Flickers of Freedom

Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues

Call for papers: Topoi conference and special issue 
Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues 
Rome, Italy, 29-30 November 2012

We are proud to announce that the first Topoi Conference will be held in Rome in November 2012. This will be the first in a series of conferences, to be held every 2 years, sponsored by Topoi: An International Journal of Philosophy (http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245).

In analogy with the journal format, each conference will focus on a specific theme (topos), and contributions presented to the conference will later appear in an issue of the journal dedicated to the same topic.

INVITED SPEAKERS 
Marcel Brass (Ghent) 
Cristiano Castelfranchi (Rome) 
Elisabeth Pacherie (Paris) 
Corrado Sinigaglia (Milan)

SUBMITTED PAPERS 
Submissions of unpublished papers are welcome on any topic relevant to the conference theme (see below). Submitted articles should be in English, not exceed 5.000 words in length (including references), and be prepared for blind reviewing. Only original papers (i.e., not published or submitted for publication elsewhere) will be considered, since the authors of accepted contributions will be invited to submit a revised longer version of their papers for a special issue of Topoi, edited by Markus Schlosser (Leiden) and Fabio Paglieri (Rome).

Submission of papers by e-mail to: Fabio Paglieri (fabio.paglieri@istc.cnr.it) 
Accepted file formats: .doc, .rtf., .odp, .pdf 
Deadline for submission (full papers): 31 August 2012

RATIONALE AND THEME 
Theorizing about human action has a long history in philosophy, and the nature of intention and intentional action has received a lot of attention in recent analytic philosophy. At the same time, intentional action has become an empirically studied phenomenon in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Many results obtained in these areas have been incorporated within the current philosophical debate, while at the same time scientists have often adopted in their experiments and models philosophical assumptions on the nature of intention and intentional action. As a result, the study of intentions is nowadays a thriving enterprise, where both conceptual and empirical issues are discussed in a dialogue across disciplines.

3:AM Interview with Mele

Yet another interesting and illuminating interview by 3:AM's Richard Marshall.  This time, Al Meletalks about free will, self-deception, neuroscience, experimental philosophy and a number of other themes.  Check it out!

Free Will Debate on Youtube

 Thanks to Bob Doyle for bringing the following series of videos to my attention.  Each one is from a worskshop in Barcelona this past October that was entitled "Is Science Compatible with Our Desire for Freedom?" 

Enchanting Causes

In Gail Carson Levine's fairy tale Ella Enchanted, the  imprudent fairy Lucinda casts a spell on Ella which causes her to ‘always be obedient’, her behaviour triggered by ‘commands’ which she literally cannot resist ‘obeying’.  Here is how Ella describes her own predicament in the novel:

 Anyone could control me with an order. It had to be a direct command, such as “Put on a shawl,” or “You must go to bed now.”…against an order I was powerless…I could never hold out for long.

 Levine’s idiosyncratic use of the word ‘obey’ aside, there is no contradiction in the scenario put forward. The tale describes a possible world in which one’s behaviour can be manipulated in just such a way. The nature of the curse entails that Ella’s behaviour - which is without question beyond her immediate control – is non-intentional (i.e. neither intentional nor unintentional). Ella’s behaviour is in no way motivated by the curse; she does not reason (consciously or otherwise) that she us under a spell and therefore has reason to obey:  the spell is not a consideration she acts upon and her belief that she is under it plays no part in the behaviour it causes. Rather, the curse causes her to do whatever she is told by paralyzing her will to do otherwise.

   So characterized, the causation in question might be thought to be ‘brute’, perhaps akin to that involved in reflex action or nervous ticks. But that would be quite wrong, for the meaning of any ‘command’ uttered to Ella (typically by one of her wicked half-sisters) plays a clear structural role in the causation of her behaviour. The expressions which cause Ella’s behaviour are effective because of their semantic content, because Ella (who speaks American English) understands what the words used mean. Commands in languages that Ella does not understand are useless: they cannot make her do anything.

