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This week's PG WiP Seminar will be led by Xavier Castellà-Güell (PhD)

Title: "Bodily movements, Intentional actions and extra features"

Thursday March 16th 2023

5pm in S2.77 and on TeamsLink opens in a new window.

Everyone welcome!

 Abstract:

The prevalent, orthodox view on the nature of intentional action is the theory that has been called the “standard story of action” (STA). STA is the thesis that an intentional action is an action or a bodily movement that is the causal product of an intention to bring about the action in question. This theory has been defended by, among others, Davidson and Smith. STA has been the object of various objections. For example, some have argued that STA cannot exclude deviant causal chains in a non-ad hoc way. For others, the main problem with STA is that it is compatible with an image of intentional action that excludes the causal role of the agent in the production of action.

I am going to focus on a more general type of critique, oriented towards what we could call "additional property theory". The additional property theory is the theory that an action can be characterized as intentional by having a property that is independent of those properties that qualify the action as being the type of action that it is. STA is an example of the additional property theory in that it postulates that an action is intentional to the extent that it possesses the additional property of being caused by a certain qualified type of mental event. If my position against the additional property theory is correct, then not only do we seem to have good justification for ruling out STA, but we can also diagnose what appears to be the fundamental problem with this theory. This diagnosis, I contend, can offer us further insight into the nature of intentional action.