Alfred Mele

Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their explanations of human actions, and they take accept-able teleological explanations of our actions to be causal explanations. Some proponents of the view that human actions are explained teleologically resist this. They regard the causal approach as a rival. I dub this position “anticausalist teleologism,” or AT, for short. I favor the causal approach, but I will not directly argue for it here. My aim is more modest. I will develop a serious problem for AT that strongly suggests that teleologists need causalism; and I will rebut a style of objection to the project of providing a causal analysis of acting in pursuit of a goal that recently resurfaced in the literature on teleological explanations of action, a style of objection featuring a certain kind of causal deviance.

This paper raises a pair of objections to the novel libertarian position advanced in Robert Kane's recent book, The Significance of Free Will.The first objection's target is a central element in Kane's intriguing response to what he calls the "Intelligibility" and "Existence" questions about free will. It is argued that this response is undermined by considerations of luck.The second objection is directed at a portion of Kane's answer to what he calls "The Significance Question" about free will: "Why do we, or should we, want to possess a free will that is incompatible with determinism? Is it a kind of freedom 'worth wanting'... and, if so, why?" A desire for "objective worth" has a featured role in his answer. However, a compatibilist can have that desire

Tackling some central problems in the philosophy of action, Mele constructs an explanatory model for intentional behavior, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reason, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. Part One comprises a comprehensive examination of the standard treatments of the relations between desires, beliefs, and actions. In Part Two, Mele goes on to develop a subtle and well-defended view that the motivational role of intentions is of a different sort from that of beliefs and desires. Mele, also offers a provocative explanation of how we come to have intentions and elaborates on his earlier work concerning akratic failures of will.

This chapter discusses the nature of intentions and how it is discussed in a variety of fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, law, and several branches of psychology. It should be noted that the term is not understood in the same way in all fields; the chapter will focus on an account of intentions similar to that held by neuroscience, specifically the concept of occurrent intentions as commanding attitudes toward plans. A number of psychologists assume that intentions are conscious in nature—that an intention appears in one’s consciousness preceding an action. Several questions arise from this assumption, and these questions are addressed here. The chapter argues that plans, including simple representations of prospective “basic” actions and complex strategies for achieving remote goals, constitute the representational content of intentions.

Can the existence of motivationally biased beliefs plausibly be explained without appealing to actions that are aimed at producing or protecting these beliefs? Drawing upon some recent work on everyday hypothesis testing, I argue for an affirmative answer. Some theorists have been too quick to insist that motivated belief must involve, or typically does involve, our trying to bring it about that we acquire or retain the belief, or our trying to make it easier for ourselves to believe a preferred proposition—and too quick to conclude that such exercises of agency are involved in specific instances of the phenomenon. There are alternative ways to accommodate the data, and it is far from clear that the “agency view” accommodates them better.

The topic of irresistible desires arises with unsurprising frequency in discussions of free agency and moral responsibility. Actions motivated by such desires are standardly viewed as compelled, and hence unfree. Agents in the grip of irresistible desires are often plausibly exempted from moral blame for intentional deeds in which the desires issue. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to the analysis of irresistible desire. Moreover, a popular analysis is fatally flawed. My aim in this paper is to construct and defend a new analysis of irresistible desire. Although, to render the discussion manageable, I shall keep the issues of freedom and responsibility to one side, readers will see them in the background at every major turn.

This contribution to a symposium on an article by Roy Baumeister, A. William Crescioni, and Jessica Alquist focuses on a tension between compatibilist and incompatibilist elements in that article. In their discussion of people’s beliefs about free will, Baumeister et al. sometimes sound like incompatibilists; but in their presentation of their work on psychological processes of free will, they sound more like compatibilists than like incompatibilists. It is suggested that Baumeister and coauthors are attempting to study free will in a metaphysically neutral way and that, because this is so, the incompatibilist elements of the article are out of place

Many issues at the heart of the philosophy of action and of philosophical work on free will are framed partly in terms of causation. The leading approach to understanding both the nature of action and the explanation or production of actions emphasizes causation. What may be termed standardcausalism is the conjunction of the following two theses: firstly, an event's being an action depends on how it was caused; and secondly, proper explanations of actions are causal explanations. Important questions debated in the literature on free will include: is an action's being deterministically caused incompatible with its being freely performed? Are actions free only if they are indeterministically caused? Does the indeterministic causation of an action preclude its being freely performed? Does free action require agent causation? This article concentrates on issues about action and free will that centrally involve causation.

This chapter argues that a proper understanding of the difference between trying to do something and trying to bring it about that one does it sheds light on the nature of mental action. For example, even if one cannot, strictly speaking, try to think of seven animal names that begin with ‘g’, one can try to bring it about that one thinks of seven such names, and one can succeed. In some versions of this scenario, one's successful attempt involves no overt actions but several mental ones: for example, keeping one's attention focused on the task, silently keeping a running account of the ‘g’ names that occurred to one, and bringing it about that one thinks of seven suitable names.

According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceiversintentionallydeceive others into believing something,p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe thatpis false while their victims falsely believe thatpis true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something,p, and there is a time at which they believe thatpis false while also believing thatpis true.

It is sometimes claimed that certain experiments show that free will is an illusion by showing that all decisions are made unconsciously. I have argued elsewhere that these experiments do not show that any decisions are made unconsciously. But suppose I am wrong about that. Even then, I argue, these experiments do not pose a serious threat to free will. First, one is not warranted in generalizing from findings about the decisions allegedly made in these experiments to the claim that all decisions are unconsciously made. Second, even if all decisions are made unconsciously, the findings are compatible with a modest time-lag hypothesis about our conscious detection of decisions we make, and the supposed truth of that hypothesis is compatible with our making some of our decisions freely.

According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceivers intentionally deceive others into believing something, p , and there is a time at which the deceivers believe that p is false while their victims falsely believe that p is true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something, p , and there is a time at which they believe that p is false while also believing that p is true

What are actions? And how are actions to be explained? These two central questions of the philosophy of action call, respectively, for a theory of the nature of action and a theory of the explanation of actions. Many ordinary explanations of actions are offered in terms of such mental states as beliefs, desires, and intentions, and some also appeal to traits of character and emotions. Traditionally, philosophers have used and refined this vocabulary in producing theories of the explanation of intentional actions. An underlying presupposition is that common-sense explanations expressed in these terms have proved very useful. People understand their own and others' actions well enough to coordinate and sustain complicated, cooperative activities integral to normal human life, and that understanding is expressed largely in a common-sense psychological vocabulary. This article focuses on these issues.