This article is concerned with social and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution. The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the im-mediate environment. Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind. They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access. However, (...) as vision deteriorates, links be-tween deictic signs and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and it becomes increasingly difficult for partici-pants to converge on objects of reference. In the past, DeafBlind people have addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters. Under the influence of the recent “pro-tactile” movement, they have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to their referential prob-lems. Drawing on analyses of 120 hours of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during twelve months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I show how DeafBlind peo-ple are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and how this pro-cess is aligning language with context in novel ways. I propose two mechanisms that can account for this process: deictic integration and embedding in the social field. I argue that together, these interactional and social mechanisms yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention-attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds. (shrink)

There is a wide and puzzleful gap between the child’s mastery of first- and recursive or higher-order attributions of attitudes, measured not only in years but also in the cognitive resources involved. Some accounts explain the gap in terms of the maturation of the competencies involved, others invoke the slow development of enabling resources, such as short-term memory, the syntax of sentence embedding or sequential reasoning. All these accounts assume a continuity of competence between first- and higher-order attributions. I disagree (...) and argue, with psychological and neuroscientific support, that there are two distinct (though developmentally overlapping and interacting) competencies, one metaintentional and the other metarepresentational. I focus below on the former and argue that it is egocentric, situated, nonpropositional and thus intrinsically limited to first-order attributions, even when all the enabling resources are in place. (shrink)

Recent research illustrates substantial gaps between entrepreneurial intentions and behavior. This is a challenge for entrepreneurship promotion interventions that have primarily focused on stimulating entrepreneurial intentions. However, extant literature suggests that implementation intentions enhance the likelihood of acting congruently to the behavioral intention. Furthermore, theory also suggests the condition effects of situations and the perceived control over them. We therefore hypothesized that implementation intentions mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and action, while perceived family support moderates the movement from implementation (...) intention to entrepreneurial action. Using two-wave survey data from a sample of students at an African university, we measured two psychological attributes as important precursors of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intentions present before undertaking an innovations and entrepreneurship course. Implementation intentions regarding entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial actions, and perceived parental support for entrepreneurial activities were also measured 2 weeks after completion of the course. Our results demonstrate support for the proposed moderated double mediation model in which the effects of the two psychological attributes on entrepreneurial actions are explained via entrepreneurial intentions and implementation intentions. We further find moderation effects of perceived family support indicating that implementation intentions more likely predicted entrepreneurial actions in cases of higher family support. (shrink)

In his recently published John Locke Lectures, Saul Kripke attempts to capture Keith Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction for definite descriptions using a distinction between general and specific intentions. I argue that although Kripke’s own way of capturing the referential/attributive distinction is inadequate, we can use general and specific intentions to successfully capture the distinction if we also distinguish between primary and secondary intentions. An attributive use is characterized by the fact that the general intention is either the primary or only designative (...) intention, whereas a referential use occurs when a specific intention is either the primary or only designative intention. Along the way, accounts of the referential/attributive distinction offered by John Searle and by Kepa Korta and John Perry come in for criticism as well, and we’ll also discuss Michael O’Rourke’s dual-aspect uses of definite descriptions. (shrink)

In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not (...) likely to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions. (shrink)

Recently, it has been shown that the perceived times of voluntary movements and their effects are perceived as shifted towards each other. This temporal binding phenomenon was explained by an integrated representation of movement and effect, facilitating operant learning and the experience of intentionality. Here, we investigated whether temporal binding depends on explicit intentional attributions. In Experiment 1, participants intended to either produce or avoid producing an effect by the timing of their movements, with the ratio of success being (...) fixed at 2:1. In Experiments 2 and 3, the influence of the action–effect contingency ratio on temporal binding was controlled for by removing the intentional attribution of the effect. The results indicate that temporal binding is a general associative mechanism that facilitates the learning of movement–effect contingencies. Beyond that, temporal binding is sensitive to explicit intentional attributions, which selectively enhance the link between an intentional movement and the effect a moving agent intends to produce. (shrink)

