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38Self-deception and akratic belief: A rejoinderPhilosophical Psychology 1 (2): 201-206. 1988.Self-deception is standardly viewed as a motivated phenomenon in both the philosophical and the psychological literature. In Irrationality, I maintain that it is at least characteristically motivated. Knight's provocative thesis, that there is an important unmotivated species of self-deception, is consistent with this. Still, if she is right, I overlooked a kind of self-deception that merits close attention.
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10Incontinent BeliefJournal of Philosophical Research 16 197-212. 1991.Brian McLaughlin, in “Incontinent Belief” (Journal of Philosophical Research 15 [1989-90], pp. 115-26), takes issue with my investigation, in lrrationality (Oxford University Press, 1987), of a doxastic analogue of akratic action. He deems what I term “strict akratic belief” philosophically uninteresting. In the present paper, I explain that this assessment rests on a serious confusion about the sort of possibility that is at issue in my chapter on the topic, correct a variety of misimpressions,…Read more
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133Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?The Monist 95 (3): 422-440. 2012.In Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Mele 2009), I argue that scientists—neuroscientists and others—have not proved that free will is an illusion and have not produced powerful evidence for that claim. Manuel Vargas has suggested that in that book I ignore a serious scientific threat to free will (2009). The alleged threat is identified in section 1. It is the topic of this article.
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7The Structure of Emotions (review)Philosophical Books 29 (4): 224-225. 1988.A book review of Robert M. Gordon's The Structure of Emotions.
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43Motivational TiesJournal of Philosophical Research 16 431-442. 1991.Must a rational ass equidistant from two equally attractive bales of hay starve for lack of a reason to prefer one bale to the other? Must a human being faced with a comparable, explicitly motivational, tie fail to pursue either option? Surely, one suspects, some practical resolution is possible. Surely, ties of either sort need not result in death or paralysis. But why? Donald Davidson has suggested that, in the human case, resolution depends upon the tie’s being broken---upon the agent’s comin…Read more
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44Folk conceptions of intentional actionPhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 281-297. 2012.Studies designed to help us understand how nonspecialists conceive of intentional action have generated some widely discussed results. To what extent are the results accounted for by the existence of different folk conceptions of intentional action? That is my guiding question in this article. I am not in a position to offer a full answer, but I do hope to make some progress.
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225Free will and consciousness: how might they work? (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2010.This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating ...
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118Intentional action, folk judgments, and stories: Sorting things outMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1). 2007.How are our actions sorted into those that are intentional and those that are not? The philosophical and psychological literature on this topic is livelier now than ever, and we seek to make a contribution to it here. Our guiding question in this article is easy to state and hard to answer: How do various factors— specifically, features of vignettes—that contribute to majority folk judgments that an action is or is not intentional interact in producing the judgment? In pursuing this question we …Read more
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14Aristotle on the Proximate Efficient Cause of ActionCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 10 (n/a): 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 recently …Read more
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298The philosophy of action (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1997.The latest offering in the highly successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, The Philosophy of Action features contributions from twelve leading figures in the field, including: Robert Audi, Michael Bratman, Donald Davidson, Wayne Davis, Harry Frankfurt, Carl Ginet, Gilbert Harman, Jennifer Hornsby, Jaegwon Kim, Hugh McCann, Paul Moser, and Brian O'Shaughnessy. Alfred Mele provides an introductory essay on the topics chosen and the questions they deal with. Topics addressed include intenti…Read more
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112Moral responsibility and the continuation problemPhilosophical Studies 162 (2): 237-255. 2013.Typical incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism contend that being basically morally responsible for a decision one makes requires that, if that decision has proximal causes, it is not deterministically caused by them. This article develops a problem for this contention that resembles what is sometimes called the problem of present (or cross-world) luck. However, the problem makes no reference to luck nor to contrastive explanation. This article also develops a solution.
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11Discussion – Velleman on Action and Agency (review)Philosophical Studies 121 (3): 249-261. 2004.
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20How to Represent Aristotelian Deliberation SyllogisticallyNew Scholasticism 59 (4): 484-492. 1985.In this paper Mele constructs, and defends as adequate, a practical-syllogistic schema for representing deliberation.
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11A Libertarian View of Akratic ActionIn T. Hoffman (ed.), Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present, The Catholic University of America Press. pp. 252-275. 2008.What may cause individuals to act contrarily to their better judgment is that although they have a good reason (or reasons) not to perform an action, they have an insignificant reason to do it. Supposing that the decision to act one way or the other is made by a free agent, un- derstood in the libertarian sense that the person had alternative possi- bilities of action, how does one account for the the actual choice of one alternative? In other words, what accounts for the difference between the …Read more
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96Scientific Skepticism about Free WillIn Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 295. 2010.My topic is recent scientific skepticism about free will. A leading argument for such skepticism features the proposition—defended by Daniel Wegner (2002, 2008) and Benjamin Libet (1985, 2004) among others that conscious intentions (and their physical correlates) never play a role in producing corresponding overt actions. This chapter examines alleged scientific evidence for the truth of this proposition.
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304Motivation: Essentially motivation-constituting attitudesPhilosophical Review 104 (3): 387-423. 1995.The term 'motivation' has considerable currency both in moral philosophy and in the philosophy of mind. It appears in debates between internalists and externalists about moral judgments and moral reasons, in the related controversy over moral realism, and in explanatory schemes for purposive behavior offered in the philosophy of mind. But what is motivation? My aim in this paper is to elucidate a notion of motivation associated with a popular perspective on intentional conduct, a perspectiv…Read more
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243Motivation and agencyOxford University Press. 2003.What place does motivation have in the lives of intelligent agents? Mele's answer is sensitive to the concerns of philosophers of mind and moral philosophers and informed by empirical work. He offers a distinctive, comprehensive, attractive view of human agency. This book stands boldly at the intersection of philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and metaphysics.
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830Decisions, intentions, and free willMidwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1): 146-162. 2005.I will argue that close attention to deciding casts doubt on the simple view and the single phenomena view of intentional action. That is my thesis. My aim is much broader—to improve our understanding of deciding and of the bearing of the phenomenon of deciding on free will and moral responsibility.
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48Teleological Explanations of Actions: Anticausalism vs. CausalismIn J. Aguilar & A. Buckareff (eds.), Causing Human Actions: New Perspectives on the Causal Theory of Action, Mit Press. 2010.This chapter discusses the view according to which human actions are explained teleologically and, therefore, all causal accounts of action explanation are, in a sense, rivals. This view is referred to here as “anticausalist teleologism” (AT). Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. After providing some background on AT, an objection raised by Mele to a proposal George Wilson makes in developing his version of AT is presen…Read more
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191Free will in everyday life: Autobiographical accounts of free and unfree actionsPhilosophical Psychology 24 (3). 2011.What does free will mean to laypersons? The present investigation sought to address this question by identifying how laypersons distinguish between free and unfree actions. We elicited autobiographical narratives in which participants described either free or unfree actions, and the narratives were subsequently subjected to impartial analysis. Results indicate that free actions were associated with reaching goals, high levels of conscious thought and deliberation, positive outcomes, and moral be…Read more
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131Addiction and Self-ControlBehavior and Philosophy 24 (2). 1996.Addicts often are portrayed as agents driven by irresistible desires in the philosophical literature on free will. Although this portrayal is faithful to a popular conception of addiction, that conception has encountered opposition from a variety of quarters (e.g., Bakalar & Grinspoon, 1984; Becker & Murphy, 1988; Peele, 1985 and 1989; Szasz, 1974). My concern here is some theoretical issues surrounding a strategy for self-control of potential use to addicts on the assumption that their pe…Read more
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99She intends to tryPhilosophical Studies 55 (1): 101-106. 1989.My aim in this paper is to refute an intriguing argument of Hugh McCann's for the thesis that'S tried to A' entails 'S intended to A. I shall call this the strong intention thesis about trying, or SIT. SIT implies, as McCann observes, that even an agent who thinks that the probability of her A-ing is close to zero intends to A, provided only that she tries to A.
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72Libertarianism, Compatibilism, and LuckThe Journal of Ethics 19 (1): 1-21. 2015.The “problem of present luck” targets a standard libertarian thesis about free will. It has been argued that there is an analogous problem about luck for compatibilists. This article explores similarities and differences between the alleged problems
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27Conscious IntentionsIn J. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. Silverstein (eds.), Action, Ethics, and Responsibility, Mit Press. 2010.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 nat…Read more
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64Intentional, Unintentional, or Neither? Middle Ground in Theory and PracticeAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 49 (4). 2012.There are intentional actions and unintentional actions. Do we ever perform actions that are neither intentional nor unintentional? Some philosophers have answered "yes" (Mele 1992; Mele and Moser 1994; Mele and Sverdlik 1996; Lowe 1978; Wasserman, forthcoming). That is, they have claimed that there is a middle ground between intentional and unintentional human actions.1 Motivation for this claim is generated by attention to a variety of issues, including two that are of special interest to expe…Read more
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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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189Free will and luck: Reply to criticsPhilosophical Explorations 10 (2). 2007.Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issues in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will--one for readers who are convinced t…Read more
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51Autonomy and akrasiaPhilosophical Explorations 5 (3). 2002.Strict akratic actions, by definition, are performed freely. However, agents may seem not to be selfgoverned with respect to such actions and therefore not to perform them autonomously. If appearance matches reality here, freedom and autonomy part company in this sphere. Do they? That is this article's guiding question. To make things manageable, it is assumed that there are free actions, including strict akratic actions. Two theses are defended. First, the combination of (i) an intentional acti…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |