Timothy Schroeder

What is that makes an act subject to either praise or blame? The question has often been taken to depend entirely on the free will debate for an answer, since it is widely agreed that an agent’s act is subject to praise or blame only if it was freely willed, but moral theory, action theory, and moral psychology are at least equally relevant to it. In the last quarter-century, following the lead of Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) seminal article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the interdisciplinary nature of the question has been emphasized by various authors. Going beyond the boundaries of the traditional free will debate, they have attempted to describe the requirements for agent accountability by appeal to theories of personality, rational agency, and ethical choice. The approach has been a breath of fresh air in the often-stagnant free will debate, bringing new considerations to bear and provoking new lines of argument, and it is an approach that we will adopt in this paper. In the following pages, we hope to show that an under-noticed phenomenon of moral psychology, inverse akrasia, exemplified by Huckleberry Finn, has something to contribute to the understanding of agency and accountability. After presenting the phenomenon in section I, we will move in section II to a quick survey of a family of Frankfurt-inspired views and a critique of them based on the phenomenon in sections III and IV. A new theory will be offered in section V, and potential objections addressed in the final section of the paper.

Some philosophers hold that the neuroscience of action is, in practice or in principle, incapable of touching debates in action theory and moral psychology. The role of desires in action, the existence of basic actions, and the like are topics that must be sorted out by philosophers alone: at least at present, and perhaps by the very nature of the questions. This paper examines both philosophical and empirical arguments against the relevance of neuroscience to such questions and argues that neither succeeds. In practice, there is already a stable body of findings from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology that warrants attention. And as a matter of principle, the ‘causal map’ of action production derivable from these findings requires the study of action theorists and moral psychologists because every such philosopher has commitments to the shape of this causal map: commitments that might be in conflict with reality.

Philosophers often talk about and engage with ideas. Scientists, artists, and historians do, too. But what is an idea? In this paper, we first motivate the desire for an ontology of ideas before discussing what conditions a candidate ontology would have to satisfy to be minimally adequate. We then offer our own account of the ontology of ideas, and consider various strategies for specifying the underlying metaphysics of the account. We conclude with a discussion of potential future work to be done on the ontology of ideas.

There is a familiar if disputed theory of mental representations which holds that to be a mental representation is to be a structure whose states are supposed to stand in correspondence to states of the world . The present work defends this so-called teleosemantic approach to mental representations against Stampian and Fodorian approaches, and develops a novel approach to the normativity underlying mental representation. It is argued that, while appealing to evolutionary functions in attributing normativity to neural structures results in unacceptable theoretical consequences, another source of "natural normativity" may be found in feedback-governed systems. The conclusion is that neural structures, driven by energetic feedback-governed systems into correspondences with distal states of affairs, are supposed to stand in such correspondences, and hence represent

Here is a rather mundane set of claims about the stapler on my desk: The function of my stapler is to staple sheets of paper together. If the stapler is loaded with staples, but for some reason will not staple papers, the stapler is malfunctioning. That is, it is not doing what it is supposed to do. It is defective, or misshapen, misaligned or inadequate to its task, or in some other way normatively defective: there is something wrong with it. The reason that my stapler has its function, and is capable of having something wrong with it, is that my stapler is designed to staple sheets of paper together. Some human being sat down at some point and formed intentions about the production of objects which would, if everything went as planned, staple sheets of paper together. As a result of this person’s intentions, my stapler was produced, and because of the particular content of these intentions, my stapler was bestowed with its particular function.

Teleosemantics has a problem: it holds that to have a mind one must have a history, often a long evolutionary history. The solution to the problem is for teleosemanticists to give up on natural selection as the source of natural norms (functions) for neural structures, and to find a different source of natural norms which is not essentially history-involving. Such a source in fact exists, in cybernetic governance. This paper argues for the existence of natural norms derived from cybernetic governance, parallel to natural norms derived from natural selection but distinct from them, and shows how such norms could save teleosemantics from its over-emphasis on history.

The first third of John Pollock’s Thinking about Acting is on the topics of pleasure, desire, and preference, and these topics are the ones on which this paper focuses. I review Pollock’s position and argue that it has at least one substantial strength (it elegantly demonstrates that desires must be more fundamental than preferences, and embraces this conclusion wholeheartedly) and at least one substantial weakness (it holds to a form of psychological hedonism without convincingly answering the philosophical or empirical objections that might be raised).

In this paper we develop a novel argument against the extended mind hypothesis. Our argument constitutes an advance in the debate, insofar as we employ only premises that are acceptable to a coarse-grained functionalist, and we do not rely on functional disanalogies between putative examples of extended minds and ordinary human beings that are just a matter of fine detail or degree. Thus, we beg no questions against proponents of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather, our argument consists in making use of the following necessary condition on holding a belief for a reason: To believe something for a reason, one must come to believe it in virtue of attitudes that epistemically rationalize the belief that is formed, and one must come to believe in virtue of the fact that these attitudes epistemically rationalize the new belief. We show that many external objects that defenders of the extended mind hypothesis have claimed are beliefs cannot constitute a belief had for a reason, as they necessarily fail to satisfy the necessary condition. Our first thesis, then, is that beliefs had for reasons cannot be extended in the most interesting way specified by the extended mind hypothesis. Furthermore, if we add to our argument the premise that every token belief is something that could have been had for a reason, we can derive the stronger thesis that no beliefs can be extended in this way

The philosophy of mind encompasses a familiar set of topics: consciousness, intentionality, mental causation, emotion, whatever topics in psychology happen to capture our interest (concepts, mindreading . . .), and so on. There is a topic deserving of addition to this list, a topic that should be receiving regular attention from philosophers of mind but is not: practical rationality. The philosophy of mind bears directly upon what can be called the ‘meta-theory’ of practical rationality, and meta-theories of rationality likewise impose constraints on the philosophy of mind. Philosophers of mind who do not engage with work on practical rationality risk developing theories that are blind to important theoretical demands. They also risk allowing ethicists—who have been at work on the meta-theory of practical rationality—to unilaterally set their theoretical agendas. It is therefore time to get to work.

There are monsters that scare children and monsters that scare grownups, and then there are monsters that scare philosophers of mind. This paper is concerned with this third sort of monster, whose primary representative is the zombie—a living being, physically just like a person but lacking consciousness. Though zombies act like normal people and appear to have normal brains, everything is blank inside. Unfortunately, the term ‘zombie’ covers a narrower class of deficits than is convenient, failing to cover apparently normal human beings lacking propositional attitudes. Davidson’s “Swampman” is supposed to be an example of such a creature, so I will dub individuals who are apparently normal but lack all propositional attitudes ‘swampfolk,’ though this is non-standard terminology. In what follows, I will refer to both zombies and swampfolk as ‘monsters,’ and will similarly designate animals lacking in consciousness or propositional attitudes.

Donald Davidson's theory of mind is widely regarded as a normative theory. This is a something of a confusion. Once a distinction has been made between the categorisation scheme of a norm and the norm's force-maker, it becomes clear that a Davidsonian theory of mind is not a normative theory after all. Making clear the distinction, applying it to Davidson's theory of mind, and showing its significance are the main purposes of this paper. In the concluding paragraphs, a sketch is given of how a truly normative Davidsonian theory of mind might be formulated

Sometimes your concept and mine have exactly the same content. When this is so, it is comparatively easy for me to understand what you say when you deploy your concept, for us to disagree, agree, and so on. But what if your concept and mine do not have exactly the same content? This question has occupied a number of philosophers, including Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and Ernie Lepore. This paper develops a novel and rigorous measure of concept similarity, Proportion, such that concepts with different contents but sufficiently high Proportion scores will also conduce to understanding, agreement, and disagreement.

To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard account holds the hedonic face of desire to reveal to true nature of desire. In this view, to desire something is to tend to pleasure if it seems that the desired state of affairs has been achieved, or displeasure if it seems otherwise, thus tying desire to feelings instead of actions. In Three Faces of Desire, Schroeder goes beyond actions and feelings to advance a novel and controversial theory of desire that puts the focus on desire's neglected face, reward. Informed by contemporary science as much as by the philosophical tradition, Three Faces of Desire discusses recent scientific discoveries that tell us much about the way that actions and feelings are produced in the brain. In particular, recent experiments reveal that a distinctive system is responsible for promoting action, on the one hand, and causing feelings of pleasure and displeasure, on the other. This system, the brain's reward system, is the causal origin of both action and feeling, and is the key to understanding the nature of desire.

Philosophers generally assume that individuals with Tourette syndrome are not responsible for their Tourettic tics, and so not blameworthy for any harm their tics might cause. Yet this assumption is based largely on ignorance of the lived experience of Tourette syndrome. Individuals with Tourette syndrome often experience their tics as freely chosen and reason-responsive. Yet it still seems wrong to treat a Tourettic individual’s tic as on a moral par with others’ actions. In this paper, I examine the options and argue that, if this is correct, then a surprising consequence follows: the standard, motivation-basedtheory of desire must be false. I go on to argue that, given what is known about the neurological basis of Tourette syndrome, this is a reasonable conclusion to draw

Desires move us to action, give us urges, incline us to joy at their satisfaction, and incline us to sorrow at their frustration. Naturalistic work on desire has focused on distinguishing which of these phenomena are part of the nature of desire, and which are merely normal consequences of desiring. Three main answers have been proposed. The first holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they lead to action. The second makes pleasure the essence of desire. And the third holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they open us to reward-based learning.

Imagine you are looking at a cat and make the following inference: That cat sneezed; That cat is missing an ear; thus There exists a sneezing cat missing an ear. Such an inference is valid only if there is no equivocation on the term “that cat.” If “that cat” in refers to Puss, but in refers to Midnight, then the inference is invalid. This much is elementary. Now imagine that Puss is the cat in front of you when you think, but that a nefarious semanticist quickly substitutes similar-looking Midnight for Puss, so that when you think, the cat in front of you is Midnight, though you believe it is Puss. If it is true that the switch changes the meaning of the term “that cat” from Puss to Midnight, then your inference is invalid although this fact is hidden from you. Two questions are then raised. Do we ever really know that our inferences are valid, given the uncertainty of apparent coreference? And, is it ever reasonable to think that our inferences are valid, given this uncertainty? Lawlor’s answers are “no” and “yes,” respectively.

This paper considers the hedonic aspect of emotions: the fact that part of an emotion is feeling good (pleasure) or feeling bad (displeasure), in various ways, to various degrees. It argues that some aspects of what might reasonably be called the modularity of emotions reduces to the modularity of the hedonic aspects of emotions. In this regard, the way in which pleasure and displeasure reflect what is expected at the visceral level (what one is jaded to, what one is hardened to, what one takes for granted...) receives particular discussion.