Johannes Roessler

A traditional tenet of virtue ethics is that a proper moral assessment of an action needs to be informed by a view of the agent; in particular, a view of their virtues or vices, as exhibited in their action. This picture has been challenged on the grounds that it is revisionary and ill-motivated. The key claim is that we are ordinarily disposed to judge the moral merits of particular actions independently of any view of the character of the agent, and that there is nothing wrong with that practice. In this paper, we identify and criticize a certain view of the nature of character that (we argue) underpins the challenge. We call this a monolithic conception of character. We sketch an alternative, non-monolithic conception, and suggest that when combined with a non-monolithic conception, the traditional tenet can be seen to be neither revisionary nor ill-motivated.

On one view, an adequate account of causal understanding may focus exclusively on what is involved in mastering general causal concepts (concepts such as ‘x causes y’ or ‘p causally explains q’). An alternative view is that causal understanding is, partly but irreducibly, a matter of grasping what Anscombe called special causal concepts, concepts such as ‘push’, ‘flatten’, or ‘knock over’. We can label these views generalist vs particularist approaches to causal understanding. It is worth emphasizing that the contrast here is not between two kinds of theories of the metaphysics of causation, but two views of the nature and perhaps source of ordinary causal understanding. One aim of this paper is to argue that it would be a mistake to dismiss particularism because of its putative metaphysical commitments. I begin by formulating an intuitively attractive version of particularism due to P.F. Strawson, a central element of which is what I will call naı̈ve realism concerning mechanical t...

First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests that we need to reconsider the terms of the standard alternative between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” explanations of first-person authority. In particular, the natural view that the authority we accord to self-ascriptions reflects a distinctive way we have of knowing our own beliefs should not be conflated with the traditional epistemological thesis that such knowledge reflects a private “mode of access”.

The causal theory of action (CTA) is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency--the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action-oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesus H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout

This chapter argues that recent attempts to make sense of the delusion of thought insertion in terms of a distinction between two notions of thought ownership have been unsuccessful. It also proposes an alternative account, in which the delusion is to be interpreted in the light of its prehistory.

12 Perceptual Attention and the Space of Reasons Johannes Roessler It is sometimes said that the source of direct perceptual knowledge of the world around us is peculiarly transparent. In Michael Ayers's words, such knowledge is “perspicuous in that one who has it knows how ...

... Chapter 30. Agents' Knowledge. Timothy O'Connor Professor of Philosophy member 2 ,; Constantine Sandis Senior Lecturer 3,4. Johannes Roessler Associate Professor. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Johannes Roessler. ...

... Stirling Naomi Eilan, University ofWarwick Christoph Hoerl, University of Warwick Hemdat Lerman, University of Warwick Andrew N. Meltzoff ... of Warwick Johannes Roessler, University of Warwick Paul Snowdon, University College London Matthew Soteriou, University ofWarwick ...

... Keywords: delusions, ownership, passivity experiences, schizophrenia, self-awareness, solipsism, thought insertion. I. ... III. A characteristic feature of delusions of alien control is the juxtaposition of a self-ascription and a denial of ownership. ...

Commonsense epistemology regards perceptual experience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in 'blindsight'. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea that perceptual experience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link between perceptual experience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, on which representational content plays no explanatory role: we make perceptual knowledge intelligible by appeal to experienced objects and features. I also present an account of how the commonsense scheme, thus interpreted, is to be defended: not by tracing the role of experience to its contribution in meeting some general condition on propositional knowledge (such as justification); but by subverting the assumption that it has to be possible to make the role of experience intelligible in terms of some such contribution.

It is sometimes said that the source of direct perceptual knowledge of the world around us is peculiarly transparent. In Michael Ayers's words, such knowledge is 'perspicuous in that one who has it knows how he knows what he knows'. (1991: 183) What is the content of this immediate understanding we seem to have of the source of perceptual knowledge? And what is the role of perceptual experience in making that kind of understanding available? The classical answer is that the 'perspicuity' of perceptual knowledge is grounded in the distinctive intelligibility of rational belief: experience provides us with justifying reasons, and our awareness of the reasons for which we hold a belief normally gives us a ready understanding of how we know what we know. In this paper I present a line of objection to what I think is the most promising version of the classical picture, John McDowell's account of the epistemic role of experience. My objection is that the account cannot respect the role of perceptual attention in providing for perspicuous perceptual knowledge. My main claim will be that there is an inextricable link between two aspects of the role of perceptual attention: its role in grounding perceptual demonstrative thought and its role in yielding non-inferential propositional knowledge. I argue that the link poses a challenge to McDowell's theory, and simultaneously provides support for an alternative account of the perspicuity of perceptual knowledge. The alternative account does not dispute that there is a deep connection between perspicuity and rationality, but it reverses the classical view of the connection: it contends that

Evidence is accumulating that infants are sensitive to
people’s false beliefs, whereas children pass the standard
false belief test at around 4 years of age. Debate
currently centres on the nature of early and late understanding.
We defend the view that early sensitivity to
false beliefs shown in ‘online tasks’ (where engagement
with ongoing events reflects an expectation of what will
happen without a judgement that it will happen) reflects
implicit/unconscious social knowledge of lawful regularities.
The traditional false belief task requires explicit
consideration of the agent’s subjective perspective on
his reasons for action. This requires an intentional
switch of perspectives not possible before 4 years of
age as evidenced by correlations between the false belief
task and many different perspective-taking tasks.

A fundamental question in recent " theory of mind " research is how to interpret a seemingly robust dissociation between young children's performance on different kinds of tests for false belief understanding. 3-year-olds' poor performance on classical, " direct " false belief tasks is well-documented. Yet a range of " indirect " tests reveal sensitivity to agents' false beliefs in much younger children. It is natural to think that the two kinds of tests bring to light two kinds of understanding: " explicit " vs. " implicit " understanding. But how should we understand this distinction? And why should " implicit " understanding of false beliefs only be available in connection with " indirect " tests? Our project in this chapter is to address these questions by further developing a hypothesis advanced elsewhere (Perner and Roessler, 2010). This is the hypothesis that young children are teleologists : they make sense of intentional actions in terms of justifying reasons provided by " worldly " facts (not by mental states). We begin by spelling out this account in more detail. We then argue that mastery of the concept of belief (or possession of an " explicit understanding " of belief) involves giving a twist to the teleological scheme of explanation. What is critical is the ability to engage in hypothetical or suppositional reasoning about justifying reasons. This account, we contend, is in competition with both a " theory theory " and a " simulation theory " of belief understanding (though it has some affi nities with certain versions of the latter). In the fi nal, fourth part of the chapter we bring the account to bear on the dissociation problem. The difference between " direct " and " indirect " tests, we argue, turns on whether successful performance requires understanding the normative underpinnings of the causal role of belief (as in direct tests) or merely requires a set of generalizations regarding the causes of behavior (as in indirect tests). Teleological explanation Why does the baker get up at 3 a.m.? Well, the bread needs to be ready by 6 to go to the supermarkets , and it takes that long to bake. This is a humble example of a teleological explanation: it makes the baker's unusual behavior intelligible not by appeal to his mental states, such as his desire to make bread etc, but in terms of the objective reason-giving facts of his situation. Our suggestion is that young children are teleologists. They predict, and perhaps explain, what someone will do on the basis of what it makes objective sense for her to do. This, we suggest, explains the following striking fi nding concerning young children's performance on false belief tests: far from answering the test question randomly, they systematically and adamantly give the wrong answer. The explanation is that they predict that the protagonist will do what he ought to do in order to attain his objective. For example, they will predict that in order to retrieve his chocolate Mistaken Max (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) will go to the cupboard (where he ought to go, as this is where the chocolate is to be found) rather than to the kitchen drawer (where he believes it is).

Gareth Evans famously affirmed an explanatory connection between answering the question whether p and knowing whether one believes that p. This is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that judging that p constitutes an adequate basis for the belief that one believes that p. This paper formulates and defends an alternative, more modest interpretation, which develops from the suggestion that one can know that one believes that p in judging that p.

First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests that we need to rethink the terms of the standard alternative between 'epistemic' and 'non-epistemic' explanations of first-person authority. In particular, the natural view that the authority we accord to self-ascriptions reflects a distinctive way we have of knowing our own beliefs should not be conflated with the traditional epistemological thesis that such knowledge reflects a private 'mode of access'.

There is converging evidence that over the course of the second year children become good at various fairly sophisticated forms of pro-social activities, such as helping, informing and comforting. Not only are toddlers able to do these things, they appear to do them routinely and almost reliably. A striking feature of these interventions, emphasized in the recent literature, is that they show precocious abilities in two different domains: they reflect complex ‘theory of mind’ abilities as well as ‘altruistic motivation’. Our aim in this paper is to present a theoretical hypothesis that bears on both kinds of developments. The suggestion is that children’s ‘instrumental helping’ reflects their budding understanding of practical reasons (in the standard sense of ‘considerations that count in favour of’ someone’s acting in a certain way). We can put the basic idea in the familiar terminology of common coding: toddlers conceive of the goals of others’ actions in the same format as the goals of their own actions: in terms of features of their situation that provide us with reasons to act.

On a widely held view, the canonical way to make sense of intentional actions, is to invoke the agent's 'motivating reasons', where the claim that X did A for some 'motivating reason' is taken to be neutral on whether X had a normative reason to do A. In this paper I explore a challenge to this view, drawing on Anscombe's 'second-personal' approach to the nature of action explanation.

According to David Velleman, it is part of the 'commonsense psychology' of intentional agency that an agent can know what she will do without relying on evidence, in virtue of intending to do it. My question is how this claim is to be interpreted and defended. I argue that the answer turns on the commonsense conception of calculative practical reasoning, and the link between such reasoning and warranted claims to knowledge. I also consider the implications of this argument for Velleman's project of vindicating the commonsense view by showing it to be consistent with an 'evidentialist' epistemology.

Th ought insertion raises two kinds of philosophical issues: general issues concerning the interpretation of what some diagnostic systems in psychiatry call bizarre delusions, and spe-cifi c issues concerning the nature of self-awareness and its pathologies. Th e basic philosophical puzzle generated by the delusion, I suggest, may be put in the form of an inconsistent triad that brings together both kinds of concerns. Transparency: To be introspectively aware of a current episode of thinking that p is to be aware of oneself thinking that p. Alienation : Patients with the delusion of thought insertion believe that someone else is the thinker of an episode of thinking of which they are introspectively aware. Intelligibility : Reports of thought insertion express rationally intelligible, coherent beliefs.

This paper has two themes. One is the question of how to understand the relation between inner speech and knowledge of one's own thoughts. My aim here is to probe and challenge the popular neo-Rylean suggestion that we know our own thoughts by 'overhearing our own silent monologues', and to sketch an alternative suggestion, inspired by Ryle's lesser-known discussion of thinking as a 'serial operation'. The second theme is the question whether, as Ryle apparently thought, we need two different accounts of the epistemology of thinking, corresponding to the distinction between thoughts with respect to which we are active vs passive. I suggest we should be skeptical about the assumption that there is a single distinction here. There are a number of interesting ways in which thinking can involve passivity, but they provide no support for a 'bifurcationist' approach to the epistemology of thinking.