•  472
    The categories of causation
    Synthese 203 (1): 1-35. 2023.
    This paper is an essay in what Austin (_Proc Aristotel Soc_ 57: 1–30, 1956–1957) called "linguistic phenomenology". Its focus is on showing how the grammatical features of ordinary causal verbs, as revealed in the kinds of linguistic constructions they can figure in, can shed light on the nature of the processes that these verbs are used to describe. Specifically, drawing on the comprehensive classification of English verbs founds in Levin (_English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary i…Read more
  •  343
    How Temptation Works
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. forthcoming.
    For most philosophers who have written recently on the topic, to give into temptation is always to revise a decision in a way that is somehow unreasonable—as when, say, recalling that there is a World Cup game that I can stream from my office, I abandon my plan to spend the morning writing. But I argue in this paper that a person can also give in to the temptation to violate a decision without undoing that decision or even calling it into question. This is possible, I argue, because the content …Read more
  •  246
    The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this ch…Read more
  •  40
    Steering Clear of Trouble
    Philosophic Exchange 2022. 2022.
    Often we make decisions whose purpose is to reduce the likelihood of our making bad decisions in the future—for example, by turning off my phone to make it more difficult for me to go on Tik Tok during the work day, or staying at home on a Friday instead of going to a party where I know my friends will be drinking to excess. These decisions seem essential, but they raise some philosophical questions. Here is one of them: What is the view that a person takes of her own future when she goes in for…Read more
  •  179
    A large body of research has found that people judge bad foreseen side effects to be more intentional than good ones. While the standard interpretation of this Side-Effect Effect takes it to show that the ordinary concept of intentionality is influenced by normative considerations, a competing account holds that it is the result of pragmatic pressure to express moral censure and, thus, that the SEE is an experimental artifact. Attempts to confirm this account have previously been unsuccessful, b…Read more
  •  469
    Knowledge of Language as Self-Knowledge
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In a series of early essays, beginning with "Must We Mean What We Say?", Stanley Cavell offers a sustained response to the argument that ordinary language philosophy is nothing more than amateur linguistics, carried out from the armchair -- so that philosophers' claims about "what we say", and what we mean when we say it, are necessarily in need of proper empirical support. The present paper provides a close reading of Cavell and a defense of his argument that, since a philosopher's descriptions…Read more
  •  275
    How to Contradict an Expression of Intention
    In Christopher Frey & Jennifer Frey (eds.), Practical Truth, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    This chapter interprets G. E. M. Anscombe’s discussion in §31 of Intention of the relationship between expressions of intention and descriptions of matters of fact. For Anscombe, a statement like “I’m raising my arm” or “I’m going to get up at 7:00”, which expresses an intention by saying what is happening or is going to happen, is contradicted only by an opposing command or the expression of an opposing intention. I first challenge an interpretation of this passage as claiming that the truth of…Read more
  •  252
    Agency and Evidence
    In Luca Ferrero (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency, Routledge. pp. 244-252. 2022.
    How does evidence figure into the reasoning of an agent? This is an intricate philosophical problem but also one we all encounter in our daily lives. In this chapter, we identify the problem and outline a possible solution to it. The problem arises, because the fact that it is up to us whether we do something makes a difference to how we should think of the evidence concerning whether we will actually do it. Otherwise we regard something that is up to us as if it were not: We regard something t…Read more
  •  436
    One: but not the same
    Philosophical Studies (6). 2021.
    Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that los…Read more
  •  386
    What Is the Bearing of Thinking on Doing?
    In Adrian Haddock & Rachael Wiseman (eds.), The Anscombean Mind, Routledge. pp. 312-332. 2021.
    What a person is doing often depends on that person’s thought about what they are doing, or about the wider circumstances of their action. For example, whether my killing is murder or manslaughter depends, in part, on whether I understand that what I am doing is killing you, and on whether I understand that my killing is unjustified. Similarly, if I know that the backpack I am taking is yours, then my taking it may be an act of theft; but it is not theft if I simply mistook your backpack for my …Read more
  •  24
    Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners, Second Edition, provides a unique approach to reading philosophy, requiring students to engage with material as they read. It contains carefully selected texts, commentaries on those texts, and questions for the reader to think about as she reads. It serves as starting points for both classroom discussion and independent study. The texts cover a wide range of topics drawn from diverse areas of philosophical investigation, ranging ov…Read more
  •  394
    Intention as Belief
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2): 318-334. 2021.
    What’s the relationship between (i) intending to do something, (ii) believing that you are going to do this, and (iii) its being the case that you are going to do the thing in question? I propose a position on which all three categories, correctly understood, amount in the fundamental case to the very same thing. The belief that constitutes future-directed intention, when strong, likewise constitutes one as having a real tendency to act in the intended way.
  •  355
    Cause, "Cause", and Norm
    In Pascale Willemsen & Alex Wiegmann (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation, . pp. 123-144. 2022.
    This chapter presents a series of experiments that elicit causal judgments using statements that do not include the verb "to cause". In particular, our interest is in exploring the extent to which previously observed effects of normative considerations on agreement with what we call "cause"-statements, i.e. those of the form "X caused ..." extend as well to those of the form "X V-ed Y", where V is a lexical causative. Our principal finding is that in many cases the effects do not extend in this …Read more
  •  385
    No Work for a Theory of Personal Identity
    Roczniki Filozoficzne 69 (1): 57-65. 2021.
    A main element in Richard Swinburne’s (2019) argument for substance dualism concerns the conditions of a person’s continued existence over time. In this commentary I aim to question two things: first, whether the kind of imaginary cases that Swinburne relies on to make his case should be accorded the kind of weight he supposes; and second, whether philosophers should be concerned to give any substantial theory, of the sort that dualism and its competitors are apparently meant to provide, to expl…Read more
  •  482
    How can there be reasoning to action?
    Analytic Philosophy 62 (2): 184-194. 2021.
    In general we think of reasoning as a way of moving from some body of evidence to a belief that is drawn as a conclusion from it. But is it possible for reasoning to conclude in action, i.e., in a person’s intentionally doing one thing or another? In PRACTICAL SHAPE Jonathan Dancy answers 'Yes', on the grounds that "when an agent deliberates well and then acts accordingly, the action done is of the sort most favoured by the considerations rehearsed, taken as a whole—just as when an agent reasons…Read more
  •  58
    Research in the psychology of causal thinking has frequently revealed effects of normative considerations on causal attributions, where participants tend to assign causality more strongly to agents who violate a norm in bringing about an outcome. Across several experiments, we show that it is possible to reverse this norm effect when the outcome in question is good rather than bad: in these cases, participants assign causality more strongly to a norm-conforming agent than to an agent who violate…Read more
  •  68
    This essay is my contribution to a symposium responding to several papers by Walter Benn Michaels that bring the work of Elizabeth Anscombe to bear on philosophical problems of artistic representation. In it, I take Benn Michaels's side in a dispute with Dominic McIver Lopes over the difference between Anscombe's view of intentional agency and that of Donald Davidson. I also critique Benn Michaels's reading of a difficult passage in section 29 of Anscombe's INTENTION, where she presents the famo…Read more
  •  207
    Risking Belief
    In John Schwenkler & Enoch Lambert (eds.), Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, Oxford University Press. pp. 196-211. 2020.
    This chapter discusses how we should think about experiences that threaten to radically transform our understanding of the world. While it can be rational to treat the “doxastically transformative” potential of an experience as a reason to choose against it, such a decision must be based in something more than the fact that this experience would alter one’s current beliefs. It only in light of knowledge of how things are that a person can choose rationally against transformative processes that w…Read more
  •  1240
    This chapter treats Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skilled coping as part of his wider project of demonstrating the sovereignty of practical intelligence over all other forms of intelligence. In contrast to the standard picture of human beings as essentially rational, individual agents, Dreyfus argued powerfully on phenomenological and empirical grounds that humans are fundamentally embedded, absorbed, and embodied. These commitments are present throughout Dreyfus’ philosophical writings, from his c…Read more
  •  519
    Molyneux's Question Within and Across the Senses
    In Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy & Charles Spence (eds.), Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science, Routledge. 2019.
    This chapter explores how our understanding of Molyneux’s question, and of the possibility of an experimental resolution to it, should be affected by recognizing the complexity that is involved in reidentifying shapes and other spatial properties across differing sensory manifestations of them. I will argue that while philosophers today usually treat the question as concerning ‘the relations between perceptions of shape in different sensory modalities’ (Campbell 1995, 301), in fact this is only …Read more
  •  108
    This volume brings together philosophers and psychologists to investigate the phenomenon of transformative change and a host of fascinating questions it prompts. Taking their departure from seminal work on transformative choice and experience by L. A. Paul and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, the authors pursue fundamental questions concerning the nature of rationality, the limits of the imagination, and the metaphysics of the self. They also strike out into new areas, including value theory, aesthetics, …Read more
  •  144
    Anscombe’s Intention: A Guide
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Written against the background of her controversial opposition to the University of Oxford's awarding of an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, Elizabeth Anscombe's /Intention/ laid the groundwork she thought necessary for a proper ethical evaluation of actions like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devoutly Catholic Anscombe thought that these actions made Truman a murderer, and thus unworthy of the university's honor — but that this verdict depended on an understanding of intentional …Read more
  •  825
    No Morality, No Self: Anscombe’s Radical Skepticism by James Doyle (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (1): 176-177. 2019.
    James Doyle’s book interprets and defends the arguments of G. E. M. Anscombe’s essays “Modern Moral Philosophy” and “The First Person.” Though both essays are widely cited, Doyle argues that in each instance Anscombe’s readers have missed the force of her arguments, which, when properly understood, are able to withstand the common objections to them.Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is commonly read as arguing that talk of moral obligation, permission etc., once had a legitimate place within …Read more
  •  68
    Action, Knowledge, and Will, by John Hyman: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. xi + 255, £35 (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 612-614. 2017.
  •  908
    Assertion and transparent self-knowledge
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (7): 873-889. 2019.
    We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one’s own do…Read more
  •  1240
    © Mind Association 2017This rich and engaging book addresses a nest of questions that have been mostly neglected in recent Anglophone philosophy. These questions concern ordinary uses of the concept of identity in speaking for example of identity crises, of one’s identity as something that can be lost or maintained, of identification with certain groups, traits, values, or beliefs, and so on. That there are these uses, and that they are an important feature of contemporary culture, is beyond que…Read more
  •  818
    Are perspectival shapes seen or imagined? An experimental approach
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (5): 855-877. 2019.
    This paper proposes a novel experimental approach that would help to determine whether perspectival shapes, such as the elliptical profile of a tilted plate or coin, are part of perceptual experience. If they are part of perceptual experience, then it should be possible to identify these shapes simply by attending appropriately to them. Otherwise, in order to identify perspectival shapes they must first be constructed in the visual imagination. We propose that these accounts of perspectival iden…Read more
  •  1732
    Intending is Believing: A Defense of Strong Cognitivism
    with Berislav Marušić
    Analytic Philosophy 59 (3): 309-340. 2018.
    We argue that intentions are beliefs—beliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of one’s practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a strong form of cognitivism because we identify intentions with beliefs, rather than maintaining that beliefs…Read more
  •  47
  •  2266
    Non‐Observational Knowledge of Action
    Philosophy Compass 7 (10): 731-740. 2012.
    Intuitively, the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions is different from the knowledge of actions of other sorts, including those of other people and unintentional actions of one's own. But how are we to understand this phenomenon? Does it pertain to all actions, under every description under which they are known? If so, then how is this possible? If not, then how should we think about cases that are exceptions to this principle? This paper is a critical survey of recent attempts to answer …Read more