Pickering & Garrod (P&G) explain dialogue dynamics in terms of forward modeling and prediction-by-simulation mechanisms. Their theory dissolves a strict segregation between production and comprehension processes, and it links dialogue to action-based theories of joint action. We propose that the theory can also incorporate intentional strategies that increase communicative success: for example, signaling strategies that help remaining predictable and forming common ground.

What do we mean when we say that some group believes something? Do we simply mean that all the members of the group believe it, or are we acknowledging the existence of some kind of group agent? According to Margaret Gilbert, talk about group mental states refers to the specific kind of agreements she calls joint commitments — that is, to collectively believe something means to be committed with others to believe it. In my article, I will first present Gilbert’s (...) approach in more detail but will ultimately show that this approach is problematic and will refute it. I will briefly consider the most common solution to the problems Gilbert’s account faces, which lies in replacing collective beliefs with acceptances, but I will show that this solution will not do either. The solution I will then present will be based on Daniel Dennett’s intentional strategy, which is a method of interpreting the things around us and predicting their behaviour by treating them as rational agents with relevant intentions. I will try to show that all the problematic cases of collective belief can be explained by applying the intentional strategy to the groups in question. (shrink)

This comment on Michael Bratman's Planning and the Stability of Intention focuses on sources of the rational stability of intentions which are not related to the presence of reflectively overrideable non-deliberative habits of (non)reconsideration. It is true that intentions have a rational resistance to reconsideration, but this stability can be understood as a by-product of the scheduling of cognitive tasks. This scheduling effect is intrinsic to all actual systems, that is, systems whose reasoning is not instantaneous or otherwise costless. Additionally, (...) rules governing practical reasoning, including rules governing reasoning with intentions, will not uniformly be subject to overrides resulting from reflective operations. Hence there is no basis for distinguishing human reasoners from artificial reasoners by reference to an alleged human capacity to reflectivity evaluate its own reasoning operations. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives toward internal and external stakeholders can independently contribute to employee attitudes and behaviors. However, little is known about the joint effects of (in)congruent internal-external CSR strategies on employee outcomes. Drawing from social exchange theory, we argue that when employees perceive that their organizations excessively favor CSR efforts to external rather than internal stakeholders, it can trigger a psychological contract breach, resulting in increased employees' turnover intention. We utilized a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method and the (...) data of 511 employee from various industries in the Philippines to investigate the interaction effects. The results revealed that a congruent CSR strategy with high internal and external CSR perceptions is critical in fulfilling employees' psychological contracts and retaining employees. However, for employees with low perceived internal CSR, a high incongruent CSR perception led to a psychological contract breach and ultimately to high turnover intention. Psychological contract breach weakened the negative joint effect of high perceived internal and external CSR on turnover intention and strengthened the positive effect of high perceived incongruent CSR on turnover intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In two experiments subjects attempted to identify words presented below the objective threshold using two task strategies emphasizing either allowing a word to pop into their heads or looking carefully at the stimulus field . Words were selected to represent both meaningful and structural dimensions. We also asked subjects to indicate their strategy preference and to rate their motivation to perform well. In the absence of conscious perception, both strategy preference and word meaning interacted with strategy condition, (...) mediating the accuracy of subjects′ direct word identification judgments. Motivation also mediated performance. Word structure had no effect. Unconscious perception manifested only in the pop condition, underscoring the importance of task strategy in determining whether subliminal effects are observed. A follow-up control experiment using sham flashes demonstrated that strategy preference and motivation effects were not artifacts resulting from performance feedback cues. (shrink)

Research suggests that attitudes guide individuals’ thinking and actions. In this study, we explore the monetary intelligence construct and investigate the relationships between a formative model of money attitudes involving affective, behavioral, and cognitive components and several sets of outcome variables—unethical intentions, intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction, and coping strategies. Based on 515 managers in the Republic of Macedonia, we test our model for the whole sample and also cross sector and gender. Managers’ negative stewardship behavior and positive cognitive meaning (...) of money define MI which, in turn, is related to unethical intentions. Positive cognition in the public sector and poor stewardship behavior in the private sector contribute to unethical intentions, respectively. Good stewards have higher intrinsic and lower extrinsic job satisfaction, those in the private sector, in particular. Affective motive and stewardship behavior are related to their stronger “approach” coping strategies and weaker “avoidance” coping strategies. Affective motive and stewardship behavior contribute to coping responses for managers in the public and private sectors, respectively. Further, the relationship between stewardship behavior and coping mechanisms exists for females, but not for males. We demonstrate that MI, a type of social intelligence, allows individuals to monitor their own emotions, behaviors, and cognitions and guides their thinking and actions. (shrink)

