No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Must There Be Basic Action? *
Abstract
Dependence, mediacy, and complexity are abstract concepts, as are their complementary opposites, independence, immediacy, and simplicity. The determinate conception we have to do with here is of an instrumentally or teleologically basic action: very roughly, an action is basic in this sense when no means are taken in its execution, or equally, when it is not the end of any other action. The concept figures in the description of the structure of getting something done, specifically of getting something done on purpose or intentionally, and thus also in the description of the agent's point of view on the structure of his own efficacy. The agent so depicted understands himself as doing whatever he does through the performance of basic actions, with all the rest derived from these. Means-end rationality expands our sphere of influence and massively extends our reach—there are flags on the moon and at the bottom of the sea!—but it is precisely at the inner limit of this teleological order that a rational agent's power to make a dent in things is genuinely displayed. Where means-end rationality comes to a close, efficacy genuinely begins: this is where the conceptual rubber is supposed to hit the material road, in the things one does without thought about how they get done. Sometimes it is said there is a spark of the divine in this. My own view is the opposite, that there is at best only a shadow of the brute.2
... The general lesson Davidson draws here is that "we never move more than our bodies, the rest is up to nature" (2001a, p. 59). This is a counterintuitive and, in a sense that his later critics elaborate on at length, alienating way of thinking about action -one which places the agent at a remove from the worldly processes by which her actions get done and casts the real action as something other than the familiar, worldly events that agents typically take themselves to be participating in (see, e.g., Hornsby, 2008;Lavin, 2013;Wiesman, 2017, 21-23). Nonetheless, since basic actions turn out to be intentional under some description, they meet the rational standards that are normative for human action (they are done for an agent's reasons, in the service of her ends). ...
... As Ford (2018) notes, the Davidsonian emphasis on finding the physical event that constitutes the agent's intentional action has a tendency to impel body-bound, "corporalist", or internalising, "volitionalist" (see, e.g., Hornsby, 1980) views of the structure of human agency. This argument, developed over this and several other articles (Ford, 2014(Ford, , 2015; see also Steward, 2000;Hornsby, 2004;Lavin, 2013Lavin, , 2015Valaris, 2015) is echoed by the case made above (in §4). As Ford notes, the logic of the Davidsonian A-D Principle is compelling here: if the action is identical with some independently specifiable movement, these must at least include those of the body; but if they include more than the body, then the body's movements considered alone are not the action. ...
The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) casts human cognition as constitutively dependent on its bodily and environmental context. Drawing on recent empirical work on ‘cognitive offloading’, HEC’s defenders claim that information processing offloaded onto such brain-external resources is sometimes ‘genuinely’ cognitive. But while debates about offloading have a high profile in philosophy of cognitive science, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fact that paradigm cases of offloading are intentional actions. As a result, opposition to HEC is driven in part by unarticulated intuitions about the metaphysics of human agency. Thinking of action as a kind of interface between separately constituted intentions and bodily movements can make HEC look problematic. But while this view of agency has been popularised – most prominently by Donald Davidson – as analytic philosophy of action’s ‘standard story’, it has come under pressure from philosophers influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe’s very different account. According to this, actions express an agent’s intention only in so far as they fit into the right kind teleologically structured worldly context. In this paper, I’ll argue that HEC’s supporters should adopt an Anscombean model of action. That is, they should understand cognitive offloading as a manifestation of human agency’s general dependence on its bodily and environmental setting.
... 21 As in, e.g., (Danto 1965). For skepticism about basic actions, see, e.g., (Lavin 2013). My point requires not that there are any basic actions, but that some agents believe that there are basic actions-or, more specifically, that there are some action types that one can only perform as basic actions. ...
... 73 Compare Danto (1965). Whether there are basic actions is controversial (see Lavin 2013), but that some philosophers believe in them is not. 74 I thank an anonymous referee for raising this point. ...
This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure (as I call it) pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my (in)action that apparently made me irrational. What, then, should Mentalists say about the phenomenon of execution failure? The phenomenon of execution failure, and the puzzle it raises for Mentalists, have rarely been discussed. This paper addresses the puzzle in two parts. First, it argues (against John Broome) that execution failure is a real phenomenon. It is possible for agents to irrationally fail to act on their present-directed intentions. It follows that Mentalists in the philosophy of action must solve the puzzle of explaining what is irrational about cases of execution failure. Second, this paper begins the search for such a solution. It considers six possible resolutions to the puzzle, arguing that none is obviously the most attractive. These resolutions include a requirement of overall conative consistency, an appeal to the norm of intention consistency, a form of Volitionalism, an appeal to factive mental states, and a proposal due to Garrett Cullity, and a novel requirement of proper functioning.
... Frequent and repeated exposure to information and knowledge can increase an individual's knowledge both from their own experience and from the experience of others. Knowledge forms the basis for an individual to act (Rahmad et al., 2023;Lavin, 2013). ...
Background: After the covid-19 pandemic, adolescent Integrated Health Centre (IHC) activities in Sampang Regency decreased drastically, both in quantity and quality. Factors related to this problem are the lack of adolescent participation, accompanied by the lack of ability of adolescent IHC cadres to perform their duties. Adolescent IHC is preventive efforts to prevent incidents of stunting.Objective: The study aimed to measure the effect of "AKSI GERCEPS" training on nutrition knowledge among adolescent IHC cadres in Sampang Regency.Methods: : Study quasi-experimental use one-group pretest-posttest design. The research was conducted in Sampang Regency in December 2023. The sample consisted of 72 people, selected using a purposive sampling method representing 12 locus villages stunting. The research variable is the effect of "AKSI GERCEPS" training on increasing the nutritional knowledge of adolescent IHC cadres. Data analysis used the T-test. Results: Mean scores before and after training were significantly different (p=0,000). At the end of the training, the participants' average score increased to 6,58, whereas before the training was 2,55. The knowledge of adolescent cadres who had previously received nutrition education was also significantly different from that of those who had never received nutrition education (p=0,000). After the training, cadres who had received nutrition education had an average score of 1,78 higher.Conclusion: Cadres knowledge of nutrition increased after the training. Nutrition training for adolescents needs to be carried out continuously, to be able to provide optimal service.
... Frequent and repeated exposure to information and knowledge can increase an individual's knowledge both from their own experience and from the experience of others. Knowledge forms the basis for an individual to act (Rahmad et al., 2023;Lavin, 2013). ...
Background: After the covid-19 pandemic, adolescent Integrated Health Centre (IHC) activities in Sampang Regency decreased drastically, both in quantity and quality. Factors related to this problem are the lack of adolescent participation, accompanied by the lack of ability of adolescent IHC cadres to perform their duties. Adolescent IHC is preventive efforts to prevent incidents of stunting. Objective: The study aimed to measure the effect of "AKSI GERCEPS" training on nutrition knowledge among adolescent IHC cadres in Sampang Regency. Methods: : Study quasi-experimental use one-group pretest-posttest design. The research was conducted in Sampang Regency in December 2023. The sample consisted of 72 people, selected using a purposive sampling method representing 12 locus villages stunting. The research variable is the effect of "AKSI GERCEPS" training on increasing the nutritional knowledge of adolescent IHC cadres. Data analysis used the T-test. Results: Mean scores before and after training were significantly different (p=0,000). At the end of the training, the participants' average score increased to 6,58, whereas before the training was 2,55. The knowledge of adolescent cadres who had previously received nutrition education was also significantly different from that of those who had never received nutrition education (p=0,000). After the training, cadres who had received nutrition education had an average score of 1,78 higher. Conclusion: Cadres knowledge of nutrition increased after the training. Nutrition training for adolescents needs to be carried out continuously, to be able to provide optimal service.
... We think it's clear that (i) is often satisfied. Often when people try to do things, they intentionally try to do them (in the primary way): people 24 For discussion see, e.g., Danto (1965), Goldman (1970), Davidson (1971), Hornsby (1980, Ch. 5-6), Thompson (2008), Lavin (2013), Amaya (2017), Ludwig (2016, Ch. 6.1, 6.6), Kelley (2024a). 25 This characterization is a standard "teleological" conception of basic action, with one important caveat: it treats basicness adverbially-as a way of doing things-rather than as a property of token doings (i.e., particular doings). ...
An action is agentially perfect if and only if, if a person tries to perform it, they succeed, and, if a person performs it, they try to. We argue that trying itself is agentially perfect: if a person tries to try to do something, they try to do it; and, if a person tries to do something, they try to try to do it. We show how this claim sheds new light on questions about basic action, the logical structure of intentional action, and the notion of “options” in decision theory. On the way to these central ideas, we argue that a person can try to do something even if they believe it is impossible that they will succeed, that a person can try to do something even if they do not want to succeed, and that a person can try to do something even if they do not intend to succeed.
... A ideia é parecida: da possibilidade de localizar infinitas potenciais ações básicas em uma ação, a própria noção de ação básica perde sentido. Essa proposta foi defendida por Michael Thompson (2008) e Douglas Lavin (2013). Thompson (2008, p. 107-108, tradução nossa) clarifica a proposta com um exemplo: ...
Neste artigo discuto aspectos da proposta Intelectualista sobre know-how a partir de uma perspectiva informada por tópicos da Filosofia da Ação. A tese central do Intelectualista é que há um conhecimento proposicional necessário e suficiente para a instanciação de know-how. Na primeira seção, apresento a argumentação em favor desta tese, a partir de características linguísticas, sintáticas e semânticas, das atribuições de know-how (“S sabe como ?”). Fundamentalmente, será relevante a identificação do tipo de proposição conhecida pelos indivíduos que possuem know-how. Esse tipo de proposição terá a forma geral: “M é um modo para S ?”. Na segunda seção, mostro como essa proposição é idêntica às proposições instrumentais discutidas em Filosofia da Ação. A partir dessa aproximação, apresento na terceira seção a dificuldade que a proposta Intelectualista terá para explicar instanciações de know-how de ações básicas, pois esse tipo de ação não figura adequadamente no tipo de proposição destacada pelo Intelectualista. Por fim, na quarta seção, motivo a tese de que know-how é um termo ambíguo, há uma dimensão teórica do know-how que é adequadamente capturada pela proposta Intelectualista, mas há uma dimensão prática do know-how, intimamente relacionada à execução de ações, que não é contemplada por essa proposta.
... Clearly, Ananya's kick is voluntary on this understanding of voluntariness, as well. 23 See, e.g., Lavin (2013) and Small (2019) for difficulties in establishing that basic action in particular is properly connected to the agent as a whole. 24 See, e.g., Paglieri (2013) and Chadha (2017) for arguments that there is no sense of agency at all. a productive means is minimally not a constitutive means and the relation between the productive means and the intentional action it is a means to is causation. ...
