Philosophy of Mind Workshop 2007-01-25

David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason, "Introduction" (Part II)

[This is a continuation of the summary of our discussion of the "Introduction" to David Velleman's The Possibility of Practical Reason, which begins in the previous post.]Velleman's Account of What Makes Behavior Into an ActionVelleman dismisses the "standard model" and the "hierarchical model" of what makes behavior into an action. What is Velleman's model? Velleman's striking view is the following (this, as usual, is a rough summary): what makes something an action is that it is done with the "higher-order aim of knowing what [one] is doing". The Freudian slip case isn't an action because the speaker doesn't utter "I hereby declare this meeting closed" or "I live in a building with a hated pool" in order to know what he is doing. The climber dropping his partner and the speaker's crying don't count as actions for the same reason--the ...

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