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We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: “Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge.” But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that... more
We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: “Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge.” But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that desires are dispositional states that are manifested in behavior. Accordingly, desires explain actions as ordinary physical dispositions, such as fragility or conductivity, explain their manifestations, namely causally. This paper argues that desires, unlike ordinary physical dispositions, are “manifestation-dependent dispositions”: dispositions whose attribution depends on their having been manifested. This feature of desires, I suggest, favours a “context-placing” approach to understanding how desires explain actions.
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Desire plays a pivotal role in our lives. Yet in recent times, it has not been a central topic in the philosophy of mind. The aim of this book is to redress this imbalance. What are desires? According to a dogma, desire is a motivational... more
Desire plays a pivotal role in our lives. Yet in recent times, it has not been a central topic in the philosophy of mind. The aim of this book is to redress this imbalance. What are desires? According to a dogma, desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire’s direction of fit and of its role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. This is in line with the thesis that we cannot desire something without “seeing” any good in it (the “guise of the good”). Are desires motivational states? How are we to understand desire’s direction of fit? How do desires explain action? Are desires evaluative states? Is the guise of the good true? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire’s deontic nature? Which view of desire does the neurosci...
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The last three decades have seen much important work on powers and dispositions: what they are and how they are related to the phenomena that constitute their manifestation. These debates have tended to focus on ‘paradigmatic’... more
The last three decades have seen much important work on powers and dispositions: what they are and how they are related to the phenomena that constitute their manifestation. These debates have tended to focus on ‘paradigmatic’ dispositions, i.e. physical dispositions such as conductivity, elasticity, radioactivity, etc. It is often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the conclusions of these debates concerning physical dispositions can be extended to psychological dispositions, such as beliefs, desires or character traits. In this paper I identify some central features of paradigmatic dispositions that concern their manifestation, stimulus conditions, and causal bases. I then focus on a specific kind of psychological disposition, namely character traits, and argue that they are importantly different from paradigmatic dispositions in relation to these features. I conclude that this difference should lead us to re-examine our assumption that character traits are dispositions and, ...
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Hans-Johann Glock attempts in his paper 'The Indispensability of Translation in Quine and Davidson" to demonstrate the incoherence of the doctrines of Radical Translation and Radical Interpretation defended by Quine and Davidson... more
Hans-Johann Glock attempts in his paper 'The Indispensability of Translation in Quine and Davidson" to demonstrate the incoherence of the doctrines of Radical Translation and Radical Interpretation defended by Quine and Davidson respectively. He does this by trying initially to undermine, and ultimately to expose as absurd, a thesis he takes to be fundamental to both theories, and which he calls 'the thesis of the Indispensability of Translation': 'the idea that all human communication involves radical translation or interpretation' (p. 197). According to him, the thesis identifies understanding with translation. But this identification would be a distortion of our concepts. Therefore any conclusions drawn from the indispensability thesis will not touch our concept of linguistic understanding. This alone would considerably weaken any motivation for endorsing Quine's and Davidson's theories. But Glock's objective is more ambitious: he wants to demonstrate that the theories of Radical Translation and Interpretation are incoherent, and that, by generating a vicious regress, the indispensability thesis entails the nihilist conclusion that there is no such a thing as linguistic understanding or meaning. For him this conclusion amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of these theories.
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In the past thirty years or so, the doctrine that actions are events has become an essential, and sometimes unargued, part of the received view in the philosophy of action, despite the efforts of a few philosophers to undermine the... more
In the past thirty years or so, the doctrine that actions are events has become an essential, and sometimes unargued, part of the received view in the philosophy of action, despite the efforts of a few philosophers to undermine the consensus. For example, the entry for Agency in a recently published reference guide to the philosophy of mind begins with the following sentence:A central task in the philosophy of action is that of spelling out the differences between events in general and those events that fall squarely into the category of human action.There is no consensus about what events are. But it is generally agreed that, whatever events may prove to be, actions are a species or a class of events. We believe that the received view is mistaken: actions are not events. We concede that for most purposes, the kind of categorial refinement which is involved in either affirming or denying that actions are events is frankly otiose. Our common idiom does not stress the difference betwe...