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A reply to Rose, Livengood, Sytsma, and Machery.Chandra Sripada, Richard Gonzalez, Daniel Kessler, Eric Laber, Sara Konrath & Vijay Nair - manuscriptdetails
Intentional action and the semantics of gradable expressions (On the Knobe Effect).Paul Egré - forthcoming - In B. Copley & F. Martin (eds.), Causation in Grammatical Structures. Oxford University Press.details
This paper examines an hypothesis put forward by Pettit and Knobe 2009 to account for the Knobe effect. According to Pettit and Knobe, one should look at the semantics of the adjective “intentional” on a par with that of other gradable adjectives such as “warm”, “rich” or “expensive”. What Pettit and Knobe’s analogy suggests is that the Knobe effect might be an instance of a much broader phenomenon which concerns the context-dependence of normative standards relevant for the application of gradable expressions. I adduce further evidence in favor of this view and go on to examine the predictions one obtains when assuming that “intentional” involves a two-dimensional scale, which implies evaluating how much an action or outcome is desired on the one hand, and how much it can be foreseen as a consequence of one’s actions on the other.
Explaining the Effect of Morality on Intentionality: The Role of Underlying Questions.Kate Falkenstien - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology.details
People's moral judgments affect their judgments of intentionality for actions that succeeded by luck. This article aimed to explain that phenomenon by suggesting that people's judgments of intentionality are driven by the underlying questions they have considered. We examined two types of questions: questions about why people act, and questions about how they succeed in acting. In a series of experiments, we found that people prefer different questions for neutral and immoral actions and that asking them to think about questions they would not have preferred can change their judgments of intentionality. These experiments suggest that neutral actions are judged to be less intentional simply because they do not motivate observers to ask questions which draw attention to the actor's mental states. We discuss the potential application of this framework to other concepts affected by morality in surprising ways, such as causality.
The Single Phenomenon View and Experimental Philosophy.Alfred Mele - forthcoming - In M. Vargas & G. Yaffe (eds.), Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman. Oxford University Press.details
This chapter explores the merits of two different versions of what Michael Bratman has dubbed “The Single Phenomenon View” of intentional action – Bratman’s version and Alfred Mele’s version. The primary focus is on what is done intentionally in cases featuring side effects. Some studies in experimental philosophy that seem to count in favor of Bratman’s view and against Mele’s are discussed with a view to uncovering their bearing on the disagreement between Bratman and Mele.
The role of the primary effect in the assessment of intentionality and morality.Michael Waldmann - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.details
In moral dilemmas performing an action often leads to both a good primary and a bad secondary effect. In such cases, how do people judge whether the bad secondary effect was brought about intentionally, and how do they assess the moral value of the act leading to the secondary effect? Various theories have been proposed that either focus on the causal role or on the moral valence of the secondary effect as the primary determinants of intentionality and morality assessments. We present experiments which show that these theories have neglected a further important factor, the primary effect. A new theory is proposed that is based on the key assumption that people’s judgments of intentionality and morality depend on the strength of assumed reasons the agent has for the primary and secondary effects.
The importance of epistemic intentions in ascription of responsibility.Katarina M. Kovacevic, Francesca Bonalumi & Christophe Heintz - 2024 - Scientific Reports 14:1183.details
We investigate how people ascribe responsibility to an agent who caused a bad outcome but did not know he would. The psychological processes for making such judgments, we argue, involve finding a counterfactual in which some minimally benevolent intention initiates a course of events that leads to a better outcome than the actual one. We hypothesize that such counterfactuals can include, when relevant, epistemic intentions. With four vignette studies, we show that people consider epistemic intentions when ascribing responsibility for a bad outcome. We further investigate which epistemic intentions people are likely to consider when building counterfactuals for responsibility ascription. We find that, when an agent did not predict a bad outcome, people ascribe responsibility depending on the reasons behind the agents’ lack of knowledge. People judge agents responsible for the bad outcome they caused when they could have easily predicted the consequences of their actions but did not care to acquire the relevant information. However, when this information was hard to acquire, people are less likely to judge them responsible.
Outcome Effects, Moral Luck and the Hindsight Bias.Markus Kneer & Iza Skoczeń - 2023 - Cognition 232.details
In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all are successful, but at least some prove promising. They should, we argue, be taken into consideration in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting.
Epistemic Luck, Knowledge-How, and Intentional Action.Carlotta Pavese, Paul Henne & Bob Beddor - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.details
Epistemologists have long believed that epistemic luck undermines propositional knowledge. Action theorists have long believed that agentive luck undermines intentional action. But is there a relationship between agentive luck and epistemic luck? While agentive luck and epistemic luck have been widely thought to be independent phenomena, we argue that agentive luck has an epistemic dimension. We present several thought experiments where epistemic luck seems to undermine both knowledge-how and intentional action and we report experimental results that corroborate these judgments. These findings have implications for the role of knowledge in a theory of intentional action and for debates about the nature of knowledge-how and the significance of knowledge representation in folk psychology.
Has the side-effect effect been cancelled? (No, not yet.).Justin Sytsma, Robert Bishop & John Schwenkler - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-15.details
A large body of research has found that people judge bad foreseen side effects to be more intentional than good ones. While the standard interpretation of this Side-Effect Effect takes it to show that the ordinary concept of intentionality is influenced by normative considerations, a competing account holds that it is the result of pragmatic pressure to express moral censure and, thus, that the SEE is an experimental artifact. Attempts to confirm this account have previously been unsuccessful, but Lindauer and Southwood :181–186, 2021) present a study that appears to provide support for it, by cancelling the SEE. We are not convinced. Here, we detail three studies testing their interpretation. The results indicate that it is the purported cancellation, rather than the SEE, that is an experimental artifact.
How to cancel the Knobe effect: the role of sufficiently strong moral censure.Matthew Lindauer & Nicholas Southwood - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):181-186.details
Empirical support is offered for the claim that the original Knobe effect, whereby our intentional action ascriptions exhibit certain asymmetries in light of our moral attitudes, can be successfully cancelled. This is predicted by the view that the Knobe effect can be explained in purely pragmatic terms (Adams and Steadman 2004a, 2004b, 2007). However, previous cancelling studies (Adams and Steadman 2007; Nichols and Ulatowski 2007) have failed to identify evidence of cancellability. The key to the successful cancelling strategy presented here is to provide subjects with the opportunity to assent to statements that involve sufficiently strong forms of moral censure.
Potoczne pojęcie intencjonalności a kultura . Studium porównawcze modyfikatorów intencjonalności w języku polskim , angielskim i włoskim.Bartosz Maćkiewicz, Katarzyna Kuś & Monika Favara - 2021 - In Efekt Knobe’a w świetle rozważań językoznawczych i metodologicznych. Studium teoretyczne i eksperymentalne efektu Knobe’a i problemu Butlera,. Warszawa, Polska:details
Barcz and Zaręba (2021) argue that depending on the shape and the size of the asymmetry in attributions of intentional actions one can distinguish various interpretations of the Knobe effect. Their classification of these interpretations can be used to compare judgments of intentional action across different languages and cultures. Our study in three languages (Polish, English and Italian) indicates that there is some cross-cultural variation both in the ascription of intentionality to an action and in the ascription of actions to the agent.
Is there a confidence condition in the concept of intention?John McGuire - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (5):705-730.details
The concept of intention is widely thought to involve a confidence condition of some sort, a condition that specifies certain beliefs that one must either have or lack if one intends to do something. Two of the most common formulations of this condition are the following: (i) A intends to X only if A believes that they (probably) will X; and (ii) A intends to X only if A does not believe that they (probably) will not X. A third, much weaker formulation can also be considered: (iii) A intends to X only if A does not believe that it is highly unlikely that they will X. In this article I report on a series of experiments that indicate that ordinary speakers of English do not apply the concepts of intention and belief in accordance with any of the foregoing hypotheses. These experimental results provide empirical evidence against the idea that there is a confidence condition in the concept of intention.
Intentional Action Without Knowledge.Romy Vekony, Alfred Mele & David Rose - 2020 - Synthese 197:1-13.details
In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/Awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing it. Here, using vignettes featuring skilled action and vignettes featuring habitual action, we provide evidence that, in various scenarios, a majority of non-specialists regard agents as intentionally doing things that the agents do not know they are doing and are not aware of doing. This puts pressure on proponents of KAT and leaves it to them to find a way these results can coexist with KAT.
Experimental Philosophy, Ethnomethodology, and Intentional Action: A Textual Analysis of the Knobe Effect.Gustav Lymer & Olle Blomberg - 2019 - Human Studies 42 (4):673-694.details
In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to the fact that Knobe’s original interpretation of the results is based on an abstract rendering of the central scenario that is significantly different from the vignettes presented to the survey participants. In particular, the experimental vignettes involve temporal and social dimensions; they portray sequences of social actions involving an agent and an interlocutor, rather than a lone agent making a momentary decision in light of certain attitudes. Through textual analyses of a set of vignettes used to study the Knobe effect, drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we show that there are many differences between the experimental conditions besides the moral valence of the side effect. In light of our textual analyses, we discuss vignette methodology in experimental philosophy and suggest an alternative interpretation of Knobe’s original experimental results. We also argue that experimental philosophy could benefit from considering research on naturally occurring social interaction as an alternative source of empirical findings for discussions of folk-psychological concepts.
Experimental Philosophy: A Critical Study.Nikil Mukerji - 2019 - London, UK; New York, USA: Rowman & Littlefield International.details
Suitable for student readers and more advanced scholars who would like an introduction to experimental philosophy, this book guides the reader through current debates on the topic, and provides links to current and emerging work in the field.
The Knobe Effect with Probable Outcomes and Availability Heuristic Triggers.Tommaso Ostillio & Michal Bukat - 2019 - Logos and Episteme 10 (4):363-377.details
This paper contributes to the existing philosophical literature on the Knobe Effect (KE) in two main ways: first, this paper disconfirms the KE by showing that the latter does not hold in contexts with probable outcomes; second, this paper shows that KE is strongly sensitive to the availability heuristic bias. In particular, this paper presents two main findings from three empirical tests carried out between 2016 and 2018: the first finding concerns the fact that if the issuer of a decision with consequences on third parties is unlikely to be perceived as unfriendly, then KE is reduced or absent; the second finding regards instead the fact that if an action has two possible outcomes (one likely to obtain with strong intensity and one likely to obtain with less intensity), then KE does not obtain for decisions whose side-effects have limited consequences on third parties.
A simple linguistic approach to the Knobe effect, or the Knobe effect without any vignette.Masaharu Mizumoto - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1613-1630.details
In this paper we will propose a simple linguistic approach to the Knobe effect, or the moral asymmetry of intention attribution in general, which is just to ask the felicity judgments on the relevant sentences without any vignette at all. Through this approach we were in fact able to reproduce the Knobe effects in different languages, with large effect sizes. We shall defend the significance of this simple approach by arguing that our approach and its results not only tell interesting facts about the concept of intentional action, but also show the existence of the linguistic default, which requires independent investigation. We will then argue that, despite the recent view on experimental philosophy by Knobe himself, there is a legitimate role of the empirical study of concepts in the investigations of cognitive processes in mainstream experimental philosophy, which suggests a broadly supplementary picture of experimental philosophy.
What is the cognitive basis of the side‐effect effect? An experimental test of competing theories.Marina Proft, Alexander Dieball & Hannes Rakoczy - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (3):357-375.details
Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 357-375, June 2019.
The Knobe Effect From the Perspective of Normative Orders.Julia Rejewska, Michał Obidziński & Andrzej Waleszczyński - 2018 - Studia Humana 7 (4):9-15.details
The characteristic asymmetry in the attribution of intentionality in causing side effects, known as the Knobe effect, is considered to be a stable model of human cognition. This article looks at whether the way of thinking and analysing one scenario may affect the other and whether the mutual relationship between the ways in which both scenarios are analysed may affect the stability of the Knobe effect. The theoretical analyses and empirical studies performed are based on a distinction between moral and non-moral normativity possibly affecting the judgments passed in both scenarios. Therefore, an essential role in judgments about the intentionality of causing a side effect could be played by normative competences responsible for distinguishing between normative orders.
Intentional action and the frame-of-mind argument: new experimental challenges to Hindriks.Florian Cova - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (1):35-53.details
Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgements about intentional action, Knobe [. “Intentional Action and Side-Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] has claimed that these judgements are shaped by our moral judgements and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action – the “frame-of-mind condition”, according to which judgements about intentional action are about the agent’s frame-of-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this intuition Hindriks [. “Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry.” The Philosophical Quarterly 58: 630–641;. “Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives.” Mind & Language 29: 51–72] has proposed an alternate account of the Knobe Effect. According to his “Normative Reason account of Intentional Action”, a side-effect counts as intentional only when the agent thought it constituted a normative reason not to act but did not care. In...
Cold Side-Effect Effect: Affect Does Not Mediate the Influence of Moral Considerations in Intentionality Judgments.Rodrigo Díaz - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8:295.details
Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side- effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explain this asymmetric pattern of judgment and the psychological factors involved in it. It has been posited that affective reactions to agents that bring about harmful side- effects could bias intentionality attributions in these cases, explaining the asymmetric pattern of intentionality judgments that we observe in the SEE. We call this the affective bias hypothesis (ABH). Evidence for the ABH is mixed, with some findings suggesting a role for affective processes, while others suggesting that affective processes play no role in the SEE. A possible explanation for these apparently contradictory results points to affective processes involved in the SEE being confined to anger. In a series of empirical studies, we systematically measured and manipulated participants’ anger in order to test this possibility. Our findings suggest that anger play no role in intentionality judgments in SEE cases, while providing support for a non-emotional motivation to blame as a factor underlying the SEE.
Mens rea ascription, expertise and outcome effects: Professional judges surveyed.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer & Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde - 2017 - Cognition 169 (C):139-146.details
A coherent practice of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action’s outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law.
Effects of Manipulation on Attributions of Causation, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility.Dylan Murray & Tania Lombrozo - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (2):447-481.details
If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome.
Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures.Erin Robbins, Jason Shepard & Philippe Rochat - 2017 - Cognition 164 (C):22-30.details
Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side- effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition.
Unjustified side effects were strongly intended: Taboo tradeoffs and the side-effect effect.Andy Vonasch & Roy Baumeister - 2017 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 68:83-92.details
The side-effect effect is the seemingly irrational tendency for people to say harmful side effects were more intentional than helpful side effects of the same action. But the tendency may not be irrational. According to the Tradeoffs Justification Model, judgments of a person's intentions to cause harm depend on how that person decided to act, and on whether the reasons for acting justified causing the harmful consequences. Across three experiments (N = 660), unjustified harms were viewed as more intentional than justified harms. If the person had a choice of what to do and knowingly caused harm for no good reason, people judged that the person must have actually desired and intended to cause the harm. However, if the person had a strong, compelling reason (e.g., to ransom his daughter from kidnappers) that the observer deemed to have justified causing the harm, then observers thought the harm was weakly intended at most. Taboo harms that violated sacred moral values were especially likely to be seen as intentional because most reasons do not adequately justify violating a sacred value.
The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Empirical approaches.Florian Cova - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.details
This paper provides a comprehensive review of the experimental philosophy of action, focusing on the various different accounts of the Knobe Effect.
Can one decide to do something without forming an intention to do it?John McGuire - 2016 - Analysis 76 (3):269-278.details
According to the received view of practical decisions, ‘deciding to X’ is synonymous with ‘forming an intention to X’. In this article, I argue against the received view on the basis of both experimental evidence and theoretical considerations. The evidence concerns a case involving a side-effect action in which people tend to agree that an agent decided to X yet disagree that the agent had a corresponding intention to X. Additionally, I explain why one should expect decisions and intentions to diverge in the case of certain side-effect actions.
Einführung in die experimentelle Philosophie.Nikil Mukerji - 2016 - Wilhelm Fink.details
Wie kann ein Experiment zur Beantwortung philosophischer Fragestellungen beitragen? Etwa: Was ist Wissen? Was bedeuten sprachliche Ausdrücke? Haben wir einen freien Willen? Kann man etwas absichtlich tun, ohne es zu beabsichtigen? Vertreter einer jungen philosophischen Bewegung wollen den Fragen ihres Fachs mithilfe empirisch-psychologischer Methoden auf den Grund gehen. Anstatt den Lehnstuhl (»armchair«) aufzusuchen, um sich philosophischen Problemen zu widmen, begeben sich experimentelle Philosophen ins Labor, um mithilfe empirischer Informationen aus Psychologie, Neurowissenschaft und Kognitionswissenschaft philosophische Schlussfolgerungen zu stützen. Die Einführung gibt einen anschaulichen Einblick in das neue Forschungsfeld der XPhi und stellt wichtige experimentelle Beiträge zur Erkenntnistheorie, Sprachphilosophie, Philosophie des Geistes und Handlungstheorie vor. In den Blick genommen wird außerdem die florierende metaphilosophische Debatte, die zwischen experimentellen Philosophen und ihren Kritikern geführt wird.
A Companion to Naturalism.Juliano Santos do Carmo (ed.) - 2015 - NEPFIL.details
Offering a engaging and accessible portrait of the current state of the field, A Companion to Naturaslim shows students how to think about the relation between Philosophy and Science, and why is both essencial and fascinating to do so. All the authors in this collection reconsider the core questions in Philosophical Naturalism in light of the challenges raised in Contemporary Philosophy. They explore how philosophical questions are connected to vigorous current debates - including complex questions about metaphysics, semantics, religion, intentionality, pragmatism, reductionism, ontology, metaethics, mind, science, belief and delusion, among others – showing how these issues, and philosopher’s attempts to answer them, matter in the Philosophy. In this sense, this collection is also compelling and illuminating reading for philosophers, philosophy students, and anyone interested in Naturalism and their place in current discussions.
Side effects and asymmetry in act-type attribution.Lilian O'Brien - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (7):1012-1025.details
Joshua Knobe's work has marshaled considerable support for the hypothesis that everyday judgments of whether an action is intentional are systematically influenced by evaluations of the action or agent. The main source of evidence for this hypothesis is a series of surveys that involve an agent either helping or harming something as a side effect. Respondents are much more likely to judge the side effect intentional if harm is involved. It is a remarkable feature of the discussion so far that it assumes without scrutiny that the substitution of one act-type for another could not, taken alone, explain the difference in responses that the two scenarios yield. This paper presents evidence, both experimental and conceptual, that it is precisely this difference that explains the asymmetry in responses. Briefly, agents who token the act-type help must fulfill certain psychological conditions that they don't have to fulfill if they are to token the act-type harm. Harming, unlike helping, does not require the ful..
Unifying morality’s influence on non-moral judgments: The relevance of alternative possibilities.Jonathan Phillips, Jamie B. Luguri & Joshua Knobe - 2015 - Cognition 145 (C):30-42.details
Past work has demonstrated that people’s moral judgments can influence their judgments in a number of domains that might seem to involve straightforward matters of fact, including judgments about freedom, causation, the doing/allowing distinction, and intentional action. The present studies explore whether the effect of morality in these four domains can be explained by changes in the relevance of alternative possibilities. More precisely, we propose that moral judgment influences the degree to which people regard certain alternative possibilities as relevant, which in turn impacts intuitions about freedom, causation, doing/allowing, and intentional action. Employing the stimuli used in previous research, Studies 1a, 2a, 3a, and 4a show that the relevance of alternatives is influenced by moral judgments and mediates the impact of morality on non-moral judgments. Studies 1b, 2b, 3b, and 4b then provide direct empirical evidence for the link between the relevance of alternatives and judgments in these four domains by manipulating (rather than measuring) the relevance of alternative possibilities. Lastly, Study 5 demonstrates that the critical mechanism is not whether alternative possibilities are considered, but whether they are regarded as relevant. These studies support a unified framework for understanding the impact of morality across these very different kinds of judgments.
The Side-Effect Effect in Children Is Robust and Not Specific to the Moral Status of Action Effects.Hannes Rakoczy, Tanya Behne, Annette Clüver, Stephanie Dallmann, Sarah Weidner & Michael Waldmann - 2015 - PLoS ONE 10:1-10.details
Adults’ intentionality judgments regarding an action are influenced by their moral evaluation of this action. This is clearly indicated in the so-called side-effect effect: when told about an action (e.g. implementing a business plan) with an intended primary effect (e.g. raise profits) and a foreseen side effect (e.g. harming/helping the environment), subjects tend to interpret the bringing about of the side effect more often as intentional when it is negative (harming the environment) than when it is positive (helping the environment). From a cognitive point of view, it is unclear whether the side-effect effect is driven by the moral status of the side effects specifically, or rather more generally by its normative status. And from a developmental point of view, little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the effect. The present study therefore explored the cognitive foundations and the ontogenetic origins of the side-effect effect by testing 4-to 5-year-old children with scenarios in which a side effect was in accordance with/violated a norm. Crucially, the status of the norm was varied to be conventional or moral. Children rated the bringing about of side-effects as more intentional when it broke a norm than when it accorded with a norm irrespective of the type of norm. The side-effect effect is thus an early-developing, more general and pervasive phenomenon, not restricted to morally relevant side effects.
Reversing the side-effect effect: the power of salient norms.Brian Robinson, Paul Stey & Mark Alfano - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (1):177-206.details
In the last decade, experimental philosophers have documented systematic asymmetries in the attributions of mental attitudes to agents who produce different types of side effects. We argue that this effect is driven not simply by the violation of a norm, but by salient-norm violation. As evidence for this hypothesis, we present two new studies in which two conflicting norms are present, and one or both of them is raised to salience. Expanding one’s view to these additional cases presents, we argue, a fuller conception of the side-effect effect, which can be reversed by reversing which norm is salient.
The Moral Status of an Action Influences its Perceived Intentional Status in Adolescents with Psychopathic Traits.Elise Cardinale, Elizabeth Finger, Julia Schechter, Ilana Jurkowitz, R. J. R. Blair & Abigail Marsh - 2014 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy: Volume 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 131-151.details
Moral judgments about an action are influenced by the action’s intentionality. The reverse is also true: judgments of intentionality can be influenced by an action’s moral valence. For example, respondents judge a harmful side-effect of an intended outcome to be more intentional than a helpful side-effect. Debate continues regarding the mechanisms underlying this “side-effect effect” and the conditions under which it will persist. The research behind this chapter tested whether the side-effect effect is intact in adolescents with psychopathic traits, who are characterized by persistent immoral behavior, deficient moral emotions, and impairments in some forms of moral judgment. Results showed no differences between healthy adolescents and those with psychopathic traits: both groups judged harmful side-effects to be more intentional than helpful side-effects by an approximately 2:1 ratio. The chapter discusses these results in light of hypothesized mechanisms underlying the side-effect effect, and in light of our current understanding of moral reasoning deficits in psychopathy.
Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives.Frank Hindriks - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (1):51-72.details
Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as ‘the Knobe effect’, in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation of the Knobe effect in terms of normative reasons. This explanation generalizes to other folk psychological notions such as deciding, but not to such notions as being free. I go on to argue, against Knobe, that offering a unified explanation of all the asymmetries he discusses is in fact undesirable.
The concept of intentional action in high-functioning autism.Edouard Machery & Tiziana Zalla - 2014 - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1. New York: Oxford. pp. 152-172.details
It’s the Knobe Effect, Stupid!: How to Explain the Side-Effect Effect.Hanno Sauer - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (4):485-503.details
People asymmetrically attribute various agential features such as intentionality, knowledge, or causal impact to other agents when something of normative significance is at stake. I will argue that three questions are of primary interest in the debate about this effect. A methodological question about how to explain it at all; a substantive question about how to explain it correctly: and a normative question about whether to explain it in terms of an error or a legitimate judgmental pattern. The problem, I argue, is that these three questions are difficult to disentangle. I propose a solution to this problem, and show how it accounts for the most recent data regarding the effect.
Attribution of externalities: An economic approach to the Knobe effect.Verena Utikal & Urs Fischbacher - 2014 - Economics and Philosophy 30 (2):215-240.details
A series of studies in experimental philosophy have revealed that people blame others for foreseen negative side effects but do not praise them for foreseen positive ones. In order to challenge this idea, also called the Knobe effect, we develop a laboratory experiment using monetary incentives. In a game-theoretic framework we formalize the two vignettes in a neutral way, which means that we abstain from the use of any specific language terms and can easily control and vary the economic parameters of the situation. We confirm the Knobe effect in one situation and present situations in which the effect vanishes or even reverses. Our results are in line with a theoretical approach where the assessment of intention is not based on the action itself but on the underlying motive – as modelled in Levine.
Explaining the Knobe effect.Verena Wagner - 2014 - In Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch & Matthias Uhl (eds.), Experimental Ethics. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 65-79.details
In this paper I reject the view that the famous ‘Knobe effect’ reveals an asymmetry within people’s judgments concerning actions with good or bad side effects. I agree with interpretations that see the ascriptions made by survey subjects as moral judgments rather than ascriptions of intentionality. On this basis, I aim at providing an explanation as to why people are right in blaming and ‘expraising’ agents that acted on unacceptable motives, but praise and excuse agents who meet intersubjective expectations by acting on acceptable motives. The asymmetry only arises when blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are seen as instances of one and the same concept: moral responsibility. This analysis is backed by a study of Joshua Shepherd who extended and varied Knobe’s original vignettes.
Unconsidered Intentional Actions. An Assessment of Scaife and Webber’s ‘Consideration Hypothesis’.Florian Cova - 2013 - Journal of Moral Philosophy (1):1-22.details
The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis and conclude that it is supported neither by the existing literature nor by their own experiments, whose results I did not replicate, and that the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’ is not the best available account of the ‘Knobe Effect’.
Experimental Philosophy on Intentionality of Actions.Agnieszka Debska - 2013 - Filozofia Nauki 21 (3):143 - +.details
Experimental Philosophy, Clinical Intentions, and Evaluative Judgment.Lynn A. Jansen, Jessica S. Fogel & Mark Brubaker - 2013 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 22 (2):126-135.details
Recent empirical work on the concept of intentionality suggests that people’s assessments of whether an action is intentional are subject to uncertainty. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that different people employ different concepts of intentional action. These possibilities have motivated a good deal of work in the relatively new ﬁeld of experimental philosophy. The ﬁndings from this empirical research may prove to be relevant to medical ethics. In this article, we address this issue head on. We ﬁrst describe a study we conducted on intention ascription. Drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy, we investigated the possibility that the ascription of intentions to clinical actors in clinical settings is inﬂuenced by prior judgments about the goodness or badness of the consequences of the action in question. Our study was modeled on experimental studies in other contexts that have shown that people, when presented with a range of scenarios, are more likely to classify a side effect of an action as intended if the side effect is negative or reﬂects poorly on the actor than if it is positive or reﬂects well on the actor. We investigated whether this asymmetry in intention ascriptions was also present among physicians who were asked to ascribe intentions to clinical actors in certain well-deﬁned clinical scenarios. After describing the study and its results, we discuss its implications for medical ethics.
El Efecto Knobe: Asimetrías en la atribuición de intencionalidad y sus causas.Alejandro Rosas & Maria Alejandra Arciniegas Gomez - 2013 - Manuscrito 36 (2):311-341.details
Chairmen, Cocaine, and Car Crashes: The Knobe Effect as an Attribution Error.Hanno Sauer & Tom Bates - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (4):305-330.details
In this paper, we argue that the so-called Knobe-Effect constitutes an error. There is now a wealth of data confirming that people are highly prone to what has also come to be known as the ‘side-effect effect’. That is, when attributing psychological states—such as intentionality, foreknowledge, and desiring—as well as other agential features—such as causal control—people typically do so to a greater extent when the action under consideration is evaluated negatively. There are a plethora of models attempting to account for this effect. We hold that the central question of interest is whether the effect represents a competence or an error in judgment. We offer a systematic argument for the claim that the burden of proof regarding this question is on the competence theorist. We sketch an account, based on the notion of the reactive attitudes, that can accommodate both the idea that these sorts of judgments are fundamentally normative and that they often constitute errors.
Intentionality, evaluative judgments, and Causal Structure.Jason Shepard & Wolff Phillip - 2013 - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 35:3390-3395.details
The results from a number of recent studies suggest that ascriptions of intentionality are based on evaluative considerations: specifically, that the likelihood of viewing a person’s actions as intentional is greater when the outcome is bad than good (see Knobe, 2006, 2010). In this research we provide an alternative explanation for these findings, one based on the idea that ascriptions of intentionality depend on causal structure. As predicted by the causal structure view, we observed that actions leading to bad outcomes are associated with negative social pressures (Experiment 1), that these negative pressures give rise to a specific kind of causal structure (Experiment 2), and that when these causal structures are pitted against the badness of the outcome, intentionality judgments track with causal structure and not badness (Experiment 3). While the badness of an outcome may have an indirect effect on judgments of intentionality, our results suggest that the factors that affect judgments of intentionality most directly are non-evaluative and objective.
Intentional Side-Effects of Action.Jonathan Webber & Robin Scaife - 2013 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (2):179-203.details
Certain recent experiments are often taken to show that people are far more likely to classify a foreseen side-effect of an action as intentional when that side-effect has some negative normative valence. While there is some disagreement over the details, there is broad consensus among experimental philosophers that this is the finding. We challenge this consensus by presenting an alternative interpretation of the experiments, according to which they show that a side-effect is classified as intentional only if the agent considered its relative importance when deciding on the action. We present two new experiments whose results can be explained by our hypothesis but not by any version of the consensus view. In the course of doing so, we develop a methodological critique of the previous literature on this topic and draw from it lessons for future experimental philosophy research.
The Centrality of Belief and Reflection in Knobe-Effect Cases.Mark Alfano, James R. Beebe & Brian Robinson - 2012 - The Monist 95 (2):264-289.details
Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the belief that one’s action would result in a certain side effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in question. We argue further that this belief-attribution asymmetry is rational because it mirrors a belief-formation asymmetry, and that thebelief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.
Culpable Control and Deviant Causal Chains.Mark Alicke & David Rose - 2012 - Personality and Social Psychology Compass 6 (10):723-735.details
Actions that are intended to produce harmful consequences can fail to achieve their desired effects in numerous ways. We refer to action sequences in which harmful intentions are thwarted as deviant causal chains. The culpable control model of blame (CCM)is a useful tool for predicting and explaining the attributions that observers make of the actors whose harmful intentions go awry. In this paper, we describe six types of deviant causal chains; those in which: an actor’s attempt is obviated by the intervention of another person or the environment; the intended effects could not have been produced regardless of the actor’s behavior; other causes diminish the actor’s causal role; the actor brings about foreseen but undesired consequences as a result of pursuing his or her focal goal; the focal action produces a chain of increasingly remote causal events; and the actor derives unforeseen benefits from his or her nefarious actions. A basic assumption of the CCM in these cases is that attributions for the participants’ actions will depend on positive and negative evaluations of their intentions and behaviors. We describe empirical findings that are consistent with this assumption, and predict other findings for causal deviance phenomena that have not yet been investigated empirically.
Side-Effect effect without side effects: The pervasive impact of moral considerations on judgments of intentionality.Florian Cova & Hichem Naar - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (6):837-854.details
Studying the folk concept of intentional action, Knobe (2003a) discovered a puzzling asymmetry: most people consider some bad side effects as intentional while they consider some good side effects as unintentional. In this study, we extend these findings with new experiments. The first experiment shows that the very same effect can be found in ascriptions of intentionality in the case of means for action. The second and third experiments show that means are nevertheless generally judged more intentional than side effects, and that people do take into account the structure of the action when ascribing intentionality. We then discuss a number of hypotheses that can account for these data, using reactions times from our first experiment.
Testing Sripada's Deep Self model.Florian Cova & Hichem Naar - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):647 - 659.details
Sripada has recently advanced a new account for asymmetries that have been uncovered in folk judgments of intentionality: the ?Deep Self model,? according to which an action is more likely to be judged as intentional if it matches the agent's central and stable attitudes and values (i.e., the agent's Deep Self). In this paper, we present new experiments that challenge this model in two ways: first, we show that the Deep Self model makes predictions that are falsified, then we present cases that it cannot account for. Finally, we discuss how the Deep Self model could be modified to accommodate these new data.
Perspective in intentional action attribution.Adam Feltz, Maegan Harris & Ashley Perez - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):673-687.details
In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not likely to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions.
Inferences about character and motive influence intentionality attributions about side effects.Jamie S. Hughes & David Trafimow - 2012 - British Journal of Social Psychology 51:661-673.details
In two studies, we predicted and found that inferences about motive and character influence intentionality attributions about foreseeable consequences of action (i.e., side effects). First, we show that inferences about intentionality are greater for good side effects than bad side effects when a target person's character is described positively. In Study 2, we manipulated information about a target person and found that inferences about intentionality were greater when side effects were consistent with a target person's character and motives. Overall, our data cast doubt on the generality of the side-effect effect. We discuss our findings and their implications for future research on intentionality and social perception.
On Doing Things Intentionally.Pierre Jacob, Cova Florian & Dupoux Emmanuel - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):378-409.details
Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb 'intentionally'. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb 'intentionally' has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We end by discussing the implications of our account for folk psychology.
Three-and-a-half folk concepts of intentional action.Alessandro Lanteri - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (1):17-30.details
Fiery Cushman and Alfred Mele recently proposed a ‘two-and-a-half rules’ theory of folk intentionality. They suggested that laypersons attribute intentionality employing: one rule based on desire, one based on belief, and another principle based on moral judgment, which may either reflect a folk concept (and so count as a third rule) or a bias (and so not count as a rule proper) and which they provisionally count as ‘half a rule’. In this article, I discuss some cases in which an agent is judged as having neither belief nor desire to bring about an action, and yet laypersons find the agent’s action to be intentional. Many lay responses apparently follow a rule, but many other seem biased. The contribution of this study is two-fold: by addressing actions performed without desire or belief, it expands Mele and Cushman’s account; it also helps discriminate between a two-rules and a three-rules theory. As a conclusion, I argue in favor of a three-and-a-half concepts theory.
Side-effect actions, acting for a reason, and acting intentionally.John Michael McGuire - 2012 - Philosophical Explorations 15 (3):317 - 333.details
What is the relation between acting intentionally and acting for a reason? While this question has generated a considerable amount of debate in the philosophy of action, on one point there has been a virtual consensus: actions performed for a reason are necessarily intentional. Recently, this consensus has been challenged by Joshua Knobe and Sean Kelly, who argue against it on the basis of empirical evidence concerning the ways in which ordinary speakers of the English language describe and explain certain side-effect actions. Knobe and Kelly's argument is of interest not only because it challenges a widely accepted philosophical thesis on the basis of experimental evidence, but also because it indirectly raises an important and largely neglected question, the question of whether or in what sense an agent can perform a side-effect action for a reason. In this article, I address this question and provide a positive answer to it. Specifically, I argue that agents act for a reason whenever they perform side-effect actions as trade-offs. Thus, I claim that there are three distinct types of rational action: actions performed as ends in themselves, actions performed as means to further ends, and side-effect actions performed as trade-offs. Given this multiplicity of types of rational action, the question of whether or not actions performed for a reason are necessarily intentional is in need of refinement. The more specific question that lies at the heart of this article is whether or not side-effect actions performed as trade-offs are necessarily intentional. I conclude that, contrary to what Knobe and Kelly suggest, the question remains open.
Deep trouble for the deep self.David Rose, Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma & Edouard Machery - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):629 - 646.details
Chandra Sripada's (2010) Deep Self Concordance Account aims to explain various asymmetries in people's judgments of intentional action. On this account, people distinguish between an agent's active and deep self; attitude attributions to the agent's deep self are then presumed to play a causal role in people's intentionality ascriptions. Two judgments are supposed to play a role in these attributions?a judgment that specifies the attitude at issue and one that indicates that the attitude is robust (Sripada & Konrath, 2011). In this article, we show that the Deep Self Concordance Account, as it is currently articulated, is unacceptable.
Action, Attitude, and the Knobe Effect: Another Asymmetry.Joshua Shepherd - 2012 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2):171-185.details
A majority of people regard the harmful side-effects of an agent’s behavior as much more intentional than an agent’s helpful side-effects. In this paper, I present evidence for a related asymmetry. When a side- effect action is an instance of harming, folk ascriptions are significantly impacted by the relative badness of either an agent’s main goal or her side- effect action, but not her attitude. Yet when a side- effect action is an instance of helping, folk ascriptions are sensitive to an agent’s expressed attitude, but not to the relative goodness of her main goal or side- effect. It seems that the connection between harmful side-effects and intentionality is, for many, uniquely impervious to the expressed attitude of the agent in question.
A Causal Model of Intentionality Judgment.Steven A. Sloman, Philip M. Fernbach & Scott Ewing - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (2):154-180.details
We propose a causal model theory to explain asymmetries in judgments of the intentionality of a foreseen side-effect that is either negative or positive (Knobe, 2003). The theory is implemented as a Bayesian network relating types of mental states, actions, and consequences that integrates previous hypotheses. It appeals to two inferential routes to judgment about the intentionality of someone else's action: bottom-up from action to desire and top-down from character and disposition. Support for the theory comes from three experiments that test the prediction that bottom-up inference should occur only when the actor's primary objective is known. The model fits intentionality judgments reasonably well with no free parameters.
Mental State Attributions and the Side-Effect Effect.Chandra Sripada - 2012 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (1):232-238.details
The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not speci␣cally intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes.
New waves in philosophy of action.Jesús H. Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff & Keith Frankish (eds.) - 2011 - New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.details
Andrei A. Buckareff is Assistant Professor at Marist College, USA --.
Foresight and Reasonable Prevention in Child Protection Contexts: Evaluating Foresee-Ability Relevant to Section 5 of the Domestic Violence, Crime, & Victims Act UK.Michelle B. Cowley-Cunningham - 2011 - ESRC E-Policy 2011/2019 Public Copy.details
This focus report presents a critical evaluation of the problems that the psychology of intent and foresight present to legal framework building for the protection of children in contemporary society. The report examines current public survey data on the role of intent and foresight in attributions of punishment and responsibility across: (i) contexts relevant to prior conviction evidence and disclosure (Ch. 11, Criminal Justice Act, 2003); and (ii) foresight and reasonable prevention when a child has died (Section 5, Domestic Violence, Crime & Victims Act, 2004). The results are embedded within psychological, legal, social care, policy and policing perspectives to help to understand the public’s response to the problem of foresight in child protection contexts (Foresight Policy ESRC Workshop: CSLS, University of Oxford, 2010). Reasonable Prevention, that is, anticipating outcomes that could have reasonably been foreseen, and anticipating the public’s attitude to the boundaries of responsibility for reasonable prevention, could provide a critical intersection for examining responsibility, punishment, and appropriate balanced intervention in child protection.
Individual differences in theory-of-mind judgments: Order effects and side effects.Adam Feltz & Edward T. Cokely - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (3):343 - 355.details
We explore and provide an account for a recently identified judgment anomaly, i.e., an order effect that changes the strength of intentionality ascriptions for some side effects (e.g., when a chairman's pursuit of profits has the foreseen but unintended consequence of harming the environment). Experiment 1 replicated the previously unanticipated order effect anomaly controlling for general individual differences. Experiment 2 revealed that the order effect was multiply determined and influenced by factors such as beliefs (i.e., that the same actor was involved in bringing about both good and bad side effects) and philosophical training (i.e., more training was associated with smaller differences in judgment when harm followed help). Results provide more evidence that the folk's philosophically relevant intuitions are predictably fragmented and depend on the dynamic interplay between persons, process, and environments. Methodological and theoretical implications are discussed.
Control, intentional action, and moral responsibility.Frank Hindriks - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (6):787 - 801.details
Skill or control is commonly regarded as a necessary condition for intentional action. This received wisdom is challenged by experiments conducted by Joshua Knobe and Thomas Nadelhoffer, which suggest that moral considerations sometimes trump considerations of skill and control. I argue that this effect (as well as the Knobe effect) can be explained in terms of the role normative reasons play in the concept of intentional action. This explanation has significant advantages over its rivals. It involves at most a conservative extension rather than a radical revision of what we tend to believe about intentional action, and it fits better with the way we conceive of the relation between intentional action and moral responsibility.
Can Substitution Inferences Explain the Knobe Effect?Corey McGrath - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (4):667-679.details
The Knobe effect is the phenomenon demonstrated in the course of repeated studies showing that moral valence affects the way in which we apply concepts. Knobe explains the effect by appealing to the nature of the concepts themselves: whether they actually apply in some situation depends upon the moral valence of some element of that situation. In this paper, a different picture of the effect is presented and given motivation. It is suggested that subjects apply concepts on the basis of substitution inferences. It is attempted to show that this picture is incompatible with, but preferable to, Knobe’s theory. In closing, some further observations and suggestions are given with respect to further research into the apparent effect of moral valence.
Philosophy's New challenge: Experiments and Intentional Action.N. Ángel Pinillos, Nick Smith, G. Shyam Nair, Peter Marchetto & Cecilea Mun - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (1):115-139.details
Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect.
Telling More Than We Can Know About Intentional Action.Chandra Sekhar Sripada & Sara Konrath - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (3):353-380.details
Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion: people's judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people's attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative assessments, but rather by attributions of underlying values and characterological dispositions to the agent. In a second study, we examined people's judgments about what they think drives asymmetric intuitions in the Chairman case and found that people are highly inaccurate in identifying which features of the case their intuitions track. In the final part of the paper, we discuss how the statistical methods used in this study can help philosophers with the critical features problem, the problem of figuring out which among the myriad features present in hypothetical cases are the critical ones that our intuitions are responsive to. We show how the methods used in this study have some advantages over both armchair methods used by traditional philosophers and survey methods used by experimental philosophers.
Judgment of Intentionality and Moral Evaluation in Individuals with High Functioning Autism.Tiziana Zalla & Marion Leboyer - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (4):681-698.details
In this study, we investigated the relationships between judgments of intentionality and moral evaluation in individuals with High Functioning Autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS). HFA or AS are neurodevelopmental disorders characterised by severe deficits in communication and social functioning. Impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others, are thought to be the core features of autism. Of all mental states, the concept of ‘intentional action’ is particularly important. People normally distinguish between actions that are performed intentionally and those that are performed unintentionally and this distinction plays a crucial role in social understanding and moral judgment. Recently, Knobe (Analysis 63: 190–193, 2003a ), (Philosophical Psychology 16: 309–324, 2003b ) showed that people’s moral evaluations might serve as input to the process by which people intuitively arrive at the intentionality judgments. Here, by using two pairs of vignettes, the Knobe’s Harm/Help cases and Murder/Bull’s-eye cases, we showed that, as already observed in typical population, in individuals with HFA/AS judgment of intentional action is informed by the moral appreciation of the action outcome. However, the two groups differed on praise judgments and moral justifications, suggesting that these processes were poorly influenced by the agent’s psychological states. We concluded that, although under certain circumstances, individuals with HFA/AS and people with typical development have similar intuitive judgments of intentionality, over-assignment of praise judgments and the reduced use of folk-psychological concepts in moral judgment likely reflect difficulties using intentionality information for moral reasoning.
“Stupid people deserve what they get”: The effects of personality assessment on judgments of intentional action.Berit Brogaard - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):332-334.details
Knobe argues that people’s judgments of the moral status of a side-effect of action influence their assessment of whether the side-effect is intentional. We tested this hypothesis using vignettes akin to Knobe’s but involving economically or eudaimonistically (wellness-related) negative side-effects. Our results show that it is people’s sense of what agents deserve and not the moral status of side-effects that drives intuition.
Le statut intentionnel d'une action dépend-il de sa valeur morale ? Une énigme encore à résoudre.Florian Cova - 2010 - Vox Philosophiae 2 (1):100-128.details
Dans cet article, nous introduisons le lecteur à une énigme qui a émergé récemment dans la littérature philosophique : celle de l’influence de nos évaluations morales sur nos intuitions au sujet de la nature des actions intentionnelle. En effet, certaines données issues de la philosophie expérimentale semblent suggérer que nos jugements quant au statut intentionnel d’une action dépendent de notre évaluation de ladite action. De nombreuses théories ont été proposées pour rendre compte de ces résultats. Nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle aucune des théories existantes n’est satisfaisante et que le mystère reste pour l’instant entier.
Moral Evaluation Shapes Linguistic Reports of Others' Psychological States, Not Theory-of-Mind Judgments.Florian Cova, Emmanuel Dupoux & Pierre Jacob - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):334-335.details
We use psychological concepts (e.g., intention and desire) when we ascribe psychological states to others for purposes of describing, explaining, and predicting their actions. Does the evidence reported by Knobe show, as he thinks, that moral evaluation shapes our mastery of psychological concepts? We argue that the evidence so far shows instead that moral evaluation shapes the way we report, not the way we think about, others' psychological states.
Modalities of Word Usage in Intentionality and Causality.Herbert Gintis - 2010 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 33 (4):336-337.details
Moral judgments often affect scientific judgments in real-world contexts, but Knobe's examples in the target article do not capture this phenomenon.
Enough skill to kill: Intentionality judgments and the moral valence of action.Steve Guglielmo & Bertram F. Malle - 2010 - Cognition 117 (2):139-150.details
Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action’s intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people’s intentionality judgments. His and other researchers’ studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull’s-eye). The present ﬁve studies offer an alternative account of these provocative ﬁndings. We suggest that people see the morally signiﬁcant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufﬁcient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull’s-eye is more difﬁcult than killing and that difﬁcult actions are less often judged intentional. When difﬁculty is held constant, people’s intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people’s sensitivity to subtle features of human action.
Can Unintended Side Effects be Intentional? Resolving a Controversy Over Intentionality and Morality.Steve Guglielmo & Bertram F. Malle - 2010 - Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36:1635-1647.details
Can an event’s blameworthiness distort whether people see it as intentional? In controversial recent studies, people judged a behavior’s negative side effect intentional even though the agent allegedly had no desire for it to occur. Such a judgment contradicts the standard assumption that desire is a necessary condition of intentionality, and it raises concerns about assessments of intentionality in legal settings. Six studies examined whether blameworthy events distort intentionality judgments. Studies 1 through 4 show that, counter to recent claims, intentionality judgments are systematically guided by variations in the agent’s desire, for moral and nonmoral actions alike. Studies 5 and 6 show that a behavior’s negative side effects are rarely seen as intentional once people are allowed to choose from multiple descriptions of the behavior. Specifically, people distinguish between “knowingly” and “intentionally” bringing about a side effect, even for immoral actions. These studies suggest that intentionality judgments are unaffected by a behavior’s blameworthiness.
Person as Lawyer: How Having a Guilty Mind Explains Attributions of Intentional Agency.Frank Hindriks - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):339-340.details
In criminal law, foresight betrays a guilty mind as much as intent does: both reveal that the agent is not properly motivated to avoid an illegal state of affairs. This commonality warrants our judgment that the state is brought about intentionally, even when unintended. In contrast to Knobe, I thus retain the idea that acting intentionally is acting with a certain frame of mind.
Norms and the Knobe Effect.Richard Holton - 2010 - Analysis 70 (3):1-8.details
Person as scientist, person as moralist.Joshua Knobe - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):315.details
It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. It is argued that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.
Are mental states assessed relative to what most people “should” or “would” think? Prescriptive and descriptive components of expected attitudes.Tamar A. Kreps, Benoît Monin & Joshua Knobe - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):341.details
For Knobe, observers evaluate mental states by comparing agents' statements with the attitudes they are expected to hold. In our analysis, Knobe's model relies primarily on what agents should think, and little on expectancies of what they would think. We show the importance and complexity of including descriptive and prescriptive norms if one is to take expectancies seriously.
Expectations and morality: A dilemma.Eric Mandelbaum & David Ripley - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):346-346.details
We propose Knobe's explanation of his cases encounters a dilemma: Either his explanation works and, counterintuitively, morality is not at the heart of these effects; or morality is at the heart of the effects and Knobe's explanation does not succeed. This dilemma is then used to temper the use of the Knobe paradigm for discovering moral norms.
Morality or modality?: What does the attribution of intentionality depend on?Bence Nanay - 2010 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (1):pp. 25-39.details
It has been argued that the attribution of intentional actions is sensitive to our moral judgment. I suggest an alternative, where the attribution of intentional actions depends on modal (and not moral) considerations. We judge a foreseen side-effect of an agent’s intentionally performed action to be intentional if the following modal claim is true: if she had not ignored considerations about the foreseen side-effect, her action might have been different (other things being equal). I go through the most important examples of the asymmetry in the attribution of intentionality and point out that the modal account can cover all the problematic cases, whereas the moral account can’t.
Morality or Modality? What Does the Attribution of Intentionality Depend On?Bence Nanay - 2010 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (1):25-39.details
It has been argued that the attribution of intentional actions is sensitive to our moral judgment. I will examine these arguments and Suggest an alternative explanation for the experiments they are based on.Joshua Knobe conducted the following experiment to support this claim. Subjects were given two vignettes that differed only in one small detail and this difference influenced their attribution of intentionality. The first vignette was the following:The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’The chairman of the board answered, ‘I don't care at all about harming the environment. I jus)t want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.’They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed.
Beliefs and moral Valence affect intentionality attributions: The case of side effects.Sandra Pellizzoni, Vittorio Girotto & Luca Surian - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):201-209.details
Do moral appraisals shape judgments of intentionality? A traditional view is that individuals first evaluate whether an action has been carried out intentionally. Then they use this evaluation as input for their moral judgments. Recent studies, however, have shown that individuals’ moral appraisals can also influence their intentionality attributions. They attribute intentionality to the negative side effect of a given action, but not to the positive side effect of the same action. In three experiments, we show that this asymmetry is a robust effect that critically depends on the agent’s beliefs. The asymmetry is reduced when agents are described as not knowing that their action can bring about side effects, and is eliminated when they are deemed to hold a false belief about the consequences of their actions. These results suggest that both evaluative and epistemic considerations are used in intentionality attribution.
The Intentional Action Factory.Mark Phelan - 2010 - The Philosophers' Magazine 52.details
This short paper, forthcoming as part of a symposium on experimental philosophy to appear in the popular publication, The Philosophers’ Magazine (including contributions by Papineau, Stich, Machery, Sommers, and Knobe), offers an accessible summary of seven years of experimental-philosophical research into intentional action attributions.
Ambiguity of \"Intention\".Thomas M. Scanlon - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):348-349.details
Knobe reports that subjects' judgments of whether an agent did something intentionally vary depending on whether the outcome in question was seen by them as good or as bad. He concludes that subjects' moral views affect their judgments about intentional action. This conclusion appears to follow only if different meanings of “intention” are overlooked.
Folk concepts of intentional action in the contexts of amoral and immoral luck.Paulo Sousa & Colin Holbrook - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):351-370.details
This paper concerns a recently discovered, puzzling asymmetry in judgments of whether an action is intentional or not (Knobe, Philosophical Psychology 16:309–324, 2003a ; Analysis 63:190–193, b ). We report new data replicating the asymmetry in the context of scenarios wherein an agent achieves an amoral or immoral goal due to luck. Participants’ justifications of their judgments of the intentionality of the agent’s action indicate that two distinct folk concepts of intentional action played a role in their judgments. When viewed from this perspective, the puzzle disappears, although the asymmetry remains.
Fixing the default position in Knobe's competence model.Joseph Ulatowski & Justus Johnson - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4):352-353.details
Although we agree with the spirit of Knobe's competence model, our aim in this commentary is to argue that the default position should be made more precise. Our quibble with Knobe's model is that we find it hard to ascribe a coherent view to some experimental subjects if the default position is not clearly defined.
Norms Inform Mental State Ascriptions: A Rational Explanation for the Side-Effect Effect.Kevin Uttich & Tania Lombrozo - 2010 - Cognition 116 (1):87–100.details
Theory of mind, the capacity to understand and ascribe mental states, has traditionally been conceptualized as analogous to a scientific theory. However, recent work in philosophy and psychology has documented a "side-effect effect" suggesting that moral evaluations influence mental state ascriptions, and in particular whether a behavior is described as having been performed 'intentionally.' This evidence challenges the idea that theory of mind is analogous to scientific psychology in serving the function of predicting and explaining, rather than evaluating, behavior. In three experiments, we demonstrate that moral evaluations do inform ascriptions of intentional action, but that this relationship arises because behavior that conforms to norms (moral or otherwise) is less informative about underlying mental states than is behavior that violates norms. This analysis preserves the traditional understanding of theory of mind as a tool for predicting and explaining behavior, but also suggests the importance of normative considerations in social cognition.
Judgements of intentionality and moral worth: Experimental challenges to Hindriks.Alessandro Lanteri - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (237):713-720.details
Joshua Knobe found that people are more likely to describe an action as intentional if it has had a bad outcome than a good outcome, and to blame a bad outcome than to praise a good one. These asymmetries raised numerous questions about lay moral judgement. Frank Hindriks recently proposed that one acts intentionally if one fails to comply with a normative reason against performing the action, that moral praise requires appropriate motivation, whereas moral blame does not, and that these asymmetries are normal features of a theory of intentional action, not anomalies. I present two empirical studies revealing asymmetries in lay judgements of intentionality and moral blameworthiness; these cannot be explained by Hindriks' theory of intentional action.
Foreknowledge, caring and the side-effect effect in young children.Sandra Pellizzoni - 2009 - Developmental Psychology 45:289-295.details
The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment.Dean Pettit & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (5):586-604.details
Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.
Is the 'trade-off hypothesis' worth trading for?Mark Phelan & Hagop Sarkissian - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (2):164-180.details
Abstract: Recently, the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe has shown that the folk are more inclined to describe side effects as intentional actions when they bring about bad results. Edouard Machery has offered an intriguing new explanation of Knobe's work—the 'trade-off hypothesis'—which denies that moral considerations explain folk applications of the concept of intentional action. We critique Machery's hypothesis and offer empirical evidence against it. We also evaluate the current state of the debate concerning the concept of intentionality, and argue that, given the number of variables at play, any parsimonious account of the relevant data is implausible.
The Ethical Dimension of Folk Psychology?Karsten R. Stueber - 2009 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):532-547.details
Participants in the debate about the nature of folk psychology tend to share one fundamental assumption: that its primary purpose consists in the prediction and explanation of another person's behavior. The following essay will evaluate recent challenges to this assumption by philosophers such as Joshua Knobe who insist that folk psychology and its concepts are intimately linked to our ethical concerns. I will show how conceiving of folk psychology in an engaged manner enables one to account for the evidence cited in favor of an ethical interpretation of folk psychology, without undermining the claim that it is primarily an explanatory practice. Nevertheless, I will suggest that the basic cognitive stance of folk psychology has ethical implications that have been insufficiently noted in the contemporary context.
Asymmetries in judgments of responsibility and intentional action.Jennifer Cole Wright & John Bengson - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (1):24-50.details
Abstract: Recent experimental research on the 'Knobe effect' suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) and (ii) the fact that intentionality commonly connects the evaluative status of actions to the responsibility of actors. We present the results of several new studies that provide empirical evidence in support of this account while disconfirming various currently prominent alternative accounts. We end by discussing some implications of this account for folk psychology.
Individual Differences, Judgment Biases, and Theory-of-Mind: Deconstructing the Intentional Action Side Effect Asymmetry.Edward Cokely & Adam Feltz - 2008 - Journal of Research in Personality 43:18-24.details
When the side effect of an action involves moral considerations (e.g. when a chairman’s pursuit of profits harms the environment) it tends to influence theory-of-mind judgments. On average, bad side effects are judged intentional whereas good side effects are judged unintentional. In a series of two experiments, we examined the largely uninvestigated roles of individual differences in this judgment asymmetry. Experiment 1 indicated that extraversion accounted for variations in intentionality judgments, controlling for a range of other general individual differences (e.g. working memory, self-control). Experiment 2 indicated that extraversion’s influence was partially mediated by more specific variations in intentional action concepts. A priming manipulation also provided causal evidence of judgment instability and bias. Results suggest that the intentional action judgment asymmetry is multiply determined, reflecting the interplay of individual differences and judgment biases. Implications and the roles of individual differences in judgment and decision-making research are discussed.
Crime and punishment: Distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment.Fiery Cushman - 2008 - Cognition 108 (2):353-380.details
Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of action were found to rely principally on the mental states of an agent, while judgments of blame and punishment are found to rely jointly on mental states and the causal connection of an agent to a harmful consequence. Also, selectively for judgments of punishment and blame, people who attempt but fail to cause harm more are judged more leniently if the harm occurs by independent means than if the harm does not occur at all. An account of these phenomena is proposed that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Intentional action : two-and-a-half folk concepts?Fiery Cushman & Alfred Mele - 2008 - In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 171.details
What are the criteria people use when they judge that other people did something intentionally? This question has motivated a large and growing literature both in philosophy and in psychology. It has become a topic of particular concern to the nascent field of experimental philosophy, which uses empirical techniques to understand folk concepts. We present new data that hint at some of the underly- ing psychological complexities of folk ascriptions of intentional action and at dis- tinctions both between diverse concepts and between associated mechanisms.
Intentional action and the praise-blame asymmetry.Frank Hindriks - 2008 - Philosophical Quarterly 58 (233):630-641.details
Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First, people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These findings suggest that the notion of intentional action has a normative component. I propose a theory of intentional action on which one acts intentionally if one fails to be motivated to avoid a bad effect. This explains the asymmetry concerning intentional action. The praise–blame asymmetry is explained in terms of the claim that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not.
The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology.Joshua Knobe - 2008 - In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.details
The folk concept of intentional action: Philosophical and experimental issues.Edouard Machery - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (2):165–189.details
Recent experimental ﬁ ndings by Knobe and others ( Knobe, 2003; Nadelhoffer, 2006b; Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007 ) have been at the center of a controversy about the nature of the folk concept of intentional action. I argue that the signiﬁ cance of these ﬁ ndings has been overstated. My discussion is two-pronged. First, I contend that barring a consensual theory of conceptual competence, the signiﬁ cance of these experimental ﬁ ndings for the nature of the concept of intentional action cannot be determined. Unfortunately, the lack of progress in the philosophy of concepts casts doubt on whether such a consensual theory will be found. Second, I propose a new, deﬂ ationary interpretation of these experimental ﬁ ndings, ‘ the trade-off hypothesis ’ , and I present several new experimental ﬁ ndings that support this interpretation.
Knobe vs Machery: Testing the trade-off hypothesis.Ron Mallon - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (2):247-255.details
Recent work by Joshua Knobe has established that people are far more likely to describe bad but foreseen side effects as intentionally performed than good but foreseen side effects (this is sometimes called the 'Knobe effect' or the 'side-effect effect.' Edouard Machery has proposed a novel explanation for this asymmetry: it results from construing the bad side effect as a cost that must be incurred to receive a benefit. In this paper, I argue that Machery's 'trade-off hypothesis' is wrong. I do this by reproducing the asymmetry between judgments about good and bad side effects in cases that cannot plausibly be construed as trade-offs.
Effects of moral cognition on judgments of intentionality.Jennifer Nado - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4):709-731.details
Several recent articles on the concept of intentional action center on experimental findings suggesting that intentionality ascription can be affected by moral factors. I argue that the explanation for these phenomena lies in the workings of a tacit moral judgment mechanism, capable under certain circumstances of altering normal intentionality ascriptions. This view contrasts with that of Knobe ([2006]), who argues that the findings show that the concept of intentional action invokes evaluative notions. I discuss and reject possible objections to the moral mechanism view, and offer arguments supporting the model over Knobe's account on grounds of simplicity and plausibility.
The folk strike back; or, why you didn’t do it intentionally, though it was bad and you knew it.Mark T. Phelan & Hagop Sarkissian - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (2):291 - 298.details
Recent and puzzling experimental results suggest that people’s judgments as to whether or not an action was performed intentionally are sensitive to moral considerations. In this paper, we outline these results and evaluate two accounts which purport to explain them. We then describe a recent experiment that allegedly vindicates one of these accounts and present our own findings to show that it fails to do so. Finally, we present additional data suggesting no such vindication could be in the offing and that, in fact, both accounts fail to explain the initial, puzzling results they were purported to explain.
Alltagspsychologie, Absichtlichkeit und Werturteil.Julius Schälike - 2008 - Facta Philosophica 10 (1):83-104.details
Joshua Knobe und andere haben empirische Belege für folgende rätsel- hafte Asymmetrie vorgelegt: Nebenfolgen, die lediglich in Kauf genommen werden, werden im Alltag als unabsichtlich bezeichnet, wenn sie positiv sind, jedoch als absichtlich, wenn sie negativ sind. Ich versuche zu zeigen, dass dieser Asymmetrie ein symmetrisches Prinzip zugrunde liegt, das auf die kausalen Rollen abhebt, die bestimmte Eigenschaften von Akteuren für das Auftreten von Ereignissen spielen. Relevant sind hierbei Kausalrelationen, mit denen gewisse „Spiegelverhältnisse“ einhergehen: im Ereignis „spiegelt“ sich die Akteurseigenschaft evaluativ und propositional.
Intention, temporal order, and moral judgments.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ron Mallon, Tom Mccoy & Jay G. Hull - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (1):90–106.details
The traditional philosophical doctrine of double effect claims that agents’ intentions affect whether acts are morally wrong. Our behavioral study reveals that agents’ intentions do affect whether acts are judged morally wrong, whereas the temporal order of good and bad effects affects whether acts are classified as killings. This finding suggests that the moral judgments are not based on the classifications. Our results also undermine recent claims that prior moral judgments determine whether agents are seen as causing effects intentionally rather than as side effects.
Knobe, Side Effects, and the Morally Good Business.Andy Wible - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 85 (S1):173 - 178.details
This paper focuses on Joshua Knobe's experiments which show that people attribute blame and intentionality to the chairman of a company that knowingly causes harmful side effects, but do not attribute praise and intentionality to the chairman of a company that knowingly causes helpful side effects. Knobe's explanation of this data is that people determine intentionality based on the moral consideration of whether the side effect is good or bad. This observation and explanation has come to be known as the "Knobe Effect." One implication from the Knobe Effect is that it seems profit-driven businesses can only intentionally cause harmful and never good side effects. This paper examines the Knobe Effect, and argues for a way that business persons can understand it and avoid its implications. The argument has three parts. The first point is that business persons who care only about profits are blameworthy and rightly should not get credit for good side effects. Second, when a morally praiseworthy person who cares about values other than profits causes side effects, her actions are intentional and praiseworthy. Therefore, profit-driven business persons can be praised for intentionally producing good side effects if they consider other moral values as moral agents should. Finally, morally praiseworthy business persons need only to be Minimally Good Samaritans and not totally altruistic. When a business person strives for profits, adheres to other morally important values, and produces morally good side effects, then we should say that she intentionally caused those effects and is praiseworthy.
The Knobe effect: A brief overview.Adam Feltz - 2007 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 28 (3-4):265-277.details
Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional action. I discuss some problems with these explanations and conclude with some possible avenues for future research.
An anomaly in intentional action ascription: More evidence of folk diversity.Adam Feltz & Edward Cokely - 2007 - In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Cognitive Science Society.details
Intentional action, folk judgments, and stories: Sorting things out.Alfred R. Mele & Fiery Cushman - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):184–201.details
How are our actions sorted into those that are intentional and those that are not? The philosophical and psychological literature on this topic is livelier now than ever, and we seek to make a contribution to it here. Our guiding question in this article is easy to state and hard to answer: How do various factors— specifically, features of vignettes—that contribute to majority folk judgments that an action is or is not intentional interact in producing the judgment? In pursuing this question we draw on a number of empirical studies, including some of our own, and we sketch some future studies that would shed light on our topic. We emphasize that the factors that concern us here are limited to features of stories to which subject respond: examples include the value of the action asked about, the agent’s being indifferent to performing that action, and the agent’s seeking to perform it. We do not discuss underlying cognitive or emotional processes here, nor do we discuss whether respondents are making errors of any kind. (Both of these issues are discussed in Cushman and Mele [forthcoming].) 1. THREE KINDS OF ACTION In the present section we draw some distinctions that set the stage for our discussion of empirical results. Our actions have effects, and an agent’s bringing about such an effect is itself an action. For example, unbeknownst to Ann, her unlocking the door to her house frightened an intruder. That is, at least one effect of Ann’s unlocking her door was the intruder’s fright. Her bringing about this effect—that is, her frightening the intruder—is an action. Side-effect actions, as we understand this..
Fringe benefits, side effects, and indifference: A reply to Feltz.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2007 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 27 (1):127-136.details
In a previous paper, I suggested that if an agent is a morally praiseworthy person and one of the consequences of the action she knowingly brings about is morally positive, then this consequence isn’t really a side effect for the agent. Adam Feltz has recently developed a case that purportedly puts pressure on my account of side effects. In the present paper, I am going to argue that Feltz’s purported counter-example fails to undermine my view even if it happens to shed new light on the difference between negative side effects and positive fringe benefits. After responding to Feltz’s criticisms, I will conclude by presenting the results of a pilot study that provide prima facie support for my view.
Intuitions and individual differences: The Knobe effect revisited.Shaun Nichols & Joseph Ulatowski - 2007 - Mind and Language 22 (4):346–365.details
Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how ‘intentional’ is interpreted. That is, in Knobe’s cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of ‘intentional’ opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe’s results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the use of intuitions in philosophy is complicated by fact that there are robust individual differences in intuitions about matters of philosophical concern.
Folk concepts, surveys and intentional action.Annie Steadman & Frederick Adams - 2007 - In C. Lumer & S. Nannini (eds.), Intentionality, Deliberation, and Autonomy: The Action-Theoretic Basis of Practical Philosophy. Ashgate Publishers.details
In a recent paper, Al Mele (2003) suggests that the Simple View of intentional action is “fiction” because it is “wholly unconstrained” by a widely shared (folk) concept of intentional action. The Simple View (Adams, 1986, McCann, 1986) states that an action is intentional only if intended. As evidence that the Simple View is not in accord with the folk notion of intentional action, Mele appeals to recent surveys of folk judgments by Joshua Knobe (2003, 2004a, 2004b). Knobe’s surveys appear to show that the folk judge unintended but known side effects of actions to be performed intentionally. In this paper we will reject Mele’s suggestion that the Simple View is “fiction.” We will also discuss the relationship between surveys and philosophical theories, and the abilities of surveys to access folk core concepts. We will argue that considerations of both fail to support Mele’s suggestion.
Intentional action and \"in order to\".Eric Wiland - 2007 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 27 (1):113-118.details
I. Thanks largely to Joshua Knobe, philosophers now frequently empirically investigate the folk psychological concept of intentional action. Knobe (2003, 2004a, 2004b) argues that application of this concept is often surprisingly sensitive to one’s moral views. In particular, it seems that people are much more willing to regard a bit of behavior as intentional, if they think that the action in question is bad or wrong. There is much controversy about both the design and the interpretation of the experiments Knobe has conducted. One concern is that common use of the word ‘intentionally’ seems to be sensitive to matters other than the concept of intentional action. Perhaps the use of the word ‘intentionally’ is also governed by pragmatic thoughts about blameworthiness—if you think N.N. is to be blamed for ф-ing, then you are more likely to say that N.N. is ф-ing intentionally, apart from whether you really judge that the ф-ing was intentional (Adams and Steadman 2004a). One way to neutralize these concerns is to gauge whether people regard an action as intentional, not by asking them whether they would apply the word ‘intentional’ or its cognates to the action in question, but by seeing whether they treat the action as susceptible to reason explanations. After all, if some act of ф-ing is susceptible to a reason explanation, then the act of ф-ing is intentional. Knobe infers that we can see whether a psychological subject regards some act as intentional by seeing whether the subject is willing to say that the bit of behavior can function appropriately in a reasons explanation.
Intentions Confer Intentionality Upon Actions: A Reply to Knobe and Burra.Frederick Adams - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):255-268.details
Is intentionally doing A linked to the intention to do A? Knobe and Burra believe that the link between the English words ‘intention’ and ‘intentional’ may mislead philosophers and cognitive scientists to falsely believe that intentionally doing an action A requires one to have the intention to do A. Knobe and Burra believe that data from other languages..
Intending, intention, intent, intentional action, and acting intentionally: Comments on Knobe and Burra.Gilbert Harman - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):269-276.details
There has been considerable controversy about whether this last entailment always holds. Ordinary subjects may judge that (4) and (5) are appropriate in cases in which none of (1)-(3) are—cases in which Jack’s breaking the base is a foreseen but undesired consequence of Jack’s intentionally doing something else. It is currently debated what the best explanation of such ordinary reactions might be. It is also debated what to make of the fact that ordinary judgments using the adjective intentional or the adverb intentionally seem influenced by normative considerations.
The concept of intentional action: A case study in the uses of folk psychology.Joshua Knobe - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (2):203-231.details
It is widely believed that the primary function of folk psychology lies in the prediction, explanation and control of behavior. A question arises, however, as to whether folk psychology has also been shaped in fundamental ways by the various other roles it plays in people’s lives. Here I approach that question by considering one particular aspect of folk psychology – the distinction between intentional and unintentional behaviors. The aim is to determine whether this distinction is best understood as a tool used in prediction, explanation and control or whether it has been shaped in fundamental ways by some other aspect of its use.
Experimental philosophy and folk concepts: Methodological considerations.Joshua Knobe & Arudra Burra - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):331-342.details
Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be possible to provide more adequate answers a few years down the line.
The folk concepts of intention and intentional action: A cross-cultural study.Joshua Knobe & Arudra Burra - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):113-132.details
Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of _intention_ and their use of the concept of _acting intentionally_. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their beliefs about whether the behavior is morally good or morally bad). These findings raise a number of difficult questions about the relationship between the concept of intention and the concept of acting intentionally. The present paper addresses those questions using a variety of different methods, including conceptual analysis, psychological experimentation, and an examination of people's use of certain expressions in other languages.
Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect: 'Theory of mind' and moral judgment.Joshua Knobe, Adam Cohen & Alan Leslie - 2006 - Psychological Science 17:421-427.details
The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where ‘theory of mind’ and moral judgment meet. Preschool children’s judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side-effect is brought about 'on purpose' when the side-effect itself is morally bad but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of ‘on-purpose’ (as opposed to purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentional action are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative — even in preschoolers — challenges current understanding. Young children’s judgments regarding foreseen side-effects depend upon whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side-effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the ‘theory of mind’ concept, NOT CARE THAT P, children show the side-effect effect.idea..
Intentionality, Morality, and Their Relationship in Human Judgment.Bertram Malle - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):61-86.details
This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality a ﬀ ect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more aﬀected than praise. Second, the concept of intentionality is constitutive of many legal judgments (e.g., of murder vs. manslaughter), and one study illustrates people’s subtle considerations of intentionality in making those judgments. Third, controversial recent studies suggest that moral considerations can aﬀect judgments of intentionality, and an asymmetry may exist such that blame a ﬀ ects those judgments more than praise. I report two new studies that may shed light on these recent ﬁndings, and I discuss several theoretical models that might account for the impact of moral considerations on intentionality judgments and for the relationship between the two more generally.
The folk concept of intentional action: A commentary.Alfred Mele - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):277-290.details
In this commentary, I discuss the three main articles in this volume that present survey data relevant to a search for something that might merit the label “the folk concept of intentional action” – the articles by Joshua Knobe and Arudra Burra, Bertram Malle, and Thomas Nadelhoffer. My guiding question is this: What shape might we find in an analysis of intentional action that takes at face value the results of all of the relevant surveys about vignettes discussed in these three articles?1 To simplify exposition, I assume that there is something that merits the label I mentioned.
Representing Intentional Relations and Acting Intentionally in Infancy.Chris Moore - 2006 - In Günther Knoblich, Ian M. Thornton, Marc Grosjean & Maggie Shiffrar (eds.), Human Body Perception From the Inside Out. Oxford University Press. pp. 427.details
Bad acts, blameworthy agents, and intentional actions: Some problems for juror impartiality.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2006 - Philosophical Explorations 9 (2):203 – 219.details
In this paper, I first review some of the recent empirical work on the biasing effect that moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action. Then, I use Mark Alicke's affective model of blame attribution to explain this biasing effect. Finally, I discuss the relevance of this research - both philosophical and psychological - to the problem of the partiality of jury deliberation. After all, if the immorality of an action does affect folk ascriptions of intentionality, and all serious criminal offenses - e.g., murder and rape - are immoral in addition to being illegal, then a juror's ability to determine the relevant mens rea (i.e., guilty mind) of a defendant in an unbiased way may be seriously undermined.
On trying to save the simple view.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2006 - Mind and Language 21 (5):565-586.details
According to the analysis of intentional action that Michael Bratman has dubbed the 'Simple View', intending to x is necessary for intentionally x-ing. Despite the plausibility of this view, there is gathering empirical evidence that when people are presented with cases involving moral considerations, they are much more likely to judge that the action (or side effect) in question was brought about intentionally than they are to judge that the agent intended to do it. This suggests that at least as far as the ordinary concept of intentional action is concerned, an agent need not intend to x in order to x intentionally.
Desire, foresight, intentions, and intentional actions: Probing folk intuitions.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):133-157.details
A number of philosophers working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy” have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way.¹ In a series of papers these philosophers—who often work in collaboration with psychologists—have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In this paper, I contribute to this research program by discussing the results of some new experiments that further probe folk intuitions about the relationship between desire, foresight, intent, intentional action, and moral considerations.
Does emotion mediate the relationship between an action's moral status and its intentional status? Neuropsychological evidence.Liane Young, Daniel Tranel, Ralph Adolphs, Marc Hauser & Fiery Cushman - 2006 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2):291-304.details
Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. According to this hypothesis, the negative emotional response triggered by a morally bad action drives the attribution of intent to the actor, or the judgment that the actor acted intentionally. We test this hypothesis by presenting cases of morally bad and morally good action to seven individuals with deficits in emotional processing resulting from damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). If normal emotional processing is necessary for the observed asymmetry, then individuals with VMPC lesions should show no asymmetry. Our results provide no support for this hypothesis: like normal individuals, those with VMPC lesions showed the same asymmetry, tending to judge that an action was intentional when it was morally bad but not when it was morally good. Based on this finding, we suggest that normal emotional processing is not responsible for the observed asymmetry of intentional attributions and thus does not mediate the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status.
Intentional action and intending: Recent empirical studies.Hugh J. McCann - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (6):737-748.details
Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues that in fact, the evidence of all the studies considered is best understood in terms of the Simple View.
Skill, luck, control, and intentional action.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (3):341 – 352.details
On the surface, it seems intuitively plausible that if an agent luckily manages to perform a desired action (e.g., rolling a six with a fair die or winning the lottery), the performance of which is not the result of any relevant skill on her part, we should not say that she performed the action intentionally. This intuition suggests that our concept of intentional action is sensitive to considerations of skill, luck, and causal control. Indeed, some philosophers have claimed that in order for an action to be performed intentionally it must be performed with a relevant amount of skill or control - i.e., an intentional action cannot simply be the result of luck. On this view, skill and control are necessary conditions of our everyday concept of intentional action. In this essay, I discuss empirical evidence that challenges this claim. After briefly setting the stage, I examine Al Mele and Paul Moser's thorough analysis of intentional action - paying particular attention to some of the interesting scenarios they offer in support of their position. Next, I discuss the results of some simple psychological experiments that show that people's judgments concerning whether actions are intentional can often be affected by the moral features of these actions - features that may trump considerations of skill, luck, and control. Finally, I conclude that if this is correct, philosophers who claim that skill and control are necessary conditions of the folk concept of intentional action appear to be mistaken. One can test attempted philosophical analyses of intentional action partly by ascertaining whether what these analyses entail about particular actions is in line with what the majority of non-specialists would say about these actions if there is a widely shared concept of intentional action, such judgments provide evidence about what the concept is, and a philosophical analysis of intentional action that is wholly unconstrained by that concept runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter. (Mele, 2001, p. 27).
Intentions and Intentional Actions in Ordinary Language and the Criminal Law.Thomas Allen Nadelhoffer - 2005 - Dissertation, details
While most philosophers agree that the concept of intentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Unfortunately, there has traditionally been a dearth of empirical data about folk ascriptions of intentional action. Lately, however, philosophers and psychologists have begun making a concerted effort to fill in this empirical lacuna. In this dissertation, I discuss how this research sheds new light on problems in action theory, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of law. First, I set the stage with a discussion of some of the problems traditionally associated with the concept of intentional action. Here, questions include: What is it to do something intentionally? How are intentional actions related to intentions? What is the relationship between intentional action and conative, cognitive, and moral considerations? In this first section, my main goal is to survey the relevant literature from action theory in order to give the reader a perspicuous view of the kinds of debates that shape the philosophical landscape. Having laid out some of the salient problems, I then turn my attention to some recent empirical research on the folk concept of intentional action and discuss the relevance of this research to the philosophy of action. Next, I compare and contrast the folk concepts of intention and intentional action with their legal counterparts. My goal is to flesh out the extent to which these concepts diverge—a problem that is particularly pressing given that in litigated cases involving juries, jurors are often asked to judge whether the defendant acted intentionally, purposely, knowingly, etc. Finally, I flesh out the implications of the aforementioned data on the folk concept of intentional action and moral psychology—especially blame attribution—for the problem of jury partiality. I argue that the biasing effect that moral considerations have on our ascriptions of intentional action further complicates our attempt to ascertain the proper role that the concepts of intention and intentional action should play in criminal proceedings.
Intentional action and moral considerations: still pragmatic.F. Adams & A. Steadman - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):268-276.details
Intentional action in ordinary language: Core concept or pragmatic understanding?Fred Adams & Annie Steadman - 2004 - Analysis 64 (2):173–181.details
Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a consequence of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a beneﬁt (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language.
Intention, intentional action and moral considerations.J. Knobe - 2004 - Analysis 64 (2):181-187.details
Folk Psychology and Folk Morality: Response to Critics.Joshua Knobe - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):270-279.details
It is often implied, and sometimes explicitly asserted, that folk psychology is best understood as a kind of predictive device. The key contention of this widely held view is that people apply folk-psychological concepts because the application of these concepts enables them to predict future behavior. If we know what an agent believes, desires, intends, etc., we can make a pretty good guess about what he or she will do next. It seems to me that this picture is not quite right. In a series of recent papers, my colleagues and I have presented data that suggests that moral considerations actually play an important role in folk psychology (Knobe 2003a; 2003b; 2004; Knobe & Burra forthcoming; Knobe & Mendlow forthcoming). These findings do not sit well with the view according to which folk psychology is best understood as a predictive device. It appears that folk psychology might be better understood as a kind of multi-purpose tool. It is used not only in making predictive judgments but also in making moral judgments, and both of these uses appear to have shaped the fundamental competencies that underlie it. One of the most important forms of evidence in this debate comes from studies of the distinction people draw between intentional and unintentional behavior. These studies indicate that people’s intuitions as to whether or not a behavior was performed intentionally can be influenced by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior..
Unintentionally biasing the data: Reply to Knobe.Roblin R. Meeks - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):220-223.details
Knobe wants to help adjudicate the philosophical debate concerning whether and under what conditions we normally judge that some side effect was brought about intentionally. His proposal for doing so is perhaps an obvious one--simply elicit the intuitions of \"The Folk\" directly on the matter and record the results. Knobe concludes that people's judgment that a side effect was brought about intentionally apparently rests, at least in part, upon how blameworthy they find the agent responsible for it. Knobe's appreciably straightforward approach to this question does not settle the matter, however. Simply raising that question can itself affect our evaluation of the side effect in question as either something good or something bad. As a result, Knobe's experiments effectively bias subjects' responses toward judging the given side effects more negatively than they might have otherwise. Subjects failed to assign a high level of praise for good side effects because taking into account whether they were brought about intentionally or unintentionally makes them suspect. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
The Butler problem revisited.T. Nadelhoffer - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):277-284.details
On the surface, it seems plausible that the goodness or badness of an agent’s actions should be completely irrelevant to the question of whether she performed them intentionally, but there is growing evidence that ascriptions of intentional actions are affected by moral considerations. Joshua Knobe, for instance, has recently published a series of groundbreaking papers (2003a, 2003b, 2004) in which he suggests that people’s judgments concerning the intentionality of an action may sometimes depend on what they think about the action – morally speaking. One of the more interesting results of Knobe’s psychological experiments is the discovery that people may have a lower threshold for judging that lucky (or unskilled) actions are intentional when these actions are praiseworthy or blameworthy than they do for judging that equally lucky (or unskilled) morally neutral actions are intentional. In this paper I show that this discovery – when supplemented with some additional empirical data – gives us a way of shedding new light on a controversy that was sparked by Ronald Butler in 1977 when he posed the following problem to the readers of Analysis.
On praise, side effects, and folk ascriptions of intentionality.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):196-213.details
In everyday discourse, we often draw a distinction between actions that are performed intentionally (e.g. opening your car door) and those that are performed unintentionally (e.g. shutting a car door on your finger). This distinction has interested philosophers working in a number of different areas. Indeed, intentional actions are not only the primary focus of those concerned with understanding and explaining human behavior, but they often occupy center stage in philosophical discussions of free will and moral and legal responsibility as well. And while most philosophers agree that the distinction between intentional and unintentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Until recently, there has been a lack of empirical data about the folk concept of intentional action and as a result the debate among philosophers has been mostly.
Blame, Badness, and Intentional Action: A Reply to Knobe and Mendlow.Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):259-269.details
Florida State University In a series of recent papers both Joshua Knobe (2003a; 2003b; 2004) and I (2004a; 2004b; forthcoming) have published the results of some psychological experiments that show that moral considerations influence folk ascriptions of intentional action in both non-side effect and side effect cases.1 More specifically, our data suggest that people are more likely to judge that a morally negative action or side effect was brought about intentionally than they are to judge that a structurally similar non-moral action or side effect was brought about intentionally. So, for instance, if two individuals A and B place a single bullet in a six shooter, spin the chamber, aim the gun, and pull the trigger, but A shoots a person and B shoots a target, people are more likely to say that A shot the person intentionally than they are to say that B shot the target intentionally— even though their respective chances of success (viz., one-in-six) and their control over the outcome are identical in both cases. And while Knobe and I agree that our research creates difficulties for any analysis of the folk concept of intentional action that ignores the biasing effect of moral considerations, we disagree about how best to explain this effect. I have suggested that the moral blameworthiness of an agent can influence folk intuitions about intentional action. In a recent response to my work, Knobe and Mendlow (2004) reject this claim on two separate grounds—one a priori, one empirical. By their lights, not only is my view conceptually confused, but it also allegedly fails to explain the results of a recent experiment they have conducted. On Knobe and Mendlow’s view, it is..
Intentionality and moral judgments in commonsense thought about action.Steven Sverdlik - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):224-236.details
The concept of intentional action occupies a central place in commonsense or folk psychological thought. Philosophers of action, psychologists and moral philosophers all have taken an interest in understanding this important concept. One issue that has been discussed by philosophers is whether the concept of intentional action is purely ‘naturalistic’, that is, whether it is entirely a descriptive concept that can be used to explain and predict behavior. (Of course, judgments using such a concept could be used to support moral or evaluative judgments about responsibility, praise and blame.) A related question is whether speakers’ views about moral and evaluative issues at least affect their judgments about intentionality, even if their explicit concept of intentional action is not itself evaluative.
Folk intuitions, asymmetry, and intentional side effects.Jason Turner - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):214-219.details
An agent S wants to A and knows that if she A-s she will also bring about B. S does not care at all about B. S then A-s, also bringing about B. Did she intentionally bring B about? Joshua Knobe (2003b) has recently argued that, according to the folk concept of intentional action, the answer depends on B's moral significance. In particular, if B is reprehensible, people are more likely to say that S intentionally brought it about. Knobe defends this position with empirical facts about how ordinary people use the adjective 'intentionally.' Knobe's results are consistent with the thesis that the concept of intentional action is fundamentally evaluative. There is an alternative hypothesis, however, which can account for Knobe's data and which keeps the concept of intentional action within the purview of action theory. The current author suggests that the following conditions are jointly sufficient for a side effect E, produced by S's action A, being intentional: (i) S knows that E will (or is likely to) occur as a result of A-ing, (ii) bringing about E counts against A-ing (from the S's perspective), and (iii) S does not try to keep E from occurring. Known immoral side effects will always, from the folk's perspective, satisfy condition (ii) of this hypothesis.
Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language.J. Knobe - 2003 - Analysis 63 (3):190-194.details
There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases. g.
Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation.Joshua Knobe - 2003 - Philosophical Psychology 16 (2):309-325.details
Four experiments examined people’s folk-psychological concept of intentional action. The chief question was whether or not _evaluative _considerations — considerations of good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame — played any role in that concept. The results indicated that the moral qualities of a behavior strongly influence people’s judgements as to whether or not that behavior should be considered ‘intentional.’ After eliminating a number of alternative explanations, the author concludes that this effect is best explained by the hypothesis that evaluative considerations do play some role in people’s concept of intentional action.<b> </b>.
Intentional action: Controversies, data, and core hypotheses.Alfred R. Mele - 2003 - Philosophical Psychology 16 (2):325-340.details
This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended; the influence of considerations of luck, skill, and causal deviance on judgments about what agents do intentionally; what interesting properties all cases of intentional action might share; and the debate between proponents of, respectively, \"the Simple View\" of the connection between intentional action and intention and \"the Single Phenomenon View\" of that connection. A substantial body of literature is devoted to the project of analyzing intentional action [1] . In this article, I explore the bearing on that project of some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended. This article may reasonably be regarded as a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a range of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and, likewise, of the potential bearing of attempted philosophical analyses of folk concepts on empirical studies of those concepts.
Folk explanations of intentional action.Bertram F. Malle - 2001 - In Bertram Malle, L. J. Moses & Dare Baldwin (eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. MIT Press. pp. 265--286.details
Acting Intentionally: Probing Folk Notions.Alfred Mele - 2001 - In Bertram Malle, L. J. Moses & Dare Baldwin (eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. MIT Press. pp. 27--43.details
In the first section, I will argue that the folk concept of necessary conditions for intentional action needs refinement. In the second and third sections, I will identify some additional issues one would need to explore in con- structing a statement of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for intentional action. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the conceptual analyst’s task.
The folk concept of intentionality.Joshua Knobe & Bertram Malle - 1997 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 33:101-121.details
When perceiving, explaining, or criticizing human behavior, people distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions. To do so, they rely on a shared folk concept of intentionality. In contrast to past speculative models, this article provides an empirically-based model of this concept. Study 1 demonstrates that people agree substantially in their judgments of intentionality, suggesting a shared underlying concept. Study 2 reveals that when asked to directly define the term intentional, people mention four components of intentionality: desire, belief, intention, and awareness. Study 3 confirms the importance of a fifth component, namely, skill. In light of these findings, the authors propose a model of the folk concept of intentionality and provide a further test in Study 4. The discussion compares the proposed model to past ones and examines its implications for social perception, attribution, and cognitive development.
Blaming Mindreaders: Intentional Action, Moral Responsibility, and Theory of Mind.Matthew James - unknowndetails
Two prominent views of the role of intentional action ascriptions are the “theory of mind” view, which holds that the primary function of intentional action ascriptions is their use in behavior explanation and prediction, and the “evaluative” view, which holds that the primary function of intentional action ascriptions is their use in evaluating moral considerations. Within the evaluative view, there are two models: a “simultaneous” model in which ascriptions of intentional action and moral responsibility are sub-processes of a general behavior evaluation process, and a “blame-first” model in which ascriptions of moral responsibility are made prior to ascriptions of intentional action, and can influence ascriptions of intentional action. Surveys by Joshua Knobe and Thomas Nadelhoffer have demonstrated that the presence of moral considerations makes people more likely to attribute intentional action than they would in parallel cases without moral considerations, providing support for the evaluative view. However, current explanations of the influence of moral considerations on ascriptions of intentional action are unsatisfactory. An account is proposed synthesizing the theory of mind view and the blame-first model of the evaluative view into an integrated theory of intentional action, moral responsibility, and theory of mind. Ascriptions of moral responsibility are made by recognizing and attributing desires to others, and originate with an earlier developing desire-based theory of mind system. Ascriptions of intentional action are made by building hypothetical models of others’ beliefs, and originate with a later developing belief-based theory of mind system.

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