele’s contention that even an optimally self-controlled (...) class='Hi'>agent could fall short of autonomy. What, he asks, can be added to an ideally self-controlled agent to provide conditions sufficient for autonomous agency? In part 2, Mele offers not one answer but two. He offers first an account that would satisfy a compatibilist, and then one that would meet the further demands of an incompatibilist. Mele himself remains agnostic as regards the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. He does, however, shape novel accounts of each by exploiting the resources that, he argues, are needed to move past self-control to autonomy. He closes by arguing that we have better reason to believe that there are autonomous agents than we do to believe that there are none. (shrink)

Autonomous Agents addresses the related topics of self-control and individual autonomy. "Self-control" is defined as the opposite of akrasia-weakness of will. The study of self-control seeks to understand the concept of its own terms, followed by an examination of its bearing on one's actions, beliefs, emotions, and personal values. It goes on to consider how a proper understanding of self-control and its manifestations can shed light on personal autonomy and autonomous behaviour. Perspicuous, objective, and incisive throughout, (...) Alfred Mele makes a convincing case for the value of individual autonomy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both Hegel's and Korsgaard's attempts to ground moral obligation in the inherent necessity of committing to being a self‐determining agent fall short of accounting for the full strength of our considered sense of moral obligation. I examine the differences between their accounts in order to show that their efforts suffer from a common inadequacy, namely, overlooking that there are two distinct ways we can value things as self‐determining agents. I maintain that (...) accounting for the actual stringency of moral judgment depends on explaining the superiority of one of these ways of valuing over the other. (shrink)

Passivity experiences in schizophrenia are thought to be due to a failure in a neurocognitive action self-monitoring system . Drawing on the assumption that inner speech is a form of action, a recent model of auditory verbal hallucinations has proposed that AVHs can be explained by a failure in the NASS. In this article, we offer an alternative application of the NASS to AVHs, with separate mechanisms creating the emotion of self-as-agent and other-as-agent. We defend the (...) assumption that inner speech can be considered as a form of action, and show how a number of previous criticisms of applying the NASS to AVHs can be refuted. This is achieved in part through taking a Vygotskian developmental perspective on inner speech. It is suggested that more research into the nature and development of inner speech is needed to further our understanding of AVHs. (shrink)

: To act is to be the author of an intentional bodily movement. I will show that, in order for that authorship to be assured, the agent must both amount to more than the mereological sum of her mental or neural states and events, and have an irreducible causal power over, at least, some of them. Hence, agent-causalism is the best position for any realist about action to assume. I will contend that, contrary to what many have claimed, (...) agent-causalism is not an unscientific theory, since it can ground its view of the agent on a form of emergent dualism that can account for robust forms of agency without having to challenge the natural supervenience of the mental on the physical. I claim that the conditions of possibility for a causally effective emergent self are the presence of neuronal indeterminism and the break of causal closure, both of which will be shown to be compatible with our current scientific picture of the world. Keywords: Action; Self; Emergent Dualism; Downward Causation; Indeterminism Prendere sul serio l’agente: ovvero, come un’attenta analisi dell’agentività ci conduce al dualismo emergentista Riassunto: Agire vuol dire essere l’autore di un movimento corporeo intenzionale. Intendo mostrare che, per assicurarsi il riconoscimento di essere l’autore di un’azione, l’agente debba essere più della semplice somma mereologica dei propri stati mentali ed eventi neurali e che debba anche avere un irriducibile potere causale su di essi, o al limite su parte di essi. Pertanto, una concezione causale riferita all’agente è la migliore posizione da assumere per chi voglia dirsi realista riguardo alle azioni. Intendo affermare che, diversamente a quanto da molti sostenuto, la concezione causale riferita all’agente non sia una teoria non scientifica, dal momento che può fondare la sua concezione dell’agente su una forma di dualismo emergentista in grado di legittimare forme robuste di agentività senza dover mettere in dubbio la sopravvenienza del mentale sul fisico. Indeterminismo neurale e rottura della chiusura causale saranno indicate come condizioni di possibilità per un sé causalmente ed effettivamente emergente e mostrerò come entrambi siano compatibili con l’immagine scientifica del mondo che oggi abbiamo. Parole chiave : Azione; Sé; Dualismo emergentista; Causalità rivolta verso il basso; Indeterminismo. (shrink)

