Habitual Virtuous Actions and Automaticity

Dual process theorists in psychology maintain that the mind’s workings can be explained in terms of conscious or controlled processes and automatic processes. Automatic processes are largely nonconscious, that is, triggered by environmental stimuli without the agent’s conscious awareness or deliberation. Automaticity researchers contend that even higher level habitual social behaviors can be nonconsciously primed. This article brings work on automaticity to bear on our understanding of habitual virtuous actions. After examining a recent intuitive account of habitual actions and habitual virtuous actions, the author offers her own explanation in terms of goal-dependent automaticity. This form of automaticity provides an account of habitual virtuous actions that explains the sense in which these actions are rational, that is, done for reasons. Habitual virtuous actions are rational in the sense of being purposive or goal-directed and are essentially linked with the agent’s psychological states. Unlike deliberative virtuous actions, the agent’s reasons for habitual virtuous actions are not present to her conscious awareness at the time of acting.

Resisting ruthless reductionism: A comment on Bickle

Philosophy and Neuroscienceis an unabashed apologetic for reductionism in the philosophy of mind. Although we have learnt much from Bickle's work, we find his central claims unconvincing. Our comments have two central foci:Bickle's account of mental causation, and his single-cell account of consciousness. We argue that Bickle's attempt to solve the problem of mental causation is marred by his refusal to take multiple realizability seriously, and we suggest that his faith in single cell accounts of consciousness is misplaced. We remain unconvinced that the solutions to the problems of mental causation and consciousness are to be found in neuroscience.     

Practical Reasons and the Redundancy of Motives

Jonathan Dancy, in his 1994 Aristotelian Society Presidential Address, set out to show 'why there is really no such thing as the theory of motivation'. In this paper I want to agree that there is no such thing, and to offer reasons of a different kind for that conclusion. I shall suggest that the so-called theory of motivation misconstrues the question which it purports to answer, and that when we properly analyse the question and distinguish it clearly from other questions with which it should not be confused, we do not need a theory of motivation at all.     

Mapping Moral Motivation

In this paper we defend a version of moral internalism and a cognitivist account of motivation against recent criticisms. The internalist thesis we espouse claims that, if an agent believes she has reason to A, then she is motivated to A. Discussion of counter-examples has been clouded by the absence of a clear account of the nature of motivation. While we can only begin to provide such an account in this paper, we do enough to show that our version of internalism can be defended against putative counter-examples. All theories of motivation which take what motivates to be a psychological state run foul of the following plausible constraint: the reason why you ought to do an action and the reason why you do it can be the same. In our view, however, while what motivates is a reason (which is a fact) the state of being motivated is a cognitive stage, viz. the belief that one has reason to act. In cases where the agent's relevant beliefs are false, then she has no reason to act, but nontheless her action can be explained in other ways.     

Epistemic justification and premise acceptability

In this paper, we want to explore the connection between premises' being acceptable and their being in some sense justified. The equivalence of premise acceptability and justification seems intuitively correct. But to argue for such a connection, we need to analyze the concepts of acceptability and justification. Such an analysis also seems necessary if this equivalence is to advance our understanding of premise acceptability. Following L. J. Cohen, we may say S believes that p when S is disposed to feel it true that p, while S accepts that p when S takes that p as a premise for further deliberation or action. Reasons for belief are reasons for acceptance, and epistemological (as opposed to pragmatic) reasons for acceptance are reason for belief. Following William P. Alston, we may explicate being a justifying reason for belief through the notion of an adequate ground on which the belief is based. In turn, adequacy of ground means that the mechanism grounding the belief is reliable. Given these notions, we may define a concept of justification in terms of presumptive adequacy.     

Ockham’s weak externalism

There is debate over whether the content of an intuitive cognition is determined externally or internally in Ockham’s theory. According to the most common view, which I call the Strong Externalist Interpretation (SE), intuitive content is wholly determined externally. Opposed to SE is the Strong Internalist Interpretation (SI), according to which the content of an intuition is wholly determined by internal features of a cognizer. The aim of this paper is to argue against those interpretations, and to argue for a third kind of interpretation which preserves interpretative advantages of SE and SI without falling into the difficulties that each faces. On this view, intuitive content is complex, and its complexity is analyzed into a mix of internalist and externalist elements.     

Hermeneutics and Sport

Hermeneutics is the exploration of the process of textual interpretation. As such, it has long been recognised as an important component within the humanities and social sciences, whether one deals with actual texts or with other the products of meaningful human activity, including social actions and utterances. Here, we offer a brief overview of the contribution that hermeneutics might make to the philosophy of sport. If sports and sporting events are seen to be the results of meaningful human interactions, then they are meaningful phenomena that lend themselves to interpretation. It can thus be argued that a hermeneutics of sport is a valid and important discipline, worthy of consideration and development. We offer a review of the nature and history of hermeneutics in general, briefly exploring the place of key figures such as Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Gadamer and Riceour, as well as key concepts such as that of the hermeneutic circle. In addition, we suggest the importance of a hermeneutics of suspicion, grounded in the work of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. In the second part of our introduction, we briefly comment on each of the papers that comprise the current volume, and that reflect the diversity of approaches that a hermeneutics of sport might embrace.     

Felix Culpa: Luck In Ethics And Epistemology

Luck threatens in similar ways our conceptions of both moral and epistemic evaluation. This essay examines the problem of luck as a metaphilosophical problem spanning the division between subfields in philosophy. I first explore the analogies between ethical and epistemic luck by comparing influential attempts to expunge luck from our conceptions of agency in these two subfields. I then focus upon Duncan Pritchard's challenge to the motivations underlying virtue epistemology, based specifically on its handling of the problem of epistemic luck. I argue that (1) consideration of the multifold nature of the problem of epistemic luck to an adequate account of human knowledge drives us to a mixed externalist epistemology; and (2) the virtue‐theoretical approach presents a particularly advantageous way of framing and developing a mixed externalist epistemology.     

Some Worries about Normative and Metaethical Sentimentalism

In this response I raise a number of problems for Michael Slote's normative and metaethical sentimentalism. The first is that his agent–based account of rightness needs be qualified in order to be plausible; any such qualification, however, leaves Slote's normative ethics in tension with his metaethical views. The second is that an agent–based ethics of empathic caring will indeed struggle to capture our common–sense understanding of deontological constraints, and that appeal to the notion of causal immediacy will be of little help here. Finally, it seems to me that Slote's metaethical account will turn out to be much less externalist (and hence, by his own lights, much less plausible) than he suspects.     

Chisholm's Internalism and Its Consequences

Abstract: Among the important themes in Roderick Chisholm's epistemology are his commitment to internalism, his defense of the independence of epistemology from empirical science, and his assumption that we do know most of what we initially think we know. In “Roderick Chisholm and the Shaping of American Epistemology” Hilary Kornblith argues that Chisholm's views lead to a radical divorce between the factors that justify beliefs and the factors that cause beliefs, that Chisholm's views have the consequence that there is no connection between justification and truth, and that Chisholm's kind of epistemology is unable to give epistemic advice. I argue that Chisholm's views do not have these consequences.