Daniel Morgan

I defend a ‘naïve’ idea about intentionality: a judgment is about an object if, and only if, that object figures in its truth-conditions. Some authors have suggested that a child’s judgment that it is 4pm, for example, is about the time of day, while it merely concerns the time zone she inhabits. But I argue that any such about/concerns distinction must be linked to a variety of phenomena in order to be explanatory of any: after all, the hypothesis of a dormative power is of no theoretical use; it does not explain the production of sleep, but only labels its occurrence. One might think that some objects figuring in the truth-conditions of a judgment are contributed by its content, and others by the act itself: but this would not explain why only some of the commitments we incur in judging are immune to error—assuming the idea of such ‘innocent commitments’ to be intelligible; nor is it plausible to suggest that ‘parochial’ elements of truth-conditions which the subject cannot vary in her judgments are contributed by the act—only a gerrymandered taxonomy of the mental could yield this result. Better to stick with the naïve view and recognize that judgment types are individuated by their truth-conditions.

The Simple Explanation just consists in the observation that a judgment will be immune to error through misidentification (IEM) when it is not based on an identification. The Simple Explanation does not itself rule out any candidate theory of de se thought. This chapter discusses IEM relative to the first person more than any other kind of error through misidentification. For convenience, the author uses fp-immunity as an abbreviation (and fp-immune as an abbreviation for the corresponding adjective). James Higginbotham and François Recanati mostly speak of 'thoughts' as exhibiting or failing to exhibit IEM. It is clear that both beliefs and judgments can exhibit IEM. The most plausible explanation of fp-immunity, the Simple Explanation, imposes no tight constraints on an account of the de se. Constraints on such an account need to be gathered from somewhere else.

The ways of thinking of things associated with a few indexical expressions—e.g. ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘that’—have a special role in the causation of action. They have a role not had by, for example, the guise associated with the ‘Superman’, or the guise associated with any other proper name. So, at least, an orthodox view about action—often associated with the phrase ‘essential indexical’—has it. Recently, this view has come under scrutiny. An increasing number of philosophers think it is a myth. In this paper, I do two things. First, I argue that the orthodox view really is an insight, not a myth. Second, I offer an explanation of why it is that the insight holds.

Experience is the most primitive kind of intentional contact with reality. Metaphysical inquiry is one of the heights of human thought. It would not be surprising if experience was often silent on metaphysics, failing to offer support to one metaphysical disputant over the other, forcing them to fall back on nonexperiential considerations. I argue that the dispute between A- and B-theorists about time is a dispute about which experience is silent. B-theorists have typically conceded that the manifest image of time conflicts with how time turns out to be, on their own view of time. They have offered an array of accounts of why that conflict should not worry us. I argue here that these accounts are unconvincing. I also argue that they are unnecessary. Nothing about how time is experienced conflicts with B-theory. An independently plausible method for discovering what properties experience represents—the method of phenomenal contrast—implies that experience does not favor A-theory over B-theory.

This paper has two aims. The first concerns the question of whether there is any essential involvement of perspectival thought in intentional agency. I defend the view that the answer is ‘no’ for one kind of perspectival thought, and ‘yes’ for a different kind. Agency does not depend on de se thought, but it does depend on de nunc thought. The second aim of the paper is to defend a claim about the significance of this de se–de nunc contrast as a case study. I argue that the contrast is best explained by a picture on which different kinds of perspectival thought are seen as islands. On this picture, an account of the conceptual role of one kind of perspectival thought won’t settle much about any other kind of perspectival thought. The picture is proposed as a replacement for the standard picture, on which perspectival thought is seen as a natural cognitive kind.

I defend the view that episodic memory judgments do not depend on any kind of identification of oneself as the person whose past is being remembered, and are therefore logically (rather than merely de facto) immune from error through misidentification relative to “I”. There are two challenges to this view that have been pressed in the literature. One appeals to the idea of background presuppositions of identity and says that “I am the person from whom my memory impression derives” is a background presupposition of any memory judgment. The other appeals to wh-misidentification and says there are possible cases in which memory goes astray that should be counted as cases of error through wh-misidentification. Although the details are different, the core thought behind both challenges is the same: Shoemaker’s thought that there could be a memory-like relation that one stands in to another’s past. I think this thought is a mistake.

