Abstracts
Lucy Campbell (Warwick) & Alexander Greenberg (UCL): “Mental Agency: A Red Herring?”
Mental agency has been appealed to in order to explain a variety of phenomena in epistemology and philosophy of mind. However, on examination, it’s not always clear in these contexts that the real explanatory work is actually being done by the notion of agency. In this paper, we consider the extent to which an appeal to agency is genuinely explanatory, focusing on three areas of literature: self-knowledge, responsibility for belief, and cognitive psychopathologies such as thought insertion.
David Jenkins (Independent): “Reasoning and its Limits”
Reasoning is naturally understood as something which we actively do—as a kind of action. However, reflection on the supposed limits to the extent to which it is up to us how our reasoning unfolds is often taken to cast doubt on this idea. I argue that, once articulated with care, challenges to the idea that reasoning is a kind of action can be seen to trade on problematic assumptions. In particular, they trade on assumptions which could be used to rule out paradigmatic actions from qualifying as such. Accordingly, no distinctive challenge to the idea that reasoning is a kind of action can trade on such assumptions. I suggest that it is a mistaken atomistic way of thinking about action which is the source of the relevant assumptions. Reasoning can unproblematically be maintained to be a kind of action. It is the atomistic way of thinking about action which ought to be rejected.
Yair Levy (Tel Aviv): “What is Reasoning?”
Despite fierce disagreement on detail, much recent work tends to agree that reasoning consists in a conscious, explicit process of transition between mental attitudes. Here I argue that this conception is much too narrow. I first criticize several extant versions of the conscious-mental-process-view, arguing that they face counterexamples and fall short of capturing the nature of the phenomenon. I then motivate an alternative view of reasoning. On this view, very roughly, a reasoning agent is one whose behaviour can be represented as if she were undergoing a conscious mental process, whether or not she is actually undergoing such a process. I expound the virtues of this alternative view, which include, among other things, its greater explanatory power and the explanation it provides for the Aristotelian doctrine that reasoning concludes in action.
Jennifer Morton (North Carolina-Chapel Hill): “Resisting Pessimism Traps: The Limits of Epistemic Resilience”
Members of marginalized groups who desire to pursue ambitious ends that might lead them to overcome disadvantage often face evidential situations that do not support the belief that they will succeed. Such agents might decide, reasonably, that their efforts are better expended elsewhere. If an agent has a less risky, valuable alternative, then quitting can be a rational way of avoiding the potential costs of failure. However, in reaching this pessimistic conclusion, she adds to the evidence that formed the basis for her pessimism in the first place, not just for herself but for future agents who will be in a similar position as hers. This is a pessimism trap. Might believing optimistically against the evidence offer a way out? In this paper, I argue against practical and moral arguments to turn to optimism as a solution to pessimism traps. I suggest that these theories ignore the opportunity costs that agents pay when they settle on difficult long-term ends without being sensitive to evidence of potential failure. The view I defend licenses optimism in a narrow range of cases. I suggest that the right response to many pessimism traps is not to be found through individual optimism.
Oded Na’aman (Hebrew University): “Narratives and Rational Heart Rates”
I argue for two theses. First, contrary to common wisdom, bodily episodes, feelings, and sensations can sometimes be rationally evaluable. For instance, like fear, one’s racing heart is a fitting response to danger and it rationally subsides when one takes oneself to be out of danger. The difference is that, unlike fear, one’s heart rate is not essentially rationally evaluable. When I am running to catch the bus, for example, my accelerated heart rate is not about anything, it is merely caused and rational norms are not applicable to it; other times, my racing heart is about the danger I’m facing, the good news I just received, or the shock of loss, and rational norms apply to it. The question arises: what makes a certain bodily episode, feeling, or sensation rationally evaluable on a particular occasion? The answer to this question is the second main thesis of this paper: what makes a physical or mental phenomenon rationally evaluable is the fact that it is part of a rationally-evaluable narrative process.
