This chapter reviews the major contributions of Donald Davidson to philosophy in the 20th century.

Abstract Although expressivist theories have been applied to many normative discourses (moral, rationality, knowledge, etc.), the normative discourse of epistemic justification has been somewhat neglected by expressivists. In this paper, I aspire to both remedy this unfortunate situation and introduce a novel version of expressivist theory: Habits-Expressivism. To pave the way for habits-expressivism, I turn to Allan Gibbard's (1990, 2003, 2008) seminal work on expressivism. I first examine Gibbard's (2003, 2008) late plan-reliance expressivism and argue that it faces certain problems (...) when applied to epistemic justification discourse. As a response to these problems, I go on to introduce habits-expressivism and argue that not only does it avoid the identified problems for plan-reliance-expressivism, but it also captures the basic attractions of both plan-reliance expressivism and Gibbard's (1990) early theory of norm-expressivism. (shrink)

According to the scenario of cosmological artificial selection and artificial cosmogenesis, our universe was created and possibly even fine-tuned by cosmic engineers in another universe. This approach shall be compared to other explanations, and some far-reaching problems of it shall be discussed.

In this paper I argue that Wittgenstein's aim in the aspect-perception passages is to critically evaluate a specific hypothesis. The target hypothesis in these passages is the Gestalt psychologist Köhler's "isomorphism principle." According to this principle, there are neural correlates of conscious perceptual experience, and these neural correlates determine the content of our perceptual experiences. Wittgenstein's argument against the isomorphism principle comprises two steps. First, he diffuses the substantiveness of the principle by undermining an important assumption that underpins this principle, (...) namely, that there is a unitary concept of seeing. Next, Wittgenstein argues that some forms of aspect-perception involve recognitional capacities, the exercise of which is normatively constrained. The normative nature of aspect-perceiving plays a pivotal role in Wittgenstein's rejection of the isomorphism principle. Aside from the clear exegetical benefits gained from identifying the target hypothesis in the aspect-perception passages as the isomorphism principle, construing the remarks in the way suggested here is also philosophically interesting in its own right: it shows Wittgenstein engaging directly in the mind–body problem, construed as the problem of intentionality. (shrink)

A number of prominent philosophers advance the following ideas: (1) Meaning is use. (2) Meaning is an intrinsically normative notion. Call (1) the use thesis, hereafter UT, and (2) the normativity thesis, hereafter NT. They come together in the view that for a linguistic expression to have meaning is for there to be certain proprieties governing its employment.1 These ideas are often associated with a third.

In this paper, I briefly outline the notion of a truth-conditional meaning-theory and introduce two prominent problems it faces. The“extensionality problem” arises because not all correct specifications of truth-conditions are meaning-giving. The “explanatory problem”concerns the extent to which truth-conditional meaning-theories can contribute to the task of clarifying the nature of linguistic meaning.The “principle of humanity” is supposed to resolve both issues simultaneously. I argue that it fails to do so.

Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation. The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus, the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies (...) invariantly seems mistaken. (shrink)

Can the question "Why do what morality requires?" be answered in such a way that anyone regardless of their desires or interests has reason to be moral? One strategy for answering this question appeals to constitutive arguments. In general, constitutive arguments attempt to establish the normativity of rational requirements by pointing out that we are already committed to them insofar as we are believers or agents. This study is concerned with the general prospects for such arguments. It starts by explaining (...) the general constitutive argument strategy, followed by an examination of constitutive arguments that have been given regarding theoretical reason and the instrumental principle in practical reason, and concluding with a discussion of some challenges to constitutive arguments in moral philosophy and some possible responses to these challenges. (shrink)

