•  170
    Twisted Self Deception
    Philosophical Psychology 12 (2): 117-137. 1999.
    In instances of "twisted" self-deception, people deceive themselves into believing things that they do not want to be true. In this, twisted self-deception differs markedly from the "straight" variety that has dominated the philosophical and psychological literature on self-deception. Drawing partly upon empirical literature, I develop a trio of approaches to explaining twisted self-deception: a motivation-centered approach; an emotion-centered approach; and a hybrid approach featuring both moti…Read more
  •  18
    How is confabulation related to self-deception? Obviously, that depends on what confabulation and self-deception are. In the first main section, I sketch a position that I have developed elsewhere on self-deception. I turn to confabulation in the second main section. Confabulation in general is more than I can take on in this chapter. I focus on confabulations associated with a trio of delusions.
  •  63
    Review of Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 95 (11): 581-584. 1998.
  •  58
    Socratic akratic action
    Philosophical Papers 25 (3): 149-159. 1996.
    I will argue that some changes of mind about what it is best to do are akratic occurrences and that the associated overt actions are derivatively akratic, and I will explain how akratic episodes of this kind are possible. Even if Socrates is mistaken in denying the reality of strict akratic action, he has identified an important phenomenon that deserves more attention than it has received.
  •  62
    Have I Unmasked Self-Deception or Am I Self-Deceived?
    In Clancy W. Martin (ed.), The philosophy of deception, Oxford University Press. pp. 260. 2009.
    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 se…Read more
  •  112
    The Illusion of Conscious Will and the Causation of Intentional Actions
    Philosophical Topics 32 (1-2): 193-213. 2004.
    My aim in this article is to ascertain whether any of the interesting phenomena that Daniel Wegner discusses in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) falsify a certain hypothesis about intentional actions. Here is a rough, preliminary statement of the hypothesis: Whenever human agents perform an overt intentional action, A, some intention of theirs is a cause of A. The hypothesis is refined in section. In section 2, I turn to this article's main question.
  •  26
    Aristotle on the Justification of Ends
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 56 (n/a): 79. 1982.
    I believe Aristotle's position on practical ends is both illuminating and consistent with the idea that practical archai, and even conceptions of the ultimate end, are subject to justificatory reasoning. The purpose of this paper is substantiate these beliefs.
  •  133
    Moral responsibility and agents' histories
    Philosophical Studies 142 (2). 2009.
    To what extent should an analysis of an agent’s being morally responsible for an action that he performed—especially a compatibilist analysis of this—be sensitive to the agent’s history? In this article, I give the issue a clearer focus than it tends to have in the literature, I lay some groundwork for an attempt to answer the question, and I motivate a partial but detailed answer.
  •  122
    Libertarianism and Human Agency
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1): 72-92. 2011.
    Some scientists have reported what they regard as evidence of indeterministic brain processes that influence behavior (Brembs 2011, Maye et al. 2007). How do these reports bear on the positive side of libertarianism about free will? That is an approximation of my guiding question in this article. I make the question more precise in section 1, in light of some conceptual and scientific background. In the remainder of the article, I seek—and eventually offer—an answer. Topics dis-cussed …Read more
  •  17
    Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind (review)
    Philosophical Review 104 (4): 637. 1995.
    Child’s aim is to defend a pair of ideas in the philosophy of mind—"interpretationism" and "causalism"—and, especially, to establish their compatibility. "What is essential for interpretationism is the claim that thought is, in its nature, interpretable" ; "interpretability is a necessary condition for thought". Regarding belief, "the interpretationist thought is that we can give an account of the circumstances under which it is true that S believes that p by considering the circumstances under …Read more
  •  42
    Rational irrationality
    The Philosophers' Magazine 26 31-32. 2004.
    Alfred Mele argues we shouldn't try to rid to rid ourselves of all delusions.
  •  60
    Self-Control in Action
    In Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the self, Oxford University Press. 2011.
    This article describes a neo-Aristotelian conception of self-control, a concept that seems essential to what it means to be a mature human person. It discusses the moral condition known as akrasia and the conception of self that underpins it. While Aristotle regarded the human self to be primarily rational where reason is taken in a strong sense, this article suggests a more holistic conception of the self, where to act out of passion may not mean that one is acting without self-control. This me…Read more
  •  152
    Free will and moral responsibility: does either require the other?
    Philosophical Explorations 18 (3): 297-309. 2015.
    This article explores the conceptual connections between free action and action for which the agent is morally responsible. Questions addressed include the following. Can agents who are never morally responsible for anything sometimes act freely? Can agents who never act freely be morally responsible for some of their actions? Various compatibilist and incompatibilist responses to these questions are discussed, as is the control over their behavior that ordinary agents attribute to themselves
  •  145
    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 inte…Read more
  •  102
    Are intentions self-referential?
    Philosophical Studies 52 (3): 309-329. 1987.
    What is it, precisely, that an agent intends when he intends, as we might say, to clean his stove today? What is the content of his intention? In recent years, Gilbert Harman and John Searle have maintained that all intentions are self-referential -- that is, that an adequate expression of the content of any intention makes essential reference to the intention whose content is being expressed. I shall call this the self-referentiality thesis (SRT). Harman, in his paper 'Practical Reasoning', arg…Read more
  •  66
    Motivated belief and agency
    Philosophical Psychology 11 (3). 1998.
    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…Read more
  •  25
    Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 163-179. 2003.
    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 th…Read more
  • CHAPTER 6. Conclusion
    In Self-Deception Unmasked, Princeton University Press. pp. 119-124. 2001.
  •  32
    Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions
    American Philosophical Quarterly 43 (3). 2006.
    Sometimes we forget to do what we intended to do. For example, we intend to buy some milk on the way home from work, but we forget and drive home, as usual. In situations of this kind, what do we do unintentionally and what do we do intentionally? That is this article's guiding question.
  •  3
    Intentions by Default
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70 (2): 155-166. 1989.
    If, as much recent work in the philosophy of action suggests, intention plays a crucial role in the production of intentional action, a complete theory of explanation of intentional action should provide an account of the production of intentions themselves. I shall not offer a perfectly general account in this paper. Rather, I shall limit my investigation to intentions formed or acquired on the basis of practical evaluative inference and to the role of some important kinds of evaluative judgmen…Read more
  •  46
    Free Will and Neuroscience
    Philosophic Exchange 43 (1). 2013.
    Has modern neuroscience shown that free will is an illusion? Those who give an affirmative answer often argue as follows. The overt actions that have been studied in some recent experiments do not have corresponding consciously made decisions or conscious intentions among their causes. Therefore no overt actions have corresponding consciously made decisions or conscious intentions among their causes. This paper challenges this inference, arguing that it is unwarranted.
  •  62
    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 coauthor…Read more
  •  16
    Autonomy, as I understand it, is associated with a family of freedom concepts: free will, free choice, free action, and the like. In much of the philosophical literature discussed in this chapter, issues are framed in terms of freedom rather than autonomy, but we are talking about (aspects of) the same thing. Libertarians argue that determinism precludes autonomy by, for example, precluding an agent's being ultimately responsible for anything. Some compatibilist believers in autonomy argue that …Read more
  •  117
    Mental action: A case study
    In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. pp. 17. 2009.
    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 ex…Read more
  •  183
    Philosophers traditionally have been concerned both to explain intentional behavior and to evaluate it from a moral point of view. Some have maintained that whether actions (and their consequences) properly count as intended sometimes hinges on moral considerations - specifically, considerations of moral responsibility. The same claim has been made about an action's properly counting as having been done intentionally. These contentions will be made more precise in subsequent sections, where infl…Read more
  •  12
    Review of Robert Audi's Action, Intention, and Reason (review)
    Mind 104 (413): 145-8. 1995.
    This volume is a welcome contribution to the philosophy of action. Audi employs a host of subtle distinctions and carefully crafted arguments in defending a unified position on the major issues in action theory. In his characteristically lucid prose, he makes vivid the location of those issues at the intersection of ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. Given the tight organization and the unifying introduction, this volume is an exceptionally cohesive collection of essays. It will ma…Read more
  •  42
    Noninstrumental rationalizing
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (3). 1998.
    A central notion in Donald Davidson's philosophy of mind and action is "rationalization," a species of causal explanation designed in part to reveal the point or purpose of the explananda. An analogue of this notion - noninstrumental rationalization - merits serious attention. I develop an account of this species of rationalization and display its utility in explaining the production of certain desires and of motivationally biased beliefs.
  •  41
    Conceptualizing Self-Control
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1): 136-137. 1995.
    A pair of arguments suggests that self-control is not properly conceptualized on the pattern/act/preference model Rachlin proposes. The first concerns the irrational following of personal rules. The second concerns scenarios in which behavioral patterns an agent deems good come into conflict.
  •  51
    Exciting intentions
    Philosophical Studies 59 (3): 289-312. 1990.
    In this paper, I restrict the discussion to overt intentional action, intentional action that essentially involves peripheral bodily movement. My guiding question is this: If there is a specific motivational role that intention is plausibly regarded as playing in all cases of overt intentional action, in virtue of what feature(s) of intention does it play this role? I am looking for an answer that can be articulated in the terminology of intentionalist psychology.
  •  34
    ?Self-deception, action, and will?: Comments
    Erkenntnis 18 (2): 159-164. 1982.
    Since the virtues of Professor Audi's paper are obvious and my time is limited, 1 shall restrict myself here to negative comments. I shall argue, first, that condition (1) - the unconscious true belief condition - in Audi's account of "clear cases of self-deception" is too strong and, second, that he does not succeed in justifying his limitation of the self-deceiver to sincere avowals of the proposition with respect to which he is in self-deception.