Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

This is a draft of my chapter on Agency and Mistakes for the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency. In it, I focus on performance mistakes and distinguish them from other "derivative" mistakes that we make as agents. I argue that a proper understanding of these mistakes recommends a generalized fallibilism about human agency.

This paper tries to argue that at least some alluring, trendy or fashionable problems to do with thought and language — several of which are discussed in this volume — are in fact alluring, trendy or fashionable red herrings or cul-de-sacs. I shall primarily be concerned with the ascription of thought and intelligence to non-language-users; but, en route to that, will need to brood over our ascriptions of such terms quite generally.

This article finds little to disagree with in Neurophilosophy The sole area of disagreement is with Professor Churchland's attitude to common?sense psychology. Unfortunately, though, the author has already attempted to describe what should be the proper view of common?sense psychology in an earlier article in this very journal. Therefore the present article tries to build on the earlier one, advocating an instrumentalist constraal of many ordinary?language mental terms ? a construal with which Professor Churchland is unlikely to agree, but which, (...) if she did agree, would give her further ammunition with which to beat her opponents. The other main strand of this article suggests that Aristotle has anticipated Professor Churchland (and also most other theoreticians of psychology and physiology), and so, willy?nilly, we are ? correctly ? returning to an Aristotelian picture of human capacity and activity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present and analyze arguments provided for the Psychological Principle of Non-Contradiction which states that one cannot have, or cannot be described as having, contradictory beliefs. By differentiating two possible interpretations of PNC, descriptive and normative, and examining arguments provided for each of them separately I point out the flaws in reasoning in these arguments and difficulties with aligning PNC with the empirical data provided by research done in cognitive and clinical psychology. I claim (...) that PNC cannot be derived from any metaphysical stance regarding the mental phenomena and that having contradictory beliefs should be regarded as possible. Furthermore, I argue that interpreting a subject as having contradictory beliefs, and therefore abandoning PNC, can be more effective in explaining the phenomena of contradictory beliefs and irrational behaviour than solutions consistent with the PNC. (shrink)

Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas non-naturalists (...) are unable to provide equally satisfactory metasemantic explanations. This article first describes how the previous non-naturalist accounts of reference fail to tell us how the normative predicates could have come to refer to the non-natural properties rather than to the natural ones. I will then use the so-called qua-problem to show how the causal theories of reference of naturalists also fail to fix the reference of normative predicates to unique natural properties. Finally, I will suggest that, just as naturalists need to rely on the non-causal mechanism of reference magnetism to solve the previous problem, non-naturalists, too, can rely on the very same idea to respond to the pressing metasemantic challenges that they face concerning reference. (shrink)

1. When we attribute beliefs, desires, and other states of common sense psychology to a person, or for that matter to an animal or an artifact, we are assuming or presupposing that the person or object can be treated as an intentional system. 2. An intentional system is one which is rational through and through; its beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography…. Its desires are those it ought to have, (...) given its biological needs and the most practicable means of satisfying them…. And its behavior will consist of those acts that it would be rational for an agent with those beliefs and desires to perform. [beliefs + desires  action] 3. If rationality is absent, we cannot coherently ascribe beliefs at all. 4. Therefore, no experiment could demonstrate that people systematically invoke invalid or irrational inferential strategies. (shrink)

SummaryIn this article I am criticizing Davidson's claim that psychological description and explanation are impossible without a strong assumption of rationality of the subject. I am trying to dispute his thesis that presupposition of coherence between propositional attitudes must be treated as a constitutive principle of psychology which fundamentally differentiates this science from physics and precludes the existence of strict psycho‐physical laws. Philosophical and empirical arguments are brought forward tho show that Davidson overestimates the role of rationality considerations in psychology. (...) There is no a priori reason why mental states should not be gradually included in a deterministic nomological net.RésuméDans cet article, je critique la thèse de Davidson selon laquelle la description et I'explication psychologiques sont impossibles si I'on ne fait pas I'hypothèse forte de la rationalité du sujet. Je conteste sa thése que la présuppositions d'une cohérence entre les attitudes propositionnelles doive être considérée comme un principe constitutif de la psychologie, principe qui la différencierait fondamentalement de la physique et interdirait I'existence de lois psycho‐physiques strictes. Des arguments philosophiques et empiriques sont produits pour montrer que Davidson surestime le rôle des considérations de rationalité en psychologie. II n'y a pas de raison a priori pour que des états mentaux ne soient pas graduellement introduits dans un réseau nomologique déterministe.ZusammenfassungIn diesem Artikel kritisiere ich Davidsons Behauptung, wonach psychologische Beschreibun‐gen und Erklärungen ohne starke Annahmen bezüglich der Rationalität des subjektes nicht mög‐lich sind. Ich versuche, die These zu widerlegen, der gemäss die Voraussetzung der Kohärenz zwischen propositionalen Haltungen als Konstitutives Prinzip der Psychologie betrachten werden muss, das diese Wissenschaft grundlegend von der Physik unterscheidet und deshalb auch die Möglichkeit von strenge psycho‐physischen Gesetzen ausschliesst. Philosophische und empirische Argumente werden vorgelegt urn zu zeigen, dass Davidson die Rolle von Rationalitätserwägungen in der Psychologie überschätzt. Es gibt keine apriorischen Gründe dafür, dass mentale Zustände nicht nach und nach in ein deterministisches Netzwerk von Gesetzen eingefügt werden könnten. (shrink)

Many physicalists are committed to an austere dichotomy: either beliefs, desires and intentions are scientifically respectable or attributions of such attitudes are all false. One physicalist, Daniel Dennett, offers a third alternative, which seems to permit a kind of instrumentalism concerning attitudes. I argue that Dennett's attempt to reconcile an instrumentalistic account of attributions of attitudes with a thoroughgoing physicalism founders on unresolvable conflicts between his official theory and his actual treatment of key concepts. As a result, instrumentalism concerning attitudes (...) is exposed as inadequate to be a genuine alternative to the physicalist's dichotomy. (shrink)

A historical theory of rational norms claims that, if we are supposed to think rationally, this is because it is biologically normal for us to do so. The historical theorist is committed to the view that we are supposed to think rationally only if, in the past, adult humans sometimes thought rationally. I consider whether there is any plausible model of rational norms that can be adopted by the historical theorist that is compatible with the claim that adult human beings (...) are subject to rational norms, given certain plausible empirical assumptions about our history and capabilities. I suggest that there is one such model: this model centres on the idea that a procedure is rational if it has been endorsed (or at least not rejected) by mechanisms that have the function to ensure that the subject learns to reason in a way that approaches a certain kind of optimality. (shrink)

Clinical delusions have traditionally been characterized as beliefs in psychiatry. However, philosophers have recently engaged with the empirical literature and produced a number of objections to the so-called doxastic status of delusion, stemming mainly from the mismatch between the functional role of delusions and that expected of beliefs. In response to this, an appeal to dispositionalism about the nature of belief has been proposed to vindicate the doxastic status of delusion. In this paper, I first present the objections to attributing (...) beliefs to delusional patients and the application of dispositionalism in the attempt to vindicate doxasticism. I then assess this application and some responses to the objections to the doxastic characterization. Finally, I offer some conclusions about the limits of folk-psychological concepts in the characterization and explanation of complex psychological phenomena such as delusions. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I discuss one apparent counterexample to the rationality constraint on belief ascription. The fact that there are inconsistent believers does not seem compatible with the idea that only rational creatures can be ascribed beliefs. I consider Davidson's explanation of the possibility of inconsistent believers and claim that it involves a reformulation of the rationality constraint in terms of the believers' subscription to norms of rationality. I shall argue that Davidson's strategy is partially successful, but that the (...) emphasis on the notion of subscription badly fits with the motivations behind his theory of interpretation. (shrink)

This paper challenges some leading views about the conditions under which the ascription of beliefs and desires can make sense of, or provide reasons for, a creature's behavior. I argue that it is unnecessary for behavior to proceed from beliefs and desires according to the principles of logic and decision theory, or even from principles that generally get things right. I also deny that it is necessary for behavior to proceed from principles that, though perhaps subrational, are similar to those (...) that we ourselves use. I then propose some conditions that are considerably weaker, and argue that they fulfill the descriptive and explanatory requirements of intentional ascription. (shrink)

How we evaluate things and what we desire are closely connected. In typical cases, the things we desire are things that we evaluate as good or desirable. According to evaluation theories of desire, this connection is a very tight one: desires are evaluations of their objects as good or as desirable. There are two main varieties of this view. According to Doxastic Evaluativism, to desire that p is to believe or judge that p is good. According to Perceptual Evaluativism, to (...) desire that p is to perceive p as being good (or for p to seem good). The present paper poses a puzzle for such views. The puzzle should be familiar to theorists interested in the normativity and metaphysics of the emotions, but I am unaware of its application to desire. The aim of the present paper is to present the puzzle as it applies to desire, which should be of independent interest, but I also hope that by shining a light on the puzzle in this domain, we might put ourselves in a better position to offer a solution in all cases. At the end of the paper, I gesture towards a promising way ahead that departs from relying on contradictory contents. (shrink)

We propose another positive illusion that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.