Work in various stages of progress:
All these texts are my property. Please, do not cite. Any
comments are welcome – please, direct them to Katarzyna.Paprzycka@usm.edu.
My main project is a book on agency. It is
basically a substantial elaboration of my dissertation project. The main task
is to try to understand the notion of action in terms of the notion of
normative expectations rather than intentions. This involves among other things
casting the notion of action wide enough to encompass unintentional omissions;
placing the notion of a doing (under a description) rather than the notion of
an intentional doing (under a description) to be of central importance for
understanding actions, the latter is understood as a special case of the
former; offering a selectional model of acting for a reason on which reasons
are construed as being selectional criteria for actions rather than generating
causes thereof; giving full attention to and a literal understanding of
nonintentional action explanations (e.g. allowing space for cases such as doing
something only because of one's mother's desire – without mediation of any of
one's own desires).
Various parts of the project are worked into a number of papers:
False Consciousness of Intentional Psychology
Reasons as Selectional Criteria
Related stuff:
Responsibility,
Responsiveness and Nonreflective Behavior: An Objection to Fischer and Ravizza
Abstract: This is a plea for slips. Most philosophers writing on action have not concerned themselves much with slips or other mistakes. While, as Davidson (1971) has argued, many mistakes are intentional under some description, slips (I argue) are not intentional under any description. Still there are reasons to believe that they are actions – they are things we do rather than things that happen to us. After clarifying Hornsby's (1980) theory of action, I argue that she can account for slips. The reason for this is, broadly speaking, the fact that her theory of action is independent of the theory of action explanation (which she borrows from Davidson 1963). It is because Davidson's criterion of what an action is depends on how it is explained that slips (and other actions) escape his criterion of agency.
How
to Distinguish the Model-Model from the Theory-Theory: Let Me Count Two Ways
Abstract:
Is
Milgram’s Account of His Experiments Incoherent?
Abstract:
Whither
Reduction: Is Social Psychology a Threat to Our Conception of Ourselves?
Abstract:
Unrelated stuff:
Flickers of Freedom and Frankfurt-Style Cases in
the Light of the New Incompatibilism of the Stit Theory (forthcoming in
Journal of Philosophical Research)
Abstract: It is widely assumed that Frankfurt-style cases provide a reason for rejecting incompatibilism because they provide a reason for rejecting the requirement that the agent be able to do otherwise. One compatibilist strategy for dealing with the cases, pursued by Fischer and Ravizza, is to weaken the mentioned requirement. While an analogous strategy on the part of the incompatibilist appears to be unexplored in the literature on moral responsibility, it is exemplified in Belnap and Perloff's logic of agency. I show how their stit account can handle Frankfurt-style cases and defend it from Fischer's criticism of "flicker-of-freedom" strategies. I also note some of the limitations of the stit rendition of the cases.
Lewis Carroll and Missing Premises
Abstract: Lewis Carroll's parable of Achilles and the tortoise relies on an equivocation. If one reflects on the fact that there is a difference between the claim that X believes that not-p and the claim that it is not the case that X believes that p, the infinite regress of allegedly missing premises is stopped.
Can
Willful Belief Aim at Truth?
Abstract: