The Structure of Action

The thesis of this paper is that what Hegel took as the existent contradiction of motion was only an apparent one that dissolves upon a closer inspection of the structure of transition itself, or what I call, action. By establishing transition or action as the exclusion of possibilities through the determination of one, determination is shown to be both positive and logically prior to, conceptually separable from, temporally simultaneous with, and ontologically inseparable from—exclusion or negation. Along with this, direction is (...) shown to be a presupposition of motion as opposed to being identical with it. Once these distinctions are made, they are applied to Zeno’s paradoxes of the Dichotomy and the Arrow, resolving them through logical and conceptual analysis without recourse to mathematics or physics, and revealing motion to be demonstrably non-contradictory and coherent without abandoning the concept of transition or requiring that the transitioning object be indeterminate in the instant thereof. Once the structure of transition has been validated in motion, a general account of transition as such follows which shows change/action/transition/becoming not to be definable without circularity due to its status as a first principle, yet articulable in terms of its intelligibility. (shrink)

This note presents an updated statement of the base logic of Resolution Theory and its deterministic account of free will. The central claim is that the free will debate has been misframed: freedom is neither a mysterious power outside causal order nor an illusion generated by causal explanation. Free will is located at resolution, the structural moment in which a conscious subject closes live uncertainty into commitment. The note clarifies the distinction between explanation and attribution, identifies the hindsight fallacy that (...) confuses retrospective fixity with the absence of real choice, and sets out the core structural chain of consciousness, exposure, evaluation, resolution, reality’s feedback, and normativity. On this view, determinism does not negate freedom but gives it significance, because only a law-governed world allows commitments to bear stable consequences. For that reason, the view is described as Telic Determinism: a deterministic account on which resolution is real and free will has meaning. (shrink)

(This is one of the essays to be included in a book examining the causes of day-to-day strife in the populations of modern democracies vying to live and assert the freedoms promised to them by systems of governance supposed and expected to represent them.) "If waste may be defined as all that is not being used for the growth and perpetuation of humanity, then health could be said to equate to all that is useful to this self-same objective. It could (...) be considered amiss to minimise such an expansive issue to that very simple definition; yet, recognising the simplicity and abiding by it at the individual level first and then at all levels in society requires acknowledgement, which, logically, should also trigger action." . (shrink)

This paper is about the logic of progressive aspect. We defend a new principle, which we call ‘Progressive Specificity’. Progressive Specificity says that if you are Ving, and to V is to X or Y, then you are Xing or you are Ying. We offer seven arguments for Progressive Specificity, which explore connections with credences, counterfactuals, indicatives, ‘wish’ reports, implicatures, and more. These arguments extend to the futurative progressive, showing that prevailing accounts of the futurative, which treat it as conveying (...) plans, must be rejected. We consider two types of apparent counterexamples to Progressive Specificity: verbs of selection, such as ‘decide’, and verbs of creation, such as ‘build’. We then respond to an objection that Progressive Specificity gives rise to objectionable arbitrariness about what things are doing. Our response appeals to the close connection between Progressive Specificity and the principle of Conditional Excluded Middle. This connection, previously unexplored, provides additional support for Progressive Specificity, and paves the way toward a conditional account of the progressive. (shrink)

Intentions play at least three roles in our psychological life: helping us think about the future, shaping our deliberation concerning what to do, and guiding us in doing what we do. This paper focuses mainly on the latter, also known under the head of intention in action. I discuss specific assumptions, such as that intentions represent states of affairs as the result of actions and that it is precisely in virtue of performing such a representational function that they can guide (...) us in acting. I argue that representational assumptions have problematic consequences concerning how both actions and their results relate to time. To avoid such difficulties, I offer a nonrepresentational and ecologically based explanation of the guiding role of intention. (shrink)

One kind of temporally extended agency involves planning your action in advance. This paper argues that there is also a different kind of temporally extended agency, characterised by planning that is partly retrospective in nature. Incorporative agency constitutively involves an agent planning to continue acting in such a way as to integrate some of their earlier activity into a to-be-completed extended action. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility of incorporative agency, explicate the distinctive mechanism through which (...) it is possible, and outline several kinds of conditions under which it can be rational to exercise. Finally, I argue that attending to the possibility of incorporative agency enables us to answer two sceptical challenges, concerning intentional skilled action that is initiated by automatic motor responses and intentional mental activity under content-involving descriptions. (shrink)

In Piñeros Glasscock (2020) I presented a version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument against the Anscombean thesis that intentional action entails knowledge. I defend this argument from recent criticisms by Beddor and Pavese (2022) and Valaris (2021). I argue that contrary to what my past self and my critics suggest, the conclusion of this anti-luminosity argument does not rest on the existence of essentially intentional actions. The argument can be recast based on the humbler premise that agential cognition must represent actions (...) as intentional. I show that this claim is well motivated by precisely the considerations of control behind the objections. (shrink)

Speech acts—promises, apologies, refusals, orders, threats, compliments—are actions we perform with words. Within speech act theory, it is standardly assumed that speech acts are performed in a moment. A speaker who says, “I apologize,” in saying so, apologizes in that very moment. Drawing on apologies as a central case study, I argue that this Momentary View is ill-equipped to explain important elements of performing an apology which occur after the moment of utterance, such as: (1) the addressee’s acceptance or rejection (...) of an apology, and (2) the speaker’s follow-through on their commitments to forbearance and making amends. As examples, I consider Joseph Biden’s attempted apology to Anita Hill and the Australian “national apology” to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children. As an alternative, I propose a novel theory of speech acts as a kind of temporally extended process. Apologies, I argue, are best understood as actions which unfold over time, like building a house or baking bread. (shrink)

Actions expressive of emotion are widely thought to pose a problem for the view that actions admit of rational explanation. Supposing the standard, instrumentalist view of practical rationality, such actions seem not to admit of practical reasons. In this paper, I assess a distinctive line of response to this problem. As Helm (2001, 2016) and Bennett (2016, 2021) have proposed, we can make sense of expressive actions as rational since they are responses to a specific type of evaluative reason, which (...) differs from paradigm instrumental reasons. Whilst sympathetic to this line of response, I argue that Helm and Bennett go awry in developing it since they rely on an inadequate view of the expressive character of expressive actions. As they suppose, emotions are at least in part a specific form of evaluation and expressive actions express this evaluation. This view, I propose, fails to make expressive actions intelligible as rational responses to evaluative reasons. I indicate an alternative way of developing the view, on which it lives up to its promise. (shrink)

A persistent difficulty in contemporary metaphysics concerns the relation among persistence, modal possibility, metaphysical dependence, causation, and emergence. Substantialist theories commonly explain persistence through numerical identity across temporal stages, while process theories emphasize transformation without always providing a sufficiently determinate account of what makes a continuing process the same process through change. Modal theories face a related problem. Possibility is frequently characterized through accessibility among worlds or through dispositional structure without an adequate account of how the space of possibilities is (...) itself generated and altered by concrete processes. This article develops a process-metaphysical framework in which finite continuance is understood as the preservation and transformation of reconfigurative capacity within an erosive field. Its central thesis is that persistence, modality, grounding, causation, and emergence can be understood as formally distinct expressions of an underlying structure of organized dependence. The article engages directly with Lewisian accounts of persistence and causation, Sider's structuralist treatment of metaphysical structure, Vetter's dispositional account of modality, Fine's distinction between essence and grounding, and the Davidsonian and Kimian analyses of events and causal efficacy. The resulting position treats identity as organized diachronic continuity, modality as structured reconfigurability, grounding as dependence among organizational conditions, causation as temporally asymmetric production within an evolving configuration, and emergence as the formation of higher-order constraints upon the space of possible subsequent states. Finite continuance thereby provides a unified metaphysical vocabulary for explaining how something can remain determinate through transformation while retaining a bounded capacity to become otherwise. Keywords: finite continuance; process metaphysics; persistence; identity; grounding; modality; causation; emergence; reconfiguration; erosion; metaphysical dependence; event individuation. (shrink)

An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument against source-compatibilism. I argue that, in cases of manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process of which it is a part. Specifically, I argue that causal processes involving direct manipulation fail to count as exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. In contrast, standard deterministic (...) causal processes do not involve heteromesial causal deviance and are agency-preserving. The upshot is that there is a relevant difference between a causal process involving direct manipulation by another agent and a deterministic causal process that involves no such intervention. If this is right, then Pereboom’s four-case argument does not pose a threat to source-compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Most human action is improvised rather than planned in advance. But how do we improvise? I develop an account of what it means for improvisation to involve ‘making things up as you go along’: improvising involves planning what to do after you have already started doing it. I explore the philosophical consequences of this account of improvisation: what psychological profile improvisors must have; how the improvisational plans that are adopted during action can causally guide the action that one is already (...) in the course of performing; what this means for how we should deliberate about and decide upon various options in the course of an improvisational performance. The main payoff is a discussion that improv(is)es on existentialist themes, in order to argue that humans can gain meaningful unity in their lives by means of improvising the performance of a self-constituting project over the whole course of their existence. (shrink)

Contemporary action theory is generally concerned with giving theories of action ontology. In this paper, we make the novel proposal that the standard view in action theory—the Causal Theory of Action—should be recast as a “model”, akin to the models constructed and investigated by scientists. Such models often consist in fictional, hypothetical, or idealized structures, which are used to represent a target system indirectly via some resemblance relation. We argue that recasting the Causal Theory as a model can not only (...) accomplish the goals of causal theorists, but also give the theory greater flexibility in responding to common objections. (shrink)

Unlike Western philosophers, classical Buddhist thinkers largely remained silent about socio-political issues and did not develop explicit frameworks for theorizing them. The present article reconstructs a Buddhist account of shared action based on select passages from works by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. It outlines the structure of individual action, according to Vasubandhu, and identifies three conditions that need to be satisfied for a joint activity to take place. This model, I suggest, is reductive in seeing joint action as an (...) aggregation of individual actions, and it differs from Western treatments of shared agency in several respects. Primarily, Vasubandhu’s paradigm rests on an extended structure of action, it is guided by an internalist standard of moral evaluation that emphasizes the consequences of shared actions for the acting members, and it is centrally concerned with how individuals can extricate themselves from social entanglements and gain control over their actions. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...) desire is distinctive in being a matter of our affective response to imagined prospects. An examination of this idea yields the following thesis: I know what I want just in case the object pursued in anticipation of a certain pleasure actually yields the anticipated pleasure. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como finalidad explorar la complementariedad de dos propuestas narrativas contemporáneas sobre la vida y acción humanas, a través del concepto de «vulnerabilidad corporal». Por una parte, se encuentran las ideas de Hans Urs von Balthasar sobre las polaridades espíritu-cuerpo, hombre-mujer, e individuo-comunidad y su posible unidad metafísica y antropológica. Por otra parte, presentamos los planteamientos del filósofo moral Alasdair MacIntyre que se desarrollan desde la teleología, en el marco de los fines naturales que brindan la vulnerabilidad (...) y la dependencia del ser humano. Así, en el primer apartado analizamos las ideas del teólogo suizo sobre las polaridades indicadas, en el contexto metafísico que él mismo propone siguiendo a Tomás de Aquino, y dentro de su visión de la dramática de la vida humana en su relación con Dios. Posteriormente, siguiendo los planteamientos tomistas de MacIntyre, consideramos los problemas de la dialéctica de la Modernidad para comprender adecuadamente la integración de tales polaridades en la narrativa vital humana, especialmente en el marco una teleología insertada en la vulnerabilidad corporal. Finalmente, llevamos a cabo una descripción de cada polaridad antropológica y presentamos, esquemáticamente, unas conclusiones, que resaltan cómo la vulnerabilidad del ser humano permite una lectura narrativa unitaria de la vida abierta a la libertad como búsqueda del bien. (shrink)

Essentially intentional actions are kinds of action that can only be done intentionally. Essentialism is the view that essentially intentional actions exist. Accidentalism is the view that essentialism is false. In my thesis, I develop and argue for naïve essentialism, a species of essentialism based on Michael Thompson’s naïve action theory. First, I present key features of naïve action theory and the broader Anscombean tradition, distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and provide an argument for the existence of essentially (...) intentional actions. Second, I respond to three objections to my argument. Third, I argue that accidentalism is a reductive approach to action and faces some standard problems to such approaches. Fourth, I present three noteworthy implications of my defense of essentialism for the philosophy of mind and action. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...) little attention from philosophers since its inception in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention (2000, §47). However, I believe that essentially intentional actions can play an important role in an ontology of action. In my paper, I develop and argue for a variety of essentialism in the context of naive action theory, which I call naive essentialism. Naive essentialism is a two-fold thesis, which claims that (1) essentially intentional actions exist, and (2) that essentially intentional actions ground accidentally intentional actions. My paper has four parts. In the first part, I distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and unpack the relevant principles of naive action theory. Second, I present the grounding thesis that accidentally intentional actions are grounded in essentially intentional actions. Next, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. Lastly, I briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The upshot of my arguments is that essentially intentional actions form the metaphysical and explanatory bedrock in a naive ontology of action, and that there are good reasons for accepting a key premise in Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the ontology of action about whether actions are processes, events, relations, or sui generis entities. This paper focuses on the process view, the view that actions are processes. I challenge it in two ways. First, I argue that some actions are not processes because their performance need not be associated with or accompanied by a process. Second, I critically discuss three main arguments that have been advanced to support the process view. My view, the (...) pluralist view, is that process-theorists are right to hold that certain actions are processes, but wrong to maintain that every action is a process: activities are processes, acts are not, and some acts are composed of a process whereas others are not. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...) at least some aspects of the reason-responsiveness theories. Moreover, by treating practical knowledge and practical understanding as gradable no-tions, the paper offers a strategy to respond to enduring objections against cognitivism about intention, control, and autonomy. (shrink)

In erkenntnistheoretischen Zusammenhängen hat sich für praktisches Wissen seit Ryle die Unterscheidung zwischen propositionalem knowing that und nicht-propositionalem knowing how etabliert. In der Handlungstheorie wird praktisches Wissen dagegen als ein im Handeln selbst als Wissen wirksames Wissen verstanden. Umstritten ist nach wie vor wie die Besonderheit dieser Wissensform angemessen zu erfassen ist. Der Band nimmt die Thematik des praktischen Wissens auf, indem unterschiedliche Diskussionsstränge zu diesem Begriff in historischer und systematischer Orientierung aus Handlungstheorie, Metaethik und Erkenntnistheorie zusammengeführt werden. Die Beiträge (...) wollen das Konzept eines praktischen Wissens hinsichtlich seiner Potentiale und weiterer Forschungsfragen erschließen und dabei als essentiell für die Grundlagen der praktischen Philosophie herausstellen. (shrink)

The Muʿtazilites were a group of Islamic theologians who believed in human free will and moral responsibility. However, they did not share the same opinion about how God relates to natural events or how humans generate their actions and resulting effects. This paper explores the theory of primary and secondary causes in the Bahšamīya branch of the Muʿtazilites of Baṣra. First, it discusses how these Muʿtazilites explain the process of becoming and passing away in the world without resorting to occasionalism. (...) Second, it introduces the theory of tawallud, which holds that human actions are not determined by the laws of nature or God, but rather humans generate effects through secondary causes. Finally, it examines the arguments presented by ʿAbd al-Ǧabbār, as a Muʿtazilite from the Bahšamīya school, against the theory of divine habit (ʿādah) in volume IX of the book ‚al-Muġnī fī abwāb at-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl‘ and proposes his idea of secondary causality as a necessary connection between events in nature that can be traced back to God as the primary cause. (shrink)

Anscombean accounts claim that intentional action is essentially characterized by an agent's practical knowledge of what she is doing. Such accounts are threatened by cases in which an agent seemingly fails to know what she is doing because of a mistake in the performance. It thus seems that such accounts are incompatible with the factivity of practical knowledge. We argue that Anscombean accounts should not be defended, as has recently been suggested, by drawing on familiar anti‐skeptical strategies from epistemology, but (...) rather by attending closely to the specifically practical character of agential knowledge. (shrink)

The paper aims to give an account of practical knowledge by outlining a hylomorphic and conceptualist account of intentional action in analogy to McDowell's conceptualist account of experience. On this view, practical concepts provide the ideal or formal structure that unifies a manifold of bodily movements into a single intentional action, and hence intentional actions are structured conceptually. -/- - §1 sets out the basic features of this view in contrast to a common dualistic or two-component view of practical knowledge, (...) as an "inner" mental state with propositional content that functions as the efficient cause of some bodily movement in the "external" world, and introduces the claim that practical knowledge is the constitutive form of intentional action. - §2 illustrates the hylomorphic unity of concept and movement in action, and thus (contra Dreyfus) the corporeality of practical reason, by means of an account of practical concept formation, on which both the formation and tradition of practical concepts take place in bodily movement iself. - §3 elucidates the concept of a self-conscious disposition or rational capacity for action, actualizations of which are characterized by a syllogistic structure that accounts for both the explanation and the justification of action and thereby renders intelligible in what sense practical judgment is internal to acting itself. - Skillful exercises of such capacities express a knowledge-how that manifests itself in practical representations. §4 characterizes representations of this kind as a perceptually situated recognition of a practical pattern that amounts to the imaginative anticipation of a movement form by which the agent determines their next steps; a practical perception of the agent's particular situation that is both normative and motivational for them. - §5 starts by developing an identity theory of practical truth, on which the conceptual content of a (true) practical judgment is numerically identical with the formal structure of a (good) action, and concludes with explaining the unity of four features commonly attributed to practical knowledge, viz. that it is at the same time descriptive, normative, causally productive, and non-observational (or self-conscious). (shrink)

The brewer and the yeast: why brewing beer sheds light on the philosophical debate about the boundaries of human agency.

ABSTRACT It’s often assumed, especially in discussions of free will and moral responsibility, that unavoidable actions are possible. In recent years, however, several philosophers have questioned that assumption. Their views are considered here, and the possibility of unavoidable actions is defended and then applied to issues in action theory and in the literature on moral responsibility.

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe (...) play. -/- Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief—which he terms religious “credence”—is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance. -/- It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith. [Abstract writing credit: book editor Andrew Kinney, HUP]. (shrink)

Beau Branson rounds out the previous two chapters, by exploring the doctrine of inseparable operations ad extra in the writings of St Gregory of Nyssa. This doctrine says that all the activities of the three hypostases of the Trinity, at least insofar as they relate to things outside of (“ad extra”) the Trinity, are not only qualitatively identical but numerically identical. Importantly, Branson focuses his attention on Gregory’s theory of action and the individuation of events that emerges from his theological (...) defense of the doctrine of inseparable operations ad extra. Through a heavy engagement with contemporary metaphysics, Branson shows that Gregory’s philosophy of action is not only coherent, anticipating current trends in the ontology of actions and events, but may provide novel solutions to longstanding problems in this field. (shrink)

Donald Davidson’s causal theory of actions states that actions must be rationalized and caused by a belief-desire-pair. One problem of such a causal theory are cases of deviant causal chains. In these cases, the rationalized action is not caused in the right way but via a deviant causal chain. It therefore intuitively seems to be no action while all conditions of the causal theory are met. I argue that the problem of deviant causal chains can be solved by adding a (...) teleofunctionalist condition. This condition requires that the belief-desire pair that rationalizes an action must cause that action in a selection-historically normal way. I try to show that this additional condition drops counterintuitive cases of deviant causal chains out of the class of actions while being flexible enough to classify such cases as actions in which causal detours are intuitively permissible. (shrink)

The traditional problem of free will has reached an impasse; we are unlikely to see progress without rethinking the terms in which the problem had been cast. Our approach offers an alternative to the standard terms of the debate, by developing an authorially parameterized approach articulated within a two-dimensional semantics for temporal predicates.

According to the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), genuine actions are individuated by their causal history. Actions are bodily movements that are causally explained by citing the agent’s reasons. Reasons are then explained as some combination of propositional attitudes – beliefs, desires, and/or intentions. The CTA is thus committed to realism about the attitudes. This paper explores current models of decision-making from the mind sciences, and argues that it is far from obvious how to locate the propositional attitudes in the (...) causal processes they describe. The outcome of the analysis is a proposal for pluralism: there are several ways one could attempt to map states like “intention” onto decision-making processes, but none will fulfill all of the roles attributed to the attitudes by the CTA. (shrink)

This paper argues for a deflationary account of trying on which ‘x tried to ϕ’ abbreviates ‘x did something with the intention of ϕ-ing’, where ‘did something’ is treated as a schematic verb. On this account, tryings are not a distinctive sort of episode present in some or all cases of acting. ‘x tried to ϕ’ simply relates some doing of x’s to a further aim x had, which may or may not have been achieved. Consequently, the analysis of ‘x (...) tried to ϕ’ adds nothing to our basic understanding of the nature of action or agency. The account handles examples of naked trying, trying without acting – for example, trying but failing to move when paralyzed – by construing ‘did something’ as a schematic verb for a broader class of purposive events than actions, subsuming inter alia the formation of intentions-in-action. It gives a technical sense to ‘doing with the intention of ϕ-ing’ so that it includes any doing that can be construed as for the purpose of executing the intention of ϕ-ing. This subsumes as a limiting case the formation of an intention-in-action to ϕ, which is for the purpose of executing that very intention. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of control’s possession as it applies to agents. The basic idea is straightforward, but details require attention. Control’s possession has to do with the reliable patterns of behavior agents display. But in order to understand what reliability comes to, we have to understand the psychological states that guide agents. This chapter accordingly introduces the notion of plan-states. We also have to understand the ways that reliability varies depending upon the circumstances in which agents behave. After (...) developing the form of an account of control’s possession, this chapter discusses possibilities for its metaphysical underpinnings. It rejects the idea that control is constituted by abilities, and suggests that dispositions may be able to do explanatory work for control. (shrink)

This chapter first offers a clear explication of control’s exercise. It then briefly discusses control over omissions, before turning to a discussion of different varietals of control. So, in particular, voluntary control is central to several debates in philosophy. No acceptable account exists. This chapter extends the account of control to offer an explication of voluntary control. It then discusses this account in light of Alfred Mele’s recent work on direct control. Finally, this chapter offers an explication of a notion (...) that is important to many who think and write about free will. This is the notion of what is “up to” an agent. The explication turns on the notion of voluntary control. (shrink)

After offering accounts of basic building blocks of agency in chapters 2 through 5, this chapter serves as a hinge. Here, drawing on Tyler Burge’s work on primitive agency, this chapter discusses the most primitive features of agency, and considers what must be added to work towards more sophisticated kinds of agent. The main aim is to articulate a kind of (metaphorical) ladder that allows us to see, not only the shape of agency in relief, but also the place of (...) key capacities like a capacity for representation of targets for behavior, and a capacity of practical reasoning. This leads, at the chapter’s very end, to a brief discussion of the role of mental action in an understanding of agency. (shrink)

The problem of deviant causation has long vexed causalist accounts of action. This chapter argues that an account of non-deviant causation can be developed by leveraging insights from the author’s account of control. In order to understand what happens when non-deviant causation happens, it develops the notion of a comprehensive set of circumstances. This is a set of circumstances that is derived by building a causal model that includes an agent, a plan, and the agent’s location in a particular situation. (...) What is special about the model is that it gets the causal parameters of the particular situation right. Non-deviant causation then turns out to be the normal production of behavior that is, for the agent, normal given the plan and across the comprehensive set of circumstances. After developing this account, this chapter discusses a range of problem cases for it, examines an alternative account due to Wayne Wu, and discusses how the account fares against some complaints drawn from relevant literature. (shrink)

The Shape of Agency offers interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. The first part offers accounts of a collection of related phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behaviour, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition, and undermine the claims made by many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore fails as an account of intentional (...) action. The second part turns to modes of agentive excellence—ways that agents display quality of form—providing a novel account of skill, including an account of the ways that agents display more or less skill. Shepherd discusses the role of knowledge in skill, and concludes that while knowledge is often important, it is inessential. This leads to a discussion of the way that knowledge of action and knowledge of how to act informs action execution. Knowledgeable action includes a unique epistemic underpinning: in knowledgeable action, the agent has authoritative knowledge of what she is doing and how she is doing it when and because she is poised to control her action by way of practical reasoning. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of a different mode of agentive excellence. This one essentially involves knowledge of action and knowledge of how to act. Here we call it knowledgeable action. The aim of this chapter is two-fold. First, to explain the special epistemic features often thought to hold of knowledge of action. Second, to explain how this knowledge plays an important role in action execution. Along the way this chapter discusses various accounts of knowledge of action, which variously emphasize (...) roles for intention, perception, and conscious awareness. Towards the end, the chapter compares and contrast the author’s account to nearby accounts that focus, not on knowledgeable action, but on knowledge how. (shrink)

In the introduction the book’s central themes are introduced. Agents are often considered special, in that agents actively do things. Non-agents, by contrast, are zones of mere passivity. The aim of this book is to offer a perspective on agency that allows agency to stand out as special when compared to non-agentive systems. This perspective will be developed by way of interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. Novel accounts of several key (...) phenomena are developed: control over behavior, non-deviant causation, intentional action, skill, and knowledgeable action. Along the way the role of planning, practical reasoning, belief, and knowledge receive thorough discussion. (shrink)

The project of analyzing intentional action has been out of favor for some time. In part this is due to exhaustion over details—accounts are usually subject to very technical problems or elaborate counterexamples. This chapter builds build on the earlier accounts of control and non-deviance to offer a new account of intentional action. This account builds on Mele and Moser’s influential work, and goes beyond it in some ways. After offering the account, this chapter considers a range of ancillary issues (...) and problem cases. It discusses, for example, side-effect cases, senseless movements, the role of belief and knowledge in intentional action, and action theoretic versions of systematic Gettier cases. Finally, it turns to issues of reductionism that motivate some rejections of causal theories of action. The upshot is that anti-causalists have a new account to contend with, and one that has answers to the problems often thought to be damning for causalism. (shrink)

In this chapter and chapter 8 we are concerned with modes of agentive excellence. These are ways that agents, qua agent, display excellence. This chapter develops a philosophical account of skill. This account offers clarity on the primary targets of skill. It argues that these are not necessarily particular actions, but often clusters of actions and behaviors—action domains. A part of this account is an explanation of the different ways skill varies—that is, of the different ways skill is gradable. After (...) developing the account, this chapter brings it into contact with competitors that place greater emphasis on the role of knowledge in skill. This chapter argues that though knowledge is often important for skill, the account gets the basic contours of skill right in a way that knowledge-involving accounts do not. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between skill and sensitivity to reasons for action. I want to know to what degree we can explain the fact that the skilled agent is very good at performing a cluster of actions within some domain in terms of the fact that the skilled agent has a refined sensitivity to the reasons for action common to the cluster. The picture is a little bit complex. While skill can be partially explained by sensitivity to (...) reasons – a sensitivity often produced by rational practice – the skilled human agent, because imperfect, must navigate a trade-off between full sensitivity and a capacity to succeed. (shrink)

This chapter concludes. Its aim is primarily summary and paraphrase, and placing the ideas developed in this book side by side. Cormac McCarthy is gratuitously quoted. And then the chapter brings reflection back to the metaphorical distinction between activity and passivity with which the book began. On the picture the book develops, agents become active by degree, in various ways. With the exercise of control, the passive becomes active, and plans give rise to intentional action. With the development of skill, (...) capacities for planning and for exercising control and for executing intentional action begin to cover broad differences of circumstance. With the acquisition of knowledge, agents are able to impose their will on parts of the world that their practice may not have adequately prepared them for. In knowledgeable action, agents exert change in the world in part by figuring out the world they change. (shrink)

Schönau et al. (2021) identified four dimensions of agency (authenticity, privacy, self-trust, and responsibility) that may be influenced by the use of neurotechnologies, such as deep brain stimula...

In this chapter what I call the “backside” of habit is explored. I am interested in the philosophical implications of the physical and physiological processes that mediate, and which allow for what comes to appear as almost magic; namely the various sensorimotor associations and integrations that allows us to replay our past experiences, and to in a certain sense perceive potential futures, and to act and bring about anticipated outcomes – without quite knowing how. Thus, the term “backside” is meant (...) to refer both the actual mediation and the epistemic opacity of these backstage intermediaries that allow for the front stage magic. The question is if the epistemic complexities around sensorimotor mediation gives us valuable insights into the nature of human agency and further how it might begin to show us new ways to think of the mind as truly embodied yet not reducible to any finite body-as-object. (shrink)

Donald Davidson famously argues that when a person acts for a reason, we can characterize that person as having some sort of pro-attitude toward actions of a certain kind and believing that their action is of that kind. If acting for a reason must be caused by pro-attitudes, then the right account of pro-attitudes will help us correctly identify cases of action for reason. In this paper, we examine what it takes for a mental state to be a pro-attitude. First, (...) we argue that having any mental state that systematically causes behavior when combined with an appropriately connected belief count as a pro-attitude is overly permissive. We do so by presenting an example of someone whose complex system of nervous tics mimics the causal structure of a pro-attitude, but where the resulting behavior does not count as action. Next, we argue that requiring beliefs about value or treating pro-attitudes as perceptions of value is overly restrictive. Such views fail to account for akrasia or attribute unprecedented functional properties to perceptual states. Finally, we propose an account of pro-attitudes that avoids these pitfalls: In addition to causing behavior, pro-attitudes cause more pleasure when one thinks about attaining their object than when one thinks about failing to attain their objects. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process (...) ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it. (shrink)

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory (...) of responsibility. (shrink)