   It seems to me that Ella’s actions seem to fit the most popular accounts of intentional action, including those of Donald Davidson and Fred Dretske. According to Davidson’s account of mental causation, intentional actions are caused by a combination of one or more beliefs and pro-attitudes, together identified as primary reasons for the action; on Dretske’s view actions are triggered by physical events (e.g. of perception) but structured by the representational content of what was seen or heard i.e. it is the meaning assigned to things by the agent which explains why certain events triggered the behaviour they did. It is plausible that on either proposal, Ella’s behaviour must count as a case of intentional action, and yet it seems to me that it clearly isn't.

But perhaps this is too quick.  Any thoughts?

When tracing meets ownership.

I've got a question related to John Fischer and Mark Ravizza's compatibilist theory of responsibility to which I don't know the answer, and I do not recall having read anything about this point, and so I thought I'd ask about it here. But first, here's a sketch of my understanding of their position (all references are to Responsibility and Control: A theory of Moral Responsibility):

To be responsible for one’s actions, one must have possessed what Fischer and Ravizza call guidance control (1998:34-41) at the time of acting. On their account, a person has guidance control over their actions when those actions issue from their own (see note [1] further below) moderately reasons-responsive mechanisms, or when that person is responsible for the fact that the mechanism from which that action issued was not moderately reasons responsive (see note [2] further below).  Mechanisms are moderately reasons-responsive when they are regularly receptive and weakly reactive to reasons. And a mechanism is weakly reactive to reasons if it reacts to those reasons in at least a small set of possible worlds (or something approximating this), even though it may not react to those reasons in this actual world (1998:69-85). Fischer and Ravizza also provide further details of the conditions under which one is responsible for the outcomes of one's actions rather than just for those actions themselves – essentially, the outcomes must be connected in the right way to the actions – but I don't think that anything in what I say below hinges on these details and so I leave them aside. And now for the two notes: [1] is a reference to Fischer and Ravizza’s ownership condition (1998:207-39), and [2] is a reference to Fischer and Ravizza’s discussion of tracing (1998:49-51).

Given this understanding (I hope that I'm not too far off the mark), here is my question stated in the form of a claim:

It also seems plausible to me that the tracing condition ([2] above) might interact with the ownership condition ([1] above), such that a person would still be responsible for their actions, irrespective of whether those actions issued from a moderately reasons responsive mechanism or not, as long as they were responsible for the fact that the mechanism from which their actions issued was not their own.

Although I find it plausible that Fischer and Ravizza would endorse this sort of claim, I am not aware of where they stand on this issue. And I do not think that this sort of scenario is already covered by their discussion of manipulation cases either, because what's going on here in the sort of scenario that I envisage is that a person might be responsible (via tracing) for the fact that the mechanism from which their future actions will issue will not be their own – for instance, they negligently allow themselves to be hypnotised by a person whom they have no reason to trust, or even more strongly, whom they have reason to distrust – and if this were the case then to me intuitively it would seem that they would still be responsible for what they do (1) irrespective of the fact that the mechanism from which they act is not their own, and (2) irrespective of whether that mechanism is moderately reasons responsive or not).

I may have tied myself up in some silly conceptual knot here, and there might be a simple answer to my question, but I just can't find it discussed in Fischer and Ravizza's Responsibility and Control. Could some kind soul please point me in the direction of where I might find discussion of this point?

Many thanks,

Nicole

Brian O'Shaugnessy (1925-2010)

I learned about this from Leiter's Blog.  Brian O'Shaugnessy has died. 

I did not know O'Shaugnessy.  But, while I rarely found myself in agreement with the positions he defended, I can say that I learned a lot from his writings and always found his essays stimulating. 

Those familiar with his work know that O'Shaugnessy's contributions to the philosophy of action and philosophy of mind were often difficult, sometimes frustrating, but always challenging and innovative.   For those unfamiliar with his work, O'Shaugnessy was one of the main figures in the philosophy of action who attempted to revive volitionism and helped make it one of the main contenders for a theory of action  Recently, his work focused on self-awareness.  But his work on the topic focused on self-awareness of agency.  For an introduction to O'Shaugnessy, the best place to start is his essay, "Trying (as the Mental 'Pineal Gland')," Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), pp. 365-386 (it can also be found, with an appendix, in Al Mele's edited collection, The Philosophy of Action (OUP, 1997)).  If you are brave and have a lot of time, read O'Shaugnessy's The Will, 2nd ed., 2 vols.(CUP 2008).   A website for a recent conference held in his honor, with audio files of talks by a number of prominent philosophers of mind and action (e.g., Christopher Peacocke, Paul Snowden, Lucy O'Brien, Tyler Burge), can be found here.

What Are Omissions?

At the risk of trying your patience, I thought I'd pursue a question that came up in some of the comments on the preceding post: what is an omission?

Some candidates:

1) Some familiar (positive) sort of thing, e.g., some action the agent is performing instead of doing the omitted thing.

2) Some negative entity--a negative act, or a negative state of affairs, or a sui generis absence.

3) Nothing at all.

What do you think? I suggest considering a range of examples. 

What in the World is Weakness of Will?

It has often been assumed in the philosophical literature that the notion of 'weakness of will' can be defined relatively straightforwardly. For example, one might think that the notion can be explained just by saying something like: 

A person shows weakness of will whenever she believes that she should not perform a particular action but then goes ahead and performs it anyway. 

In an exciting new paper, Josh May and Richard Holton report a series of experimental studies designed to show that people's ordinary intuitions about weakness of will don't follow anything like this sort of simple pattern. 

One of my favorite of their studies is the third one, in which they examine the impact of moral valence. In that study, participants were presented with different stories about an agent who ends up doing something he believes to be wrong. The difference between the stories was is just that in some conditions the agent's behavior actually does seem to be morally wrong, while in others the behavior appears to be morally right (though the agent mistakenly believes it to be wrong).

Strikingly, this difference in moral valence led to a significant difference in people's intuitions, with people being substantially more inclined to say that the agent showed weakness of will when they thought that his action actually was morally bad than when they thought his action was morally good. 

Speaking just for myself, I find that my own intuitions show exactly this same pattern. Thus, suppose that a school bully thinks he should punch some poor kid in the face but then is overcome by a feeling of compassion and can't go through with his plan. In such a case, I would never even think of saying that the bully showed 'weakness of will.'

But why not? What could account for the effect that May and Holton have uncovered here?

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) & Well Being

There is a fascinating four part series entitled Bomb in the Brain that addresses the issues associated with adverse childhood experiences and adult health and psychology problems.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Thanks to Greg Minton for bringing the videos to my attention.  Good stuff!  If nothing else, I hope to post something soon that ties this literature specifically to the question of free will and responsibility.  For now, I just wanted to pass the links along.  As always, happy viewing...

Retributivism, Punishment, and the Punitive Emotions

Setting the Stage...

The issue of retributivism and punishment has been a common theme on both the Garden and Forking Paths and Flickers of Freedom.  My present purpose is to try to briefly get clear on the salient terms and themes of the debate.  Because this is the first of what will be a series of posts by me in the coming months on retributivism, I want to define some of the key terms up front to prevent confusion downstream. 

So, for starters, I follow Moore (1997) in defining retributivism in the following way:

“Reributivism…is the view that punishment is justified by the desert of the offender.  The good that is achieved by punishing, on this view, has nothing to do with future states of affairs such as the prevention of crime or the maintenance of social cohesion.  Rather, the good of punishment achieves is that someone who deserves it, gets it.  Punishment for the guilty is thus for the retributivist an intrinsic good, not the merely instrumental good that it may be to the utilitarian or rehabilitative theorist” (p. 87-88).

On this “pure” view, we not only have a right to punish those who cause culpable harm, we actually have a duty to punish them even if punishing them will produce negative consequences.  In short, we have a duty to punish offenders because giving them what they deserve—i.e., making them suffer—is intrinsically valuable.  When I, for one, talk about retributivism, this is the view I have in mind.