How do people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm? Three preregistered vignette-based experiments (N = 788) manipulated the social role of someone causing harm and measured how intentional people thought the harm was. Results indicate that people judge harmful consequences as intentional when they think the actor unjustifiably caused harm. Social roles were shown to alter intention judgments by making people responsible for preventing harm (thereby endering the harm as an intentional neglect (...) of one’s responsibilities) or for causing the harm (thereby excusing it as an unintentional byproduct of the role). Additionally, Experiment 3 conceptually replicated and moderated the side-effect effect—revealing that people think harmful side effects are intentional when the harm is unjustified but not when a role’s responsibility justifies it. We discuss the importance of social information—including roles—in how people judge others’ intentions. (shrink)

Previous research into the perception of agency has found that objects in twodimensional displays that move along non-inertial-looking paths are frequently attributed intentional agency, including beliefs and desires. The present experiment re-addressed this finding using a tangible, interactive, electromagnetic puzzle. The experimental manipulation was whether or not participants controlled the electromagnet that moved the marbles along unexpected trajectories. Thirty-one college undergraduates participated. Participants who lacked control over the movement of the marbles were significantly more likely to attribute agency to (...) the marbles. Participants in control of the display rarely attributed intentional agency to the marbles. Implications are discussed for the identification of agents in the real world. (shrink)

Employees have their own understandings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) motives. This study investigated whether employees' different perceptions of CSR motives, including substantive CSR attribution and symbolic CSR attribution, influence their work attitudes, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Moreover, we explore the mediating role of person-organization fit in the relationships among CSR attribution, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. We collected 687 responses for an overall response rate of 16%. The results of structural equation model (SEM) analyses show (...) that substantive CSR attribution decreases employee turnover intention and that symbolic CSR attribution increases employee turnover intention. Based on these results, we provide relevant theoretical and managerial implications. (shrink)

In a short article called “Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast” that epitomizes and concludes his book The Intentional Stance, D. C. Dennett (1987) provides a sketch of what he views as an emerging Interpretivist consensus in the philosophy of mind. The gist is that Brentano’s thesis is true (the intentional is irreducible to the physical) and that it follows from the truth of Brentano’s thesis that: strictly speaking, ontologically speaking, there are no such things as beliefs, desires, or (...) other intentional phenomena. But the intentional idioms are “practically indispensable,” and we should see what we can do to make sense of their employment in what Quine called an “essentially dramatic” idiom…. Not just brute facts , then but an element of interpretation…must be recognized in any use of the intentional vocabulary. (Dennett, 1987, p. 342)12 In this context, “making sense of” the prevalence of the intentional idiom is not explaining why it should be indispensable if there are no beliefs or desires for it to refer to. Nor is it specifying the truth conditions of intentional attribution inevitably involves “an element of interpretation.” The discussion that follows treats these two papers together. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that uncertainty communication by scientists (i. e., expressing reservations towards their own research) increases the public’s trust in their work. The reasons for this have not been elucidated, however. In the present study, we provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. Specifically, we expected that attributed communicator bias would mediate the effect of uncertainty communication on trust. Results from a mixed-design experiment (N = 88), using modified science news articles, revealed support for this hypothesis. Positive effects (...) of uncertainty communication on trust and donation intention were both mediated by attributed communicator bias. (shrink)

Recent financial fraud legislation such as the Dodd–Frank Act and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (U.S. House of Representatives, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, [H.R. 4173], 2010 ; U.S. House of Representatives, The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, Public Law 107-204 [H.R. 3763], 2002 ) relies heavily on whistleblowers for enforcement, and offers protection and incentives for whistleblowers. However, little is known about many aspects of the whistleblowing decision, especially the effects of contextual and wrongdoing attributes on organizational (...) members’ willingness to report fraud. We extend the ethics literature by experimentally investigating how the nature of the wrongdoing and the awareness of those surrounding the whistleblower can influence whistleblowing. As predicted, we find that employees are less likely to report: (1) financial statement fraud than theft; (2) immaterial than material financial statement fraud; (3) when the wrongdoer is aware that the potential whistleblower has knowledge of the fraud; and (4) when others in addition to the wrongdoer are not aware of the fraud. Our findings extend whistleblowing research in several ways. For instance, prior research provides little evidence concerning the effects of fraud type, wrongdoer awareness, and others’ awareness on whistleblowing intentions. We also provide evidence that whistleblowing settings represent an exception to the well-accepted theory of diffusion of responsibility. Our participants are professionals who represent the likely pool of potential whistleblowers in organizations. (shrink)

