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526Deliberation and Acting for ReasonsPhilosophical Review 121 (2): 209-239. 2012.Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons. To hold that all voluntary activities are performed for reasons in virtue of their relations to past, present, or even merely possible acts of deliberation thus leads to infinite regresses and related problems. As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons, and these pro…Read more
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6Desire and PleasureIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: Action ‐ Based Theories of Desire Pleasure ‐ Based Theories of Desire Combined Action ‐ Based and Pleasure ‐ Based Theories Holistic Theories of Desire Natural Kind Theories The Nature of Pleasure References.
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The reward theory of desire in moral psychologyIn Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson (eds.), Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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53On Clear and Confused Ideas (review)Dialogue 42 (1): 148-149. 2003.Here is an apparently straightforward philosophical story about concepts. In the style of Jerry Fodor, a concept is a mental “word” ; it means what it does because of its causal dependencies, and it contributes this meaning to the meanings of the mental “sentences” it helps to form. The mental word OWL means owls because owls have a special causal relationship to OWLs, and when the mental word OWL is combined with other mental words, such as THERE, IS, AN and NEARBY, the meaning of the resulting…Read more
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154Alienation and ExternalityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (3): 371-387. 1999.Harry Frankfurt introduces the concept of externality. Externality is supposed to be a fact about the structure of an agent's will. We argue that the pre-theorethical basis of externality has a lot more to do with feelings of alienation than it does with the will. Once we realize that intuitions about externality are guided by intuitions about feelings of alienation surprising conclusions follow regarding the structure of our will.
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40A Casual Theory of Acting for ReasonsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2): 103-114. 2015.Amanda works in a library, and a patron asks for her help in learning about duty-to- rescue laws in China. She throws herself into the task, spending hours on retrieving documents from governmental and non-governmental sources, getting electronic translations, looking for literature on Scandinavian duty-to-rescue laws that mention Chinese laws for comparison, and so on. Why? She likes to gain this sort of general knowledge of the world; perhaps the reason she works so hard is that she is learnin…Read more
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229In Praise of DesireOxford University Press. 2013.Joining the debate over the roles of reason and appetite in the moral mind, In Praise of Desire takes the side of appetite. Acting for moral reasons, acting in a praiseworthy manner, and acting out of virtue are simply acting out of intrinsic desires for the right or the good
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611Praise, Blame and the Whole SelfPhilosophical Studies 93 (2): 161-188. 1999.What is that makes an act subject to either praise or blame? The question has often been taken to depend entirely on the free will debate for an answer, since it is widely agreed that an agent’s act is subject to praise or blame only if it was freely willed, but moral theory, action theory, and moral psychology are at least equally relevant to it. In the last quarter-century, following the lead of Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) seminal article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the in…Read more
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278The Causal Map and Moral PsychologyPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (267): 347-369. 2016.Some philosophers hold that the neuroscience of action is, in practice or in principle, incapable of touching debates in action theory and moral psychology. The role of desires in action, the existence of basic actions, and the like are topics that must be sorted out by philosophers alone: at least at present, and perhaps by the very nature of the questions. This paper examines both philosophical and empirical arguments against the relevance of neuroscience to such questions and argues that neit…Read more
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96On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex EmotionPhilosophical Review Recent Issues 125 (2): 287-289. 2016.
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148On the content of experiencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience
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93An Ontology of IdeasJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (4): 757-775. 2015.Philosophers often talk about and engage with ideas. Scientists, artists, and historians do, too. But what is an idea? In this paper, we first motivate the desire for an ontology of ideas before discussing what conditions a candidate ontology would have to satisfy to be minimally adequate. We then offer our own account of the ontology of ideas, and consider various strategies for specifying the underlying metaphysics of the account. We conclude with a discussion of potential future work to be do…Read more
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Foundations of Mental RepresentationDissertation, Stanford University. 1998.There is a familiar if disputed theory of mental representations which holds that to be a mental representation is to be a structure whose states are supposed to stand in correspondence to states of the world . The present work defends this so-called teleosemantic approach to mental representations against Stampian and Fodorian approaches, and develops a novel approach to the normativity underlying mental representation. It is argued that, while appealing to evolutionary functions in attributing…Read more
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55Functions From RegulationThe Monist 87 (1): 115-135. 2004.Here is a rather mundane set of claims about the stapler on my desk: The function of my stapler is to staple sheets of paper together. If the stapler is loaded with staples, but for some reason will not staple papers, the stapler is malfunctioning. That is, it is not doing what it is supposed to do. It is defective, or misshapen, misaligned or inadequate to its task, or in some other way normatively defective: there is something wrong with it. The reason that my stapler has its function, and is …Read more
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180DesirePhilosophy Compass 1 (6). 2006.Desires move us to action, give us urges, incline us to joy at their satisfaction, and incline us to sorrow at their frustration. Naturalistic work on desire has focused on distinguishing which of these phenomena are part of the nature of desire, and which are merely normal consequences of desiring. Three main answers have been proposed. The first holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they lead to action. The second makes pleasure the essence of desire. And the third holds …Read more
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98The Impossibility of Conscious DesireAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1). 2004.We argue for the conclusion that intrinsic desires, at least, and every other propositional attitude having the world-to-mind direction of fit exclusively, are never found within consciousness. All desire-like states found in consciousness are experiences or exercises of imaginative capacities pertaining either to the desire or the content of the desire, but never the desire itself.
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109Unexpected pleasureIn Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The modularity of emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 255-272. 2008.As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive tract, feels an impressive numb…Read more
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18Review of Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, Michael Smith, Mind, Morality, and Explanation: Selected Collaborations (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (11). 2004.
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174New norms for teleosemanticsIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind, Elsevier. pp. 1--91. 2004.Teleosemantics has a problem: it holds that to have a mind one must have a history, often a long evolutionary history. The solution to the problem is for teleosemanticists to give up on natural selection as the source of natural norms (functions) for neural structures, and to find a different source of natural norms which is not essentially history-involving. Such a source in fact exists, in cybernetic governance. This paper argues for the existence of natural norms derived from cybernetic go…Read more
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44Lawlor, Krista. New Thoughts about Old Things: Cognitive Policies as the Ground of Singular Concepts (review)Review of Metaphysics 56 (3): 661-662. 2003.Imagine you are looking at a cat and make the following inference: That cat sneezed; That cat is missing an ear; thus There exists a sneezing cat missing an ear. Such an inference is valid only if there is no equivocation on the term “that cat.” If “that cat” in refers to Puss, but in refers to Midnight, then the inference is invalid. This much is elementary. Now imagine that Puss is the cat in front of you when you think, but that a nefarious semanticist quickly substitutes similar-looking Midn…Read more
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Philosophy of Mind |
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