According to one influential philosophical view of human agency, for an agent to perform an action intentionally is essentially for her to manifest a kind of self-knowledge: An agent is intentionally φ-ing if and only if she has a special kind of practical and non-observational knowledge that this is what she is doing. I here argue that this self-knowledge view faces serious problems when extended to account for intentional actions performed by several agents together as a result of a joint (...) decision. This suggests that practical and non-observational knowledge is not essential to intentional action as such, since a theory of intentional action ought to be able to make sense of such paradigm cases of joint intentional action as well as cases of singular intentional action. Existing attempts to extend the self-knowledge view to joint intentional action face an unfortunate trilemma. These attempts must (i) require that participants have non-observational knowledge of each other’s non-observational knowledge, which in turn requires that the participants are either really one and the same agent, or that they are, for all relevant purposes, clones of each other; (ii) limit their explanatory scope to intentional actions performed by groups with a single decision maker at the top of an organisational hierarchy, which arguably are not really shared or jointly performed; or (iii) require that the intention of the group is the result of a public representational act that the group members will have observational knowledge of in a way that is incompatible with a core commitment of the self-knowledge view. I argue that each of these options is unacceptable given a self-knowledge view of intentional action. (shrink)

A “we-intention” is the kind of intention that an individual acts on when participating in joint intentional action. In discussions about what characterises such a we-intention, one fault line concerns whether the “we-ness” is a feature of a we-intention’s mode or content. According to Björn Petersson, it is an agent-perspectival feature of its mode. Petersson argues that content accounts are incompatible with theories of so-called “group identification” and “team reasoning”. Insofar as such group identification and team reasoning are commonplace in (...) many joint action situations, such an incompatibility would be a serious problem for content accounts. I here argue, however, that Petersson’s incompatibility thesis should be rejected. (shrink)

Early-Onset Schizophrenia (EOS) and Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are early- onset neurodevelopmental disorders associated with cognitive deficits. The current study represents the first attempt to compare these groups on a comprehensive cognitive test battery in a longitudinal design over 25 years in order to enhance our knowledge of particular patterns resulting from the interaction between normal maturational processes and different illness processes of these disorders. In the baseline study, 19 adolescents with schizophrenia were compared to 20 adolescents with ADHD and (...) 30 healthy controls (HC), all between 12 and 18 years of age. After 13 years (T2) and after 25 years (T3) they were re-evaluated with the cognitive test battery. A cognitive Composite Score was used in a linear mixed model. The EOS group had a significant cognitive stagnation or deterioration from T1 to T2 compared to HC. However, the EOS group had the most positive change from T2 to T3, supporting a stable level of cognitive performance over the 25 year span. The ADHD group improved or had similar development as the HC group from T1 to T2. They continued to improve significantly compared to the HC group from T2 to T3. Individuals in the EOS group performed more impaired on the cognitive composite score compared to the HC group and the ADHD group at all three time points. Results might indicate a neurodevelopmental pathway of EOS with subnormal cognitive development specific in adolescence. In comparison, the ADHD group had a more consistent cognitive maturation supporting a maturational delay hypothesis of ADHD. (shrink)

This article explores possibilities for establishing dialogues between feminism and constructivism in the field of technology studies. Based on an overview of Norwegian feminist debates about technology, it indicates several points where feminism and constructivism meet and can mutually benefit from each other. The article critically examines feminist studies questioning the problems of technological determinism, social deternacnism, and essentialism. It criticizes constructivism for a lack of concern for gender and politics but holds that it is still possible to use theoretical (...) tools from constructivism in feminist analyses. Fruitful dialogues require the application of the principle of symmetry to the dcalogues and sharing some common ground and mutual recognation of each other's strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

This paper investigates the acquisition of residual verb second (V2) in three corpora consisting of data from Norwegian-English bilinguals (Emma, Emily, and Sunniva) in order to determine to what extent these structures are affected by cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from Norwegian V2. The three girls exhibit three different patterns with regard to the relevant constructions. They are very target-like in their use of auxiliaries in the relevant structures. However, when it comes to do-support, Emily and Sunniva are equally target-like, while Emma (...) mainly produces non-target-like structures. These either involve the omission of do, or non-target-like movement of a lexical verb. Furthermore, Emma also allows verb movement across the subject with both lexical verbs and auxiliaries in topicalized structures, suggesting that she has overgeneralized residual V2 across verb types and clause types. Emily, on the other hand, is very target-like in structures involving residual V2 in English, but also allows auxiliaries and dummy-do to move across the subject in topicalized structures, overgeneralizing residual V2 to apply to non-subject-initial declaratives. Finally, Sunniva, is very precocious and very target-like in all the relevant structures, which may be an indication of acceleration due to CLI from Norwegian V2. We discuss these results with reference to language balance, finding that the measures available to us suggest that the differences between the children cannot straightforwardly be explained by language dominance. Instead, we suggest that these results can be accounted for by ambiguity in the English system, leaving the data open to several possible interpretations when acquired in contact with the consistent V2 system in Norwegian. This has several consequences: (i) the three girls’ parsers interpret the input differently, (ii) differences between the three children are qualitative rather than quantitative, and (iii) there has to be some mechanism that ensures that the children can ‘recover’ from these non-target-like grammars. In this paper, we will focus on the first two issues. (shrink)

In this paper, it will be argued that the concept of ‘Bildung’ has a twofold role in pedagogical research. On the one hand, it holds a position for conceptual analysis and discussions of how a pedagogical relation is established between an individual and the world. In this sense, it belongs to theoretical pedagogics. Humboldt concepts of receptivity and self-determination and Klafki’s theory of categorial pedagogy are central contributions to this discussion. On the other hand, the concept of Bildung has a (...) role as a regulative idea due to the ideas and imaginations of various forms of humanity it contains. In this sense, it fulfills an ethical dimension since it is regulative for the pedagogical relationship between individual and world. (shrink)

The paper explores the concept of duty in the moral philosophy of the Danish educational philosopher Knud Grue-Sørensen. The aim is to discuss how Grue-Sørensen’s view on duty might contribute to answering the question of what the content of moral education should be. Grue-Sørensen is inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but even though he in his prize dissertation from 1937 addresses the possibility of objective morality, he adopts a more pragmatic approach regarding what it means to do one’s (...) duty. In an actual Danish daily life context, the concept of duty has lost its moral meaning and decayed into a matter of domestic duties such as cleaning and dishwashing. Grue-Sørensen’s view on duty in an educational context might contribute to revitalizing the concept in a more pragmatic sense, which is useful for teachers, social educators, children, and parents. (shrink)

The article analyses the debate on egg donation in Norway using source material from the parliamentary debate of amendments to the Biotechnology Law. In both policy documents on bioethics and the Biotechnology Law, gender is not a spoken issue, but bringing egg and sperm directly to the fore highlights how gender is implicated in bioethics debates. Gender perceptions affect the understanding of `what egg and sperm may do' at the same time as the debate sets established perceptions of gender in (...) motion. In Norway, gender equality is a valid and important premise within the general political debate. It is, however, contested as a valid argument in the context of egg donation, which therefore becomes a field of negotiations about the limits of equal opportunities. The article analyses the egg donation debate as a process of cultural co-production and asks how the Norwegian emphasis on gender equality influences the debate on egg donation and, vice versa, how debates of assisted reproductive technology reopen debates on gender in relation to reproduction and parenthood. (shrink)

The new reproductive technologies affect several of our conceptual distinctions, and most basically the one between nature and culture. This includes the understanding of reproduction as natural, biological processes and of the body as a product of nature. Nature and culture has been a basic conceptual distinction in western culture and it is paralleled in the division between sex, understood as nature, and gender, understood as culture. The process of reproduction is central to the understanding of sexual difference, in the (...) sense that the abilities to conceive and give birth to children are generally considered to be features that distinguish woman from man. Therefore changes in this process provide us with empirical material for exploring changes in people's understanding of sex and gender. The article explores reproductive technology as a provider of new cultural models for understanding the relationship between nature and culture and thereby the distinction of sex/nature and gender/culture. (shrink)

Background:In recent years, operating theatre nurse students’ education focused on ethics, basic values and protecting and promoting the patients' dignity in perioperative practice. Health professionals are frequently confronted with ethical issues that can impact on patient’s care during surgery.Objective:The objective of this study was to present what operating theatre nursing students perceived and interpreted as undignified caring in perioperative practice.Research design:The study has a descriptive design with a hermeneutic approach. Data were collected using Flanagan’s critical incident technique.Participants and research context:Operating (...) theatre nurse students from Sweden and Norway participated and collected data in 2011, after education in ethics and dignity. Data consisting of 47 written stories and the text were analysed with hermeneutical text interpretation.Ethical considerations:The study was approved by the Karlstad University's Research Ethics Committee.Findings:The findings show careless behaviour and humiliating actions among health professionals. Health professionals commit careless acts by rendering the patient invisible, ignoring the patient’s worry and pain and treating the patient as an object. They also humiliate the patient when speaking in negative terms about the patient’s body, and certain health professionals blame the patients for the situation they are in. Health professionals lack the willingness and courage to protect the patient’s dignity in perioperative practice.Discussion:In the discussion, we have illuminated how professional ethics may be threatened by more pragmatic and utilitarian arguments contained in regulations and transplant act.Conclusion:The findings reveal that patients were exposed to unnecessary suffering; furthermore, the operating theatre nurse students suffered an inner ethical conflict due to the undignified caring situations they had witnessed. (shrink)

Contemporary medical imaging technologies produce images on the level of human cells. As a result of such images, egg and sperm cells have become well-known artefacts of popular culture. Medical imaging technology has transformed these gametes from invisible matter integrated in biological processes within the body to identifiable objects. The visualisation of egg and sperm cells has literally lifted the process of human reproduction out of the female body and made the gametes appear as protagonists in the story of human (...) reproduction. The article argues that visualisation of the gametes and the central role they play in contemporary imaginations of reproduction may offer vital contributions to the rather rapid acceptance and normalisation of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

Most reductionist accounts of intentional joint action include a condition that it must be common knowledge between participants that they have certain intentions and beliefs that cause and coordinate the joint action. However, this condition has typically simply been taken for granted rather than argued for. The condition is not necessary for ensuring that participants are jointly responsible for the action in which each participates, nor for ensuring that each treats the others as partners rather than as social tools. It (...) is thus something of a mystery why the condition is so widely accepted. By rejecting three arguments that could potentially support it, I argue that reductionists should get rid of the condition. I show that two of the arguments fail. While the third argument is intuitively compelling, it builds on key premises that are unavailable to the reductionist. (shrink)

Two areas of ethical conflict in intercultural nursing — who needs single rooms more, and how far should nurses go to comply with ethnic minority patients’ wishes? — are discussed from a utilitarian and common-sense morality point of view. These theories may mirror nurses’ way of thinking better than principled ethics, and both philosophies play a significant role in shaping nurses’ decision making. Questions concerning room allocation, noisy behaviour, and demands that nurses are unprepared or unequipped for may be hard (...) to cope with owing to physical restrictions and other patients’ needs. Unsolvable problems may cause stress and a bad conscience as no solution is ‘right’ for all the patients concerned. Nurses experience a moral state of disequilibrium, which occurs when they feel responsible for the outcomes of their actions in situations that have no clear-cut solution. (shrink)

According to a widely accepted constraint on the content of intentions, here called the exclusivity constraint, one cannot intend to perform another agent’s action, even if one might be able to intend that she performs it. For example, while one can intend that one’s guest leaves before midnight, one cannot intend to perform her act of leaving. However, Deborah Tollefsen’s (2005) account of joint activity requires participants to have intentions-in-action (in John Searle’s (1983) sense) that violate this constraint. I argue (...) that the exclusivity constraint should not be accepted as an unconditional constraint on the contents of intentions-in-action: one may intend to perform a basic action that belongs both to oneself and to another agent. Based on the phenomenology of tool use, I first argue that intentions-in-action of one’s basic actions may be technologically extended, meaning that their contents are not restricted to concern the agent’s bodily movements. In analogy with this, I then argue that the phenomenology of some skillful joint activities supports the idea that one’s basic intentions-in-action may be socially extended, in violation of the widely accepted exclusivity constraint. Tollefsen’s account is specifically constructed to account for the joint activities of infants and toddlers who lack the capacity to think of others as planning agents and grasp their plan-like intentions (a capacity required by Michael Bratman’s (1992, 1993, 2009a, b) influential account of joint activity). At the end of the paper, I raise some doubts regarding the extent to which infants and toddlers have socially extended intentions-in-action. (shrink)

In 'Joint Action and Development', Stephen Butterfill argues that if several agents' actions are driven by what he calls a "shared goal"—a certain pattern of goal-relations and expectations—then these actions constitute a joint action. This kind of joint action is sufficiently cognitively undemanding for children to engage in, and therefore has the potential to play a part in fostering their understanding of other minds. Part of the functional role of shared goals is to enable agents to choose means that are (...) appropriate to realising a goal with others rather than individually. By offering a counterexample, I show that the pattern of goal-relations and expectations specified by Butterfill cannot play this role. I then provide an appropriately conceptually and cognitively undemanding amendment with which the account can be saved. (shrink)

I argue that an agent can be morally responsible and fully (but not necessarily solely) blameworthy for another agent’s free intentional action, simply by intentionally creating the conditions for the action in a way that causes it. This means, I argue, that she can be morally responsible for the other’s action in the relevantly same way that she is responsible for her own non-basic actions. Furthermore, it means that socially mediated moral responsibility for intentional action does not require an agent (...) to authorize another to act on her behalf, nor does it require her to threaten, coerce, or deceive the other. (shrink)

In ordinary discourse, a single duty is often attributed to a plurality of agents. In "Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals", Stephanie Collins claims that such attributions involve a “category error”. I critically discuss Collins’ argument for this claim and argue that there is a substantive sense in which non-agential groups can have moral duties. A plurality of agents can have a single duty to bring about an outcome by virtue of a capacity of each to practically (...) reason about what they ought to do together. I also argue that Collins’ attempt to give a reductive account of such “we-reasoning” fails. (shrink)

We advocate an analysis of meaning that departs from the pragmatic slogan that “meaning is use”. However, in order to avoid common missteps, this claim is in dire need of qualification. We argue that linguistic meaning does not originate from language use as such; therefore we cannot base a theory of meaning only on use. It is important not to neglect the fact that language is ultimately reliant on non-linguistic factors. This might seem to oppose the aforementioned slogan, but it (...) will be made clear how this opposition is chimerical. We propose that meaning traces back to the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which is at the heart of the matter by inducing strong interdependency between intention and interpretation. But to base a full-fledged analysis of meaning in communicative dyads alone is also insufficient. What needs to be further acknowledged is that meaning sharing becomes regulated by the interactions of a community. This we call consensus and it is at play in framing all communicative acts. Hence arises a triadic structure – we call this the meaningsharing network. The main motivation behind this model is to capture that meaning is not “in the head”, nor is it autonomous of the individual members that constitute it. (shrink)

In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to (...) the fact that Knobe’s original interpretation of the results is based on an abstract rendering of the central scenario that is significantly different from the vignettes presented to the survey participants. In particular, the experimental vignettes involve temporal and social dimensions; they portray sequences of social actions involving an agent and an interlocutor, rather than a lone agent making a momentary decision in light of certain attitudes. Through textual analyses of a set of vignettes used to study the Knobe effect, drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we show that there are many differences between the experimental conditions besides the moral valence of the side effect. In light of our textual analyses, we discuss vignette methodology in experimental philosophy and suggest an alternative interpretation of Knobe’s original experimental results. We also argue that experimental philosophy could benefit from considering research on naturally occurring social interaction as an alternative source of empirical findings for discussions of folk-psychological concepts. (shrink)

What is required for several agents to intentionally φ together? I argue that each of them must believe or assume that their φ-ing is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Various analogies between intentional singular action and intentional joint action show that this doxastic single end condition captures a feature at the very heart of the phenomenon of intentional joint action. For instance, just as several simple actions are only unified into a complex intentional singular activity if (...) the agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each action is directed to, so several agents’ actions are only unified into an intentional joint activity if each agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Influential accounts of intentional joint action, including Christopher Kutz’s and Michael Bratman’s, implicitly include this condition only if participants must intend to contribute to the end under the same conception. While such a requirement successfully rules out some counterexamples, it also makes the accounts unable to appropriately accommodate and explain clear cases of intentional joint action that they ought to be able to accommodate and explain. (shrink)

Background:The foundation of all nursing practice is respect for human rights, ethical value and human dignity. In perioperative practice, challenging situations appear quickly and operating theatre nurses must be able to make different ethical judgements. Sometimes they must choose against their own professional principles, and this creates ethical conflicts in themselves.Objectives:This study describes operating theatre nurses’ experiences of ethical value conflicts in perioperative practice.Research design:Qualitative design, narratives from 15 operating theatre nurses and hermeneutic text interpretation.Ethical consideration:The study followed ethical principles (...) in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration and approval was granted by the local university ethics committee.Findings:The result showed that value conflicts arose in perioperative practice when operating theatre nurses were prevented from being present in the perioperative nursing process, because of current habits in perioperative practice. The patient’s care became uncaring when health professionals did not see and listen to each other and when collaboration in the surgical team was not available for the patient’s best. This occurred when operating theatre nurses’ competence was not taken seriously and was ignored in patient care.Conclusion:Value conflicts arose when operating theatre nurses experienced that continuity of patient care was lacking. They experienced compassion with the patient but still had the will and ability to be there and take responsibility for the patient. This led to feelings of despair, powerlessness and of having a bad conscience which could lead to dissatisfaction, and even resignations. (shrink)

According to some accounts, an individual participates in joint intentional cooperative action by virtue of conceiving of him- or herself and other participants as if they were parts of a single agent or body that performs the action. I argue that this notional singularization move fails if they act as if they were parts of a single agent. It can succeed, however, if the participants act as if to bring about the goal of a properly functioning single body in action (...) of which they would be parts. This latter version of the move manages to capture the cooperative character of joint intentional cooperative action. It does this without requiring of participants that they act on higher-order interlocking intentions. (shrink)

According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent's habits and skills. Markos Valaris argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational knowledge of action. (...) He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn't involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false. (shrink)

What is the moral significance of the contrast between acting together and strategic interaction? We argue that while collective moral responsibility is not uniquely tied to the former, the degree to which the participants in a shared intentional wrongdoing are blameworthy is normally higher than when agents bring about the same wrong as a result of strategic interaction. One argument for this claim focuses on the fact that shared intentions cause intended outcomes in a more robust manner than the intentions (...) involved in strategic interaction. We argue, however, that this in itself is not significant. The significant difference is rather volitional: The parties to a shared intention are mutually implicated in each other’s will in a distinct way. Since degree of blameworthiness depends on the quality of will an agent displays in her actions, this explains the higher degree of collective blameworthiness associated with shared intentional wrongdoing. (shrink)

On Common Ground presents a visual history of spatial development in postwar Switzerland through 250 images.

An increasingly central part of the scientific debate in sports has come to focus on how neuroscience can help to explain sports performance and development of expertise. In particular, the process...

L´article propose une réflexion critique autour de différentes théories sur l'« écriture féminine », leur évolution depuis 1975, et la place qu´occupe la notion de nature dans ces discours.

Experientialist semantics has contributed to a broader notion of linguistic meaning by emphasizing notions such as construal, perspective, metaphor, and embodiment, but has suffered from an individualist concept of meaning and has conflated experiential motivations with conventional semantics. We argue that these problems can be redressed by methods and concepts from phenomenology, on the basis of a case study of sentences of non-actual motion such as “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada.” Through a phenomenological reanalysis (...) of proposals of Talmy, Langacker, and Matlock, we show that non-actual motion is both experientially and linguistically non-unitary. At least three different features of human consciousness—enactive perception, visual scanning, and imagination—constitute experiential motivations for non-actual motion sentences, and each of these could be related to phenomenological analyses of human intentionality. The second problem is addressed by proposing that the experiential motivations of non-actual motion sentences can be viewed as sedimented through “passive” processes of acquisition and social transmission and that this implies an interactive loop between experience and language, yielding losses in terms of original experience, but gains in terms of communal signification. Something that is underestimated by phenomenology is that what is sedimented are not only intentional objects such as states of affairs, but aspects of how they are given, i.e., the original, temporal, bodily experiences themselves. Since cognitive semantics has emphasized such aspects of meaning, we suggest that phenomenology can itself benefit from experientialist semantics, especially when it turns its focus from prepredicative to predicative, linguistic intentionality. (shrink)

Critics argue that non-cognitivism cannot adequately account for the existence and nature of some thick moral concepts. They use the existence of thick concepts as a lever in an argument against non-cognitivism, here called the Thick Concept Argument (TCA). While TCA is frequently invoked, it is unfortunately rarely articulated. In this paper, TCA is first reconstructed on the basis of John McDowell’s formulation of the argument (from 1981), and then evaluated in the light of several possible non-cognitivist responses. In general, (...) TCA assumes too much about what a non-cognitivist is (or must be) committed to. There are several non-cognitivist theories, and only some fit the view attacked by TCA. Furthermore, TCA rests on a contestable intuition about a thought experiment, here called the External Standpoint Experiment (ESE). It is concluded that TCA is remarkably weak, given how frequently the argument is invoked. (shrink)

The view that an agent’s cognitive processes sometimes include proper parts found outside the skin and skull of the agent is gaining increasing acceptance in philosophy of mind. One main empirical touchstone for this so-called active externalism is Edwin Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition (DCog). However, the connection between DCog and active externalism is far from clear. While active externalism is one component of DCog, the theory also incorporates other related claims, which active externalists may not want to take on (...) board. DCog implies a shift away from an organism-centred cognitive science to a focus on larger socio-technical-cum-cognitive systems. In arguing for this shift, proponents of DCog seem to accept that socio-cultural systems have some form of agency apart from the agencies of the individuals inside them. I will tentatively suggest a way in which such a notion of agency can be cashed out. (shrink)

According to Kirk Ludwig, only primitive actions are actions in a primary and non-derivative sense of the term ‘action’. Ludwig takes this to imply that the notion of collective action is a façon de parler – useful perhaps, but secondary and derivative. I argue that, on the contrary, collective actions are actions in the primary and non-derivative sense. First, this is because some primitive actions are collective actions. Secondly, individual and collective composites of primitive actions are also actions in the (...) primary and non-derivative sense. Hence, individual action and collective action are ontologically on a par. Ludwig also exaggerates the contrast between individual and collective action by introducing a “sole agency requirement” in his account of the semantics of singular action sentences. However, sole agency is merely typically pragmatically implicated by singular action sentences, not entailed by them. If I say, “I turned on the light”, after we each flipped one of two switches that together turned on the light, then I might be misleading the audience, but what I say is true. Finally, I argue that, contra Ludwig, individuals often have “I-intentions” to bring about an event that can be satisfied even if there are co-agents who bring about the event in the same way. (shrink)

Jules Salomone-Sehr argues that an activity is cooperative if and only if, roughly, it consists of several participants’ actions that are (i) coordinated for a common purpose (ii) in ways that do not undermine any participant’s agency. He argues that guidance by shared intention is neither necessary nor sufficient for cooperation. Thereby, he claims to “topple an orthodoxy of shared agency theory." In response, we argue that Salomone-Sehr’s account captures another notion of cooperation than the sociopsychological notion shared agency theory (...) has focused on. Furthermore, we argue that Salomone-Sehr’s interpretation of (ii) is too demanding; it implausibly makes cooperation incompatible with exploitation. (shrink)

The word ‘empowerment’ has become a popular term, widely used as an important claim, also within the health services. In this paper the concept's philosophical roots are traced from Freire and his ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ to the philosophical thoughts of Hegel, Habermas, and Sartre. An understanding of the concept, as a way to facilitate coping and well‐being in patients through reflection and dialogue, emerges. Within an empowerment strategy the important claim on the nurse and the patient will be to (...) reveal the patient's own resources and limitations in times with sickness and reduced functionality to promote the patient's choice to act and cope. From this point of view an education‐programme for the frail elderly is outlined. If the nurse wants to empower the elderly patient she has to be willing to be educated through the dialogue with the patient, and to look for the patient's own meaning of being frail and elderly. The coping and self‐care solutions for the patient may then even be different from the preferences of the nurse, and this does not mean that the empowerment strategy is a failure or that the patient then has to continue without the assistance from the nurse. Within an empowerment strategy, in the Freirerian sense, the important thing is that both the patient and the nurse together critically reflect on the meanings of the sickness so that the patient can be able to make his own conscious choices. (shrink)

According to we-mode accounts of collective intentionality, an experience is a "we-experience"—that is, part of a jointly attentional episode—in virtue of the way or mode in which the content of the experience is given to the subject of experience. These accounts are supposed to explain how a we-experience can have the phenomenal character of being given to the subject "as ours" rather than merely "as my experience" (Zahavi 2015), and do so in a relatively conceptually and cognitively undemanding way. Galotti (...) and Frith (2013) and Schmitz (2017) present we-mode accounts that are supposed to, in particular, avoid the need for the subjects of experience to have common knowledge of each other’s perceptual beliefs. In this paper, drawing in part on Schutz’s (1932/1967; 1953) writings on "the pure We-relationship", I argue that appeal to a we-mode does not render common knowledge unnecessary. To explain when we-experiences are veridical, we-mode accounts must (i) explain how a we-experience can enable rational interpersonal coordination in some high-risk situations and (ii) explain why what is experienced is "out in the open" between the subjects of the we-experience. To do this, proponents of we-mode accounts need an account of common knowledge. In addition, they must explain why certain inferences hold between we-mode and I-mode attitudes. In light of this, we-mode accounts fare no better than content accounts in illuminating how basic forms of collective intentionality are possible. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of joint action are often prefaced by the observation that there are two different senses in which several agents can intentionally perform an action Φ, such as go for a walk or capture the prey. The agents might intentionally Φ together, as a collective, or they might intentionally Φ in parallel, where Φ is distributively assigned to the agents, considered as a set of individuals. The accounts are supposed to characterise what is distinctive about activities in which several (...) agents intentionally Φ collectively rather than distributively. This dualism between joint and parallel action also crops up outside philosophy. For instance, it has been imported into a debate about whether or not group hunting among chimpanzees is a form of joint cooperative hunting. I offer an account of a form of joint action that falls short of what most philosophers take to be required for genuine joint action, but which is not merely parallel activity. This shows that the dualism between the genuinely joint and the merely parallel is false. I offer my account as an explication of an influential definition of “cooperative behaviour” given by the primatologists Christophe and Hedwig Boesch. (shrink)

We propose a new account of collective moral obligation. We argue that several agents have a moral obligation together only if they each have (i) a context-specific capacity to view their situation from the group’s perspective, and (ii) at least a general capacity to deliberate about what they ought to do together. Such an obligation is irreducibly collective, in that it does not imply that the individuals have any obligations to contribute to what is required of the group. We highlight (...) various distinctive features of our account. One such feature is that moral obligations are always relative to an agential perspective. (shrink)