Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their explanations of human actions, and they take accept-able teleological (...) explanations of our actions to be causal explanations. Some proponents of the view that human actions are explained teleologically resist this. They regard the causal approach as a rival. I dub this position “anticausalist teleologism,” or AT, for short. I favor the causal approach, but I will not directly argue for it here. My aim is more modest. I will develop a serious problem for AT that strongly suggests that teleologists need causalism; and I will rebut a style of objection to the project of providing a causal analysis of acting in pursuit of a goal that recently resurfaced in the literature on teleological explanations of action, a style of objection featuring a certain kind of causal deviance. (shrink)

Argues for a constraint on a proper theory of motivation – namely, that proper motivational explanations of goal‐directed actions are causal explanations. The chapter criticizes the thesis that acceptable teleological explanations of actions are not causal explanations and it offers a solution to a problem that deviant causal chains pose for a causal theory of action.

How should we conceptualize direct action against climate change? Although direct action is an increasingly significant tactic by the global climate movement, we lack understanding how direct action contributes to the systemic change necessary for addressing the crisis. Drawing upon critical theories of climate change as a crisis in the social reproduction of the metabolic relations between humans and nature in capitalism, I conceptualize direct action as attempts to intervene directly in the (...) organization of the social metabolism, towards reorganizing these relations in a more socially just and ecologically sustainable manner. My framework thus expands and clarifies the scope and potential of direct action as a means of confronting the capitalist climate crisis, as evidenced by Greta Thunberg’s school strike for climate. (shrink)

First published in 1972. Militant protest is not new to British politics, but the widespread recourse to direct action, in Britain and abroad, is unprecedented. This book was the first comprehensive examination of contemporary protest in the British context. The contributors represented leading agencies of protest as well as those academics who had made this phenomenon their special concern. The result is a unique blend of direct experience and objective reflection. The first part of the volume covers (...) the theoretical and historical dimensions of protest, and is followed by a detailed consideration of specific issues. An analysis is then made of the reaction of the State to such protest through legislative and administrative channels. The final part shows the intermediary roles of political parties, MPs, the NCCL and the mass media. The book concludes with a critical examination of the interaction between protest and representative democracy and the implications which arise from it. Students of politics and sociology as well as political activists of all shades of opinion will find this book essential to an understanding of the bases of protest movements. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Investigating Extended Embodiment Using a Computational Model and Human Experimentation” by Yuki Sato, Hiroyuki Iizuka & Takashi Ikegami. Upshot: The target article’s findings on the focus of attention in extending an agent’s body schema are consistent with those in developmental psychology and neuroscience on goal-directed action. The consequences of these findings are that embodiment can be extended in a variety of ways, not all of which require direct physical manipulation.

Human action theory, with its emphasis on intentions and reasons, does little to enhance our understanding of the actions of nonhuman animals. Many animal (and human) actions are directed to objects in the world, including other animals. The notion of directedness can be analysed without attributing intentions or reasons to the agent. An action is directed to object X if and only if: (1) the agent singles out X, either by orientation or by selective performance of the (...) class='Hi'>action in the presence of X; (2) the agent recognizes X as a suitable object; and (3) the goal of the action is that X should be in a certain relation to the agent or to some other object. The goal of an action is not necessarily attributable to the agent as the agent's goal in acting. Moreover, an agent can have a goal in acting without understanding how the action achieves the goal. The usefulness of the concept of directed action in the study of animal communication is illustrated with examples from the recent ethological literature. (shrink)

for human progress to pursue, if it is to be progress at all, who, having such a route on his mind’s map, has endeavored to point it out to others; to make them see it as he sees it; who in so doing has chosen what appeared to him clear and simple expressions to convey his thoughts to others. – to such a one it appears matter for regret and confusion of spirit that the phrase “Direct Action” has suddenly (...) acquired in the general mind a circumscribed meaning, not at all implied in the words themselves, and certainly never attached to it by himself or his co-thinkers. (shrink)

When we consider closely any highly integrated vital process, like embryonic development, or animal behavior of the end-subserving or purposive type, we are inevitably impressed with the importance of those special controlling factors, collectively termed “regulative,” which appear chiefly responsible for the unified and finalistic character of the whole sequence of events. These factors are persistent in their influence although they may act intermittently. Without their presence the sequence would soon lose coördination and “run wild,” just as an automobile runs (...) off the road unless occasional compensating touches are given to the steering wheel. They are the factors which give unity and direction to the total process. Generalizing, we may say that in any complex unified process, especially a synthetic one—where the progress is from less to greater complexity—integration seems always to imply or presuppose the operation of regulative factors having the character which we call directive. These keep the sequence of events to a definite course which in the living organism usually terminates in some outcome having special biological significance, or survival value. (shrink)

Most nonviolent resistance is a species of collective political action and therefore a form of collective power. In many cases, the use of power in nonviolent action is best characterized as a kind of intelligently used coercion. How then should ethicists think about the norms that govern the use of coercion in nonviolent actions? This essay critically examines the answers provided by the early Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey. Both analyzed nonviolent resistance in similar ways: they distinguished nonviolent (...) action from pacifism, noticed its coercive element demands justification, and sought to develop ethical norms to understand these forms of political action. Taken together, this essay suggests that Niebuhr and Ramsey can be interpreted as members of a non-pacifist tradition of theorizing nonviolence that suggests an unlikely convergence between theorists of nonviolent action and theorists sympathetic to just war thought. (shrink)

Despite being a common phenomenon with significant consequences on our everyday life, strikes (and direct actions in general) are still relatively undertheorized in the philosophical literature. Our paper has a specific focus that is best encapsulated in a question: What is the relationship between liberalism and the right to strike? Liberalism’s cornerstone is the idea that rights and liberties of individuals are of supreme political importance. Rights and liberties, however, are not created equal. The basic liberties are those that (...) are so politically important that legal restrictions upon them are unjustified unless to protect other basic liberties within an overall scheme of liberties, such as under a bill of rights. So, our question becomes: Is the right to strike a basic liberty? Two ongoing disputes are relevant here. The ‘older’ debate concerns the status of economic liberties and their relation to the right to strike. We will focus on a ‘newer’ discussion because it poses a challenge to liberalism itself. Namely, some ‘radical’ critics of liberalism (Gourevitch, Raekstad and Rossi) have argued that there are rights that involve coercing others, exercised during strikes or engagement in other direct action, that do not qualify as liberal basic liberties and that can sometimes take normative precedence over the liberal basic liberties. This criticism, if correct, defeats liberalism. Notice, though: since the weighing of different particular basic liberties against each other in an overall scheme of liberty is integral to high liberalism, the genuine threat that the radical critique poses stems not from the second conjunct (which its proponents have defended) but from its first (which they have merely assumed). For, if (contrary to what the radical work assumes) the right to engage in coercive strike action is a liberal basic liberty then it can, at least in principle, win out over other basic liberties, within an overall scheme of liberties, in situations of prima facie moral conflict. Raekstad and Rossi extend the radical critique, beyond the case of coercive strikes, to other forms of direct action (outside of industrial disputes) that have avowedly moral or political goals. These could include workplace occupations, street blockades, hacktivism, counter-economics, tax resistance and more. In the paper we argue that the ‘radicals’ are not entitled to the assumption that the right to strike is not a liberal basic liberty. Moreover, we suggest, high liberalism has the resources to accommodate not only a general right to engage in non-coercive strike action, but also the right to engage in some forms of coercive direct action, whether as part of an industrial dispute or not. More precisely, we show that liberalism has the resources to accommodate not only (i) a general right to engage in non-coercive strike action, but also (ii) the right to engage in some forms of coercive direct action, whether (iii) as part of an industrial dispute or (iv) not. (shrink)

Humanities advocates focus on demonstrating the humanities’ value to encourage participation. This advocacy is largely done through institutional means, and rarely taken directly to the public. This article argues that by reframing the theory of Direct Action, humanities advocates can effectively engage the public. The article begins by exploring three different understandings of the humanities: that they develop good citizenship, that they develop understanding, and that they develop critical thought. The article then discusses what Direct Action (...) is and how it works. The article concludes by describing how to reframe Direct Action to suit the needs of the humanities, including potential actions that will achieve those ends. Humanities Direct Action must be seen as a debate and will focus on increasing critical thinking. (shrink)

Recent social science research indicates that animal rights philosophy plays the functional role of a religion in the lives of the most committed animal rights advocates. In this paper, I apply the functional religion thesis to the recent debate over the place of direct action animal rights advocacy in democratic theory. I outline the usefulness of the functional religion thesis and explain its implications for theorists that call for deliberative theories to be more inclusive of coercive forms of (...) activism. (shrink)

What concrete actions might a change-minded teacher take? This is the question driving How to Fix Education. -/- An uncanny anticipation fills the halls of American higher education today. It is the sense that a reckoning is coming. Whether it is the case that higher education is in the teeth of a catastrophic crisis or only headed in that direction, many college professors, administrators, and students can no longer stave off their suspicion that something is seriously amiss. -/- In How (...) to Fix Education, Glenn Wallis argues that consequential action can be taken immediately in the classroom to put the humanity back in “the humanities.” In this succinct handbook he provides the logic and layout of an approach for instructors who want to enact larger-scale social changes with or without institutional change at the macro level. (shrink)