I propose a modal logic that enables to reason about self-regarding and otherregarding motivations in strategic games. This logic integrates the concepts of joint action, belief, individual and group payoff. The first part of the article is focused on self-regarding agents. A self-regarding agent decides to perform a certain action only if he believes that this action maximizes his own personal benefit. The second part of the article explores different kinds of other-regarding motivations such as fairness (...) and reciprocity. Differently from self-regarding agents, other-regarding agents also consider the benefits of their choices for the group. Moreover, their decisions can be affected by their beliefs about other agents' willingness to act for the well-being of the group. The analysis also considers team-directed reasoning, i.e. the mode of reasoning that people use when they take themselves to be acting as members of a group or a team. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of action accept Aristotle’s view that actions involve movements generated by an internal cause. This is reflected in the wide support enjoyed by the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), according to which actions are bodily movements caused by mental states. Some critics argue that CTA suffers from the Problem of Disappearing Agents (PDA), the complaint that CTA excludes agents because it reduces them to mere passive arenas in which certain events and processes take place. Extant treatments of (...) PDA, most notably those of Michael Bratman and David Velleman, interpret the problem as a challenge to CTA’s ability to capture the role of rational capacities like deliberation and reflection in the etiology of human action. I argue that PDA admits of another interpretation, one that arises when we appreciate that the exercise of higher rational capacities in action presupposes possession of a prior lower-level capacity for basic self-movement – the power to initiate and control one’s bodily behavior. Bolstering CTA so that it accommodates richer exercises of practical thought – as Bratman and Velleman do – will not resolve PDA unless CTA already captures this basic agential power. Adequately responding to PDA, therefore, requires answering a question unaddressed by current responses: How do bodily movements caused by sub-agential items like mental states count as movements actively performed by the whole agent? I argue that CTA can answer this question by adopting a normative account of the nature of self-moving agents. On this view, self-moving agents are teleologically constituted, meaning (1) their nature and proper function derives from their characteristic ends and aims, and (2) the nature and proper function of their parts depend on these ends and aims. Basic self-movement consists of movements caused by a sub-agential part whose own proper function is to generate behavior that constitutes or contributes to the pursuit of the agent’s overall proper function. After showing how this picture applies to artifactual and collective agents (i.e., robots and teams), I extend the account to organic agents (human beings) by sketching a broadly Aristotelian picture of the nature of living things. (shrink)

I tend to think of myself as bodily. Probably, so do you. Philosophically this takes some explaining. A candidate explanation is this: The bodily self is a physical agent. Knowledge of oneself as bodily is fundamentally knowledge of oneself as agentive; such knowledge is grounded in both experience of oneself as instantiating a bodily structure that affords a limited range of actions; and experience of oneself as a physical agent that tries to perform a limited range of (...) actions over time. By contrast René Descartes famously argued that all self-knowledge is grounded in, and cannot extend beyond, knowledge of oneself as a mental entity. If correct this would preclude the possibility of any knowledge of a bodily self, for such a thing would ex hypothesi not exist. Accordingly, this dissertation serves a dual purpose: to demonstrate why a Cartesian theory of self-knowledge is no threat to an account of bodily self knowledge; and to provide such an account. This dual purpose is achieved over the course of three chapters. The first chapter will set up the remaining two, by introducing the notion of self-identifying judgements, providing an argument in favour of bodily self knowledge on its basis, and noting two failures of this argument in light of a Cartesian response. The second and third chapter are respective attempts to address these two failures. The second chapter is explicitly concerned with the Cartesian, but is overall devoted to giving an account of the relationship between bodily experience and action. The third chapter is more programmatic, comprising a consistent set of suggestions concerning the sense of agency and its role in an account of bodily self knowledge. (shrink)

Recently, two apparent truisms about self‐control have been questioned in both the philosophical and the psychological literature: the idea that exercising self‐control involves an agent doing something, and the idea that self‐control is a good thing. Both assumptions have come under threat because self‐control is increasingly understood as a mental mechanism, and mechanisms cannot possibly be good or active in the required sense. However, I will argue that it is not evident that self‐control should (...) be understood as a mechanism, suggesting that we might also argue the other way around: if we have independent reason to hold onto the idea that self‐control is inherently good and active, the conclusion might be that self‐control cannot be a mechanism. I will show that Aristotle's original analysis of self‐control actually offers grounds for both assumptions: he took there to be conceptual connections between self‐control and goodness/activity. By examining these connections, I argue that an Aristotelian approach could offer promising leads for a contemporary non‐mechanistic understanding of self‐control as a normative capacity. (shrink)

Andrew Forcehimes and Luke Semrau argue that agent-relative consequentialism is implausible because in some circumstances it classes an act as impermissible yet holds that the outcome of all agents performing that impermissible act is preferable. I argue that their problem is closely related to Derek Parfit's problem of ‘direct collective self-defeat’ and show how Parfit's plausible solution to his problem can be adapted to solve their problem.