Based on theory of planned behavior, we develop a theoretical model involving love of money (LOM), job satisfaction (attitude), coping strategies/responses (perceived behavioral control), work environment (subjective norm), and work-related behavioral intentions (behavioral intention). We tested this model using job satisfaction as a mediator and sector (public versus private), personal character (good apples versus bad apples), gender, and income as moderators in a sample of 515 employees and their managers in the Republic of Macedonia. For the whole sample, both coping (...) strategies and helpful work environment were related to high job satisfaction. The relationship between work environment and job satisfaction was the strongest link in all subsequent analyses. High LOM is associated with unfavorable work environment for employees in the private sectors and people with low income and is positively associated with coping strategies for bad apples. A favorable work environment was related to less corrupt intent for people in the public sectors, good apples, and with low income, but not for their counterparts. Coping strategies were related to high job satisfaction for males, but not for females. Our counterintuitive results showed that bad apples’ high LOM was related to low corrupt intent. Our theoretical model sheds new light and provides novel theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to Macedonian managers’ corrupt intent. (shrink)

Strategies are mentioned across a variety of domains, from business ethics, to the philosophy of war, philosophy of sport, game theory, and others. However, despite their wide use, very little has been said about how to think about what strategies are or how they relate to other prominently discussed concepts. In this article, I probe the close connection between strategies and plans, which have been much more thoroughly characterized in the philosophy of action. After highlighting the challenges of analyzing strategies (...) in terms of plans, I show how the work done on the connection between plans and intentions can inspire further questions about the nature of strategy. I conclude by showing how one particular innovation in the understanding of plans—how they can be more or less partial—can be used to help us to mark what makes for a good strategy. (shrink)

Trust constitutes a fundamental strategy to deal with risks and uncertainty in complex societies. In line with the vast literature stressing the importance of trust in doctor–patient relationships, trust is therefore regularly suggested as a way of dealing with the risks of medical artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, this approach has come under charge from different angles. At least two lines of thought can be distinguished: (1) that trusting AI is conceptually confused, that is, that we cannot trust AI; and (...) (2) that it is also dangerous, that is, that we should not trust AI—particularly if the stakes are as high as they routinely are in medicine. In this paper, we aim to defend a notion of trust in the context of medical AI against both charges. To do so, we highlight the technically mediated intentions manifest in AI systems, rendering trust a conceptually plausible stance for dealing with them. Based on literature from human–robot interactions, psychology and sociology, we then propose a novel model to analyse notions of trust, distinguishing between three aspects: reliability, competence, and intentions. We discuss each aspect and make suggestions regarding how medical AI may become worthy of our trust. (shrink)

I argue that if intentions are what Grice, and most contemporary action theorists, take them to be, they are inessential for acts of speaker meaning. More specifically, my primary aim is to show that the consensus view of speaker meaning is in deep tension with certain plausible, and widely accepted, cognitive constraints on rational intention pertaining to an agent’s assessment of her prospects of achieving her goal. My secondary aim is to offer an initial case for thinking that the best (...) way to resolve this tension is to give up the claim that meaning is fundamentally a matter of intention. In pursuing this strategy, we will see some of the potential benefits of Bratman’s (1987) work on intentions, plans, and practical reasoning for the theory of meaning, including some interesting consequences of his rejection of the so-called ‘Simple View’ on which we intentionally do only those things that we specifically intend to do. Moreover, our discussion will help to illustrate how some familiar tools from decision theory might find new use in discussions of meaning and communication. (shrink)

Intentional sampling methods are non-probabilistic procedures that select a group of individuals for a sample with the purpose of meeting specific prescribed criteria. Intentional sampling methods are intended for exploratory research or pilot studies where tight budget constraints preclude the use of traditional randomized representative sampling. The possibility of subsequently generalize statistically from such deterministic samples to the general population has been the issue of long standing arguments and debates. Nevertheless, the intentional sampling techniques developed in this (...) paper explore pragmatic strategies for overcoming some of the real or perceived shortcomings and limitations of intentional sampling in practical applications. (shrink)

Recent work in the business ethics field has called attention to the promise inherent in the concept of authenticity for enriching the ways we think about core issues at the intersection of management ethics and practice, like moral character, ethical choices, leadership, and corporate social responsibility [Driver, 2006; Jackson, 2005; Ladkin, 2006]. In this paper, I aim to extend these contributions by focusing on authenticity in relation to a set of organizational processes related to strategy making; most specifically an (...) organization’s strategic intent, arguing that these provide an ideal venue for particularising this exploration, as they represent the key processes through which an organization defines the self it aspires to be. In order to do this, I examine specifically what a shift from “business as usual” to the search for the creation of a more authentic corporate self might look like in practice, contending that such a shift offers the possibility for improving both the moral good and the business outcomes of an institution simultaneously. I conclude with assessment of the risks inherent in undertaking such a search for more authentic strategic intention in business organizations today. (shrink)

During the last dozen years, Daniel Dennett has been elaborating an interconnected – and increasingly influential – set of views in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and those parts of moral philosophy that deal with the notions of freedom, responsibility, and personhood. The central unifying theme running through Dennett's writings on each of these topics is his concept of an intentional system. He invokes the concept to “legitimize” mentalistic predicates ("Brainstorms", p. xvii), to explain the theoretical (...) strategy of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, and, ultimately, to attempt a reconciliation between “our vision of ourselves as responsible, free, rational agents, and our vision of ourselves as complex parts of the physical world of science” (BS, p. x). My goal in this paper is to raise some doubts about the “intentional coin” (BS, p. xviii) with which Dennett proposes to purchase his moral and “mental treasures.”. (shrink)

We will study game trees as representations of rational choice and as representations of player preferences, and promises as public announcements of genuine intentions. Promises in a game change what players know about the preferences of other players. They can be modelled as operations that change a given game into a different game where players know more about the effects of their strategies.

