scholarly journals Unconsidered Intentional Actions

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Cova
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Finding ◽  
Knobe Effect ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
Moral Valence

The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis and conclude that it is supported neither by the existing literature nor by their own experiments, whose results I did not replicate, and that the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’ is not the best available account of the ‘Knobe Effect’.

scholarly journals The Problem of ESEE Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Side Effect ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Good Thing ◽  
Knobe Effect ◽  
Knowledge Ascription ◽  
Specific Instance ◽  
Theoretical Significance ◽  
Performance Error ◽  
A New Technique ◽  
Moral Valence

Traditionally it has been thought that the moral valence of a proposition is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to whether someone knows that the proposition is true, and thus irrelevant to the truth-value of a knowledge ascription. On this view, it’s no easier to know, for example, that a bad thing will happen than that a good thing will happen (other things being equal). But a series of very surprising recent experiments suggest that this is actually not how we view knowledge. On the contrary, people are much more willing to ascribe knowledge of a bad outcome. This is known as the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE), and is a specific instance of a widely documented phenomenon, the side-effect effect (a.k.a. “the Knobe effect”), which is the most famous finding in experimental philosophy. In this paper, I report a new series of five experiments on ESEE, and in the process accomplish three things. First, I confirm earlier findings on the effect. Second, I show that the effect is virtually unlimited. Third, I introduce a new technique for detecting the effect, which potentially enhances its theoretical significance. In particular, my findings make it more likely that the effect genuinely reflects the way we think about and ascribe knowledge, rather than being the result of a performance error.

On the Role of Attention and Ascription in the Formation of Intentions within Behavior

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-196
Author(s):  
Michela Summa
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Behavior ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
Active Nature

This article explores the roots of action in behavior. Departing from the standard understanding of action as ‘intentional behavior’, we argue that this view is often based on the underestimation of the intentional structures that are already operative within behavior. Distinguishing between a broader and a narrower meaning of intentionality, we then elaborate on the processes that lead from the diffuse and operative intentionality of behavior to the focused intentionality of action. In order to properly appreciate these processes, we show that a reassessment of the phenomenon of attention – which takes into consideration its double (passive and active) nature as well as its social embedment – is required. Finally, we discuss the interplay between the obtained reframing of the genesis of intentional actions with the phenomenon of social ascription

Action and the Problem of Free Will

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Motor Control ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Pure Consciousness ◽  
Control Processes ◽  
Traditional Notion ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
Neuronal Processes

This chapter examines the concept of free will as it is discussed in philosophy and neuroscience. It reviews reflective and perceptual theories of agency and argues against neuro-centric conclusions about the illusory nature of free will. Experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet suggest that neural activations prior to conscious awareness predict specific actions. This has been taken as evidence that challenges the traditional notion of free will. Libet’s experiments, arguably, are about motor control processes on an elementary timescale and say nothing about freely willed intentional actions embedded in personal and social contexts that involve longer-term, narrative timescales. One implication of this interpretation is that enactivism is not a form of simple behaviorism. Agency is not a thing reducible to elementary neuronal processes; nor is it an idea or a pure consciousness. It rather involves a structure of complex relations.

scholarly journals GOALIATH: a theory of goal-directed behavior

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Hommel
Keyword(s):  
Driving Forces ◽  
Action Selection ◽  
Action Control ◽  
Event File ◽  
Impact Action ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
Operational Characteristics ◽  
Different Origins ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Goal Directed Behavior

AbstractCommonsense and theorizing about action control agree in assuming that human behavior is (mainly) driven by goals, but no mechanistic theory of what goals are, where they come from, and how they impact action selection is available. Here I develop such a theory that is based on the assumption that GOALs guide Intentional Actions THrough criteria (GOALIATH). The theory is intended to be minimalist and parsimonious with respect to its assumptions, as transparent and mechanistic as possible, and it is based on representational assumptions provided by the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). It holds that goal-directed behavior is guided by selection criteria that activate and create competition between event files that contain action-effect codes matching one or more of the criteria—a competition that eventually settles into a solution favoring the best-matching event file. The criteria are associated with various sources, including biological drives, acquired needs (e.g., of achievement, power, or affiliation), and short-term, sometimes arbitrary, instructed aims. Action selection is, thus, a compromise that tries to satisfy various criteria related to different driving forces, which are also likely to vary in strength over time. Hence, what looks like goal-directed action emerges from, and represents an attempt to satisfy multiple constraints with different origins, purposes, operational characteristics, and timescales—which among other things does not guarantee a high degree of coherence or rationality of the eventual outcome. GOALIATH calls for a radical break with conventional theorizing about the control of goal-directed behavior, as it among other things questions existing cognitive-control theories and dual-route models of action control.

scholarly journals The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

Topoi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Schierbaum
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
The Mind

AbstractAny account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: (i) for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. (ii) Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of faculty psychology is (iii) the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them.

scholarly journals Challenges for Experience Feedback in Engineering Design

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Nerga˚rd ◽  
Tobias Larsson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Knowledge Sharing ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Empirical Finding ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Current Feedback ◽  
Active Dissemination ◽  
Different Levels

In this paper empirical finding from a study conducted at an aerospace company is compared to theory regarding Experience Feedback (EF), Lessons Learned (LL) and Decision Making (DM). The purpose with the study was to examine how EF within the organization was conducted and what problems and possibilities that was seen. A qualitative approach was taken and interviews and a workshop was conducted. The empirical findings show that EF exist on different levels within the organization but current feedback processes are currently leaning more towards archiving and storing than knowledge sharing and learning. Also passive dissemination approaches are mostly used whereas active dissemination within the correct context is needed The aim with this paper is to discuss issues and empirical findings that should be considered when creating work methods and systems that support learning by EF and LL dissemination.

Passivity and Activity in Intentional Actions

Mind ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol XC (357) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
DONALD GUSTAFSON
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Actions

X-ray and radium beams in the therapy of nervous diseases

1930 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-199
Author(s):  
R. Ya. Gasul
Keyword(s):  
Therapeutic Effect ◽  
Empirical Finding ◽  
Biological Action ◽  
First Year ◽  
X Rays ◽  
X Ray

It's no secret that the therapeutic effect of X-rays and radium rays was, one might say, an accidental empirical finding. This, however, did not mark the first radiotherapists (who were dermatologists) without data on the biological action of X-rays and radium rays, without an exact dosage, intuitively, in the very first year after the significant discoveries of Rontgen and Kunie, these radiant factors were initially applied in the field of dermatology (before 1902 they did not know anything about the deep action of the rays).

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