Papers by Christian Kietzmann
Philosophical Investigations, 2023
Donald Davidson established causalism, i.e. the view that reasons are causes and that action expl... more Donald Davidson established causalism, i.e. the view that reasons are causes and that action explanation is causal explanation, as the dominant view within contemporary action theory. According to his "master argument", we must distinguish between reasons the agent merely has and reasons she has and which actually explain what she did, and the only, or at any rate the best, way to make the distinction is by saying that the reasons for which an agent acts are causes of her action. "Davidson's challenge" to non-causalists is to come up with an alternative, more convincing, way of drawing the distinction. In this paper, I argue that G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright offer such an alternative. Moreover, I argue that Davidson's own account of interpretation makes no use of his causalist claim.
Philosophical Explorations, 2022
I argue that realism about reasons is incompatible with the possibility of reasoning with reasons... more I argue that realism about reasons is incompatible with the possibility of reasoning with reasons, because realists are committed to the claim that we are aware of reasons by way of ordinary beliefs, whereas a proper understanding of reasoning excludes that our awareness of reasons consists in beliefs. In the first three sections, I set forth five claims that realists standardly make, explain some assumptions I make concerning reasoning, and show why realism, so understood, cannot accommodate the truism that we reason with reasons. I then consider two proposals for how to avoid the problem.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2022
Inference, understood as a form of conscious and active belief-revision, has recently attracted m... more Inference, understood as a form of conscious and active belief-revision, has recently attracted much interest among philosophers of mind. Many writings on the topic depict inference as a kind of process. However, this assumption is, to my knowledge, nowhere explicitly justified or even reflected upon. In this paper, I argue that the assumption is wrong: while processes take time, it is not possible that inferences take time. Both claims are conceptual observations. It is therefore conceptually impossible that the mental act of inferring is a process.
G.E.M. Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge raises
a puzzle for cases of practical error, i.... more G.E.M. Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge raises
a puzzle for cases of practical error, i.e. cases where, due
to a mistake of mine, I am not in fact doing what I mean to
be doing. It can seem that in such cases, we must both affirm
and deny the presence of practical knowledge. It must
be present, because practical error presupposes that there
is an intentional action in which the mistake occurs, which
in turn presupposes practical knowledge as a formal-causal
condition. At the same time, practical knowledge can’t be
present, because I am not doing what I think I am doing,
and therefore can’t have knowledge of what I am doing. I
discuss and reject various attempts to deal with the problem.
The solution I propose and defend against objections relies
on applying the Aristotelian-Thomistic conceptual framework
of form and matter to intentional action.
English Abstract: How is practical reason – the capacity to deliberate practically – related to t... more English Abstract: How is practical reason – the capacity to deliberate practically – related to the will – the capacity to make decisions? According to voluntarism, will and practical reason are separate capacities, whereas according to intellectualism, they are one and the same. I argue for intellectualism. §1 introduces some well-known problems of intellectualism which are the strongest motivation for voluntarist positions. §2 distinguishes two kinds of voluntarism and identifies difficulties for each of them. §3 introduces a view of motivation and intentional action from which intellectualism follows. § §4-6 address and resolve the problems from §1. §7 discusses two further difficulties of my porposal.
In work that spans almost four decades, Michael Bratman has developed a rich account of human age... more 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, since 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. 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.
According to a philosophical commonplace, Aristotle defined human beings as rational animals. Whe... more According to a philosophical commonplace, Aristotle defined human beings as rational animals. When one takes a closer look at his texts, however, it is surprisingly hard to find such a definition. In this paper, I will argue that this is no accident. Human being as an object for systematic explanation simply does not fit neatly into Aristotle’s conception of the sciences. By Aristotle’s lights, human being belongs to two completely different ontological realms and therefore must be investigated by two different kinds of sciences: humans as animals are investigated by physics, and more particularly by zoology, whereas humans as rational beings are investigated by theology. Since definitions fix the basic terms for each science and serve as explanatory principles within them, it follows that there cannot be a unified definition of human being. For Aristotle, humans are, as it were, ontologically divided and therefore there can be neither a science of humanity nor a unified definition of what it is to be human.
Cognitivists think that intention necessarily involves belief, non-cognitivists deny this claim. ... more Cognitivists think that intention necessarily involves belief, non-cognitivists deny this claim. I argue that both sides of the debate have so far overlooked that the beliefs involved in intention are first-personal beliefs and therefore relevantly different from ordinary beliefs that stand in need of justification through evidence. This move substantially alters the cognivist thesis, and in such a way that the non-cognivist objections can be avoided. In section one I lay out the intuitions behind cognitivism and the arguments against it which motivate non-cognitivist positions. Section two discusses and dismisses Velleman’s cognitivist response to these arguments. In section three I introduce the distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘first-personal beliefs’. In section four I argue that intention invariably involves a first-personal belief that one will do what one intends to do. Finally, in section five, I return to the non-cognitivist objections and show how my proposal answers them.
It has recently been argued that inference essentially involves the thinker taking his premises t... more It has recently been argued that inference essentially involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion and drawing his conclusion because of this fact. However, this Taking Condition has also been criticized: If taking is interpreted as believing, it seems to lead to a vicious regress and to overintellectualize the act of inferring. In this paper, I examine and reject various attempts to salvage the Taking Condition, either by interpreting inferring as a kind of rule-following, or by finding an innocuous role for the taking-belief. Finally, I propose an alternative account of taking, according to which it is not a separate belief, but rather an aspect of the attitude of believing: Believing that p implies not only taking p to be true and taking oneself to believe that p, but also taking one’s reasons q to support p, when the belief in question is held on account of an inference.
It is often said that practical reason is a capacity to deliberate practically or to step back fr... more It is often said that practical reason is a capacity to deliberate practically or to step back from one’s motivation and reflect on them. I argue that this conception of practical reason is faced with a dilemma: On the face of it, everyday intelligent action is then either always the result of deliberation and reflection or it is, where unreflective, in fact arational. Both horns seem unpalatable. Several attempts to show how unreflective, undeliberated action can nevertheless be intelligent fail as long as practical reason is described as a capacity to reflect and deliberate. We must therefore conceive of practical reason as first and foremost a capacity unreflective and undeliberated intelligent action. We can then say that it is also, but only derivatively, a capacity for reflection and deliberation.
This paper offers a reevaluation of the debate between assimilationism and differentialism about ... more This paper offers a reevaluation of the debate between assimilationism and differentialism about the anthropological difference. Both sides usually assume that the difference consists in a capacity which humans possess and other animals lack, and that gets added to a set of capacities humans share with other animals. A likely candidate for this role is reason. An additive conception of human reason on these lines runs into several difficulties, which can be avoided by thinking of reason transformatively, as providing human capacities with a special rational form. What such a transformative conception might be is described in some detail for the special case of human perception. A transformative understanding of reason's role enables us to formulate a differentialist position that does not fall prey to the usual problems of differentialism.
Book Reviews by Christian Kietzmann
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Papers by Christian Kietzmann
a puzzle for cases of practical error, i.e. cases where, due
to a mistake of mine, I am not in fact doing what I mean to
be doing. It can seem that in such cases, we must both affirm
and deny the presence of practical knowledge. It must
be present, because practical error presupposes that there
is an intentional action in which the mistake occurs, which
in turn presupposes practical knowledge as a formal-causal
condition. At the same time, practical knowledge can’t be
present, because I am not doing what I think I am doing,
and therefore can’t have knowledge of what I am doing. I
discuss and reject various attempts to deal with the problem.
The solution I propose and defend against objections relies
on applying the Aristotelian-Thomistic conceptual framework
of form and matter to intentional action.
Book Reviews by Christian Kietzmann
a puzzle for cases of practical error, i.e. cases where, due
to a mistake of mine, I am not in fact doing what I mean to
be doing. It can seem that in such cases, we must both affirm
and deny the presence of practical knowledge. It must
be present, because practical error presupposes that there
is an intentional action in which the mistake occurs, which
in turn presupposes practical knowledge as a formal-causal
condition. At the same time, practical knowledge can’t be
present, because I am not doing what I think I am doing,
and therefore can’t have knowledge of what I am doing. I
discuss and reject various attempts to deal with the problem.
The solution I propose and defend against objections relies
on applying the Aristotelian-Thomistic conceptual framework
of form and matter to intentional action.