David Owens (KCL): “Reason, Agency, and Obligation”
Sometimes we are bound to conform to a rule because being subject to that rule is a good thing, either instrumentally or non-instrumentally. However there is a problem: if your being subject to a rule does not depend on your conforming to the rule, how can the value of being subject to the rule rationally motivate conformity to the rule? In order to solve this problem, we must adopt a non-rationalist model of agency. I'll argue that this model is needed to make sense of much virtuous agency, habitual agency and action on a future directed intention.
Carlotta Pavese (Cornell): “The Place for Knowledge in a Theory of Action”
In this talk, I motivate, develop, and defend an epistemic theory of intentional action and agentive control. After motivating and developing the view, I first defend it against a recent challenge, according to which an epistemic theory of intentional action would lead to paradoxical conclusions if coupled with a margin for error principle on knowledge. I argue that this challenge can be overcome, provided that one rejects the doctrine of essentially intentional actions (joint work with Beddor). In the second part of my talk, I share some novel experimental findings that corroborate my proposed epistemic theory of intentional action. These findings (joint work with Henne and Beddor) show that judgements about intentional action are affected by manipulating the epistemic condition, and indeed that go together with judgements concerning knowledge. Through mediation analysis, I show that these results are best explained by an epistemic theory of intentional action.
Antonia Peacocke (Stanford): “Inference and Responsibility in Complex Mental Action”
Contrary to the dominant view that an inference must be constituted by a transition in thought from one judgment to another, I argue that an inference can be performed 'all at once': you can infer q from p in just one mental action. This can happen when that mental action is complex: when you carry out a complex intention to judge whether p in order to judge whether q by judging that p and judging that q all at once. Thinking of inference in this way solves serious problems about deviance, regress, and overintellectualization that have plagued past theories of inference. It also offers us a new understanding of the kind of responsibility you can incur for an inference: it is a species of responsibility for taking certain means to your ends.
Tamar Schapiro (MIT): “What Makes Weak-Willed Action Weak?”
Most accounts of weak-willed action characterize it as a kind of deliberative error, by the agent's own lights. That captures the idea that weak-willed action is bad or wrong. But in what sense is it weak? Weakness and strength are notions that we define in relation to some sort of force or pressure. But what, in principle, could pressure a free will? I motivate this question, and I sketch an answer that I think Kant could have endorsed.
Michael Smith (Princeton): “Three Conceptions of Agency”
The paper begins with a description of, and the identification of a fatal flaw in the Humean conception of agency. The identification of this flaw enables us to describe a second and more plausible conception of agency, one that has a great deal in common with the Humean conception, but which doesn’t share its fatal flaw. The paper closes by comparing the second conception of agency with Kant's conception.
Matthew Soteriou (KCL): “Reasoning in Time”
In this talk I shall be exploring connections between puzzles about the temporal profile of the activity of reasoning and puzzles about the place and role of agency in reasoning.
I first consider reasons for thinking that the activity of reasoning is constituted by mental acts that are successive and discrete, and subsequently address the following questions: If the activity of reasoning is constituted by mental acts that are successive and discrete, (i) what gives unity to the activity of reasoning, and (ii) should we accept that reasoning can be agential only if each successive mental act is a discrete mental action?
I shall be suggesting that answers to these questions should be informed by an account of the temporal perspective that we occupy when we are reasoning, and in particular, the respects in which this temporal perspective is an agential perspective that embodies a distinctive form of self-knowledge.
Jonathan Way (Southampton): “Doxastic Enkratic Reasoning”
Enkratic reasoning – reasoning from a belief that you ought to act to an intention to so act – seems a central way in which we regulate our intentions, and so our actions. Is there an analogous way in which we regulate our beliefs? The closest analogue, I argue, would be reasoning from a belief that you (epistemically) ought to believe that P to a belief that P. I then present a puzzle about how such doxastic enkratic reasoning could be correct reasoning. Roughly, correct reasoning with beliefs preserves truth, but doxastic enkratic reasoning does not. I argue that the best solution to this puzzle is to deny that doxastic enkratic reasoning is correct reasoning. The result is an important disanalogy in the way we regulate our beliefs and intentions.
