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163Free Will and Substance Dualism: The Real Scientific Threat to Free Will?In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, Mit Press. 2014.Mele uses survey methods of experimental philosophy to argue that folk notions of freedom and responsibility do not really require any dubious mind–body dualism. In his comment, Nadelhoffer questions Mele's interpretation of the experiments and adds contrary data of his own. Vargas then suggests that Mele overlooks yet another threat to free will—sourcehood. Mele replies by reinterpreting Nadelhoffer's data and rejecting Vargas’ claim that free will requires sourcehood.
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127Philosophy of ActionIn Kirk Ludwig (ed.), Donald Davidson, Cambridge University Press. 2003.The basic subject matter of the philosophy of action is a pair of questions: (1) What are actions? (2) How are actions to be explained? The questions call, respectively, for a theory of the nature of action and a theory of the explanation of actions. Donald Davidson has articulated and defended influential answers to both questions. Those answers are the primary focus of this chapter.
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68Akratics and AddictsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2). 2002.In Section 1, a pair of arguments for the nonexistence of strict akratic action are criticized with a view to setting the stage for a more general discussion of the lay of the land. In Sections 2 and 3, it is argued that the worry to which this essay is addressed is inflated.
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168Intentions, reasons, and beliefs: Morals of the toxin puzzlePhilosophical Studies 68 (2). 1992.In garden-variety instances of intentional action, according to a popular account, agents intend to perform actions of particular kinds, their intentions are based on reasons so to act, and the intentions issue in appropriate behaviour. On this account, the reasons that give rise to our intentions are reasons for action. Interesting questions for this view are raised by cases in which an agent seemingly has a reason to intend to do something while having no reason to do it. Can such reasons to i…Read more
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199Akrasia, self-control, and second-order desiresNoûs 26 (3): 281-302. 1992.Pristine belief/desire psychology has its limitations. Recognizing this, some have attempted to fill various gaps by adding more of the same, but at higher levels. Thus, for example, second-order desires have been imported into a more stream- lined view to explicate such important notions as freedom of the will, personhood, and valuing. I believe that we need to branch out as well as up, augmenting a familiar 'philosophical psychology' with psychological items that are irreducible to beliefs and…Read more
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110Underestimating self-control: Kennett and Smith on frog and toadAnalysis 57 (2). 1997.No abstract available.
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42Effective reasons and intrinsically motivated actionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (4): 723-731. 1988.In this paper I advance an alternative to Davidson’s conception of reasons that preserves the spirit of Davidson's account of effective reasons while avoiding a problem posed by a familiar species of intentional action - roughly, action done for its own sake, or what I shall call intrinsically motivated action.
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153Mental causesAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1): 61-71. 1991.Our suspicion is that philosophers who tie the fate of agency to advances in cognitive science simultaneously underestimate that conception's tenacity and overestimate their ability to divine the course of empirical inquiry. For the present, however, we shall pretend that current ideas about what would be required for the scientific vindication of folk psychology are apt, and ask where this leaves the notion of agency. Our answer will be that it leaves that notion on the whole unaffected.
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62Intention, Belief, and Intentional ActionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1). 1989.Ordinary usage supports both a relatively strong belief requirement on intention and a tight conceptual connection between intention and intentional action. More specifically, it speaks in favor both of the view that "S intends to A" entails "S believes that he (probably) will A" and of the thesis that "S intentionally A-ed" entails "S intended to A." So, at least, proponents of these ideas often claim or assume, and with appreciable justification. The conjunction of these two ideas, however, h…Read more
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193Situationism and AgencyJournal of Practical Ethics 1 (1): 62-83. 2013.Research in psychology indicates that situations powerfully impact human behavior. Often, it seems, features of situations drive our behavior even when we remain unaware of these features or their influence. One response to this research is pessimism about human agency: human agents have little conscious control over their own behavior, and little insight into why they do what they do. In this paper we review classic and more recent studies indicating “the power of the situation,” and argue for …Read more
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21Motivated BeliefBehavior and Philosophy 21 (2). 1993.In this essay, I focus on Ainslie's interesting and bold view of belief and on its implications for akratic belief.
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18Review of The Rationality of Emotion (review)Philosophical Books 30 (1): 39-40. 1989.A book review of Ronald de Sousa's The Rationality of Emotion.
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58Desiring to Try: Reply to AdamsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (4). 1994.Frederick Adams has tried again to object to my argument in "He Wants to Try"; his new attempt includes both an account of the constitution of trying and a corresponding account of desiring to try. My aim here is to show that his new efforts fail to undermine T and to develop some related problems for his positive view.
