Future-directed Intentions Research Articles

Resistance and agency in second language academic discourse socialisation: Undergraduate students’ experiences of an EAP course

Resistance is a common issue in academic discourse socialisation (ADS), especially for learners who study in their second language. How learners enact agency to negotiate their resistance can largely determine the outcomes of their ADS. In this article, we report the findings of a case study on four Chinese undergraduate students' experiences of an English-for-Academic-Purposes course in an EFL setting. Data sources of the study consist of individual and group interviews with students, observation notes of students' learning processes, students' written reflections, and instructors’ teaching journals. By comparing the four individual cases, we analyse the processes and conceptual basis for learners to enact their agency in ADS, underlying their resistance and negotiation of resistance. Specifically, we unravel how their existing conceptions of learning objectives and of learning processes frame their enactment of agency, including their identification of affordances and resources, their formation and development of present-directed intentions, and possibilities for them to construct new future-directed intentions.

A Philosophy of Contract Law for Artificial Intelligence: Shared Intentionality

This is a chapter for the forthcoming book, Contracting and Contract Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Martin Ebers, Cristina Poncibo, and Mimi Zou, to be published by Hart Publishing. The aim of this chapter is to offer a general theory of contract law to account for the inclusion of artificial intelligence in contract practices. Artificial intelligence brings out that what makes contract law a distinctive form of legal obligation is shared intentionality. I refer to this insight as the shared intentionality thesis. Shared intentionality is the psychological capacity of one agent to share and pursue a joint goal with another agent. It is an attribute of human thought empowering human planning and the ability to share agency with others. Shared intentionality leads to a focus on objective intent to enter contractual relations in Anglo-American contract law as the primary concept in understanding what is distinctive about contractual obligation. The doctrine of objective intent in contract law operates as a Turing test for determining whether a contract has been formed. The chapter explains that it does not matter which “mind” is thought to produce this intent – human or artificial. The issue is attribution of the right sort of mental states by one contract party to another. Daniel Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance, as well as philosophical work on mindreading, can assist in developing this argument. The chapter focuses on understanding how folk psychology can lead humans to the sort of recognition that is needed to engage with increasing levels of artificial intelligence in contracting. What gives artificial intelligence intent is not some internal workings of its programming but us – the ascription of intentionality to artificial intelligence by humans. But the intentional stance on its own does not offer an adequate explanation of a special kind of intent that is needed for contract formation. It does not inform us about the sort of “we” intentionality or the ability to engage in future directed intentions as elements of stable plans of action in the form of contracts. Shared intentionality, a concept developed by philosopher Michael Bratman, evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello and others, is the core of contractual obligation. It does not matter whether this shared intentionality is the result of human or artificial agency. Of course, artificial intelligence on its own does not yet have the sort of agency required for shared intentionality but it likely will in the non-too-distant future.

Self-efficacy moderates the relationship between avoidance intentions and anxiety.

Future-directed intentions elicit emotional changes that may affect behavioral performance. We have previously shown that avoidance intentions can elicit a reduction in anxiety (Ng & Lovibond, 2017). In the present experiment, we manipulated within-participant self-efficacy for an avoidance behavior to determine whether self-efficacy moderates the relationship between avoidance intentions and anxiety. Anxiety was indexed through skin conductance response and self-report. Participants learned that certain stimuli signaled an aversive electric shock, which they could avoid by performing an easy task or a hard task. Participants had relatively high self-efficacy for the easy task and low self-efficacy for the hard task. Results indicated that on trials when participants intended to avoid the shock, they experienced significantly greater reductions in anxiety when they had to perform the easy task compared with the hard task. We conclude that self-efficacy for avoidance behavior moderates the relationship between avoidance intentions and anxiety. In situations in which avoiding a harmful outcome is an adaptive response, it may be important to increase self-efficacy for avoidance behaviors from the intention-formation stage itself. If that occurs, the reinforcing reductions in anxiety may reaffirm the intention and increase its temporal stability, thereby increasing the likelihood of behavioral performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Murphy, James G. War’s Ends: Human Rights, International Order, and the Ethics of Peace. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 232 pp. $29.95 (paper).

Murphy, James G. <i>War’s Ends: Human Rights, International Order, and the Ethics of Peace</i>. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 232 pp. $29.95 (paper).

Flat intentions – crazy dispositions?

Future-directed intentions, it is widely held, involve behavioral dispositions. But of what kind? Suppose you now intend to Φ at future time t. Are you thereby now disposed to Φ at t no matter what? If so, your intention disposes you to Φ even if around t you will come to believe that Φ-ing would be crazy. And would not that be a crazy intention to have? – Like considerations have led Luca Ferrero and others to believe that only intentions with strong internal conditions are capable of rationality. This paper explores in how far a broadly dispositional view of intention supports their claims. Its first point will come as a surprise: Intentions indeed involve dispositions toward follies in plenty. Natural objections against this bizarre-sounding claim are shown to fail, and standard counterfactual analyses of disposition locutions are shown to underpin it further. However, since the dispositions at issue are pro tanto dispositions, the consequences are not as odd as might be expected: When hedged by reasonable habits to reconsider one’s intentions, dispositions toward follies do not entail any actual crazy behavior. On balance, unconditional intention is therefore found rational after all. Dispositions toward crazy actions need not be crazy dispositions.

Intention inertia and the plasticity of planning

In this article, I examine Michael Bratman’s account of stability in his planning theory of intention (PTI). Future-directed intentions should be stable, or appropriately resistant to change, over time. Bratman claims that the norm of stability governs both intentions and plans. The aim of this article is to critically enrich Bratman’s account of stability by introducing plasticity as an additional norm of planning. I construct plasticity as a kind of stability of intentions which supplements Bratman’s notion of “reasonable stability.” Unlike the latter, plasticity applies mainly to cases in which plan states are abandoned without reconsideration. I focus on the intra-theoretical problems of PTI and elucidate: (1) the distinction between future-directed intentions and plans, (2) the conceptual difference between stability and inertia, which is only implicit in PTI, and (3) the role of the environment of the planner, which has a vestigial role in Bratman’s work. I also defend my incorporation of plasticity against one possible objection and support it in the context of Bratman’s later works. Although critical, my proposal is in moderate harmony with PTI.

Minimalism about Intention: A Modest Defense

Intentions have recently played a starring role in theories of practical rationality. Michael Bratman’s Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) brought to everyone’s attention the importance of plans, general intentions, etc. in the life of a rational agent and argued for various requirements governing intentions, especially future-directed intentions. At the same time, there has been a general tendency to formulate more traditional principles of practical rationality in terms of intentions. Intentions, but not actions, seem to be under the rational control of the agent.In ‘Minimalism about Intention’, I first explain and motivate a general deflationist view of intention I call ‘minimalism’ about intentions. Minimalism contrasts with more robust views of intention, and in particular views that imply the existence of intention specific rational requirements; that is, rational requirements governing intentions that are not simple consequences of rational requirements on actions. I then distinguish four different types of putative rational requirements that are incompatible with minimalism. I argue that three of these requirement are supposed to be based on what I call ‘internal’ grounds. I then argue that these grounds are incapable of justifying any kind of rational requirement that is incompatible with minimalism. Detailed examination of the fourth type of putative requirement is left for another occasion, as it is supposed to be based on an entire different kind of justification (what I call ‘external’ grounds); however, I briefly sketch some reasons to be skeptical that this kind of justification would succeed. In sum, this paper tries to show that minimalism about intention turns out to be a rather plausible and compelling view.

La dynamique des intentions

AbstractI argue that in order to solve the main difficulties confronted by the classical versions of the causal theory of action, it is necessary not just to make room for intentions, considered as irreducible to complexes of beliefs and desires, but also to distinguish among several types of intentions. I present a three-tiered theory of intentions that distinguishes among future-directed intentions, present-directed intentions, and motor intentions. I characterize each kind of intention in terms of its functions, its type of content, its dynamics, and the rationality and time constraints that bear on it. I then try to show how the difficulties encountered by the causal theory can be solved within this new framework.

Friends and Future Selves

M Post of us believe that we have reasons to care about our own future selves and that these reasons differ, either in degree or in kind, from the reasons we have to act on behalf of one another. It is often assumed that an adequate account of personal identity should be able to explain-and perhaps also to justifythe sort of concern we have for our future selves. And this is thought to pose a special problem for psychological continuity accounts of personal identity-that is, for accounts which treat personal identity through time as consisting in some sort of continuity of experience rather than in the persistence of an irreducible subject such as an immaterial soul or a bare Cartesian ego. It is supposed to be obvious that I have special reasons to care about my future self if she has my immaterial soul in a way in which it is not obvious that I have special reasons to care about her if all she is is someone whose experiences are connected in certain ways to my present ones.. But this is far from obvious to me. In fact, my intuitions run the opposite way. I believe that I have special reasons to care about my future self if her experiences are connected in certain important ways to my present ones-if, for example, she will recall and carry out some of my present but future-directed intentions. And I doubt that I have any more reason to care about her than about anyone else, if her experiences are related to mine only in the sense that they belong to the same immaterial soul. But that may be because I assume that my soul-if I've got one-is no different from anyone else's except in so far as it has my experiences, memories, intentions and so on. Without these things, my soul is nothing to me. What follows is a defense of these intuitions-or at least of one of them. My primary aim is to argue that psychological continuity accounts of personal identity can explain, and in some sense justify, the sort of concern that each of us has for her own future selves. I will not argue that I have no reason to care about my future self if her experiences are related to mine only in the sense that they