The present paper investigates the nature of norms in correlation to the philosophical notions of intentionality and disposition. Following Amselek (2017; 2020), norms are here understood as tools giving the measure of what is possible to do. Intentionality, understood as “being-about”, in relation to norms allows us both to form a description of reality in the norm, and to correct our actions in order to correspond to the norm. Through the notion of disposition, i.e., on the one hand, the linguistic (...) manifestation of the norm and, on the other hand, the physical presence of individual mental states or social states-of-affairs, the paper investigates the “force of norms” and the “mystery of effectiveness”. Elaborating on the notion of “nomotropism”, which highlights the different ways in which a norm may work or operate, and drawing inspiration from Dennett’s philosophy of mind, the paper suggests that legal norms, which allow for the expectation that social behaviors will be measured by specific standards or yardsticks, clearly offer an evolutionary advantage in the regulation of human relationships. (shrink)

The ontology of (merely) intentional objects is a can of worms. If we can avoid ontological commitment to such entities, we should. In this paper, I offer a strategy for accomplishing that. This is to reject the traditional act-object account of intentionality in favor of an adverbial account. According to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of bearing the thinking-about relation to dragons, but of engaging in the activity of thinking dragon-wise.

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in (...) artificial intelligence and cognitive science more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)

The primary aim of this article is to find out what different linguists say about the role of intentions in the study and explanations of language change. I try to investigate if in the explanation of language change, “having an intention” does any explanatory work. If intentions play a role, how do they do it, at which point it is salutary to invoke them, and what do they contribute to the explanation of language change? My main claim is that speakers’ (...) intentions have a role to play only on higher linguistic levels, e.i., in speakers’ communicative strategies. Since this is a celebration for Kathy Wilkes and her contribution to goal-directed behaviour, in the Concluding remarks I go back to her remarks on language and intentions and see how they fi t my discussion in this paper. (shrink)

The achievement of intentional learning is a powerful paradigm for the objectives and methods of the teaching of philosophy. This paradigm sees the objectives and methods of such teaching as based not simply on the mastery of content, but as rooted in attempts to shape the various affective and cognitive factors that influence students’ learning efforts. The goals of such pedagogy is to foster an intentional learning orientation, one characterized by self-awareness, active monitoring of the learning process, and (...) a desire for publicly certified expertise. I provide a number of examples of philosophy-specific teaching strategies that follow this paradigm. (shrink)

In this paper an empirical theory about the nature of intention is sketched. After stressing the necessity of reckoning with intentions in philosophy of action a strategy for deciding empirically between competing theories of intention is exposed and applied for criticizing various philosophical theories of intention, among others that of Bratman. The hypothesis that intentions are optimality beliefs is defended on the basis of empirical decision theory. Present empirical decision theory however does not provide an empirically satisfying elaboration of (...) the desirability concepts used in these optimality beliefs. Based on process theories of deliberation two hypotheses for filling this gap are developed. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel argument against intentionalism about demonstrative reference. The term ‘intentionalism’ is used to denote the view saying that the referent of a demonstrative expression is determined by the speaker’s intention. My argument focuses on ‘mismatch cases’, roughly, the cases in which the speaker’s intention determines a different object from the one which appears to be the referent in the light of contextual factors. The opponents of intentionalism claim that intentionalism yields simply incorrect reference predictions in these (...) cases. Many intentionalism defenders claim to the contrary, i.e. that the relevant kind of intention fixes the referent in line with the contextual factors and thus the theory provides correct predictions. I will argue that this strategy is objectionable as the concept of the relevant referential intention is genuinely parasitic on non-intentional accounts of demonstrative reference. (shrink)

The key to action control is one’s ability to adequately predict the consequences of one’s actions. Predictive processing theories assume that forward models enable rapid “preplay” to assess the match between predicted and intended action effects. Here we propose the novel hypothesis that “reading” another’s action intentions requires a rich forward model of that agent’s action. Such a forward model can be obtained and enriched through learning by either practice or simulation. Based on this notion, we ran a series of (...) studies on soccer goalkeepers and novices, who predicted the intended direction of penalties being kicked at them in a computerized penalty-reading task. In line with hypotheses, extensive practice in penalty kicking improved performance in penalty reading among goalkeepers who had extensive prior experience in penalty blocking but not in penalty kicking. A robust benefit in penalty reading did not result from practice in kinesthetic motor imagery of penalty kicking in novice participants. To test whether goalkeepers actually use such penalty-kicking imagery in penalty reading, we trained a machine-learning classifier on multivariate fMRI activity patterns to distinguish motor-imagery-related from attention-related strategies during a penalty-imagery training task. We then applied that classifier to fMRI data related to a separate penalty-reading task and showed that 2/3 of all correctly read penalty kicks were classified as engaging the motor-imagery circuit rather than merely the attention circuit. This study provides initial evidence that, in order to read our opponent’s action intention, it helps to observe their action kinematics, and use our own forward model to predict the sensory consequences of “our” penalty kick if we were to produce these action kinematics ourselves. In sum, it takes practice as a penalty kicker to become a penalty killer. (shrink)

Human interactions are often improvised rather than scripted, which suggests that efficient coordination can emerge even when collective plans are largely underspecified. One possibility is that such forms of coordination primarily rely on mutual influences between interactive partners, and on perception–action couplings such as entrainment or mimicry. Yet some forms of improvised joint actions appear difficult to explain solely by appealing to these emergent mechanisms. Here, we focus on collective free improvisation, a form of highly unplanned creative practice where both (...) agents' subjective reports and the complexity of their interactions suggest that shared intentions may sometimes emerge to support coordination during the course of the improvisation, even in the absence of verbal communication. In four experiments, we show that shared intentions spontaneously emerge during collective musical improvisations, and that they foster coordination on multiple levels, over and beyond the mere influence of shared information. We also show that musicians deploy communicative strategies to manifest and propagate their intentions within the group, and that this predicts better coordination. Overall, our results suggest that improvised and scripted joint actions are more continuous with one another than it first seems, and that they differ merely in the extent to which they rely on emergent or planned coordination mechanisms. (shrink)

This study aimed at exploring the impact of post-epidemic era on teachers’ behavioral intention of distance education. In this study, purposive sampling method was used to enroll 390 teachers in colleges and universities, high schools and vocational schools, and junior high and elementary schools to be the research subjects for the questionnaire survey. A total of 360 questionnaires were collected for statistics, and AMOS 23.0 statistical software was used to analyze the correlation between variables. Meanwhile, a structural equation model was (...) used to analyze and verify the impact of the technology acceptance model, information system success model, and diffusion of innovations theory. According to the results, the system quality of distance teaching platforms certainly affected perceived usefulness, and perceived usefulness affected teachers’ attitudes toward using distance teaching systems. In addition, perceived ease of use had an impact on perceived usefulness, and trialability had an impact on teachers’ attitudes toward using distance teaching systems. Finally, teachers’ attitude toward using a distance teaching system also affected their behavioral intention. According to the results, suggestions were made in this study to teachers and students for distance teaching. Additionally, the main contribution of this study lies in providing specific strategies for further distance teaching through empirical results in combination with on-site teaching. (shrink)

This paper analyzes three contrasting strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action, and draws parallels between them and similar strategies of scientific model-construction. Gricean modeling involves identifying primitive building blocks of intentional agency, and building up from such building blocks to prototypically agential behaviors. Analogical modeling is based on picking out an exemplary type of intentional agency, which is used as a model for other agential types. Theoretical modeling involves reasoning about (...) intentional agency in terms of some domain-general framework of lawlike regularities, which involves no detailed reference to particular building blocks or exemplars of intentional agency. Given the contrasting procedural approaches that they employ and the different types of knowledge that they embody, the three strategies are argued to provide mutually complementary perspectives on intentional agency. (shrink)

This article looks at the growing practice of women's ritualization, in which women are devising and enacting their own rituals to mark life events. It examines Turner's work on liminality and offers a feminist critique. It then goes on to explore women's ritual as a conscious and intentional strategy, drawing on Catherine Bell's work and extracts from interviews. Finally, it poses questions about the ways in which women's ritual may be seen as subversive of the status quo.

In this article, I develop an account of the use of intentional predicates in cognitive neuroscience explanations. As pointed out by Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, intentional language abounds in neuroscience theories. According to Bennett and Hacker, the subpersonal use of intentional predicates results in conceptual confusion. I argue against this overly strong conclusion by evaluating the contested language use in light of its explanatory function. By employing conceptual resources from the contemporary philosophy of science, I show (...) that although the use of intentional predicates in mechanistic explanations sometimes leads to explanatorily inert claims, intentional predicates can also successfully feature in mechanistic explanations as tools for the functional analysis of the explanandum phenomenon. Despite the similarities between my account and Daniel Dennett's intentional-stance approach, I argue that intentional stance should not be understood as a theory of subpersonal causal explanation, and therefore cannot be used to assess the explanatory role of intentional predicates in neuroscience. Finally, I outline a general strategy for answering the question of what kind of language can be employed in mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

In this book, Dennett determines just how far we can push the idea that mental states are distinguished by intentionality, that is, by the fact that they have content in virtue of being about, or directed towards, the world at large. Intentionality is characteristic of such states as belief and desire, since all belief is belief of something or that something be the case. In contrast to the physical stance and the design stance, the intentional stance is the predictive (...) attitude or strategy philosophers or cognitive scientists adopt when, in order to explain the behavior of a sufficiently complex system, they treat it as if it had beliefs and desires and acted rationally on its beliefs to satisfy its desires. Dennett insists that this stance is essentially a heuristic that informs the formation of scientific theories which are void of mental state terms. For Dennett, the interesting question, whether we are considering mechanical systems, computer systems, enzymes, microorganisms, vervet monkeys, humans, or martians, is just how far should we go in employing the intentional strategy? At what point must we abandon a strict realism about beliefs, desires, and the other concepts of folk psychology? (shrink)

Husserl’s theories, which systematise the role of reflection and consciousness, can be used to give an alternative view of organisational evolution as the flow of presence punctuated by absence. This perspective adopts a contrasting approach to that of the poststructuralist. A synthesis of the Identity metaphor with the theory of strategy allows us to contextualise an application of Husserl’s theory of the epoche (the intentional reduction) and link both ontological and epistemic dimensions in a theory of organisation. The (...) firm is seen as acquiring a temporal dimension through the consciousness of strategic policy and its successive images are modelled as analogous with the epoche. This modelling process also links in with the collective belief system of the organisational paradigm, which is represented to the organisation and unfolded extrinsically as a series of images which are the discernible face of Strategic policy. This facilitates a modified social-constructivism which is better able to accommodate the actuality of organisational development than more extreme process-orientated accounts of organisation. A debate is re-opened on these themes which have influenced organisation studies from a philosophical slant. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has exacerbated the labour shortage, and promoting entrepreneurship to spur job creation is one of the most effective strategies to address this problem. Entrepreneurs must lengthen their employment or start-up cycles due to COVID-19 normalisation. Consequently, the impact of career willingness to delay satisfaction on entrepreneurial ambition is investigated in this research via an online survey in Jiangsu Province, China. The findings show that students with a high level of career delayed contentment has a higher (...) level of entrepreneurial intention, implying that career delayed contentment intention influences EI positively. Psychological capital modifies this process, increasing the influence of job delayed satisfaction on EI by strengthening PC. PC’s significant components are self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and flexibility. This study combines the willingness to wait for satisfaction with the willingness to start a business, providing a valuable reference for reducing the work condition caused by the COVID-19 epidemic. (shrink)

Two fundamental business ethics issues that repeatedly surface in the academic literature relate to business's role in the development of public policy [Suarez, S. L.: 2000, Does Business Learn? (The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI); Roberts, R. W. and D. D. Bobek: 2004, Accounting, Organizations and Society 29(5-6), 565-590] and its role in responsibly managing the natural environment [Newton, L.: 2005, Business Ethics and the Natural Environment (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford)]. When studied together, researchers often examine if, and how, (...) corporations influence environmental policy decisions. Drawing from literatures on corporate political activity, corporate social and environmental performance, and corporate environmental disclosure, we develop and empirically examine two research questions concerning the relations between corporate political expenditures, environmental performance, and environmental disclosure. The questions are: (1) Do corporations that are poorer environmental performers spend more on political activities than their better-performing counterparts? (2) Is there an association between corporations' spending on political activities and the extent of their financial report environmental disclosures? We investigated these questions through analyses of data we gathered on a sample consisting of 119 U.S. environmentally sensitive firms for the 2001-2002 election cycle. After controlling for firm size and specific industry effects, our tests reveal a significant, inverse relationship between firm environmental performance and political spending. This is consistent with the notion that U.S. firms with relatively poorer environmental performance records engage more intensely in corporate political activities as part of their overall strategic management of their relationship with the state. In addition, a significant and positive association between the amount of political spending and the extent of environmental disclosure suggests that environmental disclosure and political spending are both proactive, complementary tactics to strategically manage public policy pressure. If corporations' strategies are intentionally designed to unreasonably limit their environmental responsibilities or to misrepresent firm environmental performance, then we argue that these activities reflect a significant lapse in ethical conduct. (shrink)

The achievement of intentional learning is a powerful paradigm for the objectives and methods of the teaching of philosophy. This paradigm sees the objectives and methods of such teaching as based not simply on the mastery of content, but as rooted in attempts to shape the various affective and cognitive factors that influence students’ learning efforts. The goal of such pedagogy is to foster an intentional learning orientation, one characterized by self-awareness, active monitoring of the learning process, and (...) a desire for publicly certified expertise. I provide a number of examples of philosophy-specific teaching strategies that follow this paradigm. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kyle Ferguson argues for an individualist account of Sellarsian we-intentions. According to the individualist account, we-intentions’ intersubjective form renders them shareable rather than requiring that they be shared. Contrary to collectivist accounts, one may we-intend independently of whether and without presupposing that one's community shares one's we-intentions. After providing textual support, Ferguson proposes and implements a strategy of reportorial ascent, which strengthens the case for the individualist account. Reportorial ascent involves reflecting on the sentences one would (...) use to report or self-ascribe we-intentions. As Ferguson argues, we-intention-reporting sentences have ‘I’ as their subjects, which reveals that their truth conditions, like the performance conditions of their expressive counterparts, are satisfied by the individual who reports or expresses those intentions rather than by the host community. We-intention-reporting sentences, which make explicit both dimensions of independence and shareability, also reveal that intersubjective form is a feature of we-intentions qua mental states rather than a feature of their contents. Ferguson concludes that although the individualist account needs further development, the sketch provided in this chapter is compelling enough to demand that individualism and independence be moved from the periphery to the core of our study of we-intentions in Sellars's practical philosophy. (shrink)

The work's central thesis is that meaningful discourse would be impossible unless the discoursers had distributive access to realities structured independently of language, such an access in fact as can service a metaphysically significant correspondence theory of truth. The thesis is deployed against the view, advanced by Hilary Putnam and by Richard Rorty, that we cannot exit the circle of words so as to secure any version of external realism. ;To establish the thesis, an intentionalist hermeneutics is developed: Due to (...) the plasticity of lexical meanings, the meaning of a text cannot be compositionally derived from linguistic conventions alone; the author's intentions, constituted in part by the extra-linguistic narrative matrices framing his life, must be consulted. The finding that a text's ontological commitments are determined by authorial intentions blocks Putnam's attempt to derive the ontological indeterminacy of human discourse from the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. And his charge that this appeal to intentions is circular is faulted for its reliance on an inadequate, psycholinguistic model of intentions. ;It is then argued that meaningful discourse must be anchored, through narratively coherent transactions conducted without words, to realities structured beyond words: Our pre-linguistic ancestors could never have developed a meaningful description scheme unless its terms elicited among its original users sub-linguistic reality-negotiating strategies appropriate to encountered realities, strategies like those displayed by alexic brutes. The internal realist's claim that our grasp of reality is everywhere structured by language is consequently afforded a corrective supplement: That our grasp of language is everywhere structured by a sub-linguistic grasp of reality. The strategies our pre-linguistic ancestors used to locate and manage encountered realities indispensably underlie our present use of language and provide us with an extra-linguistic access to those realities, an access that is sufficient, it is argued, to support a substantive correspondence theory of truth: An assertion corresponds to reality as long as the reality-negotiating strategies it conjugates can be successfully implemented. And this truth-conferring conception of correspondence, constituted by an appropriateness to reality, can arguably sustain a robust version of realism. (shrink)

The interpretation and the indirect reporting of a speaker’s communicative intentions lie at the crossroad between pragmatics, argumentation theory, and forensic linguistics. Since the leading case Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., in the United States the legal problem of determining the truth of a quotation is essentially equated with the correctness of its indirect reporting, i.e. the representation of the speaker’s intentions. For this reason, indirect reports are treated as interpretations of what the speaker intends to communicate. Theoretical considerations, (...) aimed at establishing the pragmatic meaning of an utterance and differentiating between presumptive and non-presumptive interpretation, are thus interwoven with the practical legal need of distinguishing a correct indirect report from an indirect one or a misquotation. An incorrect report or a misquotation has the dialectical effect of attributing to the misquoted party commitments that he never held, which the latter needs to rebut. This shifting of the burden of persuasion can be increased by using strategically the conflict between the presumptive interpretation of an utterance and the non-presumptive one, i.e. the different types of pragmatic ambiguity. When an interpreter is confronted with an utterance taken out of its dialogical context, his interpretative process is not guided by the actual context or intention, but rather the most frequent or prototypical dialogical setting or the most typical individual purpose that it could have served to achieve. This presumptive reconstruction can be used to provide a prima facie case that the other party needs to reject. The stronger the interpretative presumptions a speaker needs to rebut, the more effective the misquotation strategy. The conflict between the systematic and the presumptive process of interpretation can be represented as an argumentative mechanism of reconstruction of the individual intention, which allows one to assess the reasonableness of the interpretative reasoning. (shrink)

In work that spans almost four decades, Michael Bratman has developed a rich account of human agency. At the centre of this account lies an understanding of intentions as individual planning states. A significant strand in this enterprise has been his work on shared agency, culminating in his 2014 monograph, which aims to extend his account of individual agency to cover cases of what he calls “modest sociality”, i.e. simple cases of acting together. Central to this endeavour is Bratman’s analysis (...) of shared intention, which for him is not a sui generis phenomenon, but can be understood in terms of his concept of individual agency, as the main components of his account of shared intention are already available in his account of the intentions of a single person. In this paper, I want to critically examine Bratman’s approach to shared intention. I will proceed as follows: In Section 1, I will describe the analytic strategy that guides Bratman’s analysis. Section 2 will introduce his central claim that the fulfilment of a list of conditions suffices for a shared intention to be present. In Sections 3 to 5, I will discuss and criticise some of these conditions. In Section 6, I will draw some positive conclusions from my critical arguments. (shrink)

Air pollution is a considerable environmental stressor for urban residents in developing countries. Perceived health risks of air pollution might induce migration intention among inhabitants. The current study employed the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) to investigate the rationale behind the domestic and international migration intentions among 475 inhabitants in Hanoi, Vietnam – one of the most polluted capital cities worldwide. We found that people perceiving more impacts of air pollution in their daily life are more likely to have migration intention. (...) The effect of perceived air pollution impact on international migration intention is stronger than that of domestic migration. Acknowledging a family member’s air pollution-induced sickness moderated the association between perceived air pollution impact and domestic migration intention, while the personal experience of air pollution-induced sickness did not. In contrast, the moderation effect of personal experience of sickness became significant in the international migration circumstance, but the effect of information about a family member’s sickness was trivial. The findings suggest that urban inhabitants’ consideration of air pollution averting strategies reflects some characteristics of Homo Oeconomicus. Additionally, the individual’s socio-economic decision is seemingly insignificant on a social scale. Still, through environmental stressors as catalysts, such decisions might result in considerable social outcomes (e.g., internal migration and emigration). (shrink)

This article discusses the discursive strategies used in some newspaper campaign advertisements for Nigeria’s 2011 elections with a view to unveiling the socio-political motifs and messages of the adverts. Data for the study comprised 60 full-page newspaper election campaign adverts of the two strongest political parties in the country: the People’s Democratic Party and Action Congress of Nigeria published between February and April 2011, a period that can be referred to as the peak period of electioneering campaigns for the 2011 (...) elections in Nigeria. The data gathered were analysed using the analytical tools of critical discourse analysis, with emphasis on Fairclough’s discourse as a social practice approach to the theory. Findings reveal that the text producers employed discursive strategies such as the metaphorization of party symbols, the use of deictic pronouns for inclusion and exclusion, deployment of rhetorical questions for persuasion, identification with the youth culture, employment of historical allusions, giving appeal to good luck, and negative other representation. In addition, the packaging of the information, graphological foregrounding, imagery, repetition and lexical choice reveal the intent of the campaign advertiser to persuade, appeal to sentiments, legitimize and delegitimize their positions in the discourse. (shrink)

Political communication in modern democratic societies often requires the speaker to address multiple audiences with heterogeneous values, interests and agendas. This creates an incentive for communication strategies that allow politicians to send, along with the explicit content of their speech, concealed messages that seek to secure the approval of certain groups without alienating the rest of the electorate. These strategies have been labeled dogwhistling in recent literature. In this article, we provide an analysis of overt intentional dogwhistling. We recognize (...) two main stages within the OIDs’ way of conveying a concealed message: the expression of a perspective together with the transmission of an accompanying positioning message vis-à-vis the OID targeted sub-audience, and the inferential extraction of a set of cognitive and non-cognitive contents inferred on the basis of the former stage. Furthermore, we identify three linguistic mechanisms whereby these contents may be transmitted: conventional meaning, conversational implicature and perlocutionary inferencing. Hence, on our view OIDs are not a uniform category, as they may differ as to what extent the concealed content is speaker-meant, and thus actually communicated by the speaker. (shrink)

RESUMEN La educación médica superior tiene la responsabilidad social de formar educandos autónomos, independientes y autorregulados. Por ello las estrategias de aprendizaje permiten la adquisición de información y el establecimiento de relaciones a partir del conocimiento previo; son procesos de toma de decisiones, consciente e intencional. Objetivo: Exponer las necesidades del desarrollo de estrategias de aprendizaje en los estudiantes de primer año de Estomatología. Método: Se realizó una investigación descriptiva transversal. El universo estuvo constituido por los estudiantes de 1er año (...) de la carrera de Estomatología, del que fueron seleccionados 120 educandos que conformaron la muestra y a los que se les aplicó la Escala de Estrategias de Aprendizaje ACRA-Abreviada para alumnos universitarios. Los datos fueron procesados utilizando la estadística descriptiva. Resultados: Las estrategias que más utilizan son las que los llevan a un aprendizaje memorístico y reproductivo, las estrategias de apoyo al aprendizaje son utilizadas por el 47.79% de los educandos y existen inadecuados hábitos de estudios. Discusión: El estudio permitió corroborar que las insuficiencias que presentan los estudiantes en cuanto al uso de estrategias de aprendizaje son similares a las descritas por los autores consultados. ABSTRACT The high medical education has the social responsibility of forming autonomous, independent and auto-regulated pupils. For it the learning strategies allow the acquisition of information and the relations establishment from the previous knowledge; there are processes of decision making, conscious and intentional. Objective: To exhibit the needs for the development of strategies of learning in the students of the first year of Stomatology. Method: A transverse descriptive investigation was carried out. The universe was constituted by the students of 1st year of the career of Dentistry, of which there were selected 120 pupils who shaped the sample and to whom there was applied the Scale of Strategies of Learning ACRA-Abbreviated for university pupils. The information was processed using the descriptive statistics. Results: The strategies that they use more are those which take them to memory and reproductive learning, the support strategies to learning are used by 47.79 % of the pupils and inadequate studies habits exist. Discussion: The study allowed to corroborate that the insufficiencies that the students present as for the use of strategies of learning are similar to the described ones by the consulted authors. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the nature of intentions and how it is discussed in a variety of fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, law, and several branches of psychology. It should be noted that the term is not understood in the same way in all fields; the chapter will focus on an account of intentions similar to that held by neuroscience, specifically the concept of occurrent intentions as commanding attitudes toward plans. A number of psychologists assume that intentions are conscious in nature—that an (...) intention appears in one’s consciousness preceding an action. Several questions arise from this assumption, and these questions are addressed here. The chapter argues that plans, including simple representations of prospective “basic” actions and complex strategies for achieving remote goals, constitute the representational content of intentions. (shrink)

In this article I consider the role of passing and performance in the everyday lives of alkaptonuria and vitiligo patients. Race, LGBTQ, gender and disability scholars have long used the term passing to describe sub-groups of people within marginal populations who intentionally manipulate their bodies or alter their behaviour in order to claim identities that are not socially assigned to them at birth. In this paper I demonstrate the effectiveness of the passing strategies that patients use in order to mitigate (...) their disease symptoms and render them invisible, thus enabling them to pass as “healthy” or unaffected by their condition. I further consider how patients who choose not to pass utilise resistance strategies in order to generate awareness of their disease and encourage funding for it. I conclude by assessing the effectiveness of these strategies in determining whether or not patients can pass, and the ways in which this is aided or hindered by their social and economic status. (shrink)

This article applies the analytic rigor of philosophy to the vexed topic of business strategy, and uses the objective, public evidence of business strategy as an existence proof for the possibility of free will and purpose in the private realm of subjective intentionality. The first part distinguishes three types of intentionality in philosophy—purposive intentionality, referential intentionality, and the problematic intentionality of a godlike, miraculous “inner intender.” After rejecting this third type of intentionality, and noting that its rejection saves (...) the first two types of intentionality from guilt by association, the second part draws parallels with three types of strategy in business: purposive, referential, and godlike. The first defines the goals and objectives of a company; the second picks out and targets consumers in market driven strategy; and the third, with the help of philosophical reflections, demands a rethinking of the function of leadership without reliance on a single, godlike leader. In the third part of this article, the existence proof from the public world of business is used to shed light on the possibility of intentionality in the private world of subjective intentionality. Finally, the article draws conclusions for its three audiences: for the philosophers, with credit to Nietzsche who saw it all, a greater clarity about intentionality and free will; for business people, greater clarity about the importance of purposiveness and strategic intent; and for business philosophers, a demonstration showing how—through strategy and intentionality—we can both create value and give meaning to the lives of our employees, ourselves, and our customers. (shrink)

Background:Healthcare organizations are now challenged to retain nurses’ generation and understand why they are leaving their nursing career prematurely. Acquiring knowledge about the effect of ethical work climate and level of perceived organizational support can help organizational leaders to deal effectively with dysfunctional behaviors and make a difference in enhancing nurses’ dedication, commitment, satisfaction, and loyalty to their organization.Purpose:This study aims to determine the relationship between ethical work climate, and perceived organizational support and nurses’ organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and turnover (...) intention.Methods:A descriptive correlational research design was conducted in all inpatient care units at three major hospitals affiliated to different health sectors at Alexandria governorate. All nurses working in these previous hospitals were included in the study (N = 500). Ethical Climate Questionnaire, Survey of Perceived Organizational Support, Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, Index of Job Satisfaction, and Intention to Turnover scale were used to measure study variables.Ethical considerations:Approval was obtained from Ethics Committee at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. Privacy and confidentiality of data were maintained and assured by obtaining subjects’ informed consent to participate in the research before data collection.Findings:The result revealed positive significant correlations between nurses’ perception of overall ethical work climate and each of perceived organizational support, commitment, as well as their job satisfaction. However, negative significant correlations were found between nurses’ turnover intention and each of these variables. Also, approximately 33% of the explained variance of turnover intention is accounted by ethical work climate, organizational support, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, and these variables independently contributed significantly in the prediction of turnover intention.Recommendation:Strategies to foster and enhance ethical and supportive work climates as well as job-related benefits are considered significant factors in increasing nurses’ commitment and satisfaction and decreasing their turnover intention. (shrink)

Strategic games require reasoning about other people’s and one’s own beliefs or intentions. Although they have clear commonalities with psychological tests of theory of mind, they are not clearly related to theory of mind tests for children between 9 and 10 years of age “Flobbe et al. J Logic Language Inform 17(4):417–442 (2008)”. We studied children’s (5–12 years of age) individual differences in how they played a strategic game by analyzing the strategies that they applied in a zero, first, and (...) second-order reasoning task. For the zero-order task, we found two subgroups with different accuracy levels. For the first-order task, subgroups of children applied different suboptimal strategies or an optimal strategy. For the second-order task only suboptimal strategies were present. Strategy use for all tasks was related to age. The 5- and 6-year old children were additionally tested on theory of mind understanding and executive functioning. Strategy-use in these children was related to working memory, but not to theory of mind after correction for age, verbal ability and general IQ. (shrink)

A form of self-deception exists that is both intentional and common. In it, people act as if they are undergoing a certain state of mind as a tactic for experiencing the state. This kind of self- deception can be illustrated by what happens to players of simulation games. Someone playing a pilot in a flight simulator game, for example, comes to experience aspects of the world of a pilot. Research on hypnotic responding is used to illustrate the nature and (...) effectiveness of such a strategy of self-deception. (shrink)

Promoting the use of contact tracing technology will be an important step in global recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Across two studies, we assessed two messaging strategies as motivators of intended contact tracing uptake. In one sample of 1117 Australian adults and one sample of 888 American adults, we examined autonomy-supportive and controlling message framing and the presence or absence of information safety as predictors of intended contact tracing application uptake, using an online randomized 2 × 2 experimental design. The (...) results suggested that the provision of data safety assurances may be key in affecting people’s intentions to use contact tracing technology, an effect we found in both samples regardless of whether messages were framed as autonomy-supportive or controlling. Those in high information safety conditions consistently reported higher intended uptake and more positive perceptions of the application than those in low information safety conditions. In Study 2, we also found that perceptions of government legitimacy related positively to intended application uptake, as did political affiliation. In sum, individuals appeared more willing to assent to authority regarding contact tracing insofar as their data safety can be assured. Yet, public messaging strategies alone may be insufficient to initiate intentions to change behavior, even in these unprecedented circumstances. (shrink)