Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P. F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non‐standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither antirealist nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead “constructivist.” On the “Scaffolding View” I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. Although this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is in providing a plausible defense of why so‐called “responsible agents” genuinely deserve to be treated as such.     

Group agential epistemic injustice: Epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging of group epistemic agency1

Expanding Miranda Fricker's (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, recent accounts of agential epistemic injustice (Lackey, 2020; Medina, 2021; Pohlhaus, 2020) have focused on cases in which the epistemic agency of individuals or groups is unfairly blocked, constrained, or subverted. In this article I argue that agential epistemic injustice is perpetrated against marginalized groups not only when their group epistemic agency is excluded, but also when it is included but receives defective uptake that neutralizes their capacity to resist epistemic oppression. I identify two harms that such injustice inflicts on marginalized groups: epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging of resistant epistemic group agency. My analysis shows how the harms of agential epistemic injustice can occur through unfair epistemic exclusions in group dynamics, but also through forms of inclusion in group dynamics that distort or coopt the epistemic agency of the group. Following Emmalon Davis (2018) and her analysis of epistemic appropriation, I argue that the harms of agential epistemic injustice can occur when the resistant epistemic resources of a marginalized group are appropriated in a way that disempowers them and critically defangs their resistant epistemic agency. I use Taylor Rogers’ (2021) analysis of the epistemic appropriation of “#MeToo” and “intersectionality” to show how epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging work in unjust epistemic group dynamics. The article offers a diagnosis of the failures of epistemic responsibility involved in agential epistemic injustice, and some suggestions for resisting those failures and working toward more responsible and just epistemic group dynamics.     

IN DEFENCE OF THE AGENT-CENTRED PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: This article explores certain issues that arise at the borderline between conceptual analysis and metaphysics, where answers to questions of a conceptual nature compete with answers to questions of an ontological or metaphysical nature. I focus on the way in which three philosophers, Kant, Collingwood and Davidson, articulate the relationship between the conceptual question “What are actions?” and the metaphysical question “How is agency possible?” I argue that the way in which one handles the relationship between the conceptual and the ontological question has important implications for one's conception of the nature of philosophy, and that thinking hard about what it takes to defend the autonomy of the mental and of the agent‐centred perspective should force us to think about our underlying conception of philosophy and to choose between one that understands it as first science and one that understands it as the under‐labourer of science.     

Four Questions of Iterated Grounding

The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped under QIG. I will also argue that given some plausible assumptions about what it would take for a relation to back metaphysical explanation, many salient views about grounding allow us to give “easy” answers to these questions—easy in the sense that we can straightforwardly derive them from the respective conception of grounding without getting into the sorts of complexities that typically inform answers to QIG. The paper's main upshot is that we cannot expect to make much progress on QIG without first addressing the difficult issue of how exactly grounding is related to metaphysical explanation.     

Free Will,Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher‐level one on a par with other higher‐level phenomena such as agency and intentionality.     

Norms and Necessity

Modality presents notorious philosophical problems, including the epistemic problem of how we could come to know modal facts and metaphysical problems about how to place modal facts in the natural world. These problems arise from thinking of modal claims as attempts to describe modal features of this world that explain what makes them true. Here I propose a different view of modal discourse in which talk about what is “metaphysically necessary” does not aim to describe modal features of the world, but, rather, provides a particularly useful way of expressing constitutive semantic and conceptual rules in the object language. The result is a “modal normativist” view that enables us to avoid the epistemic problems of modality and mitigate the metaphysical worries, while also leaving open the possibility of a unified account of the function of modal language. Finally, I address a serious challenge: we have the norms we do in order to track the modal facts of the world, so that the order of explanation must go in the opposite direction. I close by showing how the normativist may answer that challenge.     

Siding with the world: Reciprocal expressions of human and nature in an impending era of loneliness

This paper argues that our embodied and emotional attachments to the non-human world must be carried forward in an effort to comprehend nature in interdependent and agential terms. Such an understanding may allow a new ethical configuration in which the interactions between humans and nature become an “an active collaborative process” (Plumwood, 2001: 16). In this respect, the agencies of both humanity and nature are placed within reciprocal relationships of consequence. The paper begins by reviewing the limitations of dominant conceptualizations of nature that emphatically exclude it from the human realm of agency and ethical consideration. It then considers alternate theorizations that forward relational aspects and proximities of nature, particularly in terms of expanded concepts of time, agency and affect (e.g.: Greenhouse, 1996; Plumwood, 2001). Collaborative relations between human and non-human worlds are also re-considered through phenomenological accounts (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, Toadvine, 2009), which emphasize a productive dialectic of experience and recognition. In conclusion, the paper argues that the validation of emotional and agential relations between human and non-human life allow for more ethical and less destructive engagement. In recognizing such correspondences, we are also impelled to recognize the biophysical limits of all life that is threatened under climate change.     

Narrative and Metaphysical Ambition: On Being “in Christ”

This article addresses some of the confusion regarding the role of metaphysical claims in narrative theology. Proponents and critics of narrative theology alike wonder at the ambiguous place of metaphysical speech about God as an objective reality. This essay enters the conversation through the side door of soteriology. Rather than focusing on the relationship between narrative and metaphysics or narrative and analogy or narrative and first‐order theological claims, I examine what sort of metaphysical statements are required to make the Christian claim that human beings are “in Christ” intelligible as a soteriological reality. I argue that the Christian grammar itself assumes a Christology with a certain kind of metaphysical ambition without which Christianity lapses into incoherence. To make this case, I show that David Kelsey's “narrative identity” Christology in Eccentric Existence lacks the metaphysical statements necessary to uphold his conviction that human beings are “in Christ.” A comparison with T. F. Torrance and the Book of Hebrews reveals that when narrative circumvents metaphysical statements about the incarnate Son, soteriological claims lack coherence and the biblical narrative itself is distorted by a false metaphysic. Thus, metaphysical claims internal to the narrative of Jesus are necessary to tell the story of God faithfully. In this way, narrative is the expression of a theological metaphysics.     

Infant perception of causal motion produced by humans and inanimate objects

Both the movements of people and inanimate objects are intimately bound up with physical causality. Furthermore, in contrast to object movements, causal relationships between limb movements controlled by humans and their body displacements uniquely reflect agency and goal-directed actions in support of social causality. To investigate the development of sensitivity to causal movements, we examined the looking behavior of infants between 9 and 18 months of age when viewing movements of humans and objects. We also investigated whether individual differences in gender and gross motor functions may impact the development of the visual preferences for causal movements. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with walking stimuli showing either normal body translation or a “moonwalk” that reversed the horizontal motion of body translations. In Experiment 2, infants were presented with unperformable actions beyond infants’ gross motor functions (i.e., long jump) either with or without ecologically valid body displacement. In Experiment 3, infants were presented with rolling movements of inanimate objects that either complied with or violated physical causality. We found that female infants showed longer looking times to normal walking stimuli than to moonwalk stimuli, but did not differ in their looking time to movements of inanimate objects and unperformable actions. In contrast, male infants did not show sensitivity to causal movement for either category. Additionally, female infants looked longer at social stimuli of human actions than male infants. Under the tested circumstances, our findings indicate that female infants have developed a sensitivity to causal consistency between limb movements and body translations of biological motion, only for actions with previous visual and motor exposures, and demonstrate a preference toward social information.     

Living in the “space of reasons”: The “rationality debate” revisited

Two questions are central to the “rationality debate” in the philosophy of social science. First, should we acknowledge differences in basic norms of epistemic and agential rationality, or in the content of perceptual experience, as the “best explanation” of radical differences in belief and practice? Second, can genuine understanding be achieved between cultures and research traditions that so differ in their beliefs and practices? I survey a number of responses to these questions, and suggest that one of these, “dialogical optimism”, while attractive, is in need of further clarification. Such clarification may be forthcoming if we attend to recent work by John McDowell. McDowell claims that perceptual experience, as our primary mode of epistemic access to the world, must be located within what Sellars termed the “space of reasons” if we are to make sense of our conception of ourselves as thinking creatures. I develop a reading of this claim in terms of a fundamental duality in human perceptual experience, and use this conception of experience to illuminate the dialogical optimist strategy in the rationality debate.     

Sympathetic action in the seventeenth century: human and natural

The category of sympathy marks a number of basic divisions in early modern approaches to action explanations, whether for human agency or for change in the wider natural world. Some authors were critical of using sympathy to explain change. They call such principles “unintelligible” or assume they involve “mysterious” action at a distance. Others, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, appeal to sympathy to capture natural phenomena (yawn contagion, magnetism), or to supply a backbone to their metaphysics. Here I discuss how concerns about sympathetic actions form at least a partial background for differing seventeenth-century conceptions of what it is to explain action. I argue that critics of sympathy generally insist on an “atomistic” approach to action explanation, which makes primitively relational phenomena come out as problematic. Proponents of sympathy, by contrast, allow for a more holistic approach to action explanation, which allows for such basic connections. Hence, divergent attitudes toward sympathetic action in part explain differences in approaches to explanation. I conclude by showing how some of these core concerns fade into the background when in the eighteenth-century sympathy gets psychologised and individualised.     

Happiness,Dispositions and the Self

I argue that happiness is an exclusively categorical mental state. Daniel Haybron’s inclusion of dispositions into his emotional state theory rests of a confusion of constituents of happiness in the narrow psychological sense with objects of prudential concern, to which obviously belong “mood propensities” and other dispositional states. I further argue that while it is probably correct to require of a constituent of happiness that it must in some sense be “deep” and belong to, or directly impact on, a persons’ self, the importance of depth may be overrated by the emotional state theory, which also ignores the possibility that mental states other than moods and emotions can be deep in the relevant sense.     

Causal Powers and the Necessity of Realization

Non-reductive physicalists hold that mental properties are realized by physical properties. The realization relation is typically taken to be a metaphysical necessitation relation. Here, I explore how the metaphysical necessitation feature of realization can be explained by what is known as ‘the subset view’ of realization. The subset view holds that the causal powers that are associated with a realized property are a proper subset of the causal powers that are associated with the realizer property. I argue that the said explanation of the metaphysical necessitation feature requires a careful treatment of the relationship between properties and causal powers.     

GETTING UNDER MY SKIN: WILLIAM JAMES ON THE EMOTIONS, SOCIALITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE

“You are really getting under my skin!” This exclamation suggests a series of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical questions: What is the nature and development of human emotion? How does emotion arise in social interaction? To what extent can interactive situations shape our embodied selves and intensify particular affective states? With these questions in mind, William James begins to investigate the character of emotions and to develop a model of what he terms the social self. James's studies of mimicry and his interest in phenomena now often investigated using biofeedback begin to explain how affective states develop and how it might be possible for something to “get under one's skin.” I situate these studies in the history of psychology between the psychological schools of structuralism and behaviorism. More important, I suggest continuity between James's Psychology and recent research on mirror neurons, reentrant mapping, and emotional mimicry in the fields of clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This research supports and extends James's initial claims in regard to the creation of emotions and the life of the social self. I propose that James's work in the empirical sciences should be read as a prelude to his metaphysical works that speak of a coordination between embodied selves and wider environmental situations, and his psychological studies should be read as a prelude to his reflections on spiritual transcendence.     

Adaptive abilities

Abilities, in contrast to mere dispositions, propensities, or tendencies, abilities seem to be features of agents that put the agent herself in control. But what is the distinguishing feature of abilities vis-à-vis other kinds of powers? Our aim in this paper is to point, in answer to this question, to a crucial feature of abilities that existing accounts have tended to neglect: their adaptivity. Adaptivity is a feature of how abilities are exercised. The main reason for its relative neglect has been that most extant accounts have focused solely on whether abilities are exercised successfully in certain possible situations and have mostly understood the exercise of an ability in terms of complete successful performance. We begin by pointing out two aspects of abilities with regard to which current accounts seem (at best) incomplete: control and exercise. We then introduce adaptivity as we understand it, and end by putting it to work in developing a fuller understanding of abilities that does better than current accounts.     

What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them

This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with four complementary profiles: its “construction” profile, its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency.

     

Navigating the Penumbra: Children and Moral Responsibility

Child moral agency is dismissed in many historical and contemporary accounts based on children's supposed lack or marginal possession of agency-bearing capacities, including reason, deliberation, and judgment, amongst others. Given its prominence in the philosophical canon, I call this the traditional view of child agency. Recent advancements in moral developmental psychology challenge the traditional view, pointing toward the possession of relevant capacities and competencies for moral and responsible agency in early and middle childhood. I argue that both views—traditional and developmental—underdetermine our practices of holding children responsible in our common interactions. For one, we face significant epistemic barriers in accurately assessing children’s agential status qua possession of responsibility-bearing capacities and competencies. Second, overreliance on assessments of individualistic capacities emphasizes an atomistic view of agency at the expense of relational views that are of particular relevance for children as uniquely developing persons. Our practices of holding children responsible and the values that guide these practices in the context of supportive relationships are central to both supporting current and drawing out future responsible agency in childhood and, importantly, provide us with a path to regard children as participants in our moral communities, as opposed to mere agents-in-waiting.     

Aristotle's De Anima: On Why the Soul is Not a Set of Capacities

Although it is common for interpreters of Aristotle's De Anima to treat the soul as a specially related set of powers of capacities, I argue against this view on the grounds that the plausible options for reconciling the claim that the soul is a set of powers with Aristotle's repeated claim that the soul is an actuality cannot be unsuccessful. Moreover, I argue that there are good reasons to be wary of attributing to Aristotle the view that the soul is a set of powers because this claim conflicts with several of his metaphysical commitments, most importantly his claims about form and substance. I argue that although there are passages in the De Anima in which Aristotle discusses the soul in terms of its powers or capacities, these discussions do not establish that the soul is a set of capacities.     

Laws,causality and the intentional explanation of action

Whether or not an intentional explanation of action necessarily involves law-like statements is related to another question, namely, is it a causal explanation? The Popper-Hempel Thesis, which answers both questions affirmatively, inevitably faces a dilemma between realistic and universalistic requirements. However, in terms of W.C. Salmon’s concept of causal explanation, intentional explanation can be a causal one even if it does not rely on any laws. Based on this, we are able to refute three characteristic arguments for the claim “reason is not a cause of action,” namely, the “proper logical” argument, the “logical relation” argument, and the “rule-following” argument. This rebuttal suggests that the causal relationship between reason and action can provide a justification for intentional explanations.