{"title":"Mistaken actions: Davidson’s enduring dilemma","authors":"Alison A. Springle","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02609-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02609-8","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay is about a variety of action errors I call “Mistaken Actions” and a puzzle they pose for Causal Theories of Action. I begin with Davidson’s version of the Causal Theory and pose the puzzle as a dilemma: if his theory explains what makes a mistaken action mistaken, then it can’t explain what makes it intentional; and if his theory explains what makes a mistaken action intentional, then it can’t explain what makes it mistaken. I then propose three ways in which more recent Causal Guidance Theories may be able to resolve the dilemma but argue that none yield a definitive solution.","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A new double prevention model of dualist interaction","authors":"Ben Middleton","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02616-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02616-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"295 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149092583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Optimally tracking the truth: the ecological rationality of confirmation measures","authors":"Youness Ayaita,Igor Douven","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02612-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02612-z","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149092585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Replies to a fellow expressivist and two fellow inferentialists","authors":"Luca Incurvati,Julian J. Schloeder","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02603-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02603-0","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We respond to the comments by Imogen Dickie, Matthew Chrisman and Christine Tiefensee for a book symposium on our Reasoning with Attitude . Our commentators attempt to pull us further into either expressivism or into inferentialism. Here, we attempt to resist either pull and further establish our inferential expressivism as a home for both expressivists and inferentialists.","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149092683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Standards and normative authority","authors":"Jesse Hambly","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02613-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02613-y","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Norms, rules, or standards require, recommend, or evaluate actions and attitudes. Claims about what agents have a reason to do or ought to do can be true according to or relative to standards. These statements will be familiar to anyone versed in recent work in metaethics and especially those interested in the debate over whether some standards are authoritatively as opposed to merely formally normative – i.e., the debate over whether some standards, like those of morality or prudence, ‘really’ or ‘genuinely’ tell agents what they have a reason to do or ought to do, while other standards, such as those which constitute certain conventional codes of behaviour, do not. But what are standards? And what is it for normative claims to be true or false according to standards? In this paper I raise a challenge for normative authority scepticism – the position that the idea that some standards are authoritatively normative is incoherent, confused, or otherwise defective – through an examination of these questions.","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149092584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Did “might” make right? Epistemic modals in practical reasoning","authors":"Katie Zhou","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02601-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02601-2","url":null,"abstract":"Many philosophers have argued that the orthodox analysis of epistemic-modal sentences, on which such sentences assert facts about what is compatible with some contextually given informational state, is fatally flawed. As an alternative, some have suggested a nonfactualist reading of such sentences. On this reading, utterances of epistemic-modal sentences do not assert propositions. Instead, they merely propose to keep possibilities in the common ground. In this paper, I pose a challenge for nonfactualism. I begin by noting that we often cite previously uttered epistemic-modal sentences as justifications for particular actions. Moreover, as I show, any utterance of an epistemic-modal sentence can, in principle, be later cited as justification for some action that was taken in light of it, even if the prejacent has since been revealed to be false. I then show that to justify action in this manner, utterances of epistemic-modal sentences must be construed as asserting propositions about what is compatible with the agent’s informational state at the time of assertion. This is incompatible with standard forms of nonfactualism about epistemic modals.","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Memory reports as state descriptions: an Iranian perspective","authors":"Ryan Walter Smith","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02607-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02607-w","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper investigates the semantic properties of memory reports in the Iranian languages Persian and Sorani Kurdish. In these languages, memory predicates are constructed out of a noun meaning ‘memory,’ the copula, and a locative preposition. I demonstrate that memory predicates in these languages pass diagnostics for abstract state predicates, distinguishing them from imagination reports, to which memory reports have been compared in the recent philosophical and linguistic literature. Building on decompositional approaches to attitude predicates, I develop a novel compositional semantics for memory predicates in these languages that accounts for their form, stativity, and differences from imagination predicates. This work contributes to the growing literature on the semantics of memory reports in natural language cross-linguistically, and discusses implications for the relationship between natural language semantics and the philosophy of memory.","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intention-like representations in language models?","authors":"Iwan Williams","doi":"10.1007/s11098-026-02605-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-026-02605-y","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A growing chorus of AI researchers and philosophers posit internal representations in large language models (LLMs). But how do these representations relate to the kinds of mental states we routinely ascribe to our fellow humans? While some research has focused on belief- or knowledge-like states in LLMs, there has been comparatively little focus on the question of whether LLMs have intentions . I survey five properties that have been associated with intentions in the philosophical literature, and assess two candidate classes of LLM representations against this set of features. The result is mixed: current evidence suggests that LLMs have representations that are intention-like in many—perhaps surprising—respects, but they differ from human intentions in important ways. Deciding whether to classify these representations as intentions will require careful consideration of the costs and pay-offs of extending the concept beyond the paradigm human case.","PeriodicalId":48305,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES","volume":"165 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}