June 23, 2004

Group Bloggy Blog

Since I dissed the group blogs on my blogroll the other day, I thought I should give them some love today. (Plus I really wanted to use that post title.)

So I'll direct you to this post by Eddy Nahmias on The Garden of Forking Paths. Eddy suggests that, rather than learn the concept of intentional action from paradigm cases of intentional action, children may begin with a disposition to see anything that harms them as intentional, and learn the concept of intention by subtracting paradigm cases of non-agency, unintentional action, and non-responsible action. This seems like a profoundly interesting view, and one that will be of aid and comfort to semicompatibilists like myself, since actions in a deterministic universe might still not resemble any of the paradigm cases of non-intentional actions; though as Tamler Sommers points out in the comments the incompatibilist can still say that determinism is incompatible with what really counts for moral responsibility.

This also seems like the kind of conjecture that should be subjected to experimental philosophy. Fortunately the experimental philosophy and free will blogs have some overlap, including Eddy, so we will likely get to see that in the future.

Posted by Matt Weiner at June 23, 2004 02:07 PM
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