Is self-deception something that just happens to us, or is it an intentional action of an agent? This paper discusses intentionalism, a theory claiming that self-deception is intentional behavior that aims to produce a belief that the agent does not share. The agent is motivated by his belief that p (e.g. he is bald) and his desire that not-p (e.g. not to be bald), and if self-deceiving is successful, the agent will end up (...) believing not-p. Opponents of intentionalism raise two different objections: it seems that self-deceiver should then simultaneously hold two incompatible beliefs (namely, that p and not-p), as well as simultaneously intend the deception and be unaware of it. This paper reviews possible answers to anti-intentionalist objections (temporal partitioning, psychological partitioning, and the attentional strategy account) and offers guidelines to strengthen intentionalist claims. (shrink)

Consequentialists are sometimes accused of being unable to accommodate all the ways in which an agent should care about her own integrity. Here it is helpful to follow Stephen Darwall in distinguishing two approaches to moral theory. First, we might begin with the value of states of affairs and then work our way ‘inward’ to our integrity, explaining the value of the latter in terms of their contribution to the value of the former. This is the ‘outside-in’ approach, and (...) Darwall argues that it is well-suited to defending consequentialism. Alternatively, we might begin with the perspective of a virtuous agent's concern for her integrity, and then work our way ‘outward’, building a conception of the value of states of affairs from this perspective. On this ‘inside-out’ account there is a kind of agent-centred concern each agent should have for her own integritysimply because it is her own. The inside-out approach therefore suggests a possible rationale for a non-consequentialist moral theory, in so far as such a fundamental egocentric concern for one's own integrity seems alien to consequentialism's commitment to the agent-neutrality of value. If this is correct then the consequentialist should explain why we should prefer the outside-in approach to its rival. I argue that the consequentialist can meet this challenge. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical analysis of the premises and arguments put forward by the Ius Constitutionale Commune en America Latina project to ground the image of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as an agent of democratic transformation. It highlights three critical aspects: 1. the profile of the Court is constructed by legal scholars relying on self-validation and self-referentiality, 2. that image validates the idea that lawyers and the judiciary are agents of transformation ruling over local (...) spaces from above, thereby discarding people as the central subjects of change and democratization, and 3. the concept of representative democracy becomes a device that secures the self-validating dynamics of the image of the Court as democracy builder. (shrink)

Bernard Williams briefly discusses agent regret in his broader account of moral luck. The present paper first outlines one way to develop Williams’s notion with reference to the unintended harm; it then suggests that agent regret can be counteracted by externalizing the action that caused unintended harm, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of externalization; and then the present paper argues that apology is a mechanism by which a person can externalize an offending action/effect—in that way counteracting agent regret. (...) This function for apology—self-repair—is different from others described in the literature, which address the role of apology in repairing relationships. The present paper describes a nonfictional example, that of a veteran of the U.S. war in Iraq who contacts a family gravely injured by him and his combat unit; the veteran is motivated to contact the family to apologize. The example serves as a prototypical case of agent regret. The example is taken from a recent literature on the clinical psychology of self-inflicted “moral injury”; categorizing this example of moral injury as agent regret also helps broaden our understanding of moral injury as a philosophical category and as a psychological phenomenon. (shrink)

Human beings have the unique ability to consciously reflect on the nature of the self. But reflection has its costs. We can ask what the self is, but as David Hume pointed out, the self, once reflected upon, may be nowhere to be found. The favored view is that we are material beings living in the material world. But if so, a host of destabilizing questions surface. If persons are just a sophisticated sort of animal, then what (...) sense is there to the idea that we are free agents who control our own destinies? What makes the life of any animal, even one as sophisticated as Homo sapiens, worth anything? What place is there in a material world for God? And if there is no place for a God, then what hold can morality possibly have on us--why isn't everything allowed? Flanagan's collection of essays takes on these questions and more. He continues the old philosophical project of reconciling a scientific view of ourselves with a view of ourselves as agents of free will and meaning-makers. But to this project he brings the latest insights of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychiatry, exploring topics such as whether the conscious mind can be explained scientifically, whether dreams are self-expressive or just noise, the moral socialization of children, and the nature of psychological phenomena such as multiple personality disorder and false memory syndrome. What emerges from these explorations is a liberating vision which can make sense of the self, agency, character transformation, and the value and worth of human life. Flanagan concludes that nothing about a scientific view of persons must lead to nihilism. (shrink)

Neural language models (NLMs) are susceptible to producing inconsistent output. This paper proposes a new diagnosis as well as a novel remedy for NLMs' incoherence. We train NLMs on synthetic text corpora that are created by simulating text production in a society. For diagnostic purposes, we explicitly model the individual belief systems of artificial agents (authors) who produce corpus texts. NLMs, trained on those texts, can be shown to aggregate the judgments of individual authors during pre-training according to sentence-wise vote (...) ratios (roughly, reporting frequencies), which inevitably leads to so-called discursive dilemmas: aggregate judgments are inconsistent even though all individual belief states are consistent. As a remedy for such inconsistencies, we develop a self-training procedure—inspired by the concept of reflective equilibrium—that effectively reduces the extent of logical incoherence in a model's belief system, corrects global mis-confidence, and eventually allows the model to settle on a new, epistemically superior belief state. Thus, social choice theory helps to understand why NLMs are prone to produce inconsistencies; epistemology suggests how to get rid of them. (shrink)