Romy Vekony

Can one perform an intentional action without successfully performing it? On the face of it, this seems like a silly question. One can’t intentionally do A without actually doing A. An underlying assumption that many philosophers of action would share would be that if we have an intentional action, we have an action. Thus, many philosophers of action engaged in experimental work compose vignettes that feature a certain action, and then directly ask the participants to rate their agreement with a statement classifying the action as intentional. Due to the common assumption above, this method is seen as unproblematic. However, if faced with evidence that ordinary English users are comfortable with saying that an agent ‘intentionally’ performed an action despite the agent’s failure to successfully perform it, what lesson should philosophers of action take? We designed a study to investigate whether there are instances in which participants would agree that an agent has intentionally performed an action, even though the agent’s performance was unsuccessful. The results of our study indicate that English users are comfortable with saying that an agent intentionally performed an action despite the fact that the action did not occur. We posit two possible conclusions: either non-specialists are in vast error about the conception of intentional action, or the results garnered from experimental methods that ask directly for intentionality ascriptions are unreliable due to the flexible nature of ordinary language. We argue that the latter is the more reasonable conclusion, and suggest that a popular methodology in experimental philosophy of action should be re-evaluated.

In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing it. Here, using vignettes featuring skilled action and vignettes featuring habitual action, we provide evidence that, in various scenarios, a majority of non-specialists regard agents as intentionally doing things that the agents do not know they are doing and are not aware of doing. This puts pressure on proponents of KAT and leaves it to them to find a way these results can coexist with KAT.