Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues

Abstract

This topos is focused on intentions, with an emphasis on integrating philosophical analysis and empirical findings. Theorizing about human action has a long history in philosophy, and the nature of intention and intentional action has received a lot of attention in recent analytic philosophy. At the same time, intentional action has become an empirically studied phenomenon in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Many results obtained in these areas have been incorporated within the current philosophical debate, while at the same time scientists have often adopted in their experiments and models philosophical assumptions on the nature of intention and intentional action. As a result, the study of intentions is nowadays a thriving enterprise, where both conceptual and empirical issues are discussed in a dialogue across disciplines. This is well reflected in the selection of papers published here. Davide Rigoni and Marcel Brass discuss the social and neural consequences of disbelieving in free will. Contemporary neuroscience enables the experimental investigation of complex psychological functions related to free will, such as conscious intention, decision-making and selfcontrol. The findings of this research have attracted a lot of media coverage, with frequent claims to the effect that free will is nothing more than an illusion. Rigoni and Brass ask whether, why, and how such neuroscientific findings influence our everyday belief in free will. Based on an extensive review of the literature in experimental philosophy, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they show that inducing disbelief in free will has an impact on folk psychology, social behavior and intentional action. Ariel Furstenberg argues for the existence of non-executed unconscious proximal intentions, i.e., unconscious proximal intentions to act that do not result in overt movement. He first presents a conceptual framework that accounts for the phenomenon of non-executed proximal intention and the related phenomenon of change in proximal intention. Then he turns to empirical findings, claiming that a specific EEG signal could provide a neural correlate of a non-executed proximal intention, thus justifying usage of the concept of ‘‘intention’’ even for mental states that never result in overt action. The question of how to account for intentions in the absence of overt action is also central in Zoe Drayson’s discussion of mental agency in post-coma patients. She critically reviews recent findings which suggest that intentional mental action may be reliably revealed by a certain pattern of neural activity, thus allowing to attribute conscious awareness to patients in vegetative states, with important legal and ethical consequences. However, Drayson identifies two key weaknesses in this so-called ‘argument from volition’: first, while the neuroimaging data may provide evidence for the existence of certain mental events, it is neutral with regard to whether these mental events constitute mental actions; second, it is difficult to see how one could set up a neuroimaging task that would enable us to make the required discrimination. Elisabeth Pacherie tackles a foundational question in the philosophy of action: How do conscious intentions relate to actions? She first presents the traditional philosophical view of the structure of agency, in which conscious intentions are the causes of actions, as well as two important worries raised by recent empirical findings: skepticism about the role of consciousness in the causation M. Schlosser (&) F. Paglieri School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: markus.schlosser@ucd.ie