Papers by Joshua Shepherd
Philosophy Compass, 2015
Here I review work from three lines of research in cognitive science often taken to threaten free... more Here I review work from three lines of research in cognitive science often taken to threaten free will and moral responsibility. This work concerns conscious deciding, the experience of acting, and the role of largely unnoticed situational influences on behavior. Whether this work in fact threatens free will and moral responsibility depends on how we ought to interpret it, and depends as well on the nature of free and responsible behavior. I discuss different ways this work has been interpreted, and argue that though work on conscious deciding and the experience of acting presents no real threat, work on situational influences is more difficult to dismiss. This work may present a real threat, and it may require us to revise our commonsense understanding of free and responsible behavior. But this work may also present ways to augment free and responsible behavior. Determining whether and how advancing science threatens, enhances, or simply describes free will is an ongoing task for scientists and philosophers alike.
What it is like and beyond
Consciousness and Moral Status, 2018
Skill 7.1 Introduction Pistol Pete Maravich was a skilled basketball player. You can look up his ... more Skill 7.1 Introduction Pistol Pete Maravich was a skilled basketball player. You can look up his numbers. One thing the numbers don't show, however, is the unpredictability of his game. His passes, his shots, the way he moved the ball in spacesomehow routinely, he violated expectation. Expectations are currency in basketball. If you know your opponent's expectations, you can plan to violate them. Violated expectations buy time, and create advantage. Maravich's strange skill set was due in part to his father-the coach Press Maravich. From an early age Press had Pete going through unorthodox drills. The young Maravich may have just wanted to please his dad. But his training regimen instilled a unique set of skills in him. Pete's biographer Mark Kriegel explains: The gloves and blindfolds were just the beginning. There were so many other drills. Pete learned the fundamentals, of course: dribbling with either hand, chest pass, bounce pass, foul shots, jump shots, and hook shots. But as the basics could become monotonous, Press invented a more elaborate regimen. .. In all, there were about forty forms and exercises-'Homework Basketball, ' as they would come to be known-to cultivate and harvest every bit of Pete's talent. Press and Pete gave them each names, like 'Pretzel, ' 'Ricochet, ' 'Crab Catch, ' 'Flap Jack, ' 'Punching Bag. ' He would crouch, his arms moving in a figure-8 motion, between and around his legs, so rapidly that the ball looked as if it were suspended beneath his squatting self. (Kriegel 2007: 64) Like his dad, Maravich was obsessed with excellence, albeit idio syn crat ic al ly. These drills were not geared to produce competence, but rather to push the boundaries of competence towards something better. In this regard Maravich is an exemplar of skill. That's because skill is a mode of agentive
How far we have come
Consciousness and Moral Status, 2018
The Shape of Agency, 2021
This chapter develops an account of control’s possession as it applies to agents. The basic idea ... more This chapter develops an account of control’s possession as it applies to agents. The basic idea is straightforward, but details require attention. Control’s possession has to do with the reliable patterns of behavior agents display. But in order to understand what reliability comes to, we have to understand the psychological states that guide agents. This chapter accordingly introduces the notion of plan-states. We also have to understand the ways that reliability varies depending upon the circumstances in which agents behave. After developing the form of an account of control’s possession, this chapter discusses possibilities for its metaphysical underpinnings. It rejects the idea that control is constituted by abilities, and suggests that dispositions may be able to do explanatory work for control.
Consciousness and Morality
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, 2020
This chapter considers three connections between consciousness and issues in ethics: first, the r... more This chapter considers three connections between consciousness and issues in ethics: first, the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status; second, the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding moral responsibility for action; and third, the relevance of consciousness for the acquisition of moral knowledge. This is a disparate set of connections, prompting a question: is there anything about consciousness these connections have in common? One might expect the answer to be no. But debate in each area has thus far failed to settle just what about consciousness is so intuitively important for moral status, moral responsibility, and moral knowledge. Given this fact, it remains possible that there is some common connection of these different issues in ethics to consciousness. The chapter takes up this possibility in its conclusion.
Moral status
Consciousness and Moral Status, 2018
After offering accounts of basic building blocks of agency in chapters 2 through 5, this chapter ... more After offering accounts of basic building blocks of agency in chapters 2 through 5, this chapter serves as a hinge. Here, drawing on Tyler Burge’s work on primitive agency, this chapter discusses the most primitive features of agency, and considers what must be added to work towards more sophisticated kinds of agent. The main aim is to articulate a kind of (metaphorical) ladder that allows us to see, not only the shape of agency in relief, but also the place of key capacities like a capacity for representation of targets for behavior, and a capacity of practical reasoning. This leads, at the chapter’s very end, to a brief discussion of the role of mental action in an understanding of agency.
37 Neuroscientific Threaths to Free Will
Evaluative spaces, part II
The importance of phenomenal character
The Shape of Agency
In this book Shepherd offers a perspective on the shape of agency by offering interlinked explana... more In this book Shepherd offers a perspective on the shape of agency by offering interlinked explanations of the basic building blocks of agency, as well as its exemplary instances. In the book’s first part, he offers accounts of phenomena that have long troubled philosophers of action: control over behavior, non-deviant causation, and intentional action. These accounts build on earlier work in the causalist tradition and undermine the claims of many that causalism cannot offer a satisfying account of non-deviant causation, and therefore intentional action. In the book’s second part, he turns to modes of agentive excellence—ways that agents display quality of form. He offers a novel account of skill, including an account of the ways that agents display more or less skill. He discusses the role of knowledge in skill and concludes that while knowledge is often important, it is inessential. This leads to a discussion of knowledge of action—of the way that knowledge of action and knowledge...
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord, 2021
Philosophical Studies, 2021
One necessary condition on any adequate account of perception is clarity regarding whether uncons... more One necessary condition on any adequate account of perception is clarity regarding whether unconscious perception exists. The issue is complicated, and the debate is growing in both philosophy and science. In this paper we consider the case for unconscious perception, offering three primary achievements. First, we offer a discussion of the underspecified notion of central coordinating agency, a notion that is critical for arguments that purportedly perceptual states are not attributable to the individual, and thus not genuinely perceptual. We develop an explication of what it is for a representational state to be available to central coordinating agency for guidance of behavior. Second, drawing on this explication, we place a more careful understanding of the attributability of a state to the individual in the context of a range of empirical work on vision-for-action, saccades, and skilled typing. The results place pressure on the skeptic about unconscious perception. Third, reflect...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2021
In this paper I explore the relationship between skill and sensitivity to reasons for action. I w... more In this paper I explore the relationship between skill and sensitivity to reasons for action. I want to know to what degree we can explain the fact that the skilled agent is very good at performing a cluster of actions within some domain in terms of the fact that the skilled agent has a refined sensitivity to the reasons for action common to the cluster. The picture is a little bit complex. While skill can be partially explained by sensitivity to reasons – a sensitivity often produced by rational practice – the skilled human agent, because imperfect, must navigate a trade-off between full sensitivity and a capacity to succeed.
The Shape of Agency, 2021
This chapter first offers a clear explication of control’s exercise. It then briefly discusses co... more This chapter first offers a clear explication of control’s exercise. It then briefly discusses control over omissions, before turning to a discussion of different varietals of control. So, in particular, voluntary control is central to several debates in philosophy. No acceptable account exists. This chapter extends the account of control to offer an explication of voluntary control. It then discusses this account in light of Alfred Mele’s recent work on direct control. Finally, this chapter offers an explication of a notion that is important to many who think and write about free will. This is the notion of what is “up to” an agent. The explication turns on the notion of voluntary control.
Experimental Metaphysics
The folk psychological roots of free will Joshua Shepherd [A] 1. Introduction Debates surrounding... more The folk psychological roots of free will Joshua Shepherd [A] 1. Introduction Debates surrounding free will are notorious for their intractability. This is so in spite of the fact that, even at a fairly fine grain of analysis, competing views on the nature of free will are well understood. Why can't philosophers find common ground? One line of thought that has emerged fairly recently draws on the psychology of concepts. The general idea is that an explanation for persistent disagreement about free will, and perhaps guidance towards resolution, might be found by exploring the psychological roots of 'our concept' of free will-e.g., those psychological factors that underlie our tendencies to say, of some bit of human behavior, that it was performed of an agent's own free will, or not. This very general idea has motivated very different proposals regarding the psychological roots of free will. I mention two examples. Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe (2007) appeal to a difference between responses to cases described abstractly and cases described concretely to argue that the appearance of compatibilist tendencies in applications of the concept free will-that is, attribution of free will to agents in deterministic universes-in fact represents an error. Concrete cases influence application tendencies by stimulating an affective response that biases the judgments. Unbiased applications of the concept, so goes the thought, are consistent with an incompatibilism between free will and determinism. In stark contrast, Dylan
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2019
Earlier work has demonstrated that attention is indirectly cognitively malleable by processes of ... more Earlier work has demonstrated that attention is indirectly cognitively malleable by processes of self-associationprocesses by which agents explicitly associate an item with the self. We extend this work by considering the manipulation of attention to both salient and non-salient objects. We demonstrate that self-association impacts attentional processing not only of non-salient objects (i.e., shapes), but also regarding salient items known to command attention (i.e., images of food). This result indicates the flexibility and susceptibility of attentional processing to cognitive manipulation.
Rivista internazionale di filosofia e psicologia, 2016
I focus on Uriah Kriegel's account of conative phenomenology. I agree with Kriegel's argu... more I focus on Uriah Kriegel's account of conative phenomenology. I agree with Kriegel's argument that some conative phenomenology is primitive in that some conative phenomenal properties cannot be reduced to another kind of property (e.g., perceptual or cognitive). I disagree, however, with Kriegel's specific characterization of the properties in question. Kriegel argues that the experience of deciding-and-then-trying is the core of conative phenomenology. I argue, however, that the experiences of trying and acting better occupy this place. Further, I suggest that the attitudinal component of the experiences of trying and acting is not, as Kriegel suggests, best characterized in terms of commitment to the rightness or goodness of the objects of experience. Rather, I argue that the attitudinal component is best characterized in imperatival terms.
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Papers by Joshua Shepherd