Nina Simone sang: "I’m just a soul whose intentions are good." Paulina Sliwa (2019) defends a subtle, worked out picture on which Simone’s excuse turns out to be the basic form of an excuse. But good intention is a straitjacket that most excuses resist. There are cases where someone has an excuse, and the intention they have is just neutral. There are cases where someone has an excuse, and the intention they have is actually bad. In both sorts of case, the agent’s excuse must consist in something other than a good intention. I argue that it consists in their caring as they ought. The basic form of an excuse is "She cared; her heart was in the right place."

Jonathan Gingerich uses examples from literature and song to introduce a kind of freedom he calls “spontaneous freedom.” He argues that spontaneous freedom is central to our ordinary talk of freedom but overlooked by the philosophical literature on free will, which focuses on a kind of freedom that is constitutively moral. I argue that spontaneous freedom is the standard kind of freedom, the constitutively moral kind. What is distinctive about Gingerich’s examples is not that they involve a new kind of freedom but that they involve an agent feeling their freedom. This supports a different take about their significance.

One influential approach to the question of why addiction excuses focuses on the question of what addiction is and, more particularly, on what addiction turns out to be in the light of scientific inquiry, e.g. neurophysiological inquiry into the dopamine system. I note the tension between this approach and the apparent data-point that lay folk, who have not performed the relevant inquiry, can know that addiction excuses. Given this data-point, the moral psychology of addiction should work with the materials to be found in the shallows of the addicted mind.

Why are de se mental states essential? What exactly is their de se-ness needed to do? I argue that it is needed to fend off accidentalness. If certain beliefs – for example, nociceptive, proprioceptive or introspective beliefs – were not de se, then any truth they achieved would be too accidental for the subject to count as knowing. If certain intentions – intentions that are in play whenever we intentionally do anything – were not de se, then any satisfaction they achieved would be too accidental for the subject to count as intentionally acting. How states hook on to their referent is relevant in a systematic but underexplored way to whether they non-accidentally achieve their aim – truth in the case of beliefs, satisfaction in the case of intentions. In the relevant cases, the way of hooking on to a referent needed to avoid being accidental is the way a de se state hooks on to its referent.

If tokens of 'I' have a sense as well as a reference the question immediately arises of what account to give of their sense. One influential kind of account, of which Gareth Evans provides the best developed instance, attempts to elucidate the sense of 'I' partly in terms of the distinctive functional role possessed by thoughts containing this sense ('I'-thoughts). Accounts of this kind seem to entail that my 'I'-thoughts cannot be entertained by anyone other than me, a consequence generally thought unacceptable. I defend it. I also justify a functional role account of the sense of 'I'. The result should be to make plausible an account of the sense of 'I' in terms of the functional role of 'I'-thoughts.

What determines the reference of first-person thoughts—thoughts that one would express using the first-person pronoun? I defend a model on which our ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves do, in much the way that our ways of gaining knowledge of objects in the world determine the reference of perceptual demonstrative thoughts. This model—the Demonstrative Model of First-Person Thought—can be motivated by reference to independently plausible general principles about how reference is determined. But it faces a serious objection. There seems to be an explanatory rival to it with a great deal of plausiblility. The rival is The Simple Rule Model, which says that first-person thoughts are governed by the simple rule that any token of one will be about the person whose token it is. I pinpoint a crucial unclarity in The Simple Rule Model, hinging on how we understand the notion of a rule, and argue that no version of the Simple Rule Model is both plausible and a genuine explanatory rival to the Demonstrative Model. I also provide an argument that the Demonstrative Model is extensionally adequate

John Perry offers an unusually substantive, and initially plausible, account of the conceptual role of first-person thought. This paper critiques Perry’s account, particularly in what it says about action explanation, and offers a partial alternative. It also identifies three high-level assumptions about what accounts of conceptual roles should look like that plausibly explain why Perry’s account goes off track in the ways that it does – this is the top-down distortion of the title. Identifying and arguing against the three assumptions helps point in the direction of a better account.