Over the last few decades there has emerged a small, yet influential eco-Buddhism movement in South Korea which, since the turn of the millennium, has seen several S?n Buddhist clerics engage in high-profile protests and activism campaigns opposing massive development projects which threatened widespread ecological destruction. This article will survey the issues and events surrounding three such protests; the 2003 samboilbae, or ‘threesteps- one-bow’, march led by Venerable Suky?ng against the Saemangeum Reclamation Project, Venerable Jiyul’s Anti-Mt. Ch?ns?ng tunnel hunger-strike campaign (...) between 2002 and 2006, and lastly Venerable Munsu’s self-immolation protesting the Four Rivers Project in 2010. This article will additionally analyze the attempts by these clerics to deploy innovative and distinctively Buddhist forms of protest, the effects of these protests, and how these protests have altered public perceptions of the role of Buddhist clergy in Korean society. This study will additionally highlight issues relevant to the broader discourse regarding the intersection of Buddhism and social activism, such as the appropriation of traditional Buddhist practices as protest tactics and the potential for conflict between social engagement and the pursuit of Buddhist soteriological goals. (shrink)

Theories of grounded and embodied cognition offer a range of accounts of how reasoning and body‐based processes are related to each other. To advance theories of grounded and embodied cognition, we explore the cognitive relevance of particular body states to associated math concepts. We test competing models of action‐cognition transduction to investigate the cognitive relevance of directed actions to students’ mathematical reasoning in the area of geometry. The hypotheses we test include (1) that cognitively relevant directed actions have a (...) direct effect on performance (direct cognitive relevance hypothesis), (2) that cognitively relevant directed actions lead to more frequent production of gestures during explanations, which leads to improved performance (mediated cognitive relevance hypothesis), and (3) that performance effects of directed actions are influenced by the presence or absence of gesture production during mathematical explanations (moderated cognitive relevance hypothesis). We explore these hypotheses in an experiment where high school students (N = 85) evaluated the truth of geometry conjectures after performing cognitively relevant or cognitively irrelevant directed actions while playing a movement‐based video game. Contrary to the direct and mediated cognitive relevance hypotheses, we found no overall differences in performance or gesture production between relevant and irrelevant conditions. Consistent with the moderated cognitive relevance hypothesis, cognitive relevance influenced mathematical performance, as measured by the accuracy of students’ intuitions, insights, and the validity of their proofs, provided that students produced certain kinds of gestures during mathematical explanations (i.e., with explanatory gestures as the moderator). Implications for theories of grounded and embodied cognition and the design of embodied forms of educational interventions are discussed. (shrink)

Humans' spatial representations enable navigation and reaching to targets above the ground plane, even without direct perceptual support. Such abilities are inconsistent with an impoverished representation of the third dimension. Features that differentiate humans from most terrestrial animals, including raised eye height and arms dedicated to manipulation rather than locomotion, have led to robust metric representations of volumetric space.

In her highly influential 1984 study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker speculates that opposition to legal abortion among women was likely to be strongest among those who were full-time homemakers without a college education. But despite a marked decline in that demographic group and a well-documented rise in public support for gender equality since then, the rate of support for legal abortion has remained stubbornly fixed at between fifty and fifty-five percent. This tepid support has coincided with (...) a steep decline in abortion services in rural states, and ever more sweeping restrictions on abortion being tested in the courts. Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion and Katie Watson's Scarlet A both seek to address this state of affairs, albeit in markedly different ways. Haugeberg provides a historical chronicle of the motives and strategies of certain key women activists in the fight against legal abortion, with an eye toward how their concerns “came to serve as blueprints to legislators and judges who continue to craft policies and laws that erode women's right to abortion”. Katie Watson draws upon her experience as an attorney and bioethicist to write a guide “intended to encourage and equip you to engage in respectful, productive, private conversation about your experience with, and opinion of, abortion”. Though both authors reveal their support for legal abortion, both are concerned to understand the motives and goals of those who fight against it. (shrink)

When doctors become aware of a threat to public health, they have a professional duty to try to mitigate the threat. Climate change is a recognized major threat to planetary and public health that...

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weighted in classical psychological theories, but their role in generating eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotor intentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study, the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e. the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location, and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience, is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developed where a pair of faces moved systematically across a (...) screen. In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon as the participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, preventing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experiment suggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye movement intentions in a way that allows for mismatches between planned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing target to be consciously experienced during decision-making. (shrink)

Four issues that build on the ideas offered by Tomasello et al. are discussed: the developmental course of shared intentionality and its relation to other developing abilities and experiences, and the conceptualization of three key features of the process: motivation, plans and the development of planning, and culture.

