This chapter contains sections titled: Mental Toolkits God as Personal Agent Anthropomorphism Perfect Being Theology Do Words Apply? Alternatives to God as Agent God as Object and Subject Notes.

In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments (...) and developing a first positive model, concentrating on epistemic mental actions and epistemic self-control. Action initiation is a functionally adequate form of self-deception; mental actions are a specific form of predictive control of effective connectivity, accompanied and possibly even functionally mediated by a conscious “epistemic agent model”. The overall process is aimed at increasing the epistemic value of pre-existing states in the conscious self-model, without causally looping through sensory sheets or using the non-neural body as an instrument for active inference. (shrink)

This title was first published in 2002: This book is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent's epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions; attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning; a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times; (...) an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility; and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues. (shrink)

The study of human-human communication and the development of computational models for human-agent communication have diverged significantly throughout the last decade. Yet, despite frequently made claims of “super-human performance” in, e.g., speech recognition or image processing, so far, no system is able to lead a half-decent coherent conversation with a human. In this paper, we argue that we must start to re-consider the hallmarks of cooperative communication and the core capabilities that we have developed for it, and which conversational (...) class='Hi'>agents need to be equipped with: incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. We base our argument on a vast body of work on human-human communication and its psychological processes that we reason to be relevant and necessary to take into account when modeling human-agent communication. We contrast those with current conceptualizations of human-agent interaction and formulate suggestions for the development of future systems. (shrink)

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an (...) enduring mental substance animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Movements of the Mind. A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action by Wayne WuDiego D’AngeloWU, Wayne. Movements of the Mind. A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 257 pp. Cloth, $80.00Wayne Wu presented a theory of attention as selection-for-action in 2014. According to this theory, given a behavioral space in which the agent has multiple inputs and outputs to choose (...) from, attention involves the selection of a particular course of action, that is, of certain outputs based on certain inputs. In the present work Wu puts to use the selection-for-action theory to shed light on the broader topic of the “movements of the mind”: intentionality and action. Action and movement are mostly not intended as bodily movement: By focusing on mental actions Wu aims to simplify philosophical explanations. His overall theoretical approach remains consistent with his work on attention, which involves a quest to develop rigorous philosophical concepts while incorporating insights from the empirical sciences. Interestingly, biology takes precedence over cognitive sciences and psychology for him; he says, “I aspire to a biology of agency” in which philosophical analysis must respond to “empirical friction.” In this framework, this book puts forth four main claims. The first concerns the general structure of action—action arises from solving a selection problem. Second, intentional actions can be differentiated from unintentional actions using the concepts of automaticity and control. Third, Wu argues that attention is a necessary aspect of every theory of action. Fourth, he claims that intention is practical memory for action. These four are woven throughout the different chapters of his book.The first part analyzes the structure of action along three axes: how the agent “takes things to be” as the basis for selection, the agent’s response to those things, and the biases that explain the link between perceptions and responses. In the second part, Wu presents a theory of intention as practical memory. The theory is surprising, as Wu himself acknowledges when he says, “The approach to intention will, I think, jar many readers.” And indeed, it does, but Wu provides strong arguments, and future work will determine if the theory is feasible. The third part of the book explores the implications of his theory of action for specific forms and aspects of action; the first chapter in this section deals with automaticity and biases, [End Page 734] the second deals with deductive reasoning, and the third deals with introspection.According to Wu’s theory, action involves a complex combination of elements. The agent is faced with many inputs and potential outputs within a behavioral space. She takes inputs in a certain way: The way she sees things is influenced by myriad aspects, such as intentions and biases of various forms. Action and intending to act are solutions to the problem of selecting appropriate inputs and outputs. Wu thematizes the role of attention in this process of selection. Attention comes in three different forms. It can be an action itself (“attending,” for example, in searching for something); it can mean “vigilance” as readiness to act; and most importantly, attention is “mental guidance.” Every action is guided by attention insofar as a selection problem must be solved: Attention is guiding when perceptual input “plays a functional role of guiding.” Attention also shapes the agent’s actions through remembering, and remembering in turn is nothing else then attending to remembered content. This attended content provides the agent with biases and reasons to select a particular course of action. Therefore, intending to act is nothing else than practical memory, that is, memory put to work in the choice of actions.One particular type of action that is crucially important for philosophical research is introspection. According to Wu, introspection, like every kind of mental action, is not entirely reliable—as some theories would have it—or entirely unreliable but, instead, depends on context. Like any other action, introspection follows the same guiding principle, attention, specifically, perceptual attention. Therefore, introspection is a particular type of perceptual experience where attention is focused on one’s own mental states. In this way, Wu establishes criteria for veridical introspective reports, such... (shrink)

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind, reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or (...) neutral intention; participants made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction, and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent. These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information. (shrink)

The state of the art of contemporary philosophy and psychiatry is reviewed. Section 1 describes the new field as an international open society of ideas. Section 2 introduces values-based practice. Although originally a philosophy-into-practice initiative, values-based practice is now developing more strongly in areas of bodily medicine such as surgery. An example from surgery illustrates how values-based practice has been implemented as a partner to evidence-based practice in supporting shared clinical decision-making as the basis of best practice in contemporary (...) person-centered clinical care. Section 3 explores the difficulties presented by implementing values-based practice in mental health as illustrated by a case example of anorexia. This shows that these difficulties derive from the particularly intense challenges of values pluralism presented by anorexia. The resources of phenomenology provide the basis for an effective response to these challenges. Section 4 generalizes the argument of Section 3 showing that an effective response to the wider range of challenges of values pluralism arising across the board in mental health is available from the resources of the international open society of ideas of contemporary philosophy and psychiatry. The article concludes with a promissory note on values and a cautionary note on science. (shrink)

This book approaches the problems and circumstances confronting blacks in the context of black values, the black community, and the role of government. ^BContents:: The Black Community's Values as a Basis for Action; The Community as Agent of Change; and The Government's Role in Meeting New Challenges.

What mental states are required for an agent to know-how to perform an action? This question fuels one of the hottest debates in the current literature on philosophy of action. Answering this question means facing what we call here The Challenge of Format Dualism, which consists in establishing which is the format of the mental representations involved in practical knowledge and, in case they are given in more than one format, explaining how these different formats (...) can interlock. This challenge has generated two parallel debates: the debate between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism on the one hand, and the debate on the Interface Problem on the other. While the former is about whether practical knowledge can be considered a species of propositional knowledge, the latter investigates how motoric and propositional states can be related. Here we offer a unified account capable of explicitly analyzing those two problems within the same philosophical framework. Our account suggests a new way for solving the Interface Problem that paves the way for addressing the debate between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism. (shrink)

The paper defends three claims about Aristotle’s theory of uncontrolled actions (akrasia) in NE 7.3. First, I argue that the first part of NE 7.3 contains the description of the overall state of mind of the agent while she acts without control. Aristotle’s solution to the problem of uncontrolled action lies in the analogy between the uncontrolled agent and people who are drunk, mad, or asleep. This analogy is interpreted as meaning that the uncontrolled agent, while acting without control, (...) is still in possession of her knowledge but she is unable to use it as knowledge due to the temporary disablement of her reason by appetite. Due to this disablement, the uncontrolled agent is temporarily unable to be motivated to act by her knowledge and acts merely on her appetite. Second, I argue that the second part of NE 7.3 provides an analysis of the particular mental state from which the uncontrolled action issues. Its central passage is a description of the uncontrolled agent’s state of mind before the uncontrolled action and not, as it has been traditionally understood, a description of her state of mind during the uncontrolled action. Third, I argue that, on Aristotle’s view, the transition from the state before the uncontrolled action to the state in which the agent already acts without control does not involve any psychological state that would constitute the agent’s choice to abandon her decision and give in to her desires but proceeds on a purely physiological level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Sanity and Irresponsibility”Lloyd Fields (bio)AbstractI make two criticisms of Wilson’s proposal to dispense with a loaded axiological criterion of sanity. First, Edwards’s axiological criterion of sanity, which Wilson accepts, involves the requirement of impartiality, which at least excludes some standards of right and wrong. Second, value pluralism applies only to morally acceptable forms of life and thus presupposes a standard of right and wrong. I conclude by (...) noting that mental illnesses are not sufficiently characterised by extreme and persistent deviance from practical rationality, as conceived by Edwards and Wilson.KeywordsSanity, responsibility, mental illness, value pluralismWilson’s paper is set in an important tradition of which Susan Wolf is a notable exemplar. He tackles the crucially important issue of how practical rationality is related to mental health and of how certain forms of irrationality are connected with mental illness. This issue must be taken into account in order to avoid infecting the criteria of sanity with “idiosyncratic or culturally biased norms.” Like Wolf (1989, 137–151), Wilson holds that sanity is a necessary condition of responsibility. But Wilson rejects the second of Wolf’s two criteria of sanity on the grounds that it invokes a definite normative theory of right and wrong. He proposes instead that whether an agent is sane should be decided on the basis of whether s/he displays practical rationality, as defined by Edwards’s list of seven items. Following Edwards, Wilson implicitly equates “sanity” with “mental health” and “insanity” with “mental illness.” By rejecting an axiological criterion of sanity that depends on a normative theory of right and wrong, Wilson is able to ensure that individuals like JoJo are not judged to be insane and hence not morally responsible for their actions. Wilson is right to stress the importance of our not applying notions such as “mental illness” or “insanity” too widely, especially in such a way as to allow blameworthy persons to escape blame and punishment.But are Wilson’s own criteria of sanity free from dependence on a normative theory, or a normative standard, of right and wrong? First, let us note that Wilson states Edwards’s seventh condition of practical rationality as follows: “holding values that are or would be adopted under the conditions of (negative) freedom.” Edwards’s own formulation of this condition is the following: “having values which have been (or would be) adopted under conditions of freedom, enlightenment and impartiality” (1982, 315). Wilson explains “freedom” as the absence of coercion. It is uncertain what “enlightenment” means in this context. Impartiality would seem to include being impartial between oneself and others and between one’s own tribe, nation or race and that of others. Although this requirement is perhaps too general to be regarded as a sufficient standard [End Page 303] of right and wrong, it is at least part of such normative theories as utilitarianism and Kant’s moral theory, while it is inconsistent with ethical egoism, i.e., the view that an action is right or wrong depending on whether it serves or frustrates the agent’s overall best interests. One could dispute Wilson’s claim, therefore, that Edwards’s seventh item is not a “loaded” axiological criterion.Second, Wilson maintains that we can avoid assuming a loaded axiological criterion for sanity by adopting the position of value pluralism. Wolf’s axiological criterion for sanity is that the agent should be capable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Wilson holds that this criterion, as presented, invokes a normative theory of right and wrong. The criterion would not do so if it were applied in accordance with value pluralism, which, Wilson says, “rejects the notion that there is one monolithic theory of right and wrong without denying that an actor may behave virtuously or viciously.” Wilson appears to assume that an “unloaded” version of Wolf’s axiological criterion would be more or less equivalent to Edwards’s seventh condition of practical rationality.Value pluralism maintains that there are incompatible forms of life that display distinct virtues. “Whichever form of life one is pursuing there are virtues which elude one because they are available only to people pursuing alternative and... (shrink)

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

On what basis do we attribute phenomenal states to others? One answer, defended by John Stuart Mill, appeals to an analogy between ourselves and the similar bodies and actions of others (1865, p. 208). Despite its intuitive plausibility, this position is often rejected (Arico et al., 2011; Buckwalter & Phelan, 2014; Knobe & Prinz, 2008). In line with Mill’s account, we propose that the primary factors used when making phenomenal state ascriptions are the appropriate display of functional and (...) behavioral cues and having bodies with the right kind of physical composition. To test this account, we gave five groups of participants a vignette followed by three to six questions. For four of the groups, the vignette described an alien-human encounter and the participants had to judge the likelihood (on a 7-point scale) that the alien had a non-phenomenal state (a belief) and the likelihood that it could have a phenomenal state (pain). The fifth group, as a control, read a vignette about a similar interaction between two humans. We found that, as appropriate functional and behavioral cues and then humanoid features are added to the alien, people are more willing to attribute a phenomenal state to it. Attributions of the non-phenomenal state are primarily dependent on the appropriate functional and behavioral cues, not on having humanoid features. (shrink)

This dissertation develops an interpretation of Hegel's answer to the question of who or what we ourselves are, or his theory of Geist . The theory of Geist is perhaps most familiar when read as an appeal to a romantic metaphysical or theological view on which we are all part of "cosmic spirit", a self-creating collective agent identical to reality itself. I argue that the theory of Geist cannot be understood apart from Hegel's core concerns, but that these are not (...) the concerns of romantic metaphysics or theology. Instead, Hegel's theory is rooted in his engagement with philosophical problems concerning explanation---problems largely drawn from his engagement with Kant's Critique of Judgment. Hegel's central concern is to make sense of the explanatory status of teleological accounts of our own actions in terms of our ends, and of relations between this and other "levels" of explanation. I am particularly interested in two of Hegel's main conclusions. First, he claims that we are fundamentally social beings, arguing that our subjective states explain what we do only in virtue of our participation in historically developing forms of social life. This first thesis accounts for Hegel's dual use of his central term: Geist refers to the historically developing forms of social life in virtue of which---Hegel argues---we posses the mental or geistig life which distinguishes us from other living beings. Second, Hegel claims that Geist is prior to or "the truth" of nature, arguing that the basic empirical concepts of forces and species employed in the natural sciences owe their explanatory status to their place in our ongoing social endeavor of systematizing our overall knowledge and understanding of nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11.4 (2001) 391-400 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway A Shooting on Capitol Hill: "The Ruby Satellite System," Mental Illness, and Failure of the American Legal System Peter J. Cohen On 24 July 1998, Russell Eugene Weston, Jr., stormed the United States Capitol, forced his way through a security checkpoint, bypassed a metal detector, and entered the office complex of (...) Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX), the House Majority Whip (Weil 1998). During this period of terror, he shot and killed two officers of the Capitol Police and seriously wounded another as they attempted to end his foray. 1 Weston was severely wounded by several Capital police officers and taken into custody. After being treated for his injuries, he was incarcerated in the District of Columbia. 2On 5 May 1999, Weston was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institute in Butner, North Carolina (United States v. Weston, 69 F. Supp. 2d 99 (D.D.C. 1999), 103), where he remains to this day. He has neither been brought to trial nor received appropriate psychiatric therapy, but continues to be warehoused "in solitary confinement under constant observation... in a psychotic state (United States v. Weston, 255 F.3d 873; LEXIS 16851 (U.S. App. 2001b), 3-4 [LEXIS]). I will briefly detail the legal events responsible for this mad situation and suggest alternative actions that should have been taken at the very onset of the case. Early Chronology Although overtly the crime appeared to be senseless and without any conceivable motivation, Weston believed that his acts were justified and necessary. The story he told to the court-appointed forensic psychiatrist, Sally C. Johnson, M.D., 3 was that while working for NASA in the early 1980s, he had developed a "Ruby Satellite System," a powerful machine that could reverse time. With access to this system, nothing was permanent--the user could simply reverse time and exit from the current scene. However, the "System" was now controlled by cannibals who were developing and spreading "Black Heva," the deadliest disease known to [End Page 391] humankind, similar to HIV or the plague. It resulted from human corpses rotting and turning black. Time was running out, and Weston believed he had to return to override the "Ruby Satellite System" in the Capitol so that he could stem the spread of "Black Heva" and prevent world calamity. He believed that if he were tried, convicted, and even executed, he could simply time reverse himself, place himself in a safe within the Capitol, and subsequently resume his life at whatever point he chose (United States v. Weston, 206 F.3d 9 (D.C. Cir. 2000), 19-20).On 22 April 1999, the district court accepted Dr. Johnson's diagnosis that Weston suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, the symptoms of which were so severe that he would be incapable of understanding the proceedings against him and of assisting in his own defense. On this basis, the court had no difficulty in finding him incompetent to stand trial (U.S. v. Weston 1999, 102).At Weston's initial hearing, Dr. Johnson had testified that medication would be efficacious in treating Weston's delusions: [T]he standard of care in someone suffering from this type of symptom picture would be to treat them with medication.... [T]here is a good likelihood that he'll have a positive response, positive in the sense that his symptoms will diminish in response to treatment.... The potential benefits to treating the defendant far outweigh the risks.... (U.S. v. Weston 1999, 108) The defense presented no expert testimony refuting Dr. Johnson's presentation. The district court then ordered that Weston begin receiving medication in order to render him nondangerous and competent for trial (U.S. v. Weston 1999, 108-9). The Problem Weston refused to be medicated! 4 He has continued to claim that the administration of antipsychotic drugs against his will would violate his Fifth Amendment due process liberty interest in avoiding unwanted bodily intrusion and implicated... (shrink)

Moral judgments, we expect, ought not to depend on luck. A person should be blamed only for actions and outcomes that were under the person’s control. Yet often, moral judgments appear to be influenced by luck. A father who leaves his child by the bath, after telling his child to stay put and believing that he will stay put, is judged to be morally blameworthy if the child drowns (an unlucky outcome), but not if his child stays put and doesn’t (...) drown. Previous theories of moral luck suggest that this asymmetry reflects primarily the influence of unlucky outcomes on moral judgments. In the current study, we use behavioral methods and fMRI to test an alternative: these moral judgments largely reflect participants’ judgments of the agent’s beliefs. In “moral luck” scenarios, the unlucky agent also holds a false belief. Here, we show that moral luck depends more on false beliefs than bad outcomes. We also show that participants with false beliefs are judged as having less justified beliefs and are therefore judged as more morally blameworthy. The current study lends support to a rationalist account of moral luck: moral luck asymmetries are driven not by outcome bias primarily, but by mental state assessments we endorse as morally relevant, i.e. whether agents are justified in thinking that they won’t cause harm. (shrink)

Readers of Hobbes usually take his account of practical deliberation to be a passive process that does not respond to agents’ judgements about what normative reasons they have. This is ostensibly because deliberation is purely conative and/or excludes reasoning, or because Hobbesian reasoning is itself a process in which reasoners merely experience a succession of mental states (e.g. according to purely associative mental structures). I argue to the contrary that for Hobbes deliberation (and hence the (...) class='Hi'>basis for voluntary action) is not purely conative and amongst humans it involves reasoning. Furthermore, while non-linguistic reasoning is passive, specifically linguistic reasoning is for Hobbes an active process in which reasoners affirm propositions from which they reason. The historical significance of Hobbes’s new account of agency lies in his attempt, in deploying the tool of language, to weld a materialist determinism to a cognitive account of practical deliberation that can involve reasoning and be reason-responsive. (shrink)

Research on children’s ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4 years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perception. (...) We tested 33 preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small. To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly anticipate the agent’s actions on that basis. Children performed significantly better than chance in our false perception test, and there was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5 years of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding that other individuals will be perceptually misled by illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their actions in predictable ways. (shrink)

Thesis: Macro-level social phenomena are implemented through the (social) actions and minds of the individuals. Without an explicit theory of the agents' minds that founds, agents' behavior we cannot understand macro-level social phenomena, and in particular how they work. AntiThesis: Mind is not enough: the theory of individual (social) mind and action is not enough to explain several macro-level social phenomena. First, there are pre-cognitive, objective social structures that constrain the actions of the agents; second, there (...) are emergent, unaware or non-contractual forms of cooperation, organisation, and intelligence. Synthesis: The real challenge is how to reconcile, cognition with emergence, intention and deliberation with unknown or unplanned social functions and social order . Both objective structures and unplanned self-organising complex forms of social order and social function emerge from the interactions of agents and from their individual mental states; both these structures and self-organising systems feedback on agents' behaviors through the agents' individual minds. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we (...) say goes; an avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

It is not unusual to consider linguistic communication as a type of action performed by an individual —the speaker— intended to influence the mental state of another individual —the addressee. It seems more unusual to reach an agreement on what should be the effect of such influence for the communication to be successful. According to the well-known Gricean view, the success of a communicative action depends precisely on the recognition by the addressee of the mental state (...) of the speaker. In this essay, we want to analyse these mental states; however our main concern is not with the mental states of the agents in an isolated communicative action, but the mental states of the agents in a broader linguistic action, namely, conversation. (shrink)

It has been argued that neural data are an especially sensitive kind of personal information that could be used to undermine the control we should have over access to our mental states, and therefore need a stronger legal protection than other kinds of personal data. The Morningside Group, a global consortium of interdisciplinary experts advocating for the ethical use of neurotechnology, suggests achieving this by treating legally ND as a body organ. Although the proposal is currently shaping ND-related (...) policies, it is not clear what its conceptual and legal basis is. Treating legally something as something else requires some kind of analogical reasoning, which is not provided by the authors of the proposal. In this paper, I will try to fill this gap by addressing ontological issues related to neurocognitive processes. The substantial differences between ND and body organs or organic tissue cast doubt on the idea that the former should be covered by bodily integrity. Crucially, ND are not constituted by organic material. Nevertheless, I argue that the ND of a subject s are analogous to neurocognitive properties of her brain. I claim that s’ ND are a ‘medium independent’ property that can be characterized as natural semantic personal information about her brain and that s’ brain not only instantiates this property but also has an exclusive ontological relationship with it: This information constitutes a domain that is unique to her neurocognitive architecture. (shrink)

It is time to transcend the arid debate between rationality and ir-, a-, or non-rationality as our basic assumption about human agency.1 There are powerful arguments and extensive evidence both for and against the rationality assumption, with heavily defended entrenchments on both sides. Managers and management scholars continually make at least tacit assumptions about how they expect others to behave. If only we could have in both theory and practice the coherence and precision of rational models as well as the (...) descriptive richness of ‘behavioural’ approaches. The message of this paper is that perhaps we can. The advent of consciousness studies and, more recently, neuroeconomics would seem to indicate the way forward to transcend the opposition in some kind of synthesis. This paper investigates rationality in the light of Daniel Dennett’s thesis that it is at the core of all intentionality that is the defining characteristic of mental phenomena. Neuroeconomics seeks to enhance understanding of agency by investigating new insights on the materialist basis of mental phenomenology in the neurophysiology of the brain and nervous system. Experimental evidence mapping intentional states onto neurophysiological states is emerging, some researchers even claiming to have found a ‘neurophysiological utility function’. Dennett closes the circuit by locating the existence of brain-hardware supporting satisficing intentional choice and action as the output of evolutionary ‘design’. The dichotomy is transcended: satisficing models (of which normative optimising rational choice models are a reasonable abstraction) are a good basis both for statistical prediction of the behaviour of large numbers, and as the first base on which to construct and refine a model of expectation-formation about particular types of agent and then of individual agents. Using both the old (‘external’) and the new (sub-individual) behaviourism as well as work on unpacking the abstract notion of rationality, we can concretise optimising rational choice both generally, for epistemic theory-building purposes, and specifically for understanding and deploying models of managerial agency. Such models will need to incorporate emotion with cognition in an integrated approach. (shrink)

Several empirical studies have documented an asymmetry in people’s assessments of intentional action, so-called ‘Knobe effect’. Accordingly, foreseen (yet undesired) outcomes that are harmful are judged intentional, whereas foreseen (yet undesired) outcomes that are helpful are judged unintentional. The Knobe-effect has been standardly conceived of in bivalent terms: The presence or absence of perceived intentionality contingent on a negative or positive outcome valence. Unsurprisingly, explanations thereof have a similar bivalent structure: Intentionality ascriptions in Knobe-effect cases are viewed as contingent (...) on the presence or absence of a binary feature—a blameworthy agent, a norm violation, a morally bad outcome, and so on. In this paper, we report the results of two experiments exploring attributions of intentionality (and knowledge) across a range of graded outcomes: very bad, somewhat bad, neutral, somewhat good and very good. The findings suggest that the Knobe-effect data points are but two data points of a broader, more fine-grained phenomenon, and that Knobe effect explanations that have conceived of it in bivalent terms are at best incomplete. (shrink)

Mentalizing refers to our ability to read the mental states of other agents and engages many neural processes. The brain's mirror system allows us to share the emotions of others. Through perspective taking, we can infer what a person currently believes about the world given their point of view. Finally, the human brain has the unique ability to represent the mental states of the self and the other and the relationship between these mental (...) class='Hi'>states, making possible the communication of ideas. (shrink)

Expressivism, broadly construed, is the view that the function of utterances in a given area of discourse is to give expression to our sentiments or other (non-cognitive) mental states or attitudes, rather than report or describe some range of facts. This view naturally seems an attractive option wherever it is suspected that there may not be a domain of facts for the given discourse to be describing. Familiarly, to avoid commitment to ethical facts, the ethical expressivist suggests that (...) ethical utterances (e.g., “Gratuitous torture is wrong”, “What John did was morally good”) do not serve to ascribe ethical properties to objects, actions, persons, or states of affairs. Instead, they simply function to give voice to certain of our sentiments (or ‘pro/con’ attitudes). Along similar lines, philosophers have entertained versions of expressivism about the aesthetic, the modal, the mental, what is funny, even about theoretical science and knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

So-called basic self-knowledge (ordinary knowledge of one's present states of mind) can be seen as both 'baseless' and privileged. The spontaneous self-beliefs we have when we avow our states of mind do not appear to be formed on any particular epistemic basis (whether intro-or extro-spective). Nonetheless, on some views, these self-beliefs constitute instances of (privileged) knowledge. We are here interested in views on which true mental self-beliefs have internalist epistemic warrant that false ones lack. Such views (...) are committed to a form of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge. We begin by presenting an influential disjunctivist view about perceptual knowledge (Pritchard 2008, 2012, and elsewhere) and articulate a problem for it. We then consider two versions of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge – one 'constitutivist', the other 'neo-expressivist' – and argue that both can avoid an analogue of this problem for self-knowledge. However, we give reasons for preferring the disjunctivism yielded by neo-expressivism. We conclude by considering briefly whether an acceptable disjunctivism about mental self-beliefs can point the way toward a sensible disjunctivism about perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

Much recent work on empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive science has been guided by the assumption that minds are composed of intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible and thus unobservable to everyone but their owners. I challenge this claim. I defend the view that at least some mental states and processes—or at least some parts of some mental states and processes—are at times visible, capable of being directly perceived by others. I further argue that, despite (...) its initial implausibility, this view receives robust support from several strands of empirical research. (shrink)

Artificial agents (AAs), particularly but not only those in Cyberspace, extend the class of entities that can be involved in moral situations. For they can be conceived of as moral patients (as entities that can be acted upon for good or evil) and also as moral agents (as entities that can perform actions, again for good or evil). In this paper, we clarify the concept of agent and go on to separate the concerns of morality and responsibility of (...) agents (most interestingly for us, of AAs). We conclude that there is substantial and important scope, particularly in Computer Ethics, for the concept of moral agent not necessarily exhibiting free will, mental states or responsibility. This complements the more traditional approach, common at least since Montaigne and Descartes, which considers whether or not (artificial) agents have mental states, feelings, emotions and so on. By focussing directly on mind-less morality we are able to avoid that question and also many of the concerns of Artificial Intelligence. A vital component in our approach is the Method of Abstraction for analysing the level of abstraction (LoA) at which an agent is considered to act. The LoA is determined by the way in which one chooses to describe, analyse and discuss a system and its context. The Method of Abstraction is explained in terms of an interface or set of features or observables at a given LoA. Agenthood, and in particular moral agenthood, depends on a LoA. Our guidelines for agenthood are: interactivity (response to stimulus by change of state), autonomy (ability to change state without stimulus) and adaptability (ability to change the transition rules by which state is changed) at a given LoA. Morality may be thought of as a threshold defined on the observables in the interface determining the LoA under consideration. An agent is morally good if its actions all respect that threshold; and it is morally evil if some action violates it. That view is particularly informative when the agent constitutes a software or digital system, and the observables are numerical. Finally we review the consequences for Computer Ethics of our approach. In conclusion, this approach facilitates the discussion of the morality of agents not only in Cyberspace but also in the biosphere, where animals can be considered moral agents without their having to display free will, emotions or mental states, and in social contexts, where systems like organizations can play the role of moral agents. The primary cost of this facility is the extension of the class of agents and moral agents to embrace AAs. (shrink)

The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed that (...) indeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ‘‘agent-executed-eventcausal libertarianism’’, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the ‘‘Introduction’’ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective. (shrink)

Emotional, social, and cognitive intelligence competencies have been recognized as the most critical capabilities for organizations to acquire at all levels. For this reason, a wide body of research since the 1980s has demonstrated their positive impact on individual performance, career success, and wellbeing across sectors and professional roles, and a large number of theoretical contributions on how these competencies can be effectively developed has emerged over time. We focus attention on the developmental and learning processes of emotional, social, and (...) cognitive intelligence competencies that occur after formal training or educational courses provided by universities or certified organizations and directed to students or practitioners. Specifically, we conduct an exploratory literature review on the existing academic studies in order to identify the scholars and the pieces of research contributing most to the debate under investigation. This article aims at analyzing this body of research through a systematic review of the literature in order to: i) provide a comprehensive critical analysis of the distinctive features of the theoretical and methodological frameworks adopted to develop these competencies; ii) review the contexts in which the training initiatives analyzed by the literature have been delivered and the categories of learner involved; iii) discuss the learning outcomes of these educational programs and how they have been assessed; iv) identify gaps and inconsistencies in the current state of the literature, suggesting promising paths for future research; and v) stimulate insights for educators, human resource managers, executives, and policymakers by organizing and critically analyzing the extant contributions on competency development. This review represents the first attempt to systematize the methodologies of the educational programs for competency development and to assess their effectiveness in order to assist educators and executives in their ongoing efforts to equip students and employees with the relevant skills needed to achieve superior performance in the workplace. At the institutional level, policymakers should promote a dedicated agenda with concrete actions to equip people with emotional and social intelligence competencies. (shrink)

This review of Bolton & Hill's (B&H) Mind, Meaning, & Mental Disorder examines their non-reductionist yet realist position on mental content. Their arguments are compared to the writings of Dennett and Millikan, where determining function is central to determining information-processing capabilities. The normative nature of function (malfunction) is considered as is its relation to mental states more broadly. Their Wittgensteinian view of meaning as action is accepted as insightful and useful, though some questions remain about (...) their theory of meaning and its applicability to psychological phenomena. (shrink)

We think less than we think. My thesis moves from this suspicion to show that standard accounts of intentional action can't explain the whole of agency. Causalist accounts such as Davidson's and Bratman's, according to which an action can be intentional only if it is caused by a particular mental state of the agent, don't work for every kind of action. So-called automatic actions, effortless performances over which the agent doesn't deliberate, and to which she doesn't (...) need to pay attention, constitute exceptions to the causalist framework, or so I argue in this thesis. Not all actions are the result of a mental struggle, painful hesitation, or the weighting of evidence. Through practice, many performances become second nature. Think of familiar cases such as one's morning routines and habits: turning on the radio, brushing your teeth. Think of the highly skilled performances involved in sport and music: Jarrett's improvised piano playing, the footballer's touch. Think of agents' spontaneous reactions to their environment: ducking a blow, smiling. Psychological research has long acknowledged the distinctiveness and importance of automatic actions, while philosophy has so far explained them together with the rest of agency. Intuition tells us that automatic actions are intentional actions of ours all the same (I have run a survey which shows that this intuition is widely shared): not only our own autonomous deeds for which we are held responsible, but also necessary components in the execution and satisfaction of our general plans and goals. But do standard causal accounts deliver on the intentionality of automatic actions? I think not. Because, in automatic cases, standard appeals to intentions, beliefs, desires, and psychological states in general ring hollow. We just act: we don't think, either consciously or unconsciously. On the reductive side, Davidson's view can't but appeal to, at best, unconscious psychological states, the presence and causal role of which is, I argue, inferred from the needs of a theory, rather than from evidence in the world. On the non-reductive side, Bratman agrees, with his refutation of the Simple View, that we can't just attach an intention to every action that we want to explain. But Bratman’s own Single Phenomenon View, appealing to the mysterious notion of 'motivational potential', merely acknowledges the need for refinement without actually providing one. So I propose my own account of intentional action, the 'guidance view', according to which automatic actions are intentional: differently from Davidson and Bratman, who only offer necessary conditions in order to avoid the problem of causal deviance, I offer a full-blown account: E's phi-ing is intentional if and only If phi-ing is under E's guidance. This account resembles one developed by Frankfurt, with the crucial difference that Frankfurt – taking 'acting with an intention' and 'acting intentionally' to be synonymous – thinks that guidance is sufficient only for some movement being an action, but not for some movement being an intentional action. I argue that, on the other hand, Frankfurt's concept of guidance can be developed so that it is sufficient for intentional action too. In Chapter One I present and defend my definition of ‘automatic action’. In Chapter Two I show that such understanding of automatic actions finds confirmation in empirical psychology. In Chapter Three I show that Davidson's reductive account of intentional action does not work for automatic actions. In Chapter Four I show that the two most influential non-reductive accounts of intentional action, the Simple View and Bratman's Single Phenomenon View, don't work either. And in Chapter Five I put forward and defend my positive thesis, the 'guidance view'. Also, in the Appendix I present the findings of my survey on the intentionality of automatic actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Metaphysics of Practice: Writings on Action, Community, and Obligation by Wilfrid SellarsRonald LoefflerSELLARS, Wilfrid. The Metaphysics of Practice: Writings on Action, Community, and Obligation. Edited by Kyle Ferguson and Jeremy Randel Koons. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 745 pp. Cloth, $115.00Wilfrid Sellars thought deeply about ethics, practical reasoning, and intentional agency throughout his career and published extensively on these issues, with much additional unpublished (...) material housed in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In prominent places Sellars indicates that he regards his ethics as the key to his overarching project of reconciling our manifest nature as norm-governed rational beings with his nominalistic scientific naturalism. Yet with a few noteworthy exceptions, Sellars scholars have only very recently begun to seriously grapple with Sellars’s practical philosophy. No one has done more to initiate this recent trend than Jeremy Koons, who, together with Kyle Ferguson, collects in this volume virtually all of Sellars’s practical philosophical works, including approximately 200 pages of hitherto unpublished material—mostly correspondences with R. M. Hare, Robert Binkley, Hector-Neri Castañeda, Bruce Aune, and David Solomon.Sellars’s published practical philosophical writings are grouped thematically into four parts. A fifth part is dedicated to the unpublished writings. The editors also provide a sixty-page introduction, which offers a synopsis of Sellars’s overall vision of us as practically rational moral [End Page 728] agents, followed by summaries of each of the nineteen essays and the correspondences published in this volume.Sellars thinks of moral ought-judgments as simultaneously motivationally internalistic (with traditional emotivism) and as truth-apt and more or less rational (with traditional cognitivism). His key idea to combine these seemingly incongruent commitments is to regard moral ought-judgments as a species of we-intentions. Since intentions generally are “conceptually tied” to practice, in the sense that (absent interferences or defeaters) they determine proper action in accordance with norms of practical reasoning, we get, in this sense, a version of motivational internalism. Sellars models these normative connections in terms of a nuanced logic of practical reasoning—basically a logic of means–ends reasoning—that is largely parasitic on the logic of theoretical reasoning. This logic is cast in terms of shall-statements, which are linguistic expressions of intentions of the forms “Shall-be [p]” and “Shall [I do A if in C],” where the “Shall-be”s and “Shall”s express the states of intending and the square-bracketed portions the intended contents. Logically proper practical reasoning bottoms out in intentions that immediately give rise to actions (volitions), to be expressed by shall-statements of the form “Shall [I do A now].” Sellars makes the case for the truth-aptness of moral ought-judgments by treating them as a species of we-intentions. Such moral we-intentions are expressed by statements of the form “Shall(we) [We, any of us, do A if in C],” where both the “we” in the content expression and the “we” indexed to the “shall” are maximally inclusive, comprising every rational being at all. This appears to be what today we would call a combined mode and content account of moral we-intentions, where firs-tperson plural elements are built both into the mode of moral we-intending and the content of moral we-intentions. The truth-aptness of moral we-intentions, Sellars thinks, is secured by the fact that the first-person plural elements of the intention include every rational being at all. Sellars maintains that, due to this maximal inclusion, moral we-intentions are apt to yield genuine interpersonal agreement or disagreement (contra I-intentions) and they ground, via what seems to be a transcendental argument, Sellars’s fundamental principle of morality, expressed as “Shall(we) [We, any of us, maximize our general welfare]).” This principle provides the standard of objective moral correctness for any other moral judgment.Part 1 of the volume includes six essays in which Sellars offers comprehensive articulations of this overall picture, culminating in “Objectivity, Intersubjectivity, and the Moral Point of View” (OIM), the stand-alone seventh chapter of Science and Metaphysics, based on Sellars’s 1965–66 John Locke Lectures... (shrink)

Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic self-knowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the (...) baseless, no-‘how’ and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge. (shrink)

A patient is diagnosed with the persistent vegetative state (PVS) when they show no evidence of the awareness of the self or the environment for an extended period of time. The chance of recovery of any mental function or the ability to interact in a meaningful way is low. Though rare, the condition, considering its nature as a state outwith the realm of the conscious, coupled with the trauma experienced by the patient's kin as well as health care staff (...) confronted with painful decisions regarding the patient's care, has attracted a considerable amount of discussion within the bioethics community. At present, there is a wealth of literature that discusses the relevant neurology, that elucidates the plethora of ethical challenges in understanding and dealing with the condition, and that analyses the real-world cases which have prominently featured in the mainstream media as a result of emotionally charged, divergent views concerning the provision of care to the patient. However, there is scarcely anything in the published scholarly literature that proposes concrete and practically actionable solutions to the now widely recognized moral conundrums. The present article describes a step in that direction. I start from the very foundations, laying out a sentientist approach which serves as the basis for the consequent moral decision-making, and then proceed to systematically identify and deconstruct the different cases of discord, using the aforementioned foundations as the basis for their resolution. A major intellectual contribution concerns the fluidity of the duty of care which I argue is demanded by the sentientist focus. The said duty is shown initially to have for its object the patient, which depending on the circumstances, can change to the patient's kin, or the health care staff themselves. In conclusion, the proposed framework represents the first comprehensive proposal regarding the decision-making processes involved in the deliberation on the provision of life sustaining treatment to a patient in a PVS. (shrink)

This study will examine how Dāvūd al-Qarṣī, an 18th-century Ottoman scholar, resolved the paradox between human freewill and God being the creator of everything in his work Risālâh fi’l-ikhtiyārāt al-juzʾiyyah wa’l-irādāt al-qalbiyyah. In addition, in this study, the critical edition and translation of the risālah will also be provided. The treatise which is the subject of the present study is a link in the series of works written under the title of human acts in the Islamic thought tradition regarding al-irādah (...) al-juzʾiyyah, afʿāl al-ʿibād, khalq al-aʿmāl, qaḍā, and qadar. This risālah is one of the rare examples prepared with the method of “mamzūj annotation (sharḥ)”, which is a method in which “text” and “annotation” are intertwined. Qarṣī examines in detail a total of seven views, four of which are famous (mashhūr) and three of which are non-famous, about voluntary acts. Qarṣī interprets the approaches and views of the non-famous sects and includes them in the famous sects and allocates approximately 4/3 of the work to these sects. In the final stage of the work, the author states that the view of Māturīdīs is parallel with the predecessor’s (Salaf) view of “Neither jabr nor tafwīḍ; rather, it is merely a situation between these two approaches.” Qarṣī, who was inspired by Athīrī Maḥmad Afandī (d. 1092/1681), says that voluntary acts come about by the sum of “two powers (qudrat)”, “two wishes (mashīʾat)” and “one taqwīn”. Also, according to this, the first four of them are proximate causes, while the attribute taqwīn is the influencing factor. Qarṣī acts from the meanings of the term action (fiʿl) and the “theory of state (ḥāl)” in order to prove that human beings are true agents (fāʿil) on the one hand and to protect God’s attribute of creation on the other. In fact, the concept of “state (ḥāl)”, used in understanding divine attributes and some ontological issues, was applied to acts by the Māturīdī mutakallim Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa al-Thānī (d. 747/1346). Thus, a doctrine of action was developed, and this doctrine was accepted and used by the later period Māturīdī mutakallims. With reference to Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa, Qarṣī tries to justify the issue based on the meanings of the the term action and the modes of existence of these meanings. He says that action has two implications; one of them is the “infinitive meaning” (al-maʿnā al-maṣdarī) and the other is “the thing that comes with this infinitive meaning (al-ḥāṣıl bi-maṣdar)”. The infinitive meaning of the act constitutes the “non-thing aspect” of the action, and the meaning of the action that is created with the infinitive indicates “the thing aspect” thereof. Thus, because the aspect of the action that is not existentand therefore not a thing is not subject to creation, the agency and responsibility of human beings are grounded. Similarly, Qarṣī maintains that the mashīʾat, which means will, qaṣd and al-irādah al-juzʾiyyah, was not created because its existence in humans is in the form of succession and it is of a state-like (ḥāl) existenceOn this account. Qarṣī manages to preserve both human freewill and the absolute creativity of God due to the non-existent and non-thing aspect of the act on the one hand, and will (irādah), mashīʾat and qaṣd not being subjected to creation on the other. (shrink)

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub‐tasks to work on in parallel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory‐of‐mind (ToM), the ability to infer the hidden mental states that drive others to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi‐agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of (...) others by inverse planning. We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi‐agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high‐level plans (e.g., what sub‐task they should work on) and their low‐level actions (e.g., avoiding getting in each other's way). When matched with partners that act using the same algorithm, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternatives. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience. Finally, in a behavioral experiment, we show that Bayesian Delegation makes inferences similar to human observers about the intent of others. Together, these results argue for the centrality of ToM for successful decentralized multi‐agent collaboration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reasons, Responsibility, and FictionBenedict Smith (bio)Keywordsresponsibility, reflection, reasons, fictionCartwright's article considers two candidate theories of responsibility and examines their relative adequacy by assessing them in light of our reactions to a dramatic and horrifying set of circumstances. Cartwright initiates the dialectic by noting how our intuitions are in conflict. For instance, although we are instantly horrified by the murders Harris perpetrated, we might naturally experience quite different emotions and (...) reach different judgments when we reflect on the miserable and pathetic nature of Harris's upbringing and his experiences in adult life. Although we might think that Harris is responsible in a very clear sense for murdering his victims, we might feel also that his actions were the outcome of factors beyond his control, and for which he cannot be held responsible. In short, we think that Harris is and is not responsible.Overall, Cartwright's aim is to: "illuminate both the theory and practice of holding people responsible" (2006, 144). In the end, what is illuminated is that "the practice of responsibility unavoidably depends on one sort of pretence or another" (2006, 155). Although the two theories that Cartwright has chosen to consider differ in various ways, they share a common feature of being, in some sense, "fictitious." The article examines in some detail the two theories of responsibility and succeeds in providing insight to some potentially intricate material. In this brief commentary, I cannot address adequately the variety of interesting aspects and implications of Cartwright's paper. I do, however, offer some critical interpretation of Cartwright's construal of the theories under consideration, and also say a little about the status and role of fiction in Cartwright's analysis.Responsibility and the "Reflective Self"According to Cartwright, a central commitment of the "reflective self" view of responsibility is that a rational part of the self is responsible for deliberating about and reflecting on desires, and that the reflective self is the author of action (or at least authorizes the origins of action). The critical capacity of this part of the self endorses or rejects desires, and thus determines whether or not desires manifest in action and display constitutive elements of personality. The reflective self is autonomous with respect to the desiring part of the self; the former can arbitrate over desires precisely because it enjoys this sort of rational autonomy. This internalist conception of reflection and rationality has a long tradition, one that has exerted influence in a number of domains including [End Page 161] moral psychology and psychotherapy. It is well known that Anthony Kenny claimed that the very idea of "mental health" was Plato's invention (Kenny 1969, 229).1 The Platonic picture rests on understanding the soul as capable of proper functioning and in a state of health only when the relevant constitutive elements are brought into a form of cooperative harmony.2 Pivotal in reaching this harmony, is the extent to which desires are supervised by the capacity for rational self-governance. For the present context, the important claim is that there exists an autonomous and internal-to-subject faculty that specializes in rational reflection on desires, and that can be brought to bear on desires in such a way so as to motivate and justify subsequent action.This is close to the central commitment of the reflective self view that considers responsibility as primarily an internal matter of the relation between desires and rationality. Responsibility is connected to the ability of an agent to exercise some cognitive faculty that passes critical judgment on the desires that the agent possesses; such a faculty endorses or rejects desires. The reflective self view has at its center the thought that responsibility is related to the appropriate functioning of some internal process. However, unless the rational faculty of humans is infallible, there needs to be some account of the correctness of each act of desire endorsement or rejection. There must be something that explains why any particular endorsement, say, is justified; some further ground the appeal to which provides guidance and justification for the rational self. But this just pushes the explanatory burden further back and generates, as Cartwright notes, a regress. Nonetheless... (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to determine the mental space of national identity by analyzing the semantic component of the national anthem. The national anthem can be considered as a social code that forms a citizen and as an ordinary text with its semantic structured levels. The national anthem is a political symbol and therefore forms two meanings: intent and influence. In the study, we combine the theory of mental spaces by G.Fauconnier and Ch.Fillmor’s frames semantics to (...) visualize the conceptual model of Ukrainian national identity. Research results: Designating the national anthem as a patriotic work that describes and symbolizes the history and traditions of the country, we articulate the generation and manifestation of social values by the anthem. Based on this position, the article proposes a conceptual model of the mental space of the Ukrainian national identity, which was initiated by the anthem of Ukraine. The basis of the scheme is a figurative fusion of three macro-worlds: Glory-Ukraine-Freedom, which symbolizes the value component that holds around itself the basic concepts of national identity.The article compares the text of the national anthem «Shche ne vmerla Ukraina…» written by P.Chubinsky and the text edited by M.Verbitsky. The symbolic construction of the text of Chubinsky’s anthem, published in 1963, broadcasts a conceptual model of future actions. The names Zalizniak, Nalyvaiko, Triasylo embody the ideal of Cossack chivalry, past times, which are the basis for future generations to follow. The concept of “national identification borders” includes not only geographical names, the Black Sea, the Carpathians, the Dnipro (in the text «from the Syan to the Don»), but also indexical categories – «inviolability», «integrity of the state», «integrity of the territory», «unitaryness», and as well as symbols embodied in names, for example, Crimea, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv. In the context of the semantic analysis of the text of the national anthem, its influence on the mental state of the state is recognized, which is reflected in the global peace index and the global terrorism index. A nation can be presented with ethnic, territorial, cultural, and political components. But there must also be abstract ideas, a mental space that makes it visible. (shrink)

Modern tradition takes a person to be a rational (and moral) agent, namely an agent capable of acting on the basis of reasons – often desire-independent reasons, and particularly moral reasons. So, agency and freedom are involved in the definition of personhood. But what about the embodiment of persons? What about their rootedness in the particular circumstances of a human life – time, space, community of origin, material, and axiological culture? What about the individual identity of persons, their (...) irreducible individuality? The phenomenological notion of intentionality has a widely neglected richness of content, making it a key conceptual tool, capable of explaining not only consciousness but also rational agency, that is personhood, right from the level of the most basic and embodied instances of consciousness: perception, emotion, and spontaneous action. These should be considered as acts, rather than as states, and the discussion of the specific intentionality of these acts and their motivational relations purports to be an original contribution to a genetic phenomenology of embodied, individualized personhood and rational agency. (shrink)

From a moral point of view we think of ourselves as capable of responsible actions. From a scientific point of view we think of ourselves as animals whose behaviour, however highly evolved, conforms to natural scientific laws. Natural Agency argues that these different perspectives can be reconciled, despite the scepticism of many philosophers who have argued that 'free will' is impossible under 'scientific determinism'. This scepticism is best overcome, according to the author, by defending a causal theory of (...) class='Hi'>action, that is by establishing that actions are constituted by behavourial events with the appropriate kind of mental causal history. He sets out a rich and subtle argument for such a theory and defends it against its critics. Thus the book demonstrates the importance of philosophical work in action theory for the central metaphysical task of understanding our place in nature. (shrink)

How do mental states come to be about something other than their own operations, and thus to serve as ground for effective action? This papers argues that causation in the mental domain should be understood to function on principles of intelligibility (that is, on principles which make it perfectly intelligible for intentions to have a causal role in initiating behavior) rather than on principles of mechanism (that is, on principles which explain how causation works in (...) the physical domain). The paper considers Dharmakīrti’s kāryānumāna argument (that is, the argument that an inference is sound only when one infers from the effect to the cause and not vice versa), and proposes a naturalized account of reasons. On this account, careful scrutiny of the effect can provide a basis for ascertaining the unique causal totality that is its source, but only for reasoning that is context‐specific. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a preliminary explication of the role of and the relation between mental states, action, and blame in Medhātithi’s commentary on the most influential juridical text of the Sanskrit world – the jurisprudential text attributed to Manu. In defining what it means to act and what constitutes engaging in intentional and unintentional action, this paper makes three claims. First, enjoined actions (e.g., sacrifices) require particular mental states to be performed. Notwithstanding (...) the role of mental states in enjoined actions, actions lacking the corresponding mental states can be blameworthy. In fact, unintentional actions (including also actions done intentionally, but under a description that foregoes what renders the conduct sanctionable) can indeed constitute blameworthy conduct. Second, although unintentional action still meets the threshold for constituting blameworthy conduct, mental states generally play an important role regarding the degree of blame assignable to a person. Third, there are several possible rules that make sense of the seemingly inconsistent use and impact of intention throughout Manu’s Code of Laws as Medhātithi’s commentary shows. The paper also sheds light on the relation between intentions and desires according to Medhātithi. (shrink)

We are often, as agents, responsible for the things we do and say. This responsibility can come in a number of different forms: here I propose and defend a view of how we are epistemically responsible for our actions and assertions. In other normative areas, we can be responsible for our actions when those actions violate a norm (for example, we can be morally responsible when we violate some moral norm). I argue that we can similarly be epistemically responsible (...) when we violate a norm of assertion or action, norms that tell us how epistemically well-positioned we need to be towards a proposition in order to assert it or treat it as a reason for acting. I first defend a structure of epistemic norms that allows for the possibility of epistemic responsibility, and then propose a notion of epistemic responsibility itself. -/- We can, and do, evaluate actions and assertions in a specifically epistemic way: we judge that someone should not have acted on the basis of unreliable information, that someone should not have asserted something they knew was false, etc. These kinds of evaluations lead us to believe that proper action and assertion have some basic epistemic requirements, what are called norms of assertion and action. In order to defend a notion of epistemic responsibility, I first establish a general claim about the ways that we make epistemic evaluations in relation to these norms. Many who argue for a particular epistemic norm of action or assertion endorse what I call epistemic monism, the view that all epistemic evaluations of actions or assertions must be explained solely in terms of whether they have adhered to their respective norm. I argue that epistemic monism is false. Instead, I defend epistemic separability, the view that we make two different kinds of epistemic evaluations: one that pertains to whether one has adhered to an epistemic norm, and one that pertains to whether one has reason to think they are adhering to or violating the relevant norm. In my defense of epistemic separability I appeal to arguments from luminosity failure – the claim that for any given epistemic relationship we can have with a proposition we can have good reason to believe that we fail to be in it – and empirical arguments that show that we only have fallible access to our own mental states. These arguments show that we can violate an epistemic norm while having good reason to think otherwise and, in turn, shows that we can be evaluated not only in terms of whether we have adhered to or violated that norm, but also in terms of whether we are responsible for doing so. I argue that whether one’s action is epistemically responsible depends on whether one fulfils the epistemic commitments one makes in performing that action. These commitments consist in being able to provide reasons to believe that one has adhered to the norm governing the action one performs, according to a standard imposed by the situation in which one acts. Thus in more epistemically demanding situations – those in which there are high expectations that we be able to show that we have adhered to the relevant epistemic norm – it will be more difficult to act in an epistemically responsible way. Accepting a notion of epistemic responsibility (and, with it, rejecting epistemic monism) has significant consequences for a number of current debates in epistemology. The first pertains to the debate concerning the correct epistemic norm of assertion and practical reasoning. Many proposed norms are argued to be inadequate on the basis of an inability to explain intuitive epistemic evaluations solely in terms of the conditions set forth in the norms. Epistemic separability, however, implies that the structure of this dialectic is misguided, as we can perhaps accommodate problematic judgments in terms of evaluations of responsibility. The second consequence pertains to arguments for contemporary theories of knowledge. Again, such theories are judged by their ability to accommodate intuitive attributions of knowledge. However, I argue that many of the evaluations that serve as the basis for such theories are better interpreted not as judgments about whether one has knowledge, but as judgments about whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. Recognizing a notion of epistemically responsible action thus calls into question both the plausibility of a number of contemporary theories of knowledge, as well as the way in which we go about doing epistemology in general. (shrink)

Is the state a collective agent? Are citizens responsible for what their states do? If not citizens, then who, if anyone, is responsible for what the state does? Many different sub-disciplines of philosophy are relevant for answering these questions. We need to know what “the state” is, who or what it's composed of, and what relation the parts stand in to the whole. Once we know what it is, we need to know whether that thing is an agent, in (...) particular a moral agent capable of taking moral responsibility for its actions. We have to know what it takes for it to be capable of moral responsibility, e.g., what the functional equivalents in groups are of knowledge, intention, foreseeability, recklessness, and so on. And once we've established that it is an agent, and is responsible for what it does, we have to explain whether and in what way this implicates members, i.e., whether state responsibility distributes to the members of states, whoever they may be. Answers to these questions come from metaphysics, social ontology, action theory, epistemology, political theory, and ethics. In what follows, we'll give an outline of some different ways of answering these questions. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after (...) circulatory determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

Crises of forced migration are, unfortunately, nothing new. At the time of the writing of this paper, at least two such crises were in full swing – mass movements from the Middle East and parts of Africa to the E.U., and major movements from Central America to the Southern U.S. border, including movements by large numbers of families and unaccompanied minors. These movements are complex, with multiple causes, and it is always risky to attempt to craft either general policy or (...) philosophical positions in response to salient crises. However, both of these instances do bring to the foreground important questions about the proper purpose and extent of refugee protection as a means of dealing with crises of forced migration. In particular, both of these instances force us to consider what role persecution on the basis of a protected ground – race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion – ought to play in granting refugee protection, and whether our response to those in danger should change if the agents of persecution are non-state actors. This paper is not primarily about the problems arising from Syria or Central America. In a way similar to how hard cases make bad law, I contend that a too central focus on salient crises tends to lead to bad theory and often to bad general policy. However, if I am successful in my goal of clarifying the place of persecution and non-state action in refugee protection, then we may in turn be better able to think clearly about our current crisis situations. -/- In this paper I will first draw on my previous work on the normative logic of the refugee convention to argue that, while persecution should play an important, and even central, role in our thinking about refugees, this importance is shallow and pragmatic rather than deep and fundamental. Next, I will show how this conclusion supports the claim that harms amounting to persecution by non-state actors may ground an asylum claim, at least in some cases, both when the state is unwilling and when it is unable to protect its members. I consider two cases: first, instances where the authority and power of the state has been usurped by another power, and second, when the state has (implicitly or explicitly) delegated its power or authority to non-state actors. I will show how this leads to extending asylum to a broader range of people than traditional accounts would. -/- (To download this paper, please use the link from SSRN below.). (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the effect of coronavirus disease 2019 on the Chinese public’s mental health during its early stage. We collected the data through an online questionnaire survey. Specifically, we adopted the impact of event scale-revised and state-trait anxiety inventory to assess symptomatic responses to exposure to traumatic life events and public anxiety, respectively, in the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Then, we evaluated the differences in the scores among various socio-demographic groups using Kruskal-Wakkis H tests and t-tests and (...) analyzed the IES-R, state anxiety score, and trait anxiety score using the Pearson correlation analysis. Finally, we conducted a path analysis to determine the mediating role of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in the relationship between TA and SA. The results show that the average of the SA and TA scores were 48.0 ± 10.4 and 38.0 ± 8.2, respectively; the respondents who suffered from mild, moderate, and severe psychological impacts because of the health crisis accounted for 21.9, 5.2, and 13.1%, respectively; farmers have the highest IES-R score than others; people with the highest income have the lowest SA level; a significant positive correlation existed between the IES-R and STAI scores; and TA produces both direct and indirect effects on SA. Overall, the general Chinese public exhibited much higher anxiety levels than normal in the early days of the pandemic outbreak. Accordingly, we strongly recommend psychological counseling and intervention support to mitigate the adverse psychological impacts of such an event. (shrink)