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called (...) intent interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed. (shrink)

In a short article called “Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast” that epitomizes and concludes his book The Intentional Stance, D. C. Dennett (1987) provides a sketch of what he views as an emerging Interpretivist consensus in the philosophy of mind. The gist is that Brentano’s thesis is true (the intentional is irreducible to the physical) and that it follows from the truth of Brentano’s thesis that: strictly speaking, ontologically speaking, there are no such things as beliefs, desires, or (...) other intentional phenomena. But the intentional idioms are “practically indispensable,” and we should see what we can do to make sense of their employment in what Quine called an “essentially dramatic” idiom…. Not just brute facts , then but an element of interpretation…must be recognized in any use of the intentional vocabulary. (Dennett, 1987, p. 342)12 In this context, “making sense of” the prevalence of the intentional idiom is not explaining why it should be indispensable if there are no beliefs or desires for it to refer to. Nor is it specifying the truth conditions of intentional attribution inevitably involves “an element of interpretation.” The discussion that follows treats these two papers together. (shrink)

Detecting conscious awareness in a patient emerging from a coma state is problematic, because our standard attributions of conscious awareness rely on interpreting bodily movement as intentional action. Where there is an absence of intentional bodily action, as in the vegetative state, can we reliably assume that there is an absence of conscious awareness? Recent neuroimaging work suggests that we can attribute conscious awareness to some patients in a vegetative state by interpreting their brain activity as intentional (...) mental action. I suggest that this change of focus, from the interpretation of motor behaviour as intentional bodily action to the interpretation of neural activity as intentional mental action, raises philosophical issues that affect the interpretation of the neuroimaging data. (shrink)

I identify and characterize the kind of personal-level control-structure that is most relevant for skilled action control, namely, what I call, “practical intention”. I differentiate between practical intentions and general intentions not in terms of their function or timing but in terms of their content. I also highlight a distinction between practical intentions and other control mechanisms that are required to explain skilled action. I’ll maintain that all intentions, general and practical, have the function specifying, sustaining, and structuring action but (...) that several functions that have been attributed to proximal intentions are actually implemented by other control mechanisms that are not themselves best identified as intentions. Specifically, I will claim that practical intentions do not initiate, monitor, specify or guide the fine-grained, online, kinematic aspects of action. Finally, I suggest that the way in which practical and general intentions should be differentiated is in terms of their content, where general intentions specify the overall goal, outcome, or end of an action as it is conceived of by the agent at a time, and practical intentions determine the means to that end. I conclude by providing empirical evidence to support this way of characterizing the intentions that “interface” with the mechanisms of motor control. Though this discussion has repercussions for action in general, I will limit my discussion to cases of skill. (shrink)

This short paper, forthcoming as part of a symposium on experimental philosophy to appear in the popular publication, The Philosophers’ Magazine (including contributions by Papineau, Stich, Machery, Sommers, and Knobe), offers an accessible summary of seven years of experimental-philosophical research into intentional action attributions.

