Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in (...) the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. The different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X. (shrink)

This paper discusses the non-historicist structural ownership condition on moral responsibility forwarded by Benjamin Matheson. The structural ownership condition requires that a morally relevant action be grounded or partly grounded in psychological states that are generally coherent. While Matheson does not mean to settle the debate on historicism vs. non-historicism, he does mean to secure the position of the ownership condition against the problems that structuralist theories have faced in the past. This paper will focus on how the ownership condition (...) handles cases of ambivalent agents. Intuitively, ambivalent agents should be responsible for what they do as long as what they do is expressive of their cares or commitments, or their authentic character. At a first glance it appears that the ownership condition follows intuitions about ambivalence, but with a closer look we can see that Matheson has provided a potential counter example to this position. (shrink)

This paper advances a new agentially undemanding account of the conditions of attributability, the Minimal Approval account, and argues that it has a number of advantages over traditional Deep Self theories, including the way in which it handles agents with conditions like addiction, Tourette syndrome, and misophonia. It is argued that in order for an agent to be attributionally responsible, the mental process that leads to her action must dispose her to be such that she would, upon reflection, approve (...) to some minimal degree of being moved to action by the motive on which she in fact acts. (shrink)

This paper advances a new agentially undemanding account of the conditions of attributability, the Minimal Approval account, and argues that it has a number of advantages over traditional Deep Self theories, including the way in which it handles agents with conditions like addiction, Tourette syndrome, and misophonia. It is argued that in order for an agent to be attributionally responsible, the mental process that leads to her action must dispose her to be such that she would, upon reflec-tion, approve (...) to some minimal degree of being moved to action by the motive on which she in fact acts. (shrink)

Niels de Haan (2023) defends the possibility of holding collectives morally responsible against a challenge posed by the problem of self-induced moral incapacity. Self-induced moral incapacity seems to introduce a responsibility gap that corporate agents might exploit to avoid responsibility. De Haan argues that the problem does not introduce responsibility gaps because collective moral agents become responsible for actions they committed while they were incapacitated once they reacquire moral capacity. I argue that de Haan’s argument is incomplete. Simply because a (...) group reacquires moral capacity does not also necessarily mean that the group retains attributability for the wrongs in question. This means we must supplement de Haan’s argument with an Attributability Proviso: To overcome the problem of self-induced moral incapacity it must be the case that the group reacquires moral capacity and that we can still attribute the earlier actions to the group despite the changes that it has gone through. (shrink)

A prominent objection to the knowledge norm of belief is that it is too demanding or too strong. The objection is commonly framed in terms of the idea that there is a tight connection between norm violation and the appropriateness of criticism or blame. In this paper I do two things. First, I argue that this way of motivating the objection leads to an impasse in the epistemic norms debate. It leads to an impasse when knowledge normers invoke excuses to (...) explain away a prima facie connection between blamelessness and justified belief. Second, I argue that a way out of the impasse becomes available when we take a closer look at some distinctions in the theory of responsibility. There are at least three different notions of responsibility relevant here. I argue that a weaker notion of responsibility – attributability – should be used to motivate the objection that the knowledge norm of belief is too strong. Insofar as the proposal motivates the objection without appeal to blamelessness, it opens up space to move beyond the impasse. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been recognised as a challenge to responsibility. Much of this discourse has been framed around robots, such as autonomous weapons or self-driving cars, where we arguably lack control over a machine’s behaviour and therefore struggle to identify an agent that can be held accountable. However, most of today’s AI is based on machine-learning technology that does not act on its own, but rather serves as a decision-support tool, automatically analysing data to help human agents make (...) better decisions. I argue that decision-support tools pose a challenge to responsibility that goes beyond the familiar problem of finding someone to blame or punish for the behaviour of agent-like systems. Namely, they pose a problem for what we might call “decision ownership”: they make it difficult to identify human agents to whom we can attribute value-judgements that are reflected in decisions. Drawing on recent philosophical literature on responsibility and its various facets, I argue that this is primarily a problem of attributability rather than of accountability. This particular responsibility problem comes in different forms and degrees, most obviously when an AI provides direct recommendations for actions, but also, less obviously, when it provides mere descriptive information on the basis of which a decision is made. (shrink)