This paper explores what happens to the identity of self when entering a place of protest, and what happens to it on leaving. In short, it explores the relations between identities of self and place. Acknowledging the presence of a multiplicity of identities in relation to both notions, it examines the ways in which aspects of the self influence place, and conversely, how aspects of place influence the self. By using empirical examples from Environmental Direct Action, the paper (...) follows Casey in arguing for the co-constitution of self- and place-identities. It offers two notions: the spatial division of self-identity, and the rhizomatic self, to further understanding of how the where effects whom we are. (shrink)

This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children. While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or (...) desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same. (shrink)

Spatial region concepts such as “front,” “back,” “left,” and “right” reflect our typical interaction with space, and the corresponding surrounding regions have different statuses in memory. We examined the representation of spatial directions in the auditory space, specifically in how far natural response actions, such as orientation movements toward a sound source, would affect the categorization of egocentric auditory space. While standing in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants were presented acoustic stimuli coming from the loudspeakers in (...) randomized order, and verbally described their directions by using the concept labels “front,” “back,” “left,” “right,” “front-right,” “front-left,” “back-right,” and “back-left.” Response actions varied in three blocked conditions: (1) facing front, (2) turning the head and upper body to face the stimulus, and (3) turning the head and upper body plus pointing with the hand and outstretched arm toward the stimulus. In addition to a protocol of the verbal utterances, motion capture and video recording generated a detailed corpus for subsequent analysis of the participants’ behavior. Chi-square tests revealed an effect of response condition for directions within the left and right sides. We conclude that movement-based response actions influence the representation of auditory space, especially within the sides’ regions. Moreover, the representation of auditory space favors the front and the back regions in terms of resolution, which is possibly related to the physiological characteristics of the human auditory system, as well as to the ecological requirements of action control in the different regions. (shrink)

In the past couple of decades, there were a few major attempts to establish the thesis of pragmatic infringement – that a significant pragmatic ingredient figures significantly in the truth-conditions for knowledge-ascriptions. As candidates, epistemic contextualism and Relativism flaunted conversational standards, and Stanley's SSI promoted stakes. These conceptions were propelled first and foremost by obviously pragmatic examples of knowledge ascriptions that seem to require a pragmatic component in the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions in order to be accounted for. However, if (...) such examples can be adequately explained purely pragmatically, the need that such examples seem to invoke in such a pragmatic component is undermined. Here I lay out a new pragmatic account – of action-directed pragmatics, offering a different account of such examples and their pragmatic flavor. If adequate, it obviates the above need for pragmatic enrichment. Specifically, I develop and I argue for a well-entrenched pragmatic feature – that of a steering role. The assertions of knowledge ascriptions and their denials as well as of simple assertions (that don't invoke knowledge) play a pragmatic role of steering audiences in joint deliberational setups toward, or away from, the speaker's preferred action (as well as in assertions of 'I am sure', of epistemic modals, taste assertions, causal assertions, and more.) Various features and consequences of this account are drawn. Specifically, I explain why in the bank example (and related ones) the husband, in denying the knowledge ascription, neither lies nor misleads. (shrink)

Studying social phenomena is often assumed to be inherently different from studying natural science phenomena. In psychology, this assumption has led to a division of the field into social and experimental domains. The same kind of division has carried over into ecological psychology, despite the fact that Gibson clearly intended his theory for both social and natural phenomena. In this paper, we argue that the social/natural science dichotomy can be derived from a distinction between hermeneutics and science that is deeply (...) rooted in the atomistic, structuralist ontological tradition. We show that, from a process-based perspective, the central questions of hermeneutics (action of an individual within a context of possible actions), ecological psychology (behavior of an organism in an ecological niche) and physics (motion of a particle in a field) share a similar structure. Building on these ideas, we propose a common, process-based methodology for psychology that integrates field theory with insights from quantum mechanics to accommodate traditionally problematic concepts in natural science such as teleology and values. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, empirical findings on the paradigmatic problem of prospective control (such as gaze control in automobile driving in relation to perceptual tuning) are presented. (shrink)

Standard dual-process models in the action domain postulate that stimulus-driven processes are responsible for suboptimal behavior because they take them to be rigid and automatic and therefore the default. We propose an alternative dual-process model in which goal-directed processes are the default instead. We then transfer the dual- process logic from the action domain to the emotion domain. This reveals that emotional behavior is often attributed to stimulus-driven processes. Our alternative model submits that goal-directed processes could be the (...) primary determinant of emotional behavior instead. We evaluate the type of empirical evidence required for validating our model and we consider implications of our model for behavior change, encouraging strategies focused on the expectancies and values of action outcomes. (shrink)