The ability to distinguish between our own actions and those of an external agent is a fundamental component of normal human social interaction. Both low- and high-level mechanisms are thought to contribute to the sense of movement agency, but the contribution of each is yet to be fully understood. By applying small and incremental perturbations to realistic visual feedback of the limb, the influence of high-level action intentions and low-level motor predictive mechanisms were dissociated in two experiments. In the first, (...) participants were induced to claim agency over movements that were subject to large perturbations and to deny agency over self-produced unperturbed movements despite the application of motor corrections by low-level mechanisms. A control experiment confirmed that if reaches met with their intended goal then they were more likely to be attributed to the agent, regardless of the discrepancy between the actual and seen positions of the limb. (shrink)

The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal (...) background knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception. (shrink)

Korta and Perry (2011) argue that the object a speaker refers to with a demonstrative expression combined with a pointing gesture is determined by her directing intention rather than by her demonstration. They acknowledge that our use of the ordinary concept of “what is said” is affected by our judgements about the speaker’s responsibility for the results of her careless pointing; however, they claim that the effects are perlocutionary and have no bearing on determining the referential content of the speaker’s (...) act. I argue that the consequences of careless pointing are illocutionary and play a role in determining demonstrative reference. I also distinguish between two types of referential content which are attributable to the speaker’s utterance and shape its discursive behaviour: what is intended, which is determined by the speaker’s directing intention, and what is public, which depends on what she can legitimately be held responsible for. (shrink)

In this paper I give an overview of the recent developments in the phenomenalism – intentionalism debate and try to show that the proposed solutions of neither sides are satisfying. The claims and arguments of the two parties are rather vague and attribute to intentional and phenomenal properties either a too weak or a too strong relationship: too weak in the sense that they establish only mere coexistence, or too strong in the sense that they attribute some a priori (...) conceptual connection to intentional and phenomenal properties. I also compare these theories to other theories developed for solving the mind–body problem and argue that these former are much less elaborated. In the end of the paper I try to explain that all of this is not just a contingent feature of the topic, but has deep conceptual roots: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness are two quite distinct concepts on two quite distinct levels. (shrink)

A standard view in social science and philosophy is that a lie is a dishonest assertion: to lie is to assert something that you think is false in order to deceive your audience. We report four behavioral experiments designed to evaluate some aspects of this view. Participants read short scenarios and judged several features of interest, including whether an agent lied. We found evidence that ordinary lie attributions can be influenced by aspects of audience uptake, are based on judging that (...) the agent made an assertion (assertion attributions), and, at least in some contexts, are not based on attributions of deceptive intent. The finding on assertion attributions is predicted by the standard view, but the finding on intent attributions is not. These results help to further clarify the ordinary concept of lying and shed light on the psychological processes involved in ordinary lie attributions and related judgments. (shrink)

Nietzsche sometimes writes as if we are not in control—at least not in conscious control—of our actions. He seems to suggest that what we actually do is independent of our intentions. It turns out, though, that his understanding of both intention and action differs radically from most contemporary treatments of the issue. In particular, he denies that our actions are caused by their intentions, whose role is hermeneutical in a sense that this essay develops. How then is responsibility to be (...) assigned, since its moral variety, at least, depends, on several views, on the intention with which an action is performed? Nietzsche, of course, is not interested in making attributions of moral responsibility. Still, his views on the relationship between an individual action, its intention, other actions by its agent, and the agent's character, as this essay presents them, provide a reasonable account of action generally and a different, broader account of responsibility for oneself. (shrink)

If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility (...) to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore's “intentional schema” will not do the work of “theory of mind.” Their model will account neither for fundamental facts of social competence, such as the social attributions of the 10-month-old infant, nor the possibility that, though having a theory of mind, the chimpanzee's theory is “weaker” than the human's.

Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. According to this hypothesis, the negative emotional response triggered by a morally bad action (...) drives the attribution of intent to the actor, or the judgment that the actor acted intentionally. We test this hypothesis by presenting cases of morally bad and morally good action to seven individuals with deficits in emotional processing resulting from damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). If normal emotional processing is necessary for the observed asymmetry, then individuals with VMPC lesions should show no asymmetry. Our results provide no support for this hypothesis: like normal individuals, those with VMPC lesions showed the same asymmetry, tending to judge that an action was intentional when it was morally bad but not when it was morally good. Based on this finding, we suggest that normal emotional processing is not responsible for the observed asymmetry of intentional attributions and thus does not mediate the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. (shrink)

Ethics Without Intention tackles the questions raised by difficult moral dilemmas by providing a critical analysis of double effect and its most common ethical and political applications. The book discusses the philosophical distinction between intended harm and foreseen but unintended harm. This distinction, which, according to the doctrine of double effect, makes a difference to the moral justification of actions, is widely applied to some of the most controversial ethical and political questions of our time: collateral damages in wars and (...) acts of terrorism; palliative care, euthanasia, abortion, and embryo research; self-defence, suicide, and self-sacrifice. It is also crucial to the now notorious theoretical cases of the trolley problem and the knobe effect. -/- Di Nucci approaches the doctrine of double effect from four key directions: its historical origins, which can be traced further back than the classic attribution to Aquinas; its theoretical coherence, which is the subject of a lively contemporary debate in philosophy; its moral intuitiveness, which has always been taken for granted but has recently begun to be questioned; and finally its relevance to the difficult moral and political decisions of our time. An engaging and comprehensive introduction to the doctrine of double effect. (shrink)

Robots are used in various social interactions that require them to be perceived as credible agents. To be rated credible a robot’s mentalizing abilities have shown to be beneficial because they allow a robot to infer users’ inner states, thus serving as a prerequisite for understanding their beliefs and attitudes. However, social robots are often deployed by private and thus profit-oriented companies. In such cases where an organization’s implied manipulative intent is salient, the effect of robots’ mentalizing abilities might be (...) reversed. The reason for this is that mentalizing abilities could pose a persuasive threat to users rather than a feature for better understanding, thereby decreasing credibility attributions. These assumptions were tested in a three by two between-subjects, pre-registered, laboratory experiment during which participants interacted with a social robot that recommended experience vouchers as potential gifts for participants’ target persons. Contrary to our assumptions, inferential statistical results revealed no significant differences in explicit or indirect credibility attributions caused by the experimental manipulation. The external manipulative intent of an organization using the robot caused no differences in participants’ behavioral intentions or evaluations of it. Furthermore, only participants’ attribution of empathic understanding to the robot varied significantly between the three mentalizing conditions. Our results suggest that people focus more on the robot than on the organization using it, causing potential opportunities for such organizations to hide their economic interests from the users. (shrink)

In the philosophical and cognitive literature, the word ‘intention’ has been used with a variety of meanings which occasionally have been explicitly distinguished. I claim that an important cause of this polysemy is the fact that intentions are complex entities, endowed with an internal structure, and that sometimes different theories in the field are erroneously presented as if they were in conflict with each other, while they in fact just focus on different aspects of the phenomenon. The debate between Gallese’s (...) embodied simulation theory and Csibra and Gergely’s teleological stance hypothesis is discussed as a case in point, and some misunderstandings occurring in that debate are analyzed. The thesis that intentions are complex entities is argued for by shedding light on the following aspects of intentions: conscious control; perceptual (and not only motoric) representations of end-states; attributions of value to those representations; appreciation of the rational relationships between means and ends. (shrink)

The ordinary attribution of intentionality to (nonhuman) animals raises serious problems for fashionable linguistic accounts of belief and of intentionality generally; and many of the alleged problems arise from such linguistic theories of mind. Another deeper source of alleged problems is the apartness thesis, that there is a significant difference in kind, with substantial moral import, between humans and other animals; for the last lines of defence of this erroneous thesis consist in making out that there are significant (...) class='Hi'>intentional differences. A wide range of recent arguments against assigning intentionality (in the full sense) to animals are criticized in detail: those of Stich and Williams, in terms of animals lacking effective or specifiable concepts (concepts now replacing souls); those of Stich and Davidson based on the requirement for beliefs of an isomorphic belief network; those based on the usual opacity of intentionality; those of Descartes and Davidson and others based on the requirement of, or arguments to the essentiality of, language use for attributions of intentionality; arguments based on the requirement of capacity for pretence or awareness of error; and arguments used by Vendler and Malcolm. Several different arguments for assigning intentionality to animals are then advanced, arguments from cerebral organization, exteriorization arguments, and interiorization arguments from the semantical analysis of intentionality. The main arguments advanced are not analogical; they are not anthropocentric, or the result of personifying languageless animals; and the attributions of intentionality they lead to are not impoverished or of reduced status. (shrink)

Amy saves a man from drowning despite the risk to herself, because she is moved by his plight. This is a quintessentially supererogatory act: an act that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Beth, on the other hand, saves a man from drowning because she wants to get her name in the paper. On this second example, opinions differ. One view of supererogation holds that, despite being optional and good, Beth’s act is not supererogatory because she is not (...) praiseworthy; the other agrees that Beth is not praiseworthy but holds that her act is nevertheless supererogatory because, while supererogatory actions are generally performed by praiseworthy agents, an individual need not be praiseworthy for their act to be supererogatory. In this paper, I raise a problem for this latter position, which I shall call the Anti-Motivation View of supererogation. While the Anti-Motivation View rejects the claim that the agent’s motivations are important, it accepts that the agent’s intentions are. Thus, this view assumes that a clear, coherent distinction can be drawn between intentions and motivations in the context of supererogation. This distinction is often attributed to Mill; however, his original discussion reveals an inconsistency. Consider Clara, who saves a man from drowning because she wants to torture him later. According to Mill, Clara’s act is not morally good; those who follow Mill will have to accept that it is therefore not supererogatory. Mill asserts that Clara’s act differs from Amy’s and Beth’s not just in motivation but also in intention. I question this explanation and demonstrate that the distinction between motivation and intention is not as clear as the Anti-Motivation View has supposed and that the gap between the Anti-Motivation View and the alternative Praise-Based View is either much greater or much smaller than previously thought. (shrink)

Some eliminativists have predicted that a developed neuroscience will eradicate the principles and theoretical kinds (belief, desire, etc.) implicit in our ordinary practices of mental state attribution. Prevailing defenses of common-sense psychology infer its basic integrity from its familiarity and instrumental success in everyday social commerce. Such common-sense defenses charge that eliminativist arguments are self-defeating in their folk psychological appeal to the belief that eliminativism is true. I argue that eliminativism is untouched by this simple charge of inconsistency, and (...) introduce a different dialectical strategy for arguing against the eliminativist. In keeping with the naturalistic trend in the sociology and philosophy of science, I show that neuroscientists routinely rely on folk psychological procedures of intentional state attribution in applying epistemically reliable standards of scientific evaluation. These scientific contexts place ordinary procedures of attribution under greater stress, producing evidence of folk psychological success that is less equivocal than the evidence in mundane settings. Therefore, the dependence of science on folk psychology, when combined with an independently plausible explanatory constraint on reduction and an independently motivated notion of theoretical stress, allows us to reconstitute the charge of (neurophilic) eliminativist inconsistency in a more sophisticated form. (shrink)

In criminal law, foresight betrays a guilty mind as much as intent does: both reveal that the agent is not properly motivated to avoid an illegal state of affairs. This commonality warrants our judgment that the state is brought about intentionally, even when unintended. In contrast to Knobe, I thus retain the idea that acting intentionally is acting with a certain frame of mind.

This paper will investigate the roots of intentionality in Aristotle’s theory of perception and assess the accuracy of Brentano’s proposed location of intentionality in Aristotle. When introducing intentionality into contemporary philosophy, Brentano attributed it to Aristotle, whose theory of psychology he believed to reveal the characteristics of intentional inexistence. After setting up a working definition of intentionality that stresses such features as immanent content and intentional directedness, I will then clarify Aristotle’s theory of perception with regard to these (...) two characteristics. I draw the conclusion that we can only find the roots of immanent content in Aristotle’s perceptual theory. For him, directedness moves from the sensible object to the sensitive soul, and thus it does not correspond to what contemporary philosophers define as intentional directedness. (shrink)

Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...) were able to adequately demonstrate this, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) embedded in interactive human-robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive mechanisms involved in human-human interactions, and high-light the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human-robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human-robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles. (shrink)

Interpreting the world through a social lens is a central characteristic of human cognition. Humans ascribe intentions to the behaviors of other individuals and groups. Humans also make inferences about others’ emotional and mental states. This capacity for social attribution underlies many of the concepts at the core of legal and political systems. The developing scientific understanding of the neural mechanisms used in social attribution may alter many earlier suppositions. However, just as often, these new methods will lead (...) back to old conundrums. Cognitive neuroscience will not dispel the hard problems of social judgment. (shrink)

Linguistic research has revealed several pathways of language change that may guide our understanding of the evolution of mental‐state attribution. In particular, it turns out that, in many languages, quotative verbs have been exapted for attributing a variety of mental states, including beliefs and intentions. In such languages, the literal translation of, “Betty said: ‘There will be war’”, may be used not only to quote Betty's words, but also to convey that she thought or intended there to be war. (...) This paper presents a model of the pragmatic shifts underlying this pathway, and proposes an evolutionary trajectory from quotation to the public practice of attributing beliefs and intentions, and thence to implicit belief/intention attribution. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a contextualist account of the role of authors’ intentions in interpretation, according to which their role depends on readers’ interpretive interests. In light of a general discussion of intentions and responsibility, I argue that insofar as readers are interested in attributing authorial responsibility for interpretations of fictional works, authors’ intentions need to play a central role in those interpretations. And I investigate the implications of this account for ‘accidental authorship’, cases in which interpretations of a (...) work are neither intended nor reasonably foreseen by the author. (shrink)

Ordinary usage supports both a relatively strong belief requirement on intention and a tight conceptual connection between intention and intentional action. More specifically, it speaks in favor both of the view that "S intends to A" entails "S believes that he (probably) will A" and of the thesis that "S intentionally A-ed" entails "S intended to A." So, at least, proponents of these ideas often claim or assume, and with appreciable justification. The conjunction of these two ideas, however, has (...) some highly counterintuitive implications. This suggests that a certain skepticism about the coherence of ordinary usage of "intention" may be salutary. Fortunately, the skeptic need not abandon the quest for understanding. Much can be gleaned from a careful investigation of the functions attributed to intention in the literature. In this paper, I argue that the capacity of intention to do the work that the literature assigns it does not depend upon intentional A-ing's entailing intending to A, nor upon there being a strong belief constraint on intention, nor even a certain relatively weak belief constraint. I also develop an account of the features of intention in virtue of which it is capable of doing this work. This account provides the core of an adequate conception of intention. Toward the end of the paper, I briefly motivate acceptance of a modest belief requirement on non-functional grounds. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a preliminary explication of the role of and the relation between mental states, action, and blame in Medhātithi’s commentary on the most influential juridical text of the Sanskrit world – the jurisprudential text attributed to Manu. In defining what it means to act and what constitutes engaging in intentional and unintentional action, this paper makes three claims. First, enjoined actions (e.g., sacrifices) require particular mental states to be performed. Notwithstanding the role of mental states (...) in enjoined actions, actions lacking the corresponding mental states can be blameworthy. In fact, unintentional actions (including also actions done intentionally, but under a description that foregoes what renders the conduct sanctionable) can indeed constitute blameworthy conduct. Second, although unintentional action still meets the threshold for constituting blameworthy conduct, mental states generally play an important role regarding the degree of blame assignable to a person. Third, there are several possible rules that make sense of the seemingly inconsistent use and impact of intention throughout Manu’s Code of Laws as Medhātithi’s commentary shows. The paper also sheds light on the relation between intentions and desires according to Medhātithi. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether intent, an attribute of earnings management, affected the evaluation of the level of ethical acceptability of other EM attributes reported by senior Canadian undergraduate accounting students. Extending work in the U.S. begun by Merchant and Rockness and Bruns and Merchant, 22–25, 1990), our results indicate that there were statistically significant differences in the assessments of ethical acceptability attributable to intent. There were also significant differences attributable to gender.