Alfred Mele

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.

Even if everything is up for grabs in philosophy, some things are very difficult to doubt. It is hard to believe, for example, that no one ever acts intentionally. Even the most powerful arguments for the unreality of intentional action could do no more, we believe, than place one in roughly the position in which pre-Aristotelian Greeks found themselves when presented with one of Zeno's arguments that nothing can move from any given point A to any other point B. One argument has it, for example, that in order to move from one point to another, a thing must first move to the half-way point; to do that, it must move half way to that point; and so on forever: so nothing ever moves at all. The argument undoubtedly stopped some auditors in their tracks; but eventually they moved on, most of them fully confident that they were doing precisely that

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.

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick.

This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended; the influence of considerations of luck, skill, and causal deviance on judgments about what agents do intentionally; what interesting properties all cases of intentional action might share; and the debate between proponents of, respectively, "the Simple View" of the connection between intentional action and intention and "the Single Phenomenon View" of that connection. A substantial body of literature is devoted to the project of analyzing intentional action [1] . In this article, I explore the bearing on that project of some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended. This article may reasonably be regarded as a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a range of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and, likewise, of the potential bearing of attempted philosophical analyses of folk concepts on empirical studies of those concepts.

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.

This chapter separates the problem of self-deception into two component questions: how it happens and what it is. The key to this chapter's account of self-deception is called “deflationary view”. Self-deception, it notes, does not entail “intentionally deceiving oneself; intending to deceive oneself; intending to make it easier for oneself to believe something; concurrently believing each of two explicitly contrary propositions”. The chapter also offers a discussion of the notion of “twisted self-deception”: the phenomenon of the self-deceived person believing something he or she wants to be false.

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own or otherwise) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course