Do the imaginings that fictions invite have a direction of fit?

The chapter argues that a normative view of fictionality that I have defended elsewhere allows us to put in a perspicuous way an intriguing claim by Kathleen Stock regarding the imagination. The chapter puts it in terms of the direction of fit (DoF) asymmetry: imaginings prescribed by fictions have the thetic DoF of beliefs and assertions, as opposed to the telic DoF of desires and requests. Although the chapter argues that the imagination itself lacks DoF, it argues for Stock’s claim understood in these terms: imaginings prescribed by fictions have the direction of fit of judgements and assertions, not that of directives and intentions.

CLICKBAIT HEADLINES THROUGH THE PRISM OF SPEECH ACTS THEORY

Statement of the problem. The article discusses the peculiarities of YouTube video clickbait headlines. Some video makers are profit-conscious and deliberately headline their videos using eye-catching words that often have nothing to do with the real content in order to maximize the number of clicking the links. Such headlines aim at deceiving the recipients as for the content of the text or video, affecting their perception, attracting their attention and making them watch the video after all. Such headlines are known as clickbait, for they trap the reader or viewer with deliberately sensational or incomplete information. In this case promotional impact purposefully overrides the nominative function resulting in the peculiarity of the clickbait. The form of speech acts, including stylistic, lexical, syntactical, spelling and punctuation features, makes them stand out of other texts corpus. Particular attention is paid to discerning them as directive illocutionary acts and to proving that they meet all Searle’s requirements for such phenomena including illocutionary point, condition of sincerity, direction of fit. The purpose of the article is to analyze YouTube video clickbait headlines as directive illocutionary acts. Research methodology. The main method of research is qualitative content-analysis that involves revealing a specific meaning expressed with a clickbait headline as a significant element of a media text, as well as a communicative-pragmatic analysis aimed at identifying directive illocutionary force. Research results. Communicative success of clickbait headlines correlates with the “curiosity gap” manifesting itself in recipient’s information lacuna. The recipient should be able to bridge the former to avoid excessive cognitive attempts, clickbait headlines being a tool for that. Conclusions. Clickbait headlines analysis results in identifying them as directive illocutionary acts, for they foreground the perlocutionary function deliberately neglecting nominative one, thus manipulating an information recipient.

A Person-Job Fit Index Using Multiple Intelligences Profiles: Calculating Risk for Chronic Relative Underperformance

In this article an index is constructed to compare profiles with each other, taking into account the interrelatedness of the different variables, and preserving the direction of fit.

A Person-Job Fit Index Using Multiple Intelligences Profiles: Calculating Risk for Chronic Relative Underperformance

In this article an index is constructed to compare profiles with each other, taking into account the interrelatedness of the different variables, and preserving the direction of fit.

Imagistic Imagining Part I

The relationship of attitude imagining to imagistic imagining is explored in depth. Formal characterizations are given of each. A nuanced definition of ‘mental imagery’ is developed as a means to better-defining I-imagining. Competing attempts to define A-imagining in terms of a certain “direction of fit” are criticized, as are attempts to distinguish “mere supposition” from A-imagining. It is then argued that A-imagining and I-imagining pick out overlapping but distinct sets of mental phenomena. Some A-imginings are I-imaginings, and some I-imaginings are A-imaginings. But neither is a sub-set of the other. Several strains of resistance to that conclusion are considered and rejected. Currie & Ravenscroft’s (2002) notion of “recreative imagining” is closely analyzed with the conclusion that it does not pick out a third theoretically important class of imaginings.

Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture III: Indeterminacy as Indecision

This lecture presents my own solution to the problem posed in Lecture I. Instead of a new theory of speech acts, it offers a new theory of the contents expressed by vague assertions, along the lines of the plan expressivism Allan Gibbard has advocated for normative language. On this view, the mental states we express in uttering vague sentences have a dual direction of fit: they jointly constrain the doxastic possibilities we recognize and our practical plans about how to draw boundaries. With this story in hand, I reconsider some of the traditional topics connected with vagueness: bivalence, the sorites paradox, higher-order vagueness, and the nature of vague thought. I conclude by arguing that the expressivist account can explain, as its rivals cannot, what makes vague language useful.

The creation of institutional reality, special theory of relativity, and mere Cambridge change

Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit” (i.e. a world-to-word and a word-to-world direction of fit), synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity—irrespective of whether the account is interpreted as involving causal generation or non-causal grounding of worldly institutional facts—and should be replaced by a more modest theory which interprets the results of Status Function Declarations in terms of mere Cambridge change and institutional truth. I end the paper by indicating the import of this more modest theory for theorizing about the causal potency of institutional phenomena generated by declarations.

Reasoning about Means

An advantage of using conditionals as the standard formula for reasons for action is that the conditional form can also be used to bring out the structure of reasons for belief—thus making possible a close comparison between these kinds of reasons and reasoning. It then becomes apparent that the direction of derivation is the reverse in the practical case when we reason our way to desiring sufficient means to an end from desiring the end to the theoretical case when we derive beliefs from sufficient conditions for their truth. This reversal reflects the opposite direction of fit of beliefs and desires. The implications of this account of reasoning with desires for the moral doctrine of the double effect and for reasoning with respect to emotions are briefly considered.

Conclusion

The overarching aim of this book is to provide a reductionist analysis of what it is to act for a reason in such a way that we intentionally perform the action that we have a reason for performing—an action that will in the end be a basic action—and intentionally achieve the end or goal for which we do this action, as specified by the reason. This analysis of intentional action is reductionist in the sense that it does not appeal to any irreducibly action-theoretical concepts. It does not refer to anything that is unanalysably an action in virtue of involving either a unique type of agent-causation, or anything like a volition, trying, or decision that is assumed to be an act(ion) in a primitive sense. Nor does it refer to any unanalysable states or attitudes that are essentially directed at actions, like intentions and desires (to act). It does refer to a kind of desire—decisive desire—but it is in turn analysed as the causal power of some physical states in conjunction with propositional thinking. The direction of fit between thought and fact here is not that something is thought to fit the facts, but that something is caused to be fact because of how it is thought of....

What the Humean Theory of Motivation Gets Wrong

I show that defenses of the Humean theory of motivation (HTM) often rely on a mistaken assumption. They assume that desires are necessary conditions for being motivated to act because desires (and other non-cognitive states) themselves have a special, essential, necessary feature, such as their world-to-mind direction of fit, that enables them to motivate. Call this the Desire-Necessity Claim. Beliefs (and other cognitive states) cannot have this feature, so they cannot motivate. Or so the story goes. I show that: (a) when pressed, a proponent of HTM encounters a series of prima facie counterexamples to this Claim; and (b) the set of claims that seem to naturally complement the Desire-Necessity Claim as well as provide successful responses to these counterexamples turn out to deny the truth of this same claim. As a result, the Humean implicitly grants that it is at least equally plausible, if not more plausible, to claim that desires are not able to motivate in virtue of what they necessarily possess. Instead, desires contingently possess features that enable them to motivate.