The mental in intentional action

Abstract

This special section originates from a workshop `New Horizons in Action and Agency’ that we organized in August 2019 at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The aim of the workshop was to provide a venue in which a small number of participants could enjoy in-depth discussion of innovative work on action and agency. Kirk Ludwig and Alfred Mele were our keynote speakers, and in addition, we invited submissions on such topics as mental action, trying, action sentences, intending, self-control, and practical reasoning, among others. Our aim at the workshop and in this selection of papers is to re-visit some fundamental issues in the philosophy of agency. These issues primarily concern the nature and range of the mental in intentional agency. For example, trying is central to the performance of intentional action. But what is it to try to do something? Should we, as some philosophers have argued, regard it as a sui generis mental action? Deciding is also central to many, if not all, cases of intentional action, but again, what it is remains a matter of controversy. And there is ongoing controversy about what it can tell us about the nature of intentional action. Turning our attention to intentions to act and intentions in action, how do these guide the course of the bodily movements that satisfy them? And indeed, what is the relationship between their coarse-grained content and the finely developed skills that agents sometimes exercise in the performance of intentional action? Finally, such reflection on trying, deciding, intending, and on the nature of mental action more generally, provokes the question of whether or not intentional action is corporeal in nature. Commonsense may suggest that it is, and physicalist views of mind and action argue that it is, but is that correct? This question and others will, we hope, be of interest to the readers of Philosophical Explorations. In the first article, ‘Let me go and try’, Kirk Ludwig gives a deflationary account of trying according to which trying is not a specific type of action. Instead, any action that is done with an intention can be called trying: To say that a person tried to φ means that she did something with the intention of φ-ing. Ludwig is thus opposed to views that take trying to be something substantial, like a mental action. According to Ludwig, there is no such thing as trying, rather, there is a way of talking about action that uses the term ‘try’, and the function of such talk is to be able to talk about the aim of some action without implying that the aim is achieved. He defends his account against arguments that purport to show that there is no entailment from claims about trying to claims about doing something with an intention, and he uses his analysis to explain what is odd in talk about trying to try. Ludwig considers a potential problem for his account in