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71Moral Responsibility: Radical Reversals and Original DesignsThe Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3): 69-82. 2016.This article identifies and assesses a way of thinking that might help to explain why some compatibilists are attracted to what is variously called an internalist, structuralist, or anti-historicist view of moral responsibility—a view about the bearing of agents’ histories on their moral responsibility. Scenarios of two different kinds are considered. Several scenarios feature heavy-duty manipulation that radically changes an agent’s mature moral personality from admirable to despicable or vice …Read more
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79Reasonology and False BeliefsPhilosophical Papers 36 (1): 91-118. 2007.Whereas some philosophers view all reasons for action as psychological states of agents, others—objective favourers theorists—locate the overwhelming majority of reasons for action outside the agent, in items that objectively favour courses of action. (The latter may count such psychological states as a person's belief that demons dance in his kitchen as a reason for him to seek psychiatric help.) This article explores options that objective favourers theorists have regarding cases in which, owi…Read more
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71Intentional action and wayward causal chains: The problem of tertiary waywardness (review)Philosophical Studies 51 (1). 1987.
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105Recent Work on Intentional ActionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 29 (3). 1992.Central to the philosophy of action is a concern to understand intentional action. Two pertinent questions may be distinguished. What is it to do something intentionally? How is intentional behavior to be explained? Although, ideally, a review of recent work in the philosophy of action would attend equally to both questions, space does not permit my doing justice to both here. I shall focus on the definitional or conceptual issue and examine work on the explanatory issue only insofar as it sheds…Read more
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25Aristotle on the Proximate Efficient Cause of ActionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (sup1): 133-155. 1984.In this paper I shall attempt to locate and articulate Aristotle's answer to a foundational question in the theory of action - viz., 'what is the proximate (efficient) cause of action?' This task is certainly of historical importance, since one cannot hope to understand Aristotle's interesting and influential theory of action without understanding his views on the proximate efficient cause of action. But the present project is not, I should think, of historical interest alone; for it has recentl…Read more
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277Testing free willNeuroethics 3 (2): 161-172. 2008.This article describes three experiments that would advance our understanding of the import of data already generated by scientific work on free will and related issues. All three can be conducted with existing technology. The first concerns how reliable a predictor of behavior a certain segment of type I and type II RPs is. The second focuses on the timing of conscious experiences in Libet-style studies. The third concerns the effectiveness of conscious implementation intentions. The discussion…Read more
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133Direct controlPhilosophical Studies 174 (2): 275-290. 2017.This article’s aim is to shed light on direct control, especially as it pertains to free will. I sketch two ways of conceiving of such control. Both sketches extend to decision making. Issues addressed include the problem of present luck and the relationship between direct control and complete control.
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4Moral PsychologyIn Christian Miller (ed.), Continuum Companion to Ethics, Continuum. pp. 98. 2011.This chapter focuses on a pair of topics in moral psychology that are linked to motivation and evaluation: weakness of will and first-person moral ought beliefs.
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975Self-Deception and DelusionsEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 2 (1): 109-124. 2006.My central question in this paper is how delusional beliefs are related to self-deception. In section 1, I summarize my position on what self-deception is and how representative instances of it are to be explained. I turn to delusions in section 2, where I focus on the Capgras delusion, delusional jealousy (or the Othello syndrome), and the reverse Othello syndrome.
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103History and Personal AutonomyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (2). 1993.John Christman, in 'Autonomy and Personal History,' advances a novel genetic or historical account of individual autonomy.1 He formulates 'the conditions of the [i.e., his] new model of autonomy' as follows: (i) A person Pis autonomous relative to some desireD if it is the case that P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or P would not have resisted that development had P attended to the process; (ii) The lack of resistance to the development of D di…Read more
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81Reporting on Past Psychological States: Beliefs, Desires, and IntentionsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1): 61. 1993.
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111Acting Intentionally: Probing Folk Notions.In Bertram Malle, L. J. Moses & Dare Baldwin (eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, Mit Press. pp. 27--43. 2001.In the first section, I will argue that the folk concept of necessary conditions for intentional action needs refinement. In the second and third sections, I will identify some additional issues one would need to explore in con- structing a statement of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for intentional action. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the conceptual analyst’s task.
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105Self-control, motivational strength, and exposure therapyPhilosophical Studies 170 (2): 359-375. 2014.Do people sometimes exercise self-control in such a way as to bring it about that they do not act on present-directed motivation that continues to be motivationally strongest for a significant stretch of time (even though they are able to act on that motivation at the time) and intentionally act otherwise during that stretch of time? This paper explores the relative merits of two different theories about synchronic self-control that provide different answers to this question. One is due to Sripa…Read more
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8Chance, choice and freedomThe Philosophers' Magazine 55 61-65. 2011.What does the idea that you could have done something else at the time come to? According to some philosophers, it comes to this: in a hypothetical universe that has exactly the same past as our universe and exactly the same laws of nature, you do something else at this very time.
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17Intending and the Balance of MotivationPacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (4): 370-376. 1984.How is what we intend to do related to what we are most motivated to do? I shall argue that the relationship in question is more complex than is often thought and that the source of complexity, at least at one level of analysis, lies in two things: a role which evaluation often plays in the formation or acquisition of intentions, and an occasional lack of alignment between an agent's evaluations of his reasons for action and the motivation force of those reasons.
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |