What is the role of practical thought in determining the intentional action that is performed? Donald Davidson’s influential answer to this question is that thought plays an efficient-causal role: intentional actions are those events that have the correct causal pedigree in the agent's beliefs and desires. But the Causal Theory of Action has always been plagued with the problem of “deviant causal chains,” in which the right action is caused by the right mental state but in the wrong way. (...) This paper addresses an alternative approach to understanding intentional action inspired by G.E.M. Anscombe, interpreting that view as casting practical thought in the role of formal rather than efficient cause of action and thereby avoiding the problem of deviant (efficient) causal chains. Specifically, on the neo-Anscombean view, it is the agent’s “practical knowledge” – non-observational, non-inferential knowledge of what one is doing – that confers the form of intentional action on an event and is the contribution of thought to determining what is intentionally done. This paper argues that the Anscombean view is subject to its own problematic type of deviance: deviant formal causation. What we know non-observationally about what we are doing often includes more than what we intend to be doing; we also know that we are bringing about the foreseen side effects of acting in the intended way. It is argued that the neo-Anscombean view faces difficulty in excluding the expected side effects from the specification of what is intentionally done, whereas the Causal Theory has no such difficulty. Thus, the discussion amounts to an argument in favor of the Causal Theory of Action. (shrink)

Philosophy may relate to interdisciplinarity in two distinct ways On the one hand, philosophy may play an auxiliary role in the process of interdisciplinarity, typically through conceptual analysis, in the understanding that the disciplines themselves are the main epistemic players. This version of the relationship I characterise as ‘normal’ because it captures the more common pattern of the relationship, which in turn reflects an acceptance of the division of organized inquiry into disciplines. On the other hand, philosophy may be itself (...) the site for the production of interdisciplinary knowledge, understood as a kind of second-order understanding of reality that transcends the sort of knowledge that the disciplines provide, left to their own devices. This is my own position, which I dub ‘deviant’ and to which most of this article is devoted. I begin by relating the two types of interdisciplinarity to the organization of inquiry, especially their respective attitudes to the history of science. Underlying the two types are contrasting notions of what constitutes the ‘efficient’ pursuit of knowledge. This difference is further explored in terms of the organization of the university. The normal/deviant distinction was already marked in the institution’s medieval origins in terms of the difference between Doctors and Masters, respectively, an artefact of which remains in the postgraduate/undergraduate degree distinction. In the context of the history of the university, the prospects for deviant interdisciplinarity were greatest from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century—the period called ‘early modern’ in the philosophy curriculum. Towards the end of that period, due to Kant and the generation of idealists who followed him, philosophy was briefly the privileged site for deviant interdisciplinarity. After Hegel’s death, the mantle of deviant interdisciplinarity increasingly passed to some version of ‘biology’. I explore the ‘Natur-’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ versions of that post-philosophical vision, which continue to co-exist within today’s biological science. I then briefly examine the chequered reputation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, someone who exemplified the promise and perils of deviant interdisciplinarity over the past 200 years. I conclude with an Epilogue that considers contemporary efforts to engage philosophy in interdisciplinary work, invoking William James as an exemplar. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References Further reading.

Causal theories of action, perception and knowledge are each beset by problems of so-called ‘deviant’ causal chains. For each such theory, counterexamples are formed using odd or co-incidental causal chains to establish that the theory is committed to unpalatable claims about some intentional action, about a case of veridical perception or about the acquisition of genuine knowledge. In this paper I will argue that three well-known examples of a deviant causal chain have something in common: they each violate (...) Yablos proportionality constraint on causation. I will argue that this constraint provides the key to saving causal theories from deviant chains. (shrink)

This study introduces the concept of deviant behavior in a moderated-mediation framework of incentives and organizational justice perception. The proposed relationships in the theoretical framework were tested with a sample of 311 academics, using simple random sampling, via causal models and structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that incentives might boost the apparent performance, but not necessarily the intended performance. The results confirm that employees’ affection for incentives has direct, indirect, and conditional indirect effects on their deviant behavior (...) likelihood. The relationship between employee deviant behavior likelihood and affection for incentives was moderated by organizational justice perception and partially mediated by reward expectancy, thus having significant contributions toward the extant literature of deviant behavior and incentives. The findings have important implications for managers, academicians, and policy makers for mitigating adverse behavior in professional employees through proper use of incentives. (shrink)

Initially proposed as rivals of classical logic, alternative logics have become increasingly important in areas such as computer science and artificial intelligence. Fuzzy logic, in particular, has motivated major technological developments in recent years. Susan Haack's Deviant Logic provided the first extended examination of the philosophical consequences of alternative logics. In this new volume, Haack includes the complete text of Deviant Logic , as well as five additional papers that expand and update it. Two of these essays critique (...) fuzzy logic, while three augment Deviant Logic 's treatment of deduction and logical truth. Haack also provides an extensive new foreword, brief introductions to the new essays, and an updated bibliography of recent work in these areas. Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic will be indispensable to students of philosophy, philosophy of science, linguistics, mathematics, and computer science, and will also prove invaluable to experienced scholars working in these fields. (shrink)

Turing’s analysis of computability has recently been challenged; it is claimed that it is circular to analyse the intuitive concept of numerical computability in terms of the Turing machine. This claim threatens the view, canonical in mathematics and cognitive science, that the concept of a systematic procedure or algorithm is to be explicated by reference to the capacities of Turing machines. We defend Turing’s analysis against the challenge of ‘deviant encodings’.Keywords: Systematic procedure; Turing machine; Church–Turing thesis; Deviant encoding; (...) Acceptable encoding; Turing’s analysis of computability; Turing’s Notational Thesis. (shrink)

This paper discusses a puzzling tension in attributions of moral responsibility in cases of resultant moral luck: we seem to hold agents fully morally responsible for unlucky outcomes, but less-than-fully-responsible for unlucky outcomes brought about differently than intended. This tension cannot be easily discharged or explained, but it does shed light on a famous puzzle about causation and responsibility, the Thirsty Traveler.

We present two studies investigating the impact of causal perceptions and the moral emotions of anger, shame, and guilt on the justification of deviant workplace behavior. Study 1 tests our conceptual framework using a sample of undergraduate business students; Study 2 examines a population of practicing physicians. Results varied significantly between the two samples, suggesting that individual and contextual factors play an important role in shaping the perceptual and emotional processes by which individuals form reactions to undesirable affective workplace (...) events. Implications of these findings for the study of ethics, emotions, and attributions, as well as for promoting ethical behavior, are discussed. (shrink)

PART ONE I 'Alternative' in 'Alternative logic There are many systems of logic — many-valued systems and modal systems for instance - which are non-standard ...

The paradoxes of self reference have to be dealt with by anyone seeking to give a satisfactory account of the logic of truth, of properties, and even of sets of numbers. Unfortunately, there is no widespread agreement as to how to deal with these paradoxes. Some approaches block the paradoxical inferences by rejecting as invalid a move that classical logic counts as valid. In the recent literature, this deviant logic analysis of the paradoxes has been called into question.This disagreement (...) motivates a re-examination of the philosophy of formal logic and the status of logical truths and rules. In this paper I do some of this work, and I show that this gives us the means to defend the deviant approaches against such criticisms. As a result I hope to show that these analyses of the paradoxes are worthy of more serious consideration than they have so far received. (shrink)

Donald Davidson brought to our attention deviant causal chains as a problem for causal theories of action. Consider Davidson's own example: " A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet (...) it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally. " The loosening of the hold on the rope is an action, according to a simple causal theory of action earlier developed by Davidson , if we can describe it in a way that renders it intentional under that description. Is there a way of describing the climber's loosening of his hold of the rope as intentional? Did he intentionally loosen his hold? Well, his loosening his hold is both rationalized and explained causally with reference to the beliefs and desires held by the climber. But there seems to be something wrong with the causal chain.Is there a simple fix? Could we not say that even if the loosening of the hold on the rope is caused by a desire held by the climber it is not caused by any proximate desire of the climber ? Or, to give a new twist to this well-known argument, could we not say that the loosening of the hold on the rope is not caused in a way that is responsive to the desire? This latter idea has recently been suggested by Markus E. Schlosser as a simple solution to the …. (shrink)

We present two studies investigating the impact of causal perceptions and the moral emotions of anger, shame, and guilt on the justification of deviant workplace behavior. Study 1 tests our conceptual framework using a sample of undergraduate business students; Study 2 examines a population of practicing physicians. Results varied significantly between the two samples, suggesting that individual and contextual factors play an important role in shaping the perceptual and emotional processes by which individuals form reactions to undesirable affective workplace (...) events. Implications of these findings for the study of ethics, emotions, and attributions, as well as for promoting ethical behavior, are discussed. (shrink)

A gunman intends to shoot and kill Victim. He shoots and misses his target, but the gunshot startles a group of water buffalo, causing them to trample the victim to death. The gunman brings about the intended effect, Victim’s death, but in a “deviant” way rather than the one planned. This paper argues that such causal structures, deviant causal chains, pose serious problems for several key legal concepts. -/- I show that deviant causal chains pose problems for (...) the legal distinction between attempts and completed crimes, and also for the distinction between attempts and mere preparations. I then suggest that cases of deviant causation undermine notions of legal liability for completed crimes in terms of actus reus and mens rea, and argue that natural accounts of negligence misclassify some cases involving deviant causal chains. After diagnosing several conceptual vulnerabilities in the law revealed by deviant causal chains, I show that natural strategies for shoring up legal theories in the face of these examples are unpromising. (shrink)

We typically explain human action teleologically, by citing the action's goal or purpose. However, a broad class of naturalistic projects within the philosophy of mind presuppose that teleological explanation is reducible to causal explanation. In this paper I argue that two recently suggested strategies - one suggested by Al Mele and the other proposed by John Bishop and Christopher Peacocke - fail to provide a successful causal analysis of teleological explanation. The persistent troubles encountered by the reductive project suggest that (...) teleological explanations are irreducible and that the naturalistic accounts of mind and agency should be called into question. (shrink)

This paper has its roots in qualitative analysis of accounts produced by an Italian serial killer. Theoretical references are related to symbolic interactionism and its developments in the field of psychology and criminology. The whole contribution is aimed to twofold purposes: A) to provide a set of criteria specifically addressed to study deviant action as system of meanings into two related contexts: the single action itself and the whole life history. According this point, paper introduces the concept of “ (...) class='Hi'>deviant career” and it explains its development and steps; it also provides some psychological social points of views and contributions that scientific works offers. B) to think about potentialities of accounting interviews as powerful tools in clinical practice and empirical research too.Specifically, we discuss narrative about behaviour and life story as a resource in order to take suggestions about meanings, goals and rules of action. It also suggests something about functions that crime discharges in the whole pathway of one's life. Juridical case analysis, run by means of the software ATLAS.ti, is aimed to demonstrate theoretical reasoning proposed. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate some characteristics of anomalous or deviant belief systems, such belief systems which include the extraordinary diversity of paranormal claims. It is frequently suggested that the appropriate attitude to adopt to such belief systems is one of scepticism—and that is a conclusion which I will not dispute. However I also suggest that deviant belief systems have characteristics which reveal much of interest about human psychology and the way that we try to make sense of (...) the world. (shrink)

The subjective character of a given experience leaves open the question of its precise status. If it looks to a subject K as if there is an object of a kind F in front of him, the experience he is having could be veridical, or hallucinatory. Advocates of the Causal Theory of perception (whom I shall call.

In the article actualized an importance of scientific researches of nature of the deviant phenomena in church circles; also the problem of sexual crimes of modern priests is considered, as well as the questions of public relation and reaction of Church on deviant phenomena are reflected.

Deviant phenomenal knowledge is knowing what it’s like to have experiences of, e.g., red without actually having had experiences of red. Such a knower is a deviant. Some physicalists have argued and some anti-physicalists have denied that the possibility of deviants undermines anti-physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. The current paper presents new arguments defending the deviant-based attacks on anti-physicalism. Central to my arguments are considerations concerning the psychosemantic underpinnings of deviant phenomenal knowledge. I argue that physicalists (...) are in a superior position to account for the conditions in virtue of which states of deviants constitute representations of phenomenal facts. (shrink)

Deviant causal chain problems arise in many settings. The most famous instance of the problem is the Gettier problem, but the problem also arises in the philosophy of action and perception. Usually, attempts to tackle these problems try to solve them individually. This paper takes a different approach: I propose a general solution to the problem. I begin by providing a solution to the deviant causal chain problem for skillful performance, and I argue that the solution can be (...) extended to solve the Gettier problem and the deviant causal chain problems for perception and intentional action. As I develop my solution to these problems, I also compare it with other solutions to bring out the advantages of my approach. I then explain why the solution generalizes: my solution provides us with an analysis of disposition manifestation, which is the key to ruling out deviance. I conclude by considering objections and giving my replies. (shrink)

Causal processes that are technically called deviant or wayward causal chains must be ruled out when analyzing various phenomena, including intentional action, perception, and the operation of causal mechanisms involved in the manifesting of causal powers. Irving Thalberg is incorrect in arguing that this problem does not arise when analyzing intentional action. After criticizing solutions proposed by Christopher Peacocke and David Lewis, I provide a general analysis of non-deviance. In application to intentional action, the account is seen to be (...) preferable to that of Michael H. Robins, and proves to be adequate to rule out what Alfred R. Mele calls cases of tertiary waywardness. (shrink)

Causal processes that are technically called deviant or wayward causal chains must be ruled out when analyzing various phenomena, including intentional action, perception, and the operation of causal mechanisms involved in the manifesting of causal powers. Irving Thalberg is incorrect in arguing that this problem does not arise when analyzing intentional action. After criticizing solutions proposed by Christopher Peacocke and David Lewis, I provide a general analysis of non-deviance. In application to intentional action, the account is seen to be (...) preferable to that of Michael H. Robins, and proves to be adequate to rule out what Alfred R. Mele calls cases of tertiary waywardness. (shrink)

I begin by refuting Davidson’s classic account of akrasia, which turns on a purported distinction between judging p and judging p “all things considered.” The upshot of this refutation is that an adequate account of akrasia must turn on a distinction between different ways in which the agent can make judgments about her practical reasons. On the account I propose, an akratic agent makes an existential judgment that there is some decisive practical reason to act in a certain way without (...) also knowing what that reason is. An agent can do what such a reason requires only by deviating from the conditions under which her action would be a response to it. The possibility of akrasia is a consequence of our concern not only to perform actions that match what our reasons require but also to manifest reasons in conduct that they inform. (shrink)

The problem of deviant causal chains is endemic to any theory of action that makes definitional or explanatory use of a causal connection between an agent’s beliefs and pro-attitudes and his bodily movements. Other causal theories of intentional phenomena are similarly plagued. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, to defend Davidson’s defeatism. In his treatment of deviant causal chains, Davidson makes use of the clause “in the right way” to rule out causal waywardness, but he regards (...) any attempt at specifying ‘right’ sorts of causal histories as hopeless and even harmful. To my mind, Davidson’s defeatism contains a valuable insight, so I shall try to explain the reasons for it. Second, I shall try to answer a question that has often been ignored or passed over in the literature; namely the question of what it is that deviant causal chains deviate from. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 51 Heft: 1 Seiten: 39-56.

This paper examines deviant managerial behavior, and compares such behavior to the clinical psychological sociopathic model. The scope of a multinational corporate operation can enhance or degrade the quality of life for individuals with more impact than at any previous time in history. Social costs are compared to the results of sociopathic behavior and examined as the result of amoral or immoral behavior. The idea of the sociopathic manager is discussed, and theoretical causes of sociopathic development are examined with (...) bases in behavioral, economic and criminological literature. Future research and recommendations for prevention of sociopathic behavior are advanced. (shrink)

Professor Körner's Experience and Conduct , like many other notable entities, is divided into three parts. Part I contains accounts of what Körner calls factual and constructive logic, some remarks on the logic of maxims and their consistency and adequacy, a chapter on probabilistic thinking, and another on preference theory. Part II contains chapters on the logic of action, on attitudes, upon the distinction between regulative and evaluative standards of conduct, on morality, justice, welfare, prudence, legality, and what Körner calls (...) ‘idealizations’. Part III, on the epistemology and metaphysics of practical thinking, contains chapters on rationality, evidence, moral pluralism and a final chapter on moral guidance. The amount of guidance one gets from this last chapter is, as one might expect, small. (shrink)