이 글의 목적은 책임개념의 구분을 둘러싼 안젤라 스미스(Smith, Angela M.)와 데이비드 슈메이커(Shoemaker, David) 간의 논쟁을 검토하여 규범적 책임의 본성을 규명하는 것이다. 스미스에 따르면, 태도 또는 행위 Φ에 대한 행위자 갑의 책임이 성립하기 위해서는 Φ와 갑의 가치판단 간에 ‘합리적 연관성’이 존재해야 하며, 도덕적 책임은 본질적으로 답변책임(responsibility as answerability)이다. 이에 대해 슈메이커는 책임의 유형에는 답변책임 외에도 귀속책임(responsibility as attributability)과 책무책임(responsibility as accountability)이 있고, 스미스는 답변책임과 귀속책임 간의, 답변책임과 책무책임 간의 차이를 포착해내지 못했다고 비판한다. 슈메이커에 따르면, 행위자 갑은 태도나 행위 Φ가 그에게 (...) 귀속되는 한 Φ에 대해 귀속책임이 있다. 각종 공포증에서 나타나는 비합리성에 대한 귀속책임이나 감정적 전념에 대한 귀속책임이 대표적이다. 또한 슈메이커는 관계 존속을 규정하는 기준을 위반하여 관계 자체를 파탄낼 때 책무책임이 성립하며. 하지만 사이코패스의 경우에는 그의 ‘도덕적 무능력’으로 인해 책무책임이 성립하지 않는다고 주장한다. 기본적으로 필자는 도덕적 실천에서 구현되는 책임의 원형이 답변책임이라는 스미스의 논지에 동의한다. 필자는 비합리성에 대한 도덕적 책임이 답변책임 개념을 통해 적절히 설명될 수 있다는 것과 슈메이커의 감정적 전념에 대한 귀속책임 개념은 감정적 전념에 대한 도덕적 책임이 문제시되는 경우와 그렇지 않은 경우를 구분하지 못한다는 것을 보여주고자 한다. 또한 슈메이커의 책무책임 개념은 개별적 태도나 행위에 대해 물어지는 ‘책임’이라기보다는 그러한 책임을 묻는 데 전제가 되는 ‘의무’ 내지 ‘책무’임을 밝히고자 한다. (shrink)

There are many books on legal theory that are devoted to describing different accounts of law, criticising some theories, supporting others, and at times even developing new ones. Typically, howeve...

The final chapter of the study argues that the disjunctive analysis of intention provides a distinctively plausible explanation of the intention-consequential (IC) requirements of practical rationality. Consistent with an analysis that sees intentions as optative attitudes accompanied by only minimal, negative doxastic conditions, I reject cognitive explanations of the IC requirements, arguing instead that they represent constraints on an agent’s project of self-forging, a project that is in an important sense orthogonal to her responses to everyday reasons. The chapter discusses (...) the most prominent noncognitivist model, Michael Bratman’s grounding of the norms in the demands of self governance. The model, I argue, is vitiated by its normative functionalist framework, which, because it cannot, on pain of circularity, ground its explanation in features of intending, has to postulate a specific reason behind intention’s subjection to the requirements. However, because the norms are in place for all intentional agency, they cannot depend on specific aims or reasons, even reasons most of us have, but need to be grounded in intentional agency itself.According to my constructive proposal, to postdeliberatively opt to perform certain actions is to “take personal responsibility” for them, thus providing an anchor for their attributability. It is a concern to provide such an anchor, I claim, that has conferred on intention the shape it has. The reason for intending’s subjection to the IC requirements is that their contravention renders responsibility-taking unintelligible: an agent who intends in violation of the IC requirements becomes opaque to himself, thus necessarily losing his hold on his own agency. This fact provides agents with a distinct kind of reason, one that is both stringent and, under certain circumstances strikingly weak, a conjunction of features which suffices as an answer to the scepticism expressed by Broome as to whether rationality can be shown to generate reasons. I then show how the notion of taking personal responsibility extends to cover cases of nondecisional intending. The explanation of this extension is, crucially, in part normative. It grounds in the deeply entrenched demand that persons deliberate on whether they are willing to see themselves as the realisers of their motivationally unrivalled wants*. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is what I will call “biased emotion”. Biased emotions are emotions which are influenced by implicit bias. An example is racially biased fear. A person who explicitly denies that every black man is dangerous, might implicitly have the tendency to be afraid of black men. Biased emotions lead to certain types of behavior, such as avoidance behavior out of fear. Some have argued that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are not attributable. Because fearful behavior is (...) supposedly reflex-like, it can be considered as “external” to who one really is. I will, however, argue that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are not reflexes but behavior which reflects a person’s goals and what one cares about. For this reason, I will argue that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are attributable and reveal who one truly is. (shrink)

attributive/referential. Pragmatic intrusion.

In a single-iteration fake barn case, the agent correctly identifies an object of interest on the first try, despite the presence of nearby lookalikes that could have mislead her. In a multiple-iteration fake barn case, the agent first encounters several fakes, misidentifies each of them, and then encounters and correctly identifies a genuine item of interest. Prior work has established that people tend to attribute knowledge in single-iteration fake barn cases, but multiple-iteration cases have not been tested. However, some theorists (...) contend that multiple-iteration cases are more important and will elicit a strong tendency to deny knowledge. Here I report a behavioural experiment investigating knowledge judgments in multiple-iteration fake barn cases. The main finding is that people tend to attribute knowledge in these cases too. Ironically, the results indicate that the presence of fakes could prevent iterated errors from lowering knowledge attributions. The results also provide evidence that ordinary knowledge attributions are based on attributions of cognitive ability. (shrink)

For many contemporary theorists, one is morally responsible for an action or attitude just in case it is properly attributable to one’s deep self. There has been long-standing difficulty, however, in figuring out just what the deep self consists in. Two competing theories have attempted to resolve the difficulty: (a) the Humean approach, which locates the deep self in non-cognitive psychic elements like cares; and (b) the Platonic approach, which locates the deep self in cognitive, judging psychic elements like evaluative (...) commitments. Each approach founders on counterexamples the other approach handles well, though. This chapter develops an ecumenical solution: an action or attitude is properly attributable to an agent just in case it expresses either her cares or her commitments. The chapter motivates this pluralistic view through consideration of several cases and then thwarts possible objections of various defenders of a monistic approach. (shrink)

Perceptual representations pick out individuals and attribute properties to them. This paper considers the role of perceptual attribution in determining or guiding perceptual reference to objects. We consider three extant models of the relation between perceptual attribution and perceptual reference–all attribution guides reference, no attribution guides reference, or a privileged subset of attributions guides reference–and argue that empirical evidence undermines all three. We then defend a flexible-attributives model, on which the range of perceptual attributives used to guide reference shifts adaptively (...) with context. This model underscores the remarkable and dynamic intelligence of our perceptual capacities. We elucidate implications of the model for the boundary between perception and propositional thought. (shrink)

A common objection to particular views of attributability is that they fail to account for weakness of will. In this paper, I show that the problem of weakness of will is much deeper than has been recognized, extending to all views of attributability on offer because of the general form that these views take. The fundamental problem is this: current views claim that being attributionally responsible is a matter of exercising whatever capacity that they take to be relevant (...) to attributability; however, weakness of will cases show that we can be attributionally responsible for actions that result from failing to exercise that capacity. I propose a novel solution that any view of attributability can and must take on board in order to be viable. The solution is to recognize that being attributionally responsible is not fundamentally a matter of exercising the attributability-relevant capacity but is rather a matter of having that capacity, so long as that capacity figures in the explanation of the action. (shrink)

In this commentary on Anneli Jefferson’s Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? I endorse her capacitarian approach to responsibility but suggest that the effects of at least some mental/brain disorders on the agent’s psychology show that we cannot neatly separate the epistemic condition from the control condition when assessing agential capacity. I then discuss the labeling issue in the context of rival attributionist accounts of responsibility which hold that agents are responsible if their actions are attributable to them. The incorporation of (...) mental disorders into identity through social processes may open agents with mental or brain disorders open to unfair blame. However, we cannot fully understand the effects of the disorders on agential capacity without closely attending to the social environment that shapes the way the disorder is conceived, enacted, perceived, and responded to over time. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of moral emotions from an attributional point of view, guided by the metaphors of man as a naïve scientist (Heider, 1958) and as a moral judge (Weiner, 2006). The theoretical analysis focuses on three concepts: (a) The distinction between the actor and the observer, (b) the functional quality of moral emotions, and (c) the perceived controllability of the causes of events. Moral emotions are identified (admiration, anger, awe, contempt, disgust, elevation, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, indignation, (...) jealousy, pity, pride, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, respect, schadenfreude, scorn, shame, and sympathy). A classification of these moral emotions is suggested and the empirical evidence briefly summarized. In discussing our results, we identify unresolved issues awaiting further analyses and research. (shrink)

Recently T. M. Scanlon and others have advanced an ostensibly comprehensive theory of moral responsibility—a theory of both being responsible and being held responsible—that best accounts for our moral practices. I argue that both aspects of the Scanlonian theory fail this test. A truly comprehensive theory must incorporate and explain three distinct conceptions of responsibility—attributability, answerability, and accountability—and the Scanlonian view conflates the first two and ignores the importance of the third. To illustrate what a truly comprehensive theory might (...) look like, I investigate what it would say about the difficult case of the psychopath. (shrink)

Many ethicists writing about automated systems attribute agency to these systems. Not only that; they seemingly attribute an autonomous or independent form of agency to these machines. This leads some ethicists to worry about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps in cases where automated systems harm or kill human beings. In this paper, I consider what sorts of agency it makes sense to attribute to most current forms of automated systems, in particular automated cars and military robots. I argue that whereas it indeed (...) makes sense to attribute different forms of fairly sophisticated agency to these machines, we ought not to regard them as acting on their own, independently of any human beings. Rather, the right way to understand the agency exercised by these machines is in terms of human–robot collaborations, where the humans involved initiate, supervise, and manage the agency of their robotic collaborators. This means, I argue, that there is much less room for justified worries about responsibility-gaps and retribution-gaps than many ethicists think. (shrink)

People regularly profess belief in religious ideas. But do they merely think of themselves as believing, or do they think of themselves as possessing knowledge? I first argue that it is difficult to determine this based purely on religious people’s self-descriptions. I instead appeal to functionalist considerations about the way religious metacognitive attitudes are formed and guide action, which suggest ordinary religious people often do self-attribute knowledge. This raises problems for recent arguments that first-order religious attitudes are a form of (...) make-believe instead of genuine belief, while also bringing out the importance of religious metacognition for fully understanding religious psychology. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the semantics of knowledge attributions(K-claims, for short) and proposes a position holding that K-claims are contextsensitive that differs from extant views on the market. First I lay down the data a semantic theory for K-claims needs to explain. Next I present and assess three views purporting to give the semantics for K-claims: contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and relativism. All three views are found wanting with respect to their accounting for the data. I then propose a hybrid (...) view according to which the relevant epistemic standards for evaluating K-claims are neither those at the context of the subject (subject-sensitive invariantism), nor those at the context of the assessor (relativism), but it is itself an open matter. However, given that we need a principled way of deciding which epistemic standards are the relevant ones, I provide a principle according to which the relevant standards are those that are the highest between those at the context of the subject and those at the context of the assessor/attributor. In the end I consider some objections to the view and offer some answers. (shrink)

In his recent article “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” David Shoemaker argues that our actual moral practices embody three distinct conceptions of responsibility and that some recent accounts of moral responsibility that draw their inspiration from the work of T. M. Scanlon fail to capture these distinct conceptions. My aim in this essay is to argue that our moral practices do not, in fact, embody three different conceptions of moral responsibility and that what (...) Shoemaker aptly calls “responsibility as answerability” is indeed the only kind of moral responsibility there is. (shrink)

While the necessity of a concept of “self” for understanding human behavior remains subject to debate, it evidently has significance in everyday life: Lay individuals ascribe selves to humans but also to animals and technical systems, shaping their interactions accordingly. The literature suggests that there are distal behavioral cues eliciting this perception of selfhood and they may be as minimal as simple movement observed as causal. We aimed to identify which types of behavioral cues increase selfhood‐attribution to other agents such (...) as robots. Specifically, we compared behavior of nonhumanoid robots suggesting either the presence or absence of behavioral cues for one of the characteristics of causality, equifinality, behavioral efficiency, learning sensitivity, and context sensitivity. Results showed a consistent pattern of increased selfhood‐attribution toward robots exhibiting any one of the examined minimal characteristics. Furthermore, most perceived sentient characteristics of the robot were triggered by any single characteristic's cue. These results reflect a Halo effect like pattern: Even a single perceived cue of selfhood‐related characteristics may be sufficient to trigger a change in overall selfhood‐attribution to robots. We suggest two versions of a Brunswikian model of selfhood‐judgment, wherein selfhood is attributed based on the perception of (probably loosely defined) self‐related characteristics. We propose that not all characteristics are directly perceived by their corresponding behavioral cues; rather, that the characteristics interact with each other and/or distal cues trigger the perception of more than one characteristic. We term this a Pars‐Pro‐Toto account as people go way beyond the perceived information when attributing selfhood. (shrink)

In this book I address a dichotomy that is as central as any in ontology - that between ordinary objects or substances and the various attributes (Le., properties, kinds, and relations) we associate with them. My aim is to arrive at the correct philosophical account of each member of the dichotomy. What I shall argue is that the various attempts to understand substances or attri butes in reductive terms fail. Talk about attributes, I shall try to show, is just that (...) - talk about attributes; and, likewise, talk about substances is just tha- talk about substances. The result is what many will find a strange combina tion of views - a Platonistic theory of attributes, where attributes are univer sals or multiply exemplifiable entities whose existence is independent of "the world of flux", and an Aristotelian theory of substance, where substances are basic unities not reducible to metaphysically more fundamental kinds of things. Part One is concerned with the ontology of attributes. After distinguishing three different patterns of metaphysical thinking about attributes, I examine, in turn, the phenomena of predication, resemblance, and higher order quanti fication. I argue that none of these phenomena by itself is sufficient to establish the inescapability of a Platonistic interpretation of attributes. Then, I discuss the phenomenon of abstract reference as it is exhibited in the use of abstract singular terms. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT) can communicate in strikingly humanlike ways. This has prompted many chatbot users to attribute psychological properties, including consciousness, to these systems. However, there is little scientific evidence that current AI chatbots are conscious. How, then, should we understand people’s consciousness attributions to chatbots? Are they merely metaphorical claims, or do they express genuine beliefs? If these attributions lack evidential support, are users epistemically blameworthy for making them, or might they be epistemically innocent, yielding significant (...) benefits otherwise unattainable? This paper offers a conceptual analysis of consciousness attributions to AI chatbots and develops a multidimensional taxonomy of the attitudes they may express, ranging from non-doxastic stances (e.g., pretence) to different forms of belief, including delusions. This taxonomy helps avoid conflations by showing that linguistically identical attributions can reflect importantly different attitudes and degrees of epistemic commitment to the proposition that chatbots are conscious. The taxonomy also provides a framework for empirical studies to operationalize and measure different forms of epistemic commitment to AI consciousness. Using this taxonomy, I argue that although some consciousness attributions to chatbots are epistemically benign, and even some irrational ones may be epistemically innocent, many others render the attributor epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating roles of hostile attribution bias and negative reciprocity beliefs in the relationship between workplace incivility, as perceived by employees, and their interpersonal deviance. Data were collected using a three-wave survey research design. Participants included 233 employees from a large manufacturing company in China. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypothesized relationships. Our study revealed that hostile attribution bias and negative reciprocity beliefs strengthened the positive relationship between workplace incivility (...) and interpersonal deviance. This relationship was the most positive when both hostile attribution bias and negative reciprocity beliefs were high. The findings provided evidence that directing employees to depress hostile attribution bias and negative reciprocity beliefs may attenuate the effects of workplace incivility on interpersonal deviance. Implications for theory, research, and management practice are discussed. (shrink)

In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve it. Infants’ looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when—and only when—the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result (...) supports the view that infants’ possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relationship between this early ability and later forms of ‘theory of mind’ that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators. (shrink)

The first section introduces a distinction between 2 families of cognitive operations, called System 1 and System 2. The second section presents an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which elaborates and extends earlier treatments of the topic. The third section introduces a research design for studying attribute substitution. The fourth section discusses the controversy over the representativeness heuristic. The last section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global judgments concerning (...) an entire set. (shrink)

This chapter offers a close reading of Gary Watson’s important article “Two Faces of Responsibility.” It aims to disambiguate and revise the notions of attributability and accountability that Watson’s essay introduced and to clarify the relation between them. It distinguishes mere negative _descriptions_ of an individual from negative _attitudes_ toward that individual, and further distinguishes negative attitudes that constitute _criticism_ from other attitudes that constitute _blame_. Accepting Watson’s idea that an act or trait is attributable to someone just in (...) case it discloses a feature of an agent’s self, the essay argues that attributability (of a fault) is sufficient to justify criticism of an individual; blame and public sanctions, by contrast, require accountability. (shrink)

The Attributes of Adulthood Recognised by Adolescents and Adults The article has made an attempt to identify the ways in which adolescents and adults see the process of "transitioning into adulthood" and what attributes they think are necessary for an adult person to possess. The problem of "becoming an adult" has been portrayed in the broader context of parent-adolescent relation development. Research by Smetana (1988) has cast some light on a possible source of the conflict: differences in understanding social situations (...) and the role of authority figures by adolescents and their parents. In contemporary society there are no unquestionable determinants of adulthood, a fact very conducive to intergenerational conflict. In the current study two groups of adolescents (15- and 18-year-olds) and a group of adults (38 to 56-year-olds) were examined using a questionnaire by J. J. Arnett (1997) The Attributes of Adulthood. The results show marked uniformity among subjects as to the choice of "adulthood" characteristics. They point to events such as reaching a certain age, completing one's education or starting a family as the least important in transitioning to adolescence. The most popular categories, regardless of age, included subjective and psychological characteristics, such as financial independence, the ability to accept and fulfil new social roles or accepting responsibility for the consequences of one's actions. Reference to such ambiguous attributes can lead to parents and adolescents interpreting them differently and thus contribute to misunderstanding and conflict in parent-child relations. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them. This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which (...) people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias. (shrink)

Three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We argue that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We argue furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological implication: (...) when you judge a product to be creative--attributing creativity--you are not just judging it to be new and valuable. Even if you did not witness how it was produced, you are also making a judgement about how it was produced. (shrink)

In this article the history of the attribution approach to emotion and motivation is reviewed. Early motivation theorists incorporated emotion within the pleasure/pain principle but they did not recognize specific emotions. This changed when Atkinson introduced his theory of achievement motivation, which argued that achievement strivings are determined by the anticipated emotions of pride and shame. Attribution theorists then suggested many other emotional reactions to success and failure that are determined by the perceived causes of achievement outcomes and the shared (...) characteristics or dimensions of causality. The article outlines the hypothesized dimensional antecedents of a number of self- and other-directed achievement-related emotions following success (admiration, apprehension, confidence, disliking, envy, gratitude, liking, pride, and surprise) and failure (anger, guilt, helplessness, hope, hopelessness, pity, regret, Schadenfreude, scorn, shame, surprise, and sympathy). Motivational consequences of emotions also are highlighted. (shrink)

In recent years, political theorists have begun to systematically consider the concept and justification of territorial rights, and advance rival theories of state’s (or nation’s) rights over territory. This article aims to advance our understanding of the challenge facing territorial rights theories, by closely analysing one of the most developed and important theories of territory, viz., the nationalist theory. It argues that nationalist theory, which employs a quasi-Lockean argument for territorial rights, faces a problem of attribution: What value-adding activities can (...) be attributed to a cultural nation, which is viewed as the primary holder of territorial rights by the theory? It proceeds to examine three approaches to solve the problem of attribution – but argues that all of them fail. In the concluding section, the paper explores the potential implications of this largely critical argument for all attempts to develop a coherent and plausible normative theory of territory. (shrink)

How do people attribute responsibility to individuals in a group? Several models in psychology predict a close relationship between counterfactuals and responsibility. The chapter first reviews these models and points out a major limitation: people sometimes hold individuals responsible, even though the group outcome was not counterfactually dependent on their contribution. The chapter proposes a modeling framework that conceptualizes responsibility attributions in terms of richer counterfactuals defined over structured causal models. Using this framework, it shows that an individual’s responsibility increases, (...) the closer their contribution was to making a difference to the outcome. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that retrospective responsibility attributions are affected by a person’s prospective responsibility: individuals whose contributions are perceived to be more critical for the team’s success receive more responsibility for the outcome. (shrink)

In this paper, I give an overview of different models of understanding attribution and advance a contextualist account of understanding attribution. Whereas other contextualist accounts make the degree in which the epistemic states of the relevant agents satisfy certain invariant conditions context-sensitive, the proposed account makes the conditions themselves context-sensitive.

ABSTRACTMany long‐standing debates about anachronistic concept‐attributions derive from an essentialist understanding of concepts that is often difficult to sustain for metaphysical or epistemological reasons. The intentionalist alternative to essentialism elaborated in this article successfully clarifies and avoids many standard problems with anachronism.

This paper presents new evidence on the impact of socioeconomic status and education on knowledge attribution. I examine a variety of cases, including vignettes where agents have been Gettiered, have false beliefs, and possess knowledge. Early work investigated whether SES might be associated with knowledge attribution :429–460, 2001; Seyedsayamdost in Episteme 12:95–116, 2014). But these studies used college education as a dummy variable for SES. I use the recently developed Great British Class Survey :219–250, 2013) to measure SES. The paper (...) reports evidence against an association between SES and patterns of knowledge ascription, and reports mixed evidence about education effects. (shrink)

In this paper, we draw on insights from theories in the management and corporate governance literature to develop a theoretical model that makes explicit the links between a firm’s corporate social responsibility related board attributes, its board CSR strategy, and its environmental and social performance. We then test the model using structural equation modeling approach. We find that the greater the CSR orientation of the board, the more proactive and comprehensive the firm’s CSR strategy, and the higher its environmental and (...) social performance. Moreover, we find this link to be endogenous and self-reinforcing, with superior CSR performers tending to further strengthen their board CSR orientation. This result while positive is also suggestive of the widening of the gap between the leads and laggards in CSR. Therefore, the question arises as to how ‘leaders’ are using their superior CSR competencies seen by many scholars as a source of corporate competitive advantage. Stakeholders of corporations therefore need to be cognizant of this aspect of CSR when evaluating a firm’s CSR activities. Policy makers also need to be cognizant of these concerns when designing regulation in this field. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human properties to nonhuman entities, is often posited as an explanation for the origin and nature of God concepts, but it remains unclear which human properties we tend to attribute to God and under what conditions. In three studies, participants decided whether two types of human properties—psychological properties and physiological properties—could or could not be attributed to God. In Study 1, participants made significantly more psychological attributions than physiological attributions, and the frequency of those attributions (...) was correlated both with participants’ religiosity and with their attribution of abstract, theological properties. In Study 2 and Study 3, participants not only showed the same preference for psychological properties but were also significantly faster, more consistent, and more confident when attributing psychological properties to God than when attributing physiological properties. And when denying properties to God, they showed the reverse pattern—that is, they were slower, less consistent, and less confident when denying psychological properties than when denying physiological properties. These patterns were observed both in a predominantly Christian population and a predominantly Hindu population. Overall, we argue that God is conceptualized not as a person in general but as an agent in particular, attributed a mind by default but attributed a body only upon further consideration. (shrink)

Humans often attribute the things that happen to one or another actual cause. In this chapter, we survey some recent philosophical and psychological research on causal attribution. We pay special attention to the relation between graphical causal modeling and theories of causal attribution. We think that the study of causal attribution is one place where formal and experimental techniques nicely complement one another.

Some eliminativists have predicted that a developed neuroscience will eradicate the principles and theoretical kinds (belief, desire, etc.) implicit in our ordinary practices of mental state attribution. Prevailing defenses of common-sense psychology infer its basic integrity from its familiarity and instrumental success in everyday social commerce. Such common-sense defenses charge that eliminativist arguments are self-defeating in their folk psychological appeal to the belief that eliminativism is true. I argue that eliminativism is untouched by this simple charge of inconsistency, and introduce (...) a different dialectical strategy for arguing against the eