Mikayla Kelley

Intentional action is often accompanied by knowledge of what one is doing---knowledge which appears non-observational and non-inferential. G.E.M. Anscombe defends the stronger claim that intentional action always comes with such knowledge. Among those who follow Anscombe, some have altered the features, content, or species of the knowledge claimed to necessarily accompany intentional action. In this paper, I argue that there is no necessary connection between intentional action and knowledge, no matter the assumed features, content, or species of the knowledge. Further, rather than follow the usual methodology in this debate of arguing by counterexample, I present an argument that explains why we continue to find counterexamples: intentional action and knowledge are regulated by thresholds under distinct pressures; in particular, the threshold of control regulating intentional action is disparately influenced by the role of intentional action in practical normativity.

Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful inquirer for creatures like us. The argument builds on Enoch's (2007, 2011) deliberative indispensability argument for Robust Realism but avoids relying on an overly pragmatic account of the sources of basic epistemic justification. Instead, I suggest that the sources of basic epistemic justification are those belief-forming methods which are indispensable for zetetically indispensable projects, that is, projects which are constitutive of being a successful inquirer for embodied, agential creatures like ourselves.

Some actions we perform “just like that” without taking a means, e.g., raising your arm or wiggling your finger. Other actions—the nonbasic actions—we perform by taking a means, e.g., voting by raising your arm or illuminating a room by flipping a switch. A nearly ubiquitous view about nonbasic action is that one's means to a nonbasic action constitutes the nonbasic action, as raising your arm constitutes voting or flipping a switch constitutes illuminating a room. In this paper, I challenge this view. I argue that one's means to a nonbasic action can cause rather than constitute it. In the process, we gain a clearer understanding of the scope of our agency—one that includes mental actions such as judgment and decision—and the pluralistic nature of basic features of action including control, purposefulness, and agent participation.

There is an extensive literature in social choice theory studying the consequences of weakening the assumptions of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Much of this literature suggests that there is no escape from Arrow-style impossibility theorems unless one drastically violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). In this paper, we present a more positive outlook. We propose a model of comparing candidates in elections, which we call the Advantage-Standard (AS) model. The requirement that a collective choice rule (CCR) be rationalizable by the AS model is in the spirit of but weaker than IIA; yet it is stronger than what is known in the literature as weak IIA (two profiles alike on x, y cannot have opposite strict social preferences on x and y). In addition to motivating violations of IIA, the AS model makes intelligible violations of another Arrovian assumption: the negative transitivity of the strict social preference relation P. While previous literature shows that only weakening IIA to weak IIA or only weakening negative transitivity of P to acyclicity still leads to impossibility theorems, we show that jointly weakening IIA to AS rationalizability and weakening negative transitivity of P leads to no such impossibility theorems. Indeed, we show that several appealing CCRs are AS rationalizable, including even transitive CCRs.

There is a well-known equivalence between avoiding accuracy dominance and having probabilistically coherent credences (see, e.g., de Finetti 1974, Joyce 2009, Predd et al. 2009, Pettigrew 2016). However, this equivalence has been established only when the set of propositions on which credence functions are defined is finite. In this paper, I establish connections between accuracy dominance and coherence when credence functions are defined on an infinite set of propositions. In particular, I establish the necessary results to extend the classic accuracy argument for probabilism to certain classes of infinite sets of propositions including countably infinite partitions.

In Arrovian social choice theory assuming the independence of irrelevant alternatives, Murakami (1968) proved two theorems about complete and transitive collective choice rules that satisfy strict non-imposition (citizens’ sovereignty), one being a dichotomy theorem about Paretian or anti-Paretian rules and the other a dictator-or-inverse-dictator impossibility theorem without the Pareto principle. It has been claimed in the later literature that a theorem of Malawski and Zhou (1994) is a generalization of Murakami’s dichotomy theorem and that Wilson’s (1972) impossibility theorem is stronger than Murakami’s impossibility theorem, both by virtue of replacing Murakami’s assumption of strict non-imposition with the assumptions of non-imposition and non-nullness. In this note, we first point out that these claims are incorrect: non-imposition and non-nullness are together equivalent to strict non-imposition for all transitive collective choice rules. We then generalize Murakami’s dichotomy and impossibility theorems to the setting of incomplete social preference. We prove that if one drops completeness from Murakami’s assumptions, his remaining assumptions imply (i) that a collective choice rule is either Paretian, anti-Paretian, or dis-Paretian (unanimous individual preference implies noncomparability) and (ii) that adding proposed constraints on noncomparability, such as the regularity axiom of Eliaz and Ok (2006), restores Murakami’s dictator-or-inverse-dictator result.