Commonsense psychology, dual visual streams, and the individuation of action

Philosophical Psychology 25 (1):25 - 47 (2012)
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Abstract

Psychologists and philosophers are often tempted to make general claims about the importance of certain experimental results for our commonsense notions of intentional agency, moral responsibility, and free will. It is a strong intuition that if the agent does not intentionally control her own behavior, her behavior will not be an expression of agency, she will not be morally responsible for its consequences, and she will not be acting as a free agent. It therefore seems natural that the interest centers on the notion of intentional control. If it can be experimentally shown that agents do as a matter of fact not control their own actions, even though they think they do, it will have far reaching consequences for our moral psychology. In this paper I look at recent eliminative arguments allegedly demonstrating that our commonsense notion of intentional control is incompatible with experimental data in support of the dual visual stream theory

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Thor Grünbaum
University of Copenhagen

Citations of this work

Conscious Action/Zombie Action.Joshua Shepherd - 2016 - Noûs 50 (2):419-444.
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Freedom in Uncertainty.Filippos Stamatiou - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Copenhagen

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References found in this work

Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Intention, plans, and practical reason.Michael Bratman - 1987 - Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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