One of the central explananda in the debate on social cognition is the interpretation of other people in terms of reasons for action. There is a growing dissatisfaction among participants in the debate concerning the descriptive adequacy of the traditional belief-desire model of action interpretation. Applying this model as an explanatory model at the subpersonal level threatens to leave the original explanandum largely unarticulated. Against this background we show how Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping model can be used as a valuable descriptive (...) tool for making folk psychology explicit. Following Brandom’s non-formalist and non-mentalistic account of reason discourse, we suggest that the process of making sense of others is best captured as proceeding from a ‘factive’ baseline. According to this picture the ascription of beliefs and desires is not the default interpretation strategy, but rather the result of prior scaffolding of the agent’s deontic score. We close by discussing Brandom’s model in the light of empirical findings on the ontogeny of reason attribution. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the dependency or, maybe, the interdependency of rationality and self-knowledge. Here two questions may be distinguished, viz. (1) whether being rational is a necessary condition for a creature to have self-knowledge, and (2) whether having self-knowledge is a necessary condition for a creature to be rational. After a brief explication of what I mean by self-knowledge, I deal with the first question. There I defend the Davidsonian position, according to which rationality is, indeed, a (...) necessary condition for self-knowledge. In addition, I distinguish two aspects of rationality which I call basic and local rationality. After that I concentrate on the second question for the remaining larger part of this article. Here I proceed in two stages: first I examine whether self-knowledge is necessary for basic rationality, and then whether it is necessary for local rationality. (shrink)

In this paper my primary aim is to present a logical system of practical reasoning that can be used to assess the validity of practical arguments, that is, arguments with a practical judgment as conclusion. I begin with a critical evaluation of other approaches to this issue and argue that they are inadequate. On the basis of these considerations, I explain in Sect. 2 the informal conception of practical validity and introduce in Sect. 3 the logical system P , which (...) is an extension of propositional logic and can be used to assess the validity of a wide range of practical arguments. In the last section, I apply this system to some examples of practical reasoning in order to demonstrate how it can be used in practice. (shrink)

Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophical and (...) empirical considerations lead us to accord a fairly minimal role for mirror neurons in social cognition. (shrink)

Social cognition is the capacity to understand and interact with others. The mainstream account of social cognition is mindreading, the view that we humans understanding others by interpreting their behavior in terms of mental states. Recently theorists from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have challenged the mindreading account, arguing for a more deflationary account of social cognition. In this paper I examine a deflationary account of social cognition, embodied simulation, which is inspired by recent neuroscientific findings. I argue that embodied simulation (...) fails to present an adequate alternative to mindreading accounts of social cognition. I defend a philosophically and empirically plausible two-systems account of social cognition, which holds that even very young children are capable of mindreading. (shrink)

Cognitive Science is a promising field of research that deals with one of the most fundamental questions ever: how do beings know? However, despite the long and extensive tradition of the field it has not yet become an area of knowledge with scientific identity. This is primarily due to three reasons: the lack of boundaries in defining the object of study, i.e. cognition, the lack of a precise, robust and consistent scientific methodology and results, and the inner problems derived from (...) its interdisciplinary nature. This paper presents a background review, a theoretical frame and a humble reflection on these topics in order to arouse the internal debate among readers once more. (shrink)

Do we need principles of the unification of our agency, our mode of acting? Immanuel Kant and Christine Korsgaard argue that the reflective structure of our mind forces us to have some conception of ourselves, others and the world—including our agency—and that it is through will and reason, and in particular principles of our agency, that we take upon ourselves to unify and test the way(s) in which we make our lives consistent. I argue that the principles suggested—the hypothetical imperative (...) and the categorical imperative—function to unify our understanding of ourselves and others as agents as efficacious and autonomous and that the extent to which those concerned render themselves efficacious and autonomous in cosmopolitan education or elsewhere is due to the extent to which they act in accordance with and are motivated by the suggested principles and in particular the categorical one. I first discuss how the principles function to unify our agency and how the categorical imperative functions as a test of maxims for our actions, how the will is the source of our morality, and how we are forced to have practical identities. I end with some remarks on what it means to acknowledge the mentioned principles in cosmopolitan education. (shrink)

This paper sets out some new skeleton mathematically-couched models for dealing with supervenience in some, if not all, its many guises. Our models are based around a naïve invocation of a ‘topology’ induced on object sets by property sets. We have two aims: one is to provide an overview of supervenience with enough rigour and detail to act as a self-contained introduction to the subject; and the other is to set out our new approach—but without getting too bogged down in (...) excessive mathematical, or indeed philosophical, niceties—so that it can be used as a foundation for further work. Throughout we have scattered examples and comments to help clarify the points we make. The early sections use our topological approach to recast what appears elsewhere in the literature. And in the latter sections of the paper, we introduce some new ideas and techniques which help in exploring the general structures underpinning supervenience. (shrink)

Hamblin's Action-State Semantics provides a sound philosophical foundation for understanding the character of the imperative. Taking this as our inspiration, in this paper we present a logic of action, which we call ST, that captures the clear ontological distinction between being responsible for the achievement of a state of affairs and being responsible for the performance of an action. We argue that a relativised modal logic of type RT founded upon a ternary relation over possible worlds integrated with a basic (...) tense logic captures intuitions of the Hamblinian model of imperatives. The logic implements a direct mapping of each of Hamblin's key concepts: strategies, partial strategies and wholehearted satisfaction. (shrink)

Hamblin’s Action-State Semantics provides a sound philosophical foundation for understanding the character of the imperative. Taking this as our inspiration, in this paper we present a logic of action, which we call ST, that captures the clear ontological distinction between being responsible for the achievement of a state of affairs and being responsible for the performance of an action. We argue that a relativised modal logic of type RT founded upon a ternary relation over possible worlds integrated with a basic (...) tense logic captures intuitions of the Hamblinian model of imperatives. The logic implements a direct mapping of each of Hamblin’s key concepts: strategies, partial strategies and wholehearted satisfaction. (shrink)

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of (...) UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.). (shrink)

This paper challenges the view that arguments are (by definition, as it were) attempts to persuade or convince an audience to accept (or reject) a point of view by presenting reasons for (or against) that point of view. I maintain, first, that an arguer need not intend any effect beyond that of making it manifest to readers or hearers that there is a reason for doing some particular thing (e.g., for believing a certain proposition, or alternatively for rejecting it), and (...) second that when an arguer is in fact trying to induce an effect above and beyond rendering a reason manifest, the effect intended—the use to which his or her argument is put—need not be that hearers do what the stated reasons are reasons for doing. Where the actual or intended effect of making a reason R for doing X manifest is something other than doing X, I call it an oblique—as opposed to a direct—effect of making that reason manifest. The core of the paper presents an overview or map of the main categories of effect which arguments can have, and the main sub-types within each category, calling attention to the points at which such effects can be indirect or oblique effects. The purpose of that typology is to make it clear (i) how oblique effects can come about and (ii) how important a role they can play in the conduct of argumentation. (shrink)

In this paper, the nature of the contract of employment is explored from an ethical point of view. It is argued that certain normative arguments should be taken into account in order to justify such a contract. Furthermore, an argument is developed against the claim that (a) the individual’s freedom of decision and (b) the practice of institutional arrangements are sufficient to justify a contract of employment. The dimensional analysis offered shows that further conditions are needed: (a) must be elaborated (...) and interpreted to the extent that this condition is not sufficient – rather sub-criteria regarding the agent’s state of knowledge must be met; and (b) should be supplemented by a demand for fairness. A tentative analysis of existing work contracts is the starting point for the ethical analysis. The aim is to show what a legitimate, or reasonable, contract of employment will require. Finally, some important normative implications and consequences regarding the contract’s normative status are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between argumentation and persuasion. It defends the idea that these two concepts are not as opposed as all too often said. If it is important to recognize their differences (there are argumentative discourses without persuasion and persuasive discourses without argumentation), there is nevertheless an overlap, in which characteristics are taken from both. We propose to call this overlap “persuasive argumentation”. In order to bridge argumentation and persuasion, we will first distinguish the latter from manipulation. (...) In the second part of this article, we will analyze four cases of persuasive argumentation: the enthymeme, a few rhetorical figures, narration and visual argumentation. (shrink)

Ausonio Marras has argued that Jaegwon Kim's principle of explanatory exclusion depends on an implausibly strong interpretation of explanatory realism that should be rejected because it leads to an extensional criterion of individuation for explanations. I examine the role explanatory realism plays in Kim's justification for the exclusion principle and explore two ways in which Kim can respond to Marras's criticism. The first involves separating criteria for explanatory truth from questions of explanatory adequacy, while the second appeals to Kim's fine-grained (...) theory of events. I argue that the first response is unconvincing on its own but when coupled with the second might provide a viable way for Kim to avoid Marras's criticism. However, I show that the second strategy is weak from a polemical point of view because Kim's theory of events already assumes what the principle of explanatory exclusion was introduced to establish: the falsity of nonreductive physicalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRational agents have consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this (...) essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, a... (shrink)

When we talk about creation, we use the progressive and verbs of creation as in ‘Mary is building a house’. The modal account of the progressive says that a sentence such as ‘Mary is building a house’ is true just in case Mary eventually builds a house in all worlds in which her house-building proceeds normally. Recently, the modal account has come under fire from those who claim that it over-generates modal entailments and those who think the progressive should be (...) treated as a predicate of events. By properly situating the modal account within a contemporary semantic framework for natural language modals, I argue that it gives the best semantic treatment of the progressive. (shrink)

This is a review of Kathrin Gluer's Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction. A dispute about the grounding of the Principle of Charity is discussed, and some resources Davidson has for responding to a criticism of his theory of action.

This paper offers an analysis of the logical form of plural action sentences that shows that collective actions so ascribed are a matter of all members of a group contributing to bringing some event about. It then uses this as the basis for a reductive account of the content of we-intentions according to which what distinguishes we-intentions from I-intentions is that we-intentions are directed about bringing it about that members of a group act in accordance with a shared plan.

In opposition to a common assumption, this paper defends the idea that the auxiliary verb will has no other semantic contribution in contemporary English than a temporal shift towards the future with respect to the utterance time. Strong reasons for rejecting the idea that will quantifies over possible worlds are presented. Given the adoption of Lewis’s and Kratzer’s views on modality, the alleged ‘modal’ uses of will are accounted for by a pragmatic mechanism which restricts the domain of the covert (...) epistemic necessity operator scoping over the sentence. (shrink)

A psychologically plausible analysis of the way we assign illocutionary forces to utterances is formulated using a 'contextualist' analysis of what is said. The account offered makes use of J. L. Austin's distinction between phatic acts (sentence meaning), locutionary acts (contextually determined what is said), illocutionary acts, and perolocutionary acts. In order to avoid the conflation between illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, assertive, directive and commissive illocutionary forces are defined in terms of inferential potential with respect to the common ground. Illocutionary (...) forces are conceived as automatic but optional components of the process of interpretation. (shrink)

The paper argues against the widely accepted assumption that the causal laws of (completed) physics, in contrast to those of the special sciences, are essentially strict. This claim played an important role already in debates about the anomalousness of the mental, and it currently experiences a renaissance in various discussions about mental causation, projectability of special science laws, and the nature of physical laws. By illustrating the distinction with some paradigmatic physical laws, the paper demonstrates that only law schemata are (...) strict whereas causal laws are generally non-strict. Several potential replies to this argument are discussed and rejected as unsound. (shrink)

New Volitionalism is a name for certain widespread conception of the nature of intentional action. Some of the standard arguments for New Volitionalism, the so-called arguments from total failure, have even acquired the status of basic assumptions for many other kinds of philosophers. It is therefore of singular interest to investigate some of the most important arguments from total failure. This is what I propose to do in this paper. My aim is not be to demonstrate that these arguments are (...) inconsistent or that total failure and naked tryings are metaphysically impossible. Rather, my aim is be to build a case against the possibility of naked, independently existing tryings, by questioning how well we understand the scenarios invoked in their favour. Thus, rather than attempting to present a definitive metaphysical refutation of New Volitionalism, I attempt to diminish or demolish its underlying motivation. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's influential ‘sceptical paradox’ of semantic rule-following alleges that speakers cannot have any justification for using a word one way rather than another. If it is correct, there can be no such thing as meaning anything by a word. I argue that the paradox fails to undermine meaning. Kripke never adequately motivates its excessively strict standard for the justified use of words. The paradox lacks the resources to show that its standard is truly mandatory or that speakers do not (...) frequently satisfy the well-motivated competitor I offer. So the paradox fails. (shrink)

In recent years, a debate concerning the nature of knowing-how has emerged between intellectualists who claim that knowledge-how is reducible to knowledge-that and anti-intellectualists who claim that knowledge-how comprises a unique and irreducible knowledge category. The arguments between these two camps have clustered largely around two issues: intellectualists object to Gilbert Ryle's assertion that knowing-how is a kind of ability, and anti-intellectualists take issue with Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson's positive, intellectualist account of knowing-how. Like most anti-intellectualists, in this paper (...) I will raise objections to Stanley and Williamson's account of knowing-how and also defend the claim that ability is necessary for knowing-how attributions. Unlike most discussions of knowing-how, however, I will return to more Rylean considerations in order to illustrate that any intellectualist account of knowing-how, not simply Stanley and Williamson's preferred variety, will fail because it will be unable to account for fundamental differences in the knowledge required to instantiate an ability and the knowledge involved in propositional thought. (shrink)

The requirements of rationality are fundamental in practical and theoretical philosophy. Nonetheless, there exists no correct account of what constitutes rational requirements. This paper attempts to provide a correct constitutive account of ‘rationality requires’. I argue that rational requirements are grounded in ‘necessary explanations of subjective incoherence’, as I shall put it. Rationality requires of you to X if and only if your rational capacities, in conjunction with the fact that you not-X, explain necessarily why you have a non-maximal degree (...) of subjective coherence. (shrink)

Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu have advanced what seem at first sight to be incompatible theories of human agency. While Archer places heavy stress on conscious reflexive deliberation and the consequent choices of identity and projects that individuals make, Bourdieu's concept of habitus places equally heavy stress on the role of social conditioning in determining our behavior, and downplays the contribution of conscious deliberation. Despite this, I argue that these two approaches, with some modification, can be reconciled in a single (...) emergentist theory of human action that is sketched out in this article. It examines how human dispositions and our reflexive decisions are related to the determination of human action, linking dispositions and decisions to their neural base in human physiology and to the social factors that influence them. As a result, it argues, we can see human action as the outcome of a continuous interaction between dispositions and reflexivity. The article goes on to relate this explanation back to Bourdieu's concept of the habitus and Archer's account of reflexivity. It argues that the weaknesses in Bourdieu's theory of action can be resolved by a reasonable reinterpretation of the habitus that makes it consistent with the emergentist theory and creates space for human choices as well as social influences on our behavior. This opens up a role for the sort of reflexive deliberations advocated by Archer and thus to a reconciliation of the key contributions of both Archer and Bourdieu. (shrink)

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

Recently, a new problem has arisen for an Anscombean conception of intentional action. The claim is that the Anscombean’s emphasis on the formally causal character of practical knowledge precludes distinguishing between an aim and a merely foreseen side effect. I propose a solution to this problem: the difference between aim and side effect should be understood in terms of the familiar Anscombean distinction between acting intentionally and the intention with which one acts. I also argue that this solution has advantages (...) over an alternative that has already been endorsed in the literature: it is a better fit for the Anscombean theory, and it naturally accommodates intuitions about the moral significance of aiming vs. merely foreseeing. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

The phenomenology of agency has, until recently, been rather neglected, overlooked by both philosophers of action and philosophers of consciousness alike. Thankfully, all that has changed, and of late there has been an explosion of interest in what it is like to be an agent. 1 This burgeoning field crosses the traditional boundaries between disciplines: philosophers of psychopathology are speculating about the role that unusual experiences of agency might play in accounting for disorders of thought and action; cognitive scientists are (...) developing models of how the phenomenology of agency is generated; and philosophers of mind are drawing connections between the phenomenology of agency and the nature of introspection, phenomenal character, and agency itself. My aim in this paper is not to provide an exhaustive survey of this recent literature, but to provide a.. (shrink)

Kaiho Seiry (1755-1817) is probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships. I examine in this paper the view of human beings that led him to this conclusion. Giving up previous definitions of humans, Seiry focuses on the faculty of practical reason. While this leads him to recognize a hierarchy of humans, some having more humanity than others, it also allows him to develop the most modern understanding of social relationship available in his time. His (...) radical reinterpretation of what it is to be a human being is all the more remarkable because it was done with the concepts and ideas provided by the Chinese Classics. Establishing new connections, giving new life to ideas that were never exploited, Seiry showed it was possible to make sense of modernity without using foreign concepts. (shrink)

This paper investigates interactive kinds, a class of kinds suggested by Ian Hacking for which classification generates a feedback loop between the classifiers and what is classified, and argues that human interactive kinds should be distinguished from non-human ones. First, I challenge the claim that there is nothing ontologically special about interactive kinds in virtue of their members being classified as such. To do so, I reject Cooper’s counterexample to Hacking’s thesis that kind descriptions are necessary for intentional action, arguing (...) that classification is required for intentional action. Having considered ways to characterise the metaphysics of interactive kinds and the semantics of kind terms, I argue that the fact that classification facilitates intentional action makes human interactive kinds ontologically distinctive because of the anomalous nature of the change which the kind-classification brings about. I then briefly examine further distinguishing features of human interactive kinds. (shrink)