Reason's self-actualization: An essay on self-consciousness and rational agency (original) (raw)

Self-Knowledge and Rationality

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2010

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent’s intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view.

Intentions and Self-Consciousness: Revision of a Neutral Conception of Intentionality

The Cooperative Filter

INTENTIONALITY Abstract: In this article I will address the question concerning the relation between Self-consciousness and Intentionality. I will argue that the concept of intentionality is mystifying if treated as isolated mental stance because this requires a sort of non-observational knowledge that does not fit with the observational aspects of the intentionality like directness and interaction with an environment. I will further analyze basic forms of intentionality in intentional systems and agents in order to investigate the link between intentions and interaction with the environment. Through this investigation will emerge the particular form of interaction of the human beings that underlies specific competences like recognition and evaluation of norms that are organized in the way of the self-consciousness.

Inhibited Intentionality: On Possible Self-Understanding in Cases of Weak Agency

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

The paper addresses the question of how to approach consciousness in unreflective actions. Unreflective actions differ from reflective, conscious actions in that the intentional description under which the agent knows what she is doing is not available or present to the agent at the moment of acting. Yet, unreflective actions belong to the field in which an agent experiences herself as capable of acting. Some unreflective actions, however, narrow this field and can be characterized by intentionality being inhibited. By studying inhibited intentionality in unreflective actions, the aim of the paper is to show how weaker forms of action urge us to expand our overall understanding of action. If we expand the field of actions such that it encompasses also some of the involuntary aspects of action, we are able to understand how unreflective actions can remain actions and do not fall under the scope of automatic behavior. With the notion of weak agency, the paper thus addresses one aspect...

Self-Knowledge and Rational Agency: a defense of empiricism

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

How does one know one’s own beliefs, intentions, and other attitudes? Many responses to this question are broadly empiricist: they take self-knowledge to be epistemically based in empirical justification or warrant. Agentialists object that empiricist approaches to self-knowledge portray us as mere observers of a passing cognitive show, and thereby neglect the fact that believing and intending are things we do, for reasons. Agentialists contend that our capacity for self-knowledge derives from our rational agency—our ability to conform our attitudes to our reasons, and to commit ourselves to those attitudes through avowals (Burge 1996; Moran 2001; Bilgrami 2006; Boyle 2009). This paper has two goals. The first is exegetical: to identify agentialism’s defining thesis and precisely formulate the agentialist challenge to empiricism. The second goal is to defend empiricism from the agentialist challenge. I propose a way to understand the role of agency in reasoning and avowals, one that does justice to what is distinctive about these phenomena yet is compatible with empiricism about self-knowledge.

Chapter 2: The normativity of intentional agency

In this Chapter, my aim is to explore three normative aspects of practical commitments, on the one hand, and to suggest an account of the requirements governing rational agency, on the other. Section 2.1 is concerned with the first of these two aims: the analysis of three normative features of practical commitments. The first of them concerns the link between reasons and normative judgements—this is, the normative structure of practical reasoning. I will argue that (i) reasons are facts, and not mental states; and (ii) they have to be possessed by that agent: effective reasons are subjective (or agent‑relative) reasons. Second, I will defend that the conclusion of practical reasoning is a normative belief, and not an intention. Finally, I will discuss the 'bootstrapping objection', proposed by Bratman (1987). The objection can be stated as follows: “you cannot bootstrap a reason into existence from nowhere, just by a forming an intention” (Broome 2001). Section 2.2 is devoted to the analysis of normative requirements. Attributions of irrationality are made on the basis of a violation of some of those requirements. I will first present a recent debate about the appropriate formulation of normative requirements: wide versus narrow‑scope formulations (§2.2.1). I will argue that narrow‑scoped requirements have the advantage of gathering the directionality and agent‑relativity of practical rationality. In Section 2.2.2, I will suggest an alternative formulation of three rational requirements: enkrasia, resolve, and means‑ends reasoning, whose violation is the basis for attributing akrasia and weakness of will (see Section 1.2.3). I will defend that enkrasia is better understood as a restriction, rather than a requirement, and that the means‑end coherence requirement is derived from a more general rationality principle regarding consistency amongst intentional states, which I call resolve.

Gallagher, S. 2005. Intentionality and intentional action. Synthesis Philosophica 40 (2): 319-26.

Synthesis Philosophica, 2005

Those who argue that free will is an illusion are wrong. They base their argument on scientific evidence that tests the wrong level of description for intentional action. Free will is not about subpersonal neuronal processes, muscular activation, or basic bodily movements, but about contextualized actions in a system that is larger than many contemporary philosophers of mind, psychologists, and neuroscientists consider. In this paper, I describe the kind of intentionality that goes with the exercise of free will.

THE INTERPRETATION OF INTENTIONAL ACTIONS: Three non reducible features

Analítica N° 9 , 2016

In this paper I wish to explore four features that I take to be necessarily present in every possible interpretation of intentional agents. These are the holistic, rational, teleological and normative attribution of mental states and actions. I also want to argue that from these, the latter three features cannot be present in a physical explanatory description, which would prove that intentional interpretation cannot be reducible to physical explanation.

Intentionality and Self-Awareness

Ratio, 2003

In this essay I defend both the individual plausibility and conjoint consistency of two theses. One is the Intentionality Thesis: that all mental states are intentional (object-directed, exhibit 'aboutness'). The other is the Self-Awareness Thesis: that if a subject is aware of an object, then the subject is also aware of being aware of that object. I begin by arguing for the individual prima facie plausibility of both theses. I then go on to consider a regress argument to the effect that the two theses are incompatible. I discuss three responses to that argument, and defend one of them.