Absences as Latent Potentialities

Absences, i.e., agential omissions and forbearances, but also ‘natural’ negative states and events beyond the sphere of human agency, seem to be part and parcel of the real world. Yet, it is exactly the putative reality of absences that strikes many philosophers as utterly mysterious, if not entirely unintelligible. As a promising approach towards solving the problem of real absences, I wish to explore the idea that absences are latent potentialities. To this end, I shall investigate what potentialities are, what kinds of potentiality exist, and what it means for a potentiality to remain latent. I will also discuss whether the framework of latent potentiality is able to meet the extensional constraints imposed on the theory of absences by our intuitions about the reach of negative acts and events, i.e., whether latent potentialities can account for all real absences.     

The logical form of negative action sentences

It is typically assumed that actions are events, but there is a growing consensus that negative actions, like omissions and refrainments, are not events, but absences thereof. If so, then we must either deny the obvious, that we can exercise our agency by omitting and refrainment, or give up on event-based theories of agency. I trace the consensus to the assumption that negative action sentences are negative-existentials, and argue that this is false. The best analysis of negative action sentences treats them as quantifying over omissions and refrainments, conceived of as events.     

Exploring the relationship between perceived Action-Outcome distance and Agency: Evidence from temporal binding

Intentional actions are usually accompanied by a sense of agency (SoA), along with a perceived shortening of action-outcome intervals known as the intentional binding (IB) effect. This is at least partly associated with the perceived strength of action-outcome relationships, which have been described in terms of distance (e.g., a ‘distancing effect’). Given that actions in the modern world are increasingly distant from their outcomes, the current study aimed to explore the effect of perceived spatial distance on the strength of IB. Participants voluntarily triggered, or passively observed, a circle on a background that was either flat or appeared three-dimensional, and estimated action-outcome delays. Depth cues modified the circle’s perceived distance while the circle itself did not change. When viewed on a forced-perspective background, interval estimates increased with apparent distance, but only when outcomes were caused by intentional actions. This suggests that agency is reduced for outcomes that appear further away.     

Metacognition of agency

The feeling that we are agents, intentionally making things happen by our own actions, is foundational to our understanding of ourselves as humans. People's metacognitions of agency were investigated in 4 experiments. Participants played a game in which they tried to touch downward scrolling Xs and avoid touching Os. Variables that affected accuracy included speed of the scroll, density of the targets, and feedback. Of central interest were variables directed not only at accuracy but also at people's control: the turbulence of the cursor and how close the cursor had to come to the target for a hit (i.e., "magic"). After each trial, people made judgments of agency or judgments of performance. People were selectively sensitive to the variables to which they should be responsive in agency monitoring--whether the cursor moved in close synchrony to their movements and whether targets disappeared by magic. People knew, separably from their objective or judged performance, when they were in control and when they were not. These results indicate that people can sensitively monitor their own agency.     

When Mental States Matter,When They Don't,and What That Means for Morality

Research has shown that moral judgments depend on the capacity to engage in mental state reasoning. In this article, we will first review behavioral and neural evidence for the role of mental states (e.g., people's beliefs, desires, intentions) in judgments of right and wrong. Second, we will consider cases where mental states appear at first to matter less (i.e., when people assign moral blame for accidents and when explicit information about mental states is missing). Third, we will consider cases where mental states, in fact, matter less, specifically, in cases of “purity” violations (e.g., committing incest, consuming taboo foods). We will discuss how and why mental states do not matter equivalently across the multi‐dimensional space of morality. In the fourth section of this article, we will elaborate on the possibility that norms against harmful actions and norms against “impure” actions serve distinct functions – for regulating interpersonal interactions (i.e., harm) versus for protecting the self (i.e., purity). In the fifth and final section, we will speculate on possible differences in how we represent and reason about other people's mental states versus our own beliefs and intentions. In addressing these issues, we aim to provide insight into the complex structure and distinct functions of mental state reasoning and moral cognition. We conclude that mental state reasoning allows us to make sense of other moral agents in order to understand their past actions, to predict their future behavior, and to evaluate them as potential friends or foes.     

Subjective agency and awareness of shared actions

Voluntary actions and their distal effects are intimately related in conscious awareness. When an expected effect follows a voluntary action, the experience of the interval between these events is compressed in time, a phenomenon known as ‘intentional binding’ (IB). Current accounts of IB suggest that it serves to reinforce associations between our goals and our intention to attain these goals via action, and that IB only occurs for self-generated (i.e., intentional) actions. We used a novel approach to study IB in the context of shared intentions and actions. Pairs of participants judged the time of occurrence of actions and events attributed either to oneself or to another agent. We found that IB and subjective agency are not mutually predictive when an action can be attributed to only one of two ‘co-intending’ agents. Our results pose a complication for the prevailing view that IB and subjective agency reflect a common mechanism.     

On The Nature of Experiencing Self‐Agency: The Role of Goals and Primes in Inferring Oneself as the Cause of Behavior

People often find themselves in situations where the cause of events may be ambiguous. Surprisingly though, the experience of self‐agency, i.e., perceiving oneself as the causal agent of behavioral outcomes, appears quite natural to most people. How then do these experiences arise? We discuss common models proposing that self‐agency experiences result from the comparison between actual action‐outcomes and the outcomes one explicitly set as a goal. However, recent developments in psychology and neuroscience suggest that our behaviors and the outcomes they produce can be primed and implicitly guided by environmental cues and yet are accompanied by experiences of self‐agency. Hence, we also review research revealing how self‐agency experiences may arise over behavioral outcomes that are implicitly primed before they occur and how such implicitly cued agency experiences may differ from agency experiences that are the result of explicitly set goals. Directions for future research are briefly addressed.     

Visual variability affects early verb learning

Research demonstrates that within‐category visual variability facilitates noun learning; however, the effect of visual variability on verb learning is unknown. We habituated 24‐month‐old children to a novel verb paired with an animated star‐shaped actor. Across multiple trials, children saw either a single action from an action category (identical actions condition, for example, travelling while repeatedly changing into a circle shape) or multiple actions from that action category (variable actions condition, for example, travelling while changing into a circle shape, then a square shape, then a triangle shape). Four test trials followed habituation. One paired the habituated verb with a new action from the habituated category (e.g., ‘dacking’ + pentagon shape) and one with a completely novel action (e.g., ‘dacking’ + leg movement). The others paired a new verb with a new same‐category action (e.g., ‘keefing’ + pentagon shape), or a completely novel category action (e.g., ‘keefing’ + leg movement). Although all children discriminated novel verb/action pairs, children in the identical actions condition discriminated trials that included the completely novel verb, while children in the variable actions condition discriminated the out‐of‐category action. These data suggest that – as in noun learning – visual variability affects verb learning and children's ability to form action categories.     

Intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility: correlational evidence for an evolutionary-embodied-epistemological account

Abstract

We outline an evolutionary-embodied-epistemological (EEE) account of intellectual arrogance (IA), proposing that people psychologically experience their important beliefs as valued possessions – mental materialism – that they must fight to keep – ideological territoriality – thereby disposing them toward IA. Nonetheless, IA should still vary, being higher among people taking a hostile and domineering epistemic stance (rejecting reality, resisting evidence) than among those taking an open and deferential one (embracing reality, respecting evidence). Such variations can be predicted from people’s standing on the communion-agency circumplex at multiple levels of analysis (i.e. from their social inclusion and status; dispositional warmth and competence; and behavioral amiability and assertiveness). Using pre-validated indices of mental materialism and ideological territoriality, and an argument evaluation task permitting the quantification of rational objectivity and egotistical bias, we obtained consistent correlational evidence that, as hypothesized, IA is the highest when agency is high and communion low, validating the EEE account.     

Level of agency in sub-clinical checking

This study examined cognitive representations of routine action, through the assessment of level of agency, in individuals with sub-clinical checking. The level of agency stems from Action Identification Theory [Vallacher, R. R., Wegner, D. M. (1989). Levels of personal agency: Individual variation in action identification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57, 660-671], which states that how actions are usually identified (based on instrumental aspects or purpose) reflects the predominant accessibility of internal representation (movements executed vs. goal pursued). Furthermore, this framework proposed that altered action regulation is related to low-level of agency (i.e., action identification at an instrumental level). In the current study, the main result indicated that checking symptoms were related to a low-level of agency, that is, individuals with sub-clinical checking identified habitual actions on the basis of instrumental aspects. This seems to indicate that checkers may act with a lack of goal representations. The results are discussed in terms of the role of low-level of agency in checking phenomena and related cognitive dysfunction.     

Connecting action control and agency: Does action-effect binding affect temporal binding?

The sense of agency, i.e., the notion that we, as agents, are in control of our own actions and can affect our environment by acting, is an integral part of human volition. Recent work has attempted to ground agency in basic mechanisms of human action control. Along these lines, action-effect binding has been shown to affect explicit judgments of agency. Here, we investigate if such action-effect bindings are also related to temporal binding which is often used as an implicit measure of agency. In two experiments, we found evidence for the establishment of short-term action-effect bindings as well as temporal binding effects. However, the two phenomena were not associated with each other. This finding suggests that the relation of action control and agency is not a simple one, and it adds to the evidence in favor of a dissociation between subjective agency and perceptual biases such as temporal binding.     

Re-construction of action awareness depends on an internal model of action-outcome timing

The subjective time of an instrumental action is shifted towards its outcome. This temporal binding effect is partially retrospective, i.e., occurs upon outcome perception. Retrospective binding is thought to reflect post-hoc inference on agency based on sensory evidence of the action – outcome association. However, many previous binding paradigms cannot exclude the possibility that retrospective binding results from bottom-up interference of sensory outcome processing with action awareness and is functionally unrelated to the processing of the action – outcome association. Here, we keep bottom-up interference constant and use a contextual manipulation instead. We demonstrate a shift of subjective action time by its outcome in a context of variable outcome timing. Crucially, this shift is absent when there is no such variability. Thus, retrospective action binding reflects a context-dependent, model-based phenomenon. Such top-down re-construction of action awareness seems to bias agency attribution when outcome predictability is low.     

主动控制感在大脑表征中的时空标记

主动控制感是主动动作过程中产生的控制自身动作, 进而控制外部环境的主观体验。构成动作主动控制感的核心要素是主观意图与结果反馈。本研究试图通过操控这两个核心要素的不同属性, 借助脑磁图等技术, 探寻主动控制感在大脑额-顶为主的脑网络中前-后馈的作用方式及时空特异性标记, 并建构新的认知神经理论模型。这将有利于理解人类动作的产生及后效、为相关精神类疾病的临床诊断提供更加客观的参照标准。     

Ethical and institutional frameworks for interactional justice in public organizations: a comparative analysis of selected Western and Chinese sources

This paper explores both differences and points of contact between selected contemporary theories of public ethics in the West and China. China is in a greater state of flux in this connection, with new, eclectic approaches to ethical justification for moral agency gaining prominence. There are thematic parallels between East and West in their distinct strains of institutionalism (in which neither individual moral agency nor the justice claims of individuals have much play). However, there are recent Chinese theoretical proposals – many incorporating Western sources – that address this quandary, namely the institutional overdetermination of moral agency. These proposals are joined to contributions from feminist and liberation ethics in a critical reconsideration of overridingness in formal ethics. Contemporary Chinese ethics connect moral claims to kin, community, and reciprocity networks, particularly as traditional philosophy is recovered in new theoretical syntheses. The grounding of Confucian ethics in kin and community offers an instructive contrast to formal Western ethical systems, as do radical strains of Western ethics that suggest that transcendence is found in the self's extension toward others in need. This paper considers these ethical themes in connection with hypothetical instances of interactional justice in organizations.     

Skeptical Appeal: The Source‐Content Bias

Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two factors. First, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly than perceptual belief. Second, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly when its content is negative (i.e., that something is not the case) than when it is positive (i.e., that something is the case). It just so happens that potent skeptical arguments tend to focus our attention on negative inferential beliefs, and we are especially prone to doubt that such beliefs count as knowledge. That is, our cognitive evaluations are biased against this specific combination of source and content. The skeptic sows seeds of doubt by exploiting this feature of our psychology.     

Retrospective construction of the judgement of free choice

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. Some authors propose that actions are unconsciously initiated and awareness of intention is referred retrospectively to the action after it has been performed [e.g. Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness & Cognition, 14, 439-458]. This contrasts with the common impression that our intentions cause those actions. By combining a stop signal paradigm and an intentional action paradigm we show that participants sometimes indicate to have intentionally initiated an action while reaction time data strongly suggest that they in fact failed to stop the action. In a second experiment we demonstrate that the number of trials in which participants misattributed their awareness of intention varied with the intentional involvement during action planning. Our data support the retrospective account of intentional action. Furthermore, we introduce an experimental approach that objectifies introspective judgments of awareness of intention.     

Cardiovascular responses to agency and communion stressors in young women

Theory and research (Helgeson, 1994) suggest that women are particularly responsive to communion stressors (i.e., social relationship concerns) as opposed to agency (i.e., achievement and dominance concerns) and that women low in the trait of agency are vulnerable to stress. To test these hypotheses, 60 undergraduate women interacted with a pre-recorded partner; one-third provided support to an interaction partner (i.e., communion stressor), debated current events (i.e., agency stressor), or described a typical day (i.e., control task). Compared to controls, the debate task evoked greater systolic blood pressure and heart rate reactivity and related autonomic changes. Compared to controls, providing support evoked larger increases in cardiac sympathetic activation and reduced vascular resistance. Low levels of trait agency were associated with greater CVR overall. Hence, agency and communion stressors had distinct psychophysiologic effects. Although both tasks heightened reactivity, the agency task evoked cognitive and physiological responses consistent with threat, whereas the communion task evoked a pattern consistent with challenge.     

Political agency and violence: understanding the causes of the Mountain Meadows Massacre

ABSTRACT

In contrast to political power – a generalised capacity for modifying the behaviour of other actors – the article conceptualises political agency as the actions of political actors which actually cause other actors to behave in a certain way. Analysing agency consists of identifying agents, actual veto players whose (in)actions lead to the outcomes in question, and explaining the causal relation between their (in)actions and the behaviour of other actors. Thus conceptualised, agency becomes an empirically grounded, value-free synonym for the more emotionally charged notions of political or moral responsibility. This model of political agency is then applied to an empirical analysis of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a mass murder of emigrants in Utah committed by Mormons and Native Americans in 1857. Three categories of factors are invoked – cultural, institutional and behavioural – to recreate the chain of necessary, sufficient, SUIN and INUS causes which led up to the event.     

The amount of recent action-outcome coupling modulates the mechanisms of the intentional binding effect: A behavioral and ERP study

Our everyday interactions depend on the ability to maintain a feeling of control over our bodily actions, that is, the sense of agency. The intentional binding effect – a perceived temporal shortening between voluntary actions and sensory outcomes – has been shown to implicitly measure agency. We investigated the effect’s underlying mechanisms: prediction and retrospective inference. First, long-term and recent action-outcome coupling were compared. Second, brain activity was recorded to uncover the neural correlates of the two mechanisms. Our results show that the recent accumulation of action-outcome coupling, but not that of a long-term accumulation, is correlated with the binding effect of actions and accounts for both mechanisms. Temporal action binding was reflected in both the readiness potential and the auditory evoked potential. The results shed new light on our understanding of the influence that immediate context of an action has on its temporal binding and the neural substrate of human agency.