This paper presents a way of classifying different forms of naturalness and unnaturalness. Three main forms of (un)naturalness are found as the following: history- based (un)naturalness, property-based (un)naturalness and relation-based (un)naturalness. Numerous subforms (and some subforms of the subforms) of each are presented. The subforms differ with respect to the entities that are found (un)natural, with respect to their all-inclusiveness, and whether (un)naturalness is seen as all-or-nothing affair, or a continuous gradient. This kind of conceptual analysis is needed, first, because (...) discussion concerning (un)naturalness is common in current bioethics and environmental ethics, and second, because the terms natural and unnatural are highly ambiguous. Thus, the lack of an exact definition of the type of (un)naturalness may lead into equivocation, other forms of bad argumentation, or at least vagueness. (shrink)

'Knowledge and its Limits' starts its exposition of the knowledge-first approach to epistemology with a structural analogy between knowledge and action as the two key relations between mind and world (Williamson 2000: 1, 6-8). This chapter aims to reconsider the relation between knowledge and action, and refine the analogy.

The problem of act individuation is a debate about the identity conditions of human acts. The fundamental question about act individuation is: how do we distinguish between actions? Three views of act individuation have dominated the literature. First, Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that a number of different descriptions refer to a single act. Second, Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim have argued that each description designates a distinct act. Finally, Irving Thalberg and Judith Jarvis Thomson have averred that (...) some acts are sequences of causally related events, which include both a primitive bodily action and some of its effects. All of these accounts have assumed that a simple invariantist account of act individuation captures how ordinary people distinguish between acts. For my dissertation, I devised an experiment to test the action theorists' assumptions. My data show that people's intuitions seem to depend on the valence of the consequences of the action under consideration. So, an invariantist account is not possible. In light of the empirical results, I argue that if we seek a folk account of act individuation, then that account should be able to explain the variability that seems to be present in people's intuitions about different cases. (shrink)