Some actions we perform “just like that” without taking a means, e.g., raising your arm or wiggling your finger. Other actions—the nonbasic actions—we perform by taking a means, e.g., voting by raising your arm or illuminating a room by flipping a switch. A nearly ubiquitous view about nonbasic action is that one's means to a nonbasic action constitutes the nonbasic action, as raising your arm constitutes voting or flipping a switch constitutes illuminating a room. In this paper, I challenge this view. I argue that one's means to a nonbasic action can cause rather than constitute it. In the process, we gain a clearer understanding of the scope of our agency—one that includes mental actions such as judgment and decision—and the pluralistic nature of basic features of action including control, purposefulness, and agent participation.
... We started with the idea that Sally does not know what she is doing by having evidence of what she is doing, i.e. for example by watching herself do it. Lavin (2013), following Anscombe, calls the knowledge that Sally has of her activities 'non-observational'. Yet, the question arises: can Sally know what John is doing in this way? ...
For Anscombe a solitary activity is intentional if the agent has self-knowledge of what she is doing. Analogously one might think that to partake in shared intentional activities is for the agents involved to have plural or collective self-knowledge of what they are doing together. I call this ‘the Plural Practical Knowledge Thesis’ (PPK). While some authors have advanced related theses about the nature of the knowledge involved in shared practical activities (see Laurence, B. [2011]. “An Anscombian Approach to Collective Action.” In Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, edited by Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland. Cambridge: Harvard UP; Schmid, H.-B. [2016]. “On Knowing What We Are Doing Together.” In The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives, edited by Michael S. Brady, and Miranda Fricker. Oxford: Oxford UP; Rödl, S. [2015]. “Joint Action and Recursive Consciousness of Consciousness.” Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 14: 769–779. doi:10.1007/s11097-015-9423-1; Rödl, S. [2018a]. “Joint Action and Pure Self-Consciousness.” Journal of Social Philosophy 49 (1): 124–136; Rödl, S. [2018b]. Self-Consciousness and Objectivity. Cambridge: Harvard UP) this alternative remains relatively underexplored in the current literature. The paper offers an account of plural practical knowledge based on the idea that shared activities of the relevant sort share a normative structure given by practical, means-end structures and proposes a paradigmatic methodology that generalizes this account to understand what different cases of collective intentional action have in common. It then discusses the differences between the proposed approach and those due to Schmid 2016. “On Knowing What We Are Doing Together.” In The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives, edited by Michael S. Brady, and Miranda Fricker. Oxford: Oxford UP and Laurence 2011. “An Anscombian Approach to Collective Action.” In Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, edited by Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland. Cambridge: Harvard UPand the reasons why it should be preferred.
... There is currently a debate in Anscombe-inspired action theory on precisely this question. See e.g., Thompson (2008), Lavin (2013) and Hornsby (2013). What Hornsby argues for, which seems plausible to me, is that both telic action and non-telic activity are needed for a complete picture of intentional agency. ...
When spontaneous expressions such as smiling or crying have been at issue in Anglophone philosophy of action, the touchstone has been Donald Davidson’s belief-desire account of action. In this essay, I take a different approach. I use Elizabeth Anscombe’s formal conception of intentional action to capture the distinction and unity between intentional action and spontaneous expression. Anscombe’s strategy is to restrict her inquiry to the class of acts to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ has application. Applying Anscombe’s strategy to an area she did not consider other than by contrast, I argue that spontaneous expressions are subject to a different but intimately related why-question. Both questions elicit non-observational knowledge. But where the question posed to intentional actions opens up a means-end order (an order of practical reasoning) this is not true of the corresponding question for spontaneous expressions. Our explanations of our own spontaneous expressions have conceptual and normative dimensions, but they do not display an inferential order. Anscombe, taking a formulation from Aquinas, describes practical knowledge as the cause of what it understands. I conclude by arguing that this formulation also holds true of our understanding of our own smiles and episodes of crying.
... cit.) 26 An alternative approach is to deny that any action is basic -that all acts are performed by means of some other act. (Thompson, 2008;Lavin, 2013) The pressure towards this view, as I see it, arises from a combination of the desire to preserve the mindedness of action with the commitment that mind can only be present in action via the purposive structure of means to end. The account of ways of acting I propose suggests a way out of this dilemma of either denying the intelligence of basic action, or denying basic action altogether. ...
In The Concept of Mind and the earlier Presidential Address, Gilbert Ryle posed the question, What is it for qualities of mind to be displayed in an agent’s overt behaviour? This thesis takes up this Rylean question concerning the relation between the mental and embodied physical action. I understand the question as asking primarily about the psychological explanation of action — what kinds of psychological states causally explain features of an agent’s behaviour in such a way as to justify the characterisation of that behaviour as intelligent. Following a recent proposal by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, I explore and defend the view that intelligent action is action guided by knowledge of ways of acting. However, I depart from Stanley and Williamson in claiming that this knowledge is non essentially propositional. I make a case for an ineliminable role for nonpropositional, acquaintance-like knowledge of ways of acting in psychological explanations of action.
... Davidson, the influential architect of the causal theory, takes the question of 13. For further discussion of this tendency in the literature, see Lavin (2013). 14. ...
... Classical papers on the notion of a basic action are Danto (1965) and Davidson (2001Davidson ( , originally published 1971. See Lavin (2013) and Ford (2014) for critical perspectives on the basic/non-basic distinction. ...
In this article I argue that the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts needs examination, not just in its details but in its philosophical standing. We need to consider whether the distinction is motivated by (sometimes unwittingly) assumed problematic philosophical assumptions concerning the nature of our dependence on the words of others and the rationality of speech reception. Working with an example of the act of telling, I argue against the idea that the distinction is self-evident or easy to draw. By developing an analogy with perception, I argue further that defending the distinction requires one to engage in an argumentative dialectic with powerful alternative positions. I end by suggesting that taking the challenge further would require us to look more closely at how passivity and rationality might be reconciled in the reception of speech.
... Complex actions are actions that have other actions as their components or antecedents, whereas basic actions are those that do not. The distinction between basic and complex action is crucial to the metaphysics of action (Lavin 2013; see also Sandis 2010; Hornsby 2013). However, here we do not engage with the debate about metaphysical basicness. ...
There is a view on consciousness that has strong intuitive appeal and empirical support: the intermediate-level theory of consciousness, proposed mainly by Ray Jackendoff and by Jesse Prinz. This theory identifies a specific “intermediate” level of representation as the basis of human phenomenal consciousness, which sits between high-level non-perspectival thought processes and low-level disjointed feature-detection processes in the perceptual and cognitive processing hierarchy. In this article, we show that the claim that consciousness arises at an intermediate-level is true of some cognitive systems, but only in virtue of specific constraints on their active interactions with the environment. We provide ecological reasons for why certain processing levels in a cognitive hierarchy are privileged with respect to consciousness. We do this from the perspective of a prediction-error minimization model of perception and cognition, relying especially on the notion of active inference: the privileged level for consciousness depends on the specific dispositions of an organism concerned with inferring its policies for action. Such a level is indeed intermediate for humans, but this depends on the spatiotemporal resolution of the typical actions that a human organism can normally perform. Thus, intermediateness is not an essential feature of consciousness. In organisms with different action dispositions the privileged level or levels may differ as well.
... The alternative tradition in the philosophy of action which rejects these assumptions is primarily represented by Elizabeth Anscombe (1957), but has in recent times received much renewed attention, and has been further developed by, e.g., Moran (2004), Thompson (2008), Marcus (2012) and Lavin (2013). Roughly, the idea behind these accounts is that intentional action is action of which agents know that they are doing it and why: they can answer the so-called "why-question", or the "Anscombean question", as Railton (2009) calls it. ...
Much of the time, human beings seem to rely on habits. Habits are learned behaviours directly elicited by context cues, and insensitive to short-term changes in goals: therefore they are sometimes irrational. But even where habitual responses are rational (contributing to current goal fulfillment), it can seem as if they are nevertheless not done for reasons. For, on a common understanding of habitual behaviour, agents’ intentions do not play any role in the coming about of such responses. This paper discusses under what conditions we can say that habitual responses are, after all, done for reasons. We show how the idea that habitual behaviour cannot be understood as ‘acting for reasons’ stems from a widely but often implicitly held theoretical framework: the causal theory of action. We then propose an alternative, Anscombean understanding of intentional action, which can account for habitual responses being done for reasons.
... Alternatively, Parsons (1990) tries to introduce the temporality on the basic level by showing how the aspectual contrast can be treated within a broadly Davidsonian treatment of the logical form of action sentences. For a critical discussion of the former strategy see Lavin 2013. 150) If it is to be true that I crossed the street, my being on the other side must be the result of activity that was properly described by the correlated imperfective as long as it was present. ...
The literature on agentive or practical knowledge tends to be focused on knowing what one is doing or what one is going to do. Knowing what one has done and has achieved thereby seems to be another matter. In fact, achievements are often taken to be beyond the ken of practical knowledge. I argue that this is a mistake. The intelligibility of the very idea of practical knowledge depends on the possibility of knowing one's achievements in the same manner. For if it is to be intelligible as knowledge of the actuality of one's action in the material world, knowing what one is doing has to include knowledge of what one has done so far.
... Naturally, such atomism in the philosophy of action is susceptible to criticism. It is not only dubious that the 'element' described as a basic action should be considered as fully-fledged intentional action (see Lavin, 2013). One may also suspect that this approach has had far-reaching consequences for how we conceive human agency as such. ...
It is probably not a big exaggeration to say that contemporary philosophy of action (or: action theory), especially the one from the analytic tradition, has been shaped by the work of G. E. M. Anscombe and Donald Davidson. So, if we abstract from the Aristotelian, Humean, or Kantian roots and inspirations, it is rather plain that action theory does not have a long tradition. Nevertheless , I believe that it would be unjust oversimplification to say that Anscombe and Davidson were the only 'founding parents' of action theory. Among those who contributed to its development in no less degree is Tadeusz Kotarbiński. This is a bold claim. The name of this Polish philosopher-one of the most prominent figures from the Lvov-Warsaw School-is almost completely absent in the mainstream action theory. My goals in this essay are two. Firstly, I would like to show the reasons why Kotarbiński's so-called praxiology is a philosophy of action which should be considered as no less important for the tradition of analytic action theory and for contemporary action-theoretical debates as the classics. Secondly, I shall try to explain why Kotarbiński's action theory--despite its incontestable philosophical value--has remained almost unnoticed in the mainstream for over half a century.
The structure of this essay is as follows. I start with a brief description of what praxiology is. Second, on the basis of selected examples, I try to show its most typical and attractive--from the perspective of classic and contemporary action theory--aspects and features. Third, I shortly sketch my answer to the question why Kotarbiński's praxiology in its original form has had to meet serious difficulties when it comes to its reception and interpretation. I end the essay claiming that the issue behind these difficulties not only veiled the classic character of praxiology and its contemporary attractiveness, but it also is responsible for its original shape as the Polish analytic action theory.
... Some arguments in the same spirit can be found inLavin (2013).Equal treatment for belief ...
This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense of should. Next I reply to an objection which alleges that non-evidential considerations cannot serve as reasons for which one believes. I then situate Equal Treatment in a broader theoretical framework, discussing connections to rationality, justification, knowledge, and theoretical versus practical reasoning. Finally, I show how Equal Treatment has important implications for a wide variety of issues, including the status of religious belief, philosophical skepticism, racial profiling and gender stereotyping, and certain issues in psychology, such as depressive realism and positive illusions.
... 7 We want to extend our gratitude to an anonymous reviewer for making helpful suggestions regarding this distinction. 8 Please note that not everyone agrees that there must be basic acts, see Lavin (2013). an arm: We simply raise it, without any further steps in between. ...
Connecting human minds to various technological devices and applications through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) affords intriguingly novel ways for humans to engage and interact with the world. Not only do BCIs play an important role in restorative medicine, they are also increasingly used outside of medical or therapeutic contexts (e.g., gaming or mental state monitoring). A striking peculiarity of BCI technology is that the kind of actions it enables seems to differ from paradigmatic human actions, because, effects in the world are brought about by devices such as robotic arms, prosthesis, or other machines, and their execution runs through a computer directed by brain signals. In contrast to usual forms of action, the sequence does not need to involve bodily or muscle movements at all. A motionless body, the epitome of inaction, might be acting. How do theories of action relate to such BCI-mediated forms of changing the world? We wish to explore this question through the lenses of three perspectives on agency: subjective experience of agency, philosophical action theory, and legal concepts of action. Our analysis pursues three aims: First, we shall discuss whether and which BCI-mediated events qualify as actions, according to the main concepts of action in philosophy and law. Secondly, en passant, we wish to highlight the ten most interesting novelties or peculiarities of BCI-mediated movements. Thirdly, we seek to explore whether these novel forms of movement may have consequences for concepts of agency. More concretely, we think that convincing assessments of BCI-movements require more fine-grained accounts of agency and a distinction between various forms of control during movements. In addition, we show that the disembodied nature of BCI-mediated events causes troubles for the standard legal account of actions as bodily movements. In an exchange with views from philosophy, we wish to propose that the law ought to reform its concept of action to include some, but not all, BCI-mediated events and sketch some of the wider implications this may have, especially for the venerable legal idea of the right to freedom of thought. In this regard, BCIs are an example of the way in which technological access to yet largely sealed-off domains of the person may necessitate adjusting normative boundaries between the personal and the social sphere.
Philosophers and cognitive scientists increasingly recognize the need to appeal to motor representations over and above intentions in attempting to understand how action is planned and executed. But doing so gives rise to a puzzle, which has come to be known as “the Interface Problem”: How is it that intentions and motor representations manage to interface in producing action? The question has semed puzzling, because each state is thought to be formatted differently: Intention has propositional format, whereas the format of motor representation is motoric. My primary goal here is to defend a novel and attractive (dis)solution to the interface problem. I do so by connecting it with a rather different discussion about the format of intention, instigated by a minority of philosophers who reject the idea that intention should be construed as a propositional attitude. As I explain, the most compelling reason to accept the heterodox non‐propositional conception of intention actually holds the key also to explaining away the interface problem. In so doing, the heterodox conception itself gains further credibility.
Anscombean accounts claim that intentional action is essentially characterized by an agent's practical knowledge of what she is doing. Such accounts are threatened by cases in which an agent seemingly fails to know what she is doing because of a mistake in the performance. It thus seems that such accounts are incompatible with the factivity of practical knowledge. We argue that Anscombean accounts should not be defended, as has recently been suggested, by drawing on familiar anti‐skeptical strategies from epistemology, but rather by attending closely to the specifically practical character of agential knowledge.
What is the remit of theoretical linguistics? How are human languages different from animal calls or artificial languages? What philosophical insights about language can be gleaned from phonology, pragmatics, probabilistic linguistics, and deep learning? This book addresses the current philosophical issues at the heart of theoretical linguistics, which are widely debated not only by linguists, but also philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists. It delves into hitherto uncharted territory, putting philosophy in direct conversation with phonology, sign language studies, supersemantics, computational linguistics, and language evolution. A range of theoretical positions are covered, from optimality theory and autosegmental phonology to generative syntax, dynamic semantics, and natural language processing with deep learning techniques. By both unwinding the complexities of natural language and delving into the nature of the science that studies it, this book ultimately improves our tools of discovery aimed at one of the most essential features of our humanity, our language.
When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that insofar as representing practically just is knowing practically, it is equally acting intentionally.
Imagine an artist creating new work, a painter applying paint to canvas with a brush, for example. Assuming she acts intentionally, is she responsible for the work she creates? Is she responsible, in particular, for whatever value her finished work has? In the first part of the paper, I formulate an argument for the claim she is not; I call this the Luck Argument . According to that argument, an important aspect of the work's value is due to luck, so not something for which the artist is responsible. I then go on to challenge the Luck Argument. I suggest that intentional control is not the only type of control artists exercise over their bodily activity. There is another type, which I call receptive control . The concept of receptive control makes it possible to challenge a crucial premise in the Luck Argument.
Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p , need not be intentional as a judgment that p . It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh‐ for some specific wh ‐ question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p . This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model of intentional judgment does not stand in tension with the fact that judgment is causally regulated for truth, and that it is correct only if it is true. On the contrary, the structure of intentional action explains how an intentional judgment has these features. An extended example is developed, and sufficient conditions on intentional judgment are laid out.
In this paper I argue that there is textual evidence that the chapter on Teleology in Hegel's Science of Logic , read under certain premises, also discusses something that in contemporary analytic philosophy is called a ‘basic action’. The three moments of Teleology—(a) ‘The Subjective Purpose’, (b) ‘The Means’ and (c) ‘The Realized Purpose’—can be interpreted as (a) a certain intentional content in the mind of a subject, which can be expressed in the form of an imperative, (b) the immediate taking in possession of the body, which can be described as a basic action, and (c) the description of the relation of the event brought about by the basic action with other events in the world, which can be described in the terms of event-causality. This reading reveals an astonishing parallel to Donald Davidson's distinction between proper basic actions and their different descriptions in the form of events. In this way we can make Hegel's, at first glance, confusing identification of subjective purpose (intention), means (basic action) and realized purpose (event) comprehensible. Through that, the actual aim is to show that what I call basic actions are in fact an example of a more general thought that Hegel calls a teleological relation.
In his Analytical Philosophy of History, published in 1965, Arthur Danto made a path‐breaking, but largely unacknowledged contribution to the philosophy of action. Davidson's sentences are to the effect that someone has done something: their verbs bear the past tense and the perfective aspect. Danto's sentences are to the effect that someone is doing something: their verbs bear the present tense and the imperfective aspect. Danto's sentences are central to the language of action. Philosophers of action who unreflectively employ the abstract sentences assume that their meaning takes care of itself, and as such fail to have in mind the concrete sentences in which their meaning consists. The fantasy of basic action is the fantasy of action without acting.
Aristotle’s account of action as kinesis, an intrinsically temporal process, posits that action is a kind of change over time, with parts or sub-actions that occupy distinct subordinate phases of a movement. This general idea has produced conflicting accounts of agency, however. Proponents of the causal theory of action ((CTA), causalism, or ‘the standard account’) have taken it as evidence of a reductionist or decompositional programme that supports the concept of basic action (Davidson, 1980; Coope, 2007). In contrast, recent critiques of causalism have relied explicitly on Aristotle’s idea of kinesis to defend an anti-decompositional approach, arguing that the sub-phases of an action must be known to its agent for such proceedings to qualify as agential (Thompson, Life and action: Elementary structures of practice and practical thought, Harvard University Press, 2008; Lavin, Noûs 00(0):1–32, 2012, 2016). This essay assesses these challenges to (CTA) as representing variations on the problem of disappearing or alienated agency, and argues that (CTA)‘s strongest critics fail to show that basic action indeed lacks temporal structure. Instead, we propose a revision in the conventional account of action as either complex or basic, as either taking much time or no time at all. On our account, the analysis of action as possessing temporal sub-phases is reconcilable with an anti-decompositional approach: the latter’s success depends on a proper assessment of the temporal structure of agency, not only in the so-called ‘complex’ actions which have an obvious means-end rational character, but also in the metaphysically simple and spontaneous movements that occur in the sub-phases of performance, which some identify as ‘basic’.KeywordsAristotelian kinesisAgencyTemporal structure
Much of our know-how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge-how comes in degrees, and through practice a person gradually learns how to do something. However, the two standard accounts of know-how in the literature, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, cannot properly account for the distinctive way in which know-how is gradually acquired by practice, a process in which conceptual representations and practical abilities are intimately interwoven. Drawing on Gareth Evans's work, I outline an account that may do so, and use this account to distinguish between two forms of learning to explain why skill generally cannot be learnt through testimony, and requires practice.
What is offered in this paper is the foundation upon which a catechesis on evil and sin can be developed and an underpinning for a substantial catechetical approach that is both philosophically sound and theologically relevant. In so doing, this paper will examine the philosophic problem of evil and seek to identify the metaphysical nature of the concept of evil along with the resultant ethical implications in terms of sin. Although the work will provide a groundwork and frame for theodicy and a philosophical basis for subsequent religious dogmatics relational to response to absolute otherness, whether it be in the form of God or other metaphysical truth claims of origin; the aim of the work is to provide a metaphysical understanding of evil and an approach to teaching the ethical concerns of evil’s instantiation in terms of transgression. As Maritain clarifies, evil and sin enter creation in the difference between God’s primordial or antecedent will and His consequent or conditional will. It is the difference between what God intends and what God permits. Consequently, it must form the fundamental basis of any catechism on evil and sin. This work, therefore, will look to develop an understanding of evil in terms of its non-existence and its existence. For this reason, Thomas Aquinas is presented as the systematic philosopher in whom these two forms of understanding are articulated and organised in a fundamental way.
Clark ( Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (3–4), 71–87, 2018) worries that predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception introduce a puzzling disconnect between the content of personal-level perceptual states and their underlying subpersonal representations. According to PP, in perception, the brain encodes information about the environment in conditional probability density distributions over causes of sensory input. But it seems perceptual experience only presents us with one way the world is at a time. If perception is at bottom probabilistic, shouldn’t this aspect of subpersonally represented content show up in consciousness? To address this worry, Clark argues that representations underlying personal-level content are constrained by the need to provide a single action-guiding take on the environment. However, this proposal rests a conception of the nature of agency, famously articulated by Davidson (1980a, b), that is inconsistent with a view of the mind as embodied-extended. Since Clark and other enactivist PP theorists present the extended mind as an important consequence of the predictive framework, the proposal is in tension with his complete view. I claim that this inconsistency could be resolved either by retaining the Davidsonian view of action and abandoning the extended-embodied approach, or by adopting a more processual, world-involving account of agency and perceptual experience than Clark currently endorses. To solve the puzzle he raises, Clark must become a radical enactivist or a consistent internalist.
In this book Shepherd offers a perspective on the shape of agency by offering interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. In the book’s first part, he offers accounts of phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behavior, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition and undermine the claims of many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore intentional action. In the book’s second part, he turns to modes of agentive excellence—ways that agents display quality of form. He offers a novel account of skill, including an account of the ways that agents display more or less skill. He discusses the role of knowledge in skill and concludes that while knowledge is often important, it is inessential. This leads to a discussion of knowledge of action—of the way that knowledge of action and knowledge of how to act informs action execution. Shepherd argues that knowledgeable action includes a unique epistemic underpinning. For 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.
Harvey Sacks suffers no want of authoritative interpreters, and reading, for example, the likes of Coulter (1976), Schegloff (1992a, 1992b), Lynch and Bogen (1994), Watson’s commentaries (1994; 2009) or Silverman’s introductions (1998) certainly deepens our understanding by revealing layers in Sacks’ work we might otherwise miss. Nonetheless, while these guides are invaluable, the real “joy of Sacks”, as Fitzgerald (2012) memorably puts it, lies in reading and engaging with his work for ourselves, as anyone who has begun to delve into Lectures in Conversation, his transcribed lectures, quickly comes to see. The ground Sacks covers, his breadth of interests and the diverse range of examples and materials he focuses on means his work affords all manner of opportunities for engagement – returning to it, there is always something else to be discovered in it and taken away (and see Bjelić 2017, Lynch 2017, Fitzgerald 2018 for just some of the more recent returns). Rather than try to anticipate a variety of possible engagements, however, this chapter attempts something much more limited: it charts just one line through Sacks wider body of work, concentrating on the distinctive way Sacks handles and helps us to handle the relationship between action, meaning and understanding. While that relationship has long been treated as a problem in and for the social sciences, based on his detailed analyses of our everyday practices, Sacks refused to follow suit and treat it as a problem for the sociologist at all. For Sacks, to understand the meaning of someone’s actions is just to grasp what they’re doing, and that is not a theoretical but a practical matter, one internal to and resolved in social life. Although Sacks did not dwell on this insight but put it to work in developing a new way of practicing sociology, tracing its bases and what it shows about the value of his approach to doing sociology is salutary in several respects. Drawing from material across his lectures and published writings, the aim of this chapter is therefore to do just that and highlight one of the ways in which Sacks shows us how to see sociologically.
Is it impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it? The phenomenon of self-deceived agency might seem to show otherwise. Here the agent is not (at least in a straightforward sense) lying, yet disavows a correct description of her intentional action. This disavowal might seem expressive of ignorance. However, I show that the self-deceived agent does know what she's doing. I argue that we should understand the factors that explain self-deception as masking rather than negating the practical knowledge characteristic of intentional action. This masking takes roughly the following form: when we are deceiving ourselves about what we are intentionally doing, we don't think about our action because it's painful to do so.
An agent's knowledge of her own intentional actions (agential knowledge) is non-observational. Yet, intentional actions typically consist of happenings external to the agents. A theory is needed to explain how agents are warranted to form such beliefs independent of observation. This paper first argues for three desirable features of an ideal theory about agential knowledge. After showing that no existing theories possess all three, a novel theory that does is presented. According to this theory, agential knowledge is the same kind of knowledge as the Kripkean contingent a priori: they are knowledge justified a priori by stipulation.
Properly understood, the instrumental rule says to take means that actually suffice for my end, not, as is nearly universally assumed, to intend means that I believe are necessary for my end. This alternative explains everything the standard interpretation can—and more, including grounding certain correctness conditions for exercises of our will unexplained by the standard interpretation.
Almost everything that we do, we do by doing other things. Even actions we perform without deliberation or conscious planning are composed of ‘smaller’, subsidiary actions. But how should we think of such subsidiary actions? Are they fully‐fledged intentional actions (in the sense of things that we do for reasons) in their own right? In this paper I defend an affirmative answer to this question, against a recently influential form of scepticism. Drawing on a distinctive kind of ‘action‐demonstrative’ representation, I show that the sceptic's arguments do not go through.
The possibility of error conditions the possibility of normative principles. I argue that extant interpretations of this condition undermine the possibility of normative principles for our action because they implicitly treat error as a perfection of an action. I then explain how a constitutivist metaphysics of capacities explains why error is an imperfection of an action. Finally, I describe and defend the interpretation of the error condition which follows.
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.
Sich dem Phänomen des Computerspielens aus der Perspektive der philosophischen Handlungstheorie zu nähern, kann einem zunächst nicht besonders vielversprechend vorkommen. Und dies aus zwei Gründen: Zum einen scheint sich der universalistische Anspruch der Handlungstheorie nicht besonders gut mit dem Studium eines Partikularbereichs menschlichen Tuns zu vertragen. Denn die Handlungstheorie ist jener Bereich der Philosophie, der zu erklären versucht, wie man das Phänomen des menschlichen Handelns als solches verstehen kann. Das heißt in der Philosophie des Handelns wird der Frage nachgegangen, auf welche Weise wir am besten verstehen können, dass Handlungen sich von anders gearteten Bewegungen unseres Körpers (etwa dem Lidschlussreflex oder der peristaltischen Bewegung des Darms) einerseits aber auch von der Art des zielgerichteten Verhaltens, zu dem Tiere in der Lage sind, unterscheiden. Handlungstheorie, so kann man das auch beschreiben, ist eine Form der Anthropologie: Sie beschreibt eine spezielle Weise, in der sich unsere Charakteristik als vernünftiges Tier ausbuchstabieren lässt.
Intellectualists about knowledge‐how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e., a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by modeling practical modes of thought after Fregean senses. In this paper, I take up her model and the presuppositions it is built upon, arguing that her view of practical thought is not positioned to account for much of what human agents are able to do.
A widespread view in the philosophy of mind and action holds that intentions are propositional attitudes. Call this view ‘Propositionalism about Intention’. The key alternative holds that intentions have acts, or do-ables, as their contents. Propositionalism is typically accepted by default, rather than argued for in any detail. By appealing to a key metaphysical constraint on any account of intention, I argue that on the contrary, it is the Do-ables View which deserves the status of the default position, and Propositionalism which bears the burden of proof. I go on to show that this burden has not been met in the literature.
I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which the normative status of actions is properly determined through appeal to rankings of states of affairs as better and worse. This covert support for consequentialism from the theory of action, I argue, has had a distorting effect on debates in normative ethics. I then present challenges to each of these three commitments, a challenge to the first commitment by T.M. Scanlon, a challenge to the second by recent interpreters of Anscombe, and a new challenge to the third commitment that requires only minimal and prima facie plausible modifications to the Standard Story. The success of any one of the challenges, I demonstrate, is sufficient to block support from the theory of action for the teleological conception of reasons and the consequentialist evaluative framework. I close by demonstrating the pivotal role that such arguments grounded in the theory of action play in the current debate between evaluator-relative consequentialists and their critics.
The notion of basic action has recently come under attack based on the idea that any putative basic action can always be divided into more basic sub-actions. In this paper it is argued that this criticism ignores a key aspect of the idea of basic action, namely, the ‘anything else’ part of the idea that basic actions are not done by doing anything else. This aspect is clarified, and it is argued that doing the sub-actions of which a putative basic action consists does not amount to doing something different from doing that putative basic action.
This chapter explains the theory of act individuation initially through G. E. M. Anscombe's interpretation, which states that there is a natural ordering of the descriptions of actions. However, this idea is problematic since the ordering only applies to descriptions pertaining to specific acts. The chapter then looks at Donald Davidson's insight through his workThe Individuation of Events, which is similar to Anscombe's except he suggested a criterion of act individuation. It also addresses the so-called temporal problem, initiated by Lawrence Davis and Judith Jarvis Thomson, of the Anscombe-Davidson concept which calls for a deeper understanding of the ontological condition of an act. The chapter then presents an analysis of action sentences, citing the works of Romane Clark and Terence Parsons in the discussion of act type and act property.
L'A. defend la these des deux facteurs selon laquelle une personne sait ce qu'elle a l'intention de faire sans recours a l'observation, alors que la connaissance de ce qu'elle est en train de faire repose sur l'observation. Distinguant les notions d'expression et de description, de justification et de capacite, l'A. definit le role de l'auto-attribution dans le processus de la connaissance de l'intention.
This is a collection of published and unpublished chapters by distinguished philosopher Michael E. Bratman of Stanford University. They revolve around his influential theory, known as the “planning theory of intention and agency.” Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls “strong” forms of human agency—including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy.
I consider two inter-related problems in the philosophy of action. One concerns the role of the agent in the determination of action, and I call it the problem of agential authority. The other concerns the relation between motivating desire and the agent's normative deliberation, and I call it the problem of subjective normative authority. In part by way of discussion of work of Harry Frankfurt and Christine Korsgaard, I argue that we make progress with these problems by appeal to certain kinds of higher-order policies and to their role in the cross-temporal organization of the deliberation and action of temporally persisting agents like us.
Skilled activity, such as shaving or dancing, differs in important ways from many of the stock examples that are employed by action theorists. Some critics of the causal theory of action contend that such a view founders on the problem of skilled activity. This paper examines how a causal theory can be extended to the case of skilled activity and defends the account from its critics.
