Agent causation as a solution to the problem of action

My primary aim is to defend a nonreductive solution to the problem of action. I argue that when you are performing an overt bodily action, you are playing an irreducible causal role in bringing about, sustaining, and controlling the movements of your body, a causal role best understood as an instance of agent causation. Thus, the solution that I defend employs a notion of agent causation, though emphatically not in defence of an account of free will, as most theories of agent causation are. Rather, I argue that the notion of agent causation introduced here best explains how it is that you are making your body move during an action, thereby providing a satisfactory solution to the problem of action.     

Polarized Opinions on Racial Progress and Inequality: Measurement and Application to Affirmative Action Preferences

This study presents new measures of opinion about progress toward racial equality and provides a multifaceted rationale for preferring the new measures to the old ones. To reduce several sources of measurement error and improve analytic bite by breaking progress into its constituent elements, surveys should ask about past, present, and ideal conditions, not “progress.” These questions reveal racially polarized opinions: Black and White Americans agree on the goal of equality and agree that conditions were worse in the past, but Blacks think conditions were much worse than Whites do. They especially differ in opinions on current conditions and thus in how much change is required to achieve the goal of equality. Blacks see much more current inequality than Whites do. These opinions help explain preferences for affirmative action (AA). Contrary to previously published findings, reactions to AA do not depend on opinions on progress but depend strongly on something related but distinct: how much current racial conditions differ from the ideal. Implications for theories of policy preferences, racial attitudes, progress, and equality are discussed.     

Political Action in Conflict and Nonconflict Regions in Indonesia: The Role of Religious and National Identifications

This study examined the relationship between group identification and political action in Indonesia. We made four contributions to the literature. First, we studied political action on behalf of religious groups and examined the role of religious identification alone and in combination with national identification. Second, we analyzed political action in a non‐Western country where social cleavages occur primarily along religious lines and where a conflict and nonconflict region can be studied. Third, we compared Muslims and Christians, whose majority and minority status varies across the two regions, and fourth, we investigated both normative and nonnormative forms of political action (protest and violence). In line with the dual‐identification model of politicization, we found that religious identification increased support for protest (but not violence) in the conflict region only and particularly among high national identifiers. In the nonconflict region, religious identification was not related to violence, and it was related to lower support for protest among high national identifiers. The patterns were largely similar for Muslims and Christians, but some differences were found depending on the majority‐minority status. We conclude that particularities of the intergroup context should be taken into consideration when studying politicization.     

Influence of gait mode and body orientation on following a walking avatar

Regulating distance with a moving object or person is a key component of human movement and of skillful interpersonal coordination. The current set of experiments aimed to assess the role of gait mode and body orientation on distance regulation using a cyclical locomotor tracking task in which participants followed a virtual leader. In the first experiment, participants moved in the backward-forward direction while the body orientation of the virtual leader was manipulated (i.e., facing towards, or away from the follower), hence imposing an incongruence in gait mode between leader and follower. Distance regulation was spatially less accurate when followers walked backwards. Additionally, a clear trade-off was found between spatial leader-follower accuracy and temporal synchrony. Any perceptual effects were overshadowed by the effect of one’s gait mode. In the second experiment we examined lateral following. The results suggested that lateral following was also constrained strongly by perceptual information presented by the leader. Together, these findings demonstrated how locomotor tracking depends on gait mode, but also on the body orientation of whoever is being followed.     

Unpleasant stimuli differentially modulate inhibitory processes in an emotional Go/NoGo task: an event-related potential study

Threat stimuli typically elicit a psychophysiological response pattern supporting the organism's preparation for active defence. Differently, blood stimuli prompt a distinctive autonomic response pattern and sustained processing, which do not call for clear-cut mobilisation for action. However, the contribution of motor disposition in these response patterns remains unclear. One way to address this issue is to investigate whether threat and blood stimuli differentially affect the active suppression of an ongoing motor activity. Thirty-two undergraduates were presented with threat, mutilation, pleasant, and neutral pictures in an emotional Go/NoGo task. The amplitudes of the NoGo-N2 and NoGo-P3 components of the event-related potentials were analysed as indices of conflict monitoring and inhibition of motor response, respectively. Reaction times to Go trials were significantly faster for threat than for mutilations. The NoGo-N2 was significantly larger to threat than to mutilations, whereas the NoGo-P3amplitude did not differ between the two conditions. These findings suggest that threat stimuli facilitated the execution of a prepotent response and enhanced conflict monitoring when action must be withheld. In contrast, blood stimuli did not either promote action in the Go trials or increase conflict in the NoGo condition, suggesting a response pattern compatible with defensive immobility.     

CAUSATION,DISPOSITIONS, AND PHYSICAL OCCASIONALISM

Even though theistic philosophers and scientists agree that God created, sustains, and providentially governs the physical universe and even though much has been published in general regarding divine action, what is needed is a fine‐grained, conceptually coherent account of divine action, causation, dispositions, and laws of nature consistent with divine aseity, satisfying the widely recognized adequacy conditions for any account of dispositions.¹ Such an account would be a basic part of a more comprehensive theory of divine action in relation to the fundamental concepts of science and of mathematics. Our aim in this article is simply to present such a theory.     

Action: a bridge between vocational and mental health counselling*

A theory of goal-directed action is proposed as a conceptual link between vocational and mental health counselling. Originally emerging from the vocational counselling field, contextual action theory is presented as a critical conceptual link not only between mental health and occupational life but also between counselling practices in these domains. This specific application of goal-directed action to vocational and mental health counselling is addressed by describing counselling as goal-directed action, the five tasks of counselling it invites, and tools for supporting client goals, such as the self-confrontation interview.     

Transitivity,Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left‐to‐right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.     

Pollard on Habits of Action

Bill Pollard has recently developed an account of habits of action, endeavoring to rehabilitate the traditional notion of habit in a way that can be used to address current philosophical concerns. I argue that Pollard’s account has important shortcomings. The account is intended to apply indiscriminately to both habitual and skilled acts, but this overlooks crucial distinctions. Moreover, Pollard’s account fails to do justice to the various ways in which the idea of habit figures in the explanation and assessment of action. These shortcomings are a consequence of certain assumptions Pollard shares with the accounts of mind and action he sets to criticize. As long as these assumptions are left intact, the potential of dispositional notions such as habit and skill to contribute to contemporary debates will not be realized.     

Predictions,precision, and agentive attention

Ransom, Fazelpour, and Mole (this journal - 2017) raise an important puzzle for the ‘prediction error minimization’ account of cognitive processing. That account depicts all cognitive processing as fundamentally in the business of minimizing prediction errors concerning the evolving flow of sensory information. One of the cornerstones of these highly ambitious, would-be unifying accounts is their depiction of attention as nothing other than the process of optimizing the precision (inverse variance) of critical prediction error signals. But that story, Ransom et al. suggest, cannot accommodate voluntary shifts of attention. In this paper, I show why this challenge to the grand unifying project fails. It fails because it locates the origins of voluntary attention in complexes of unanalyzed desire rather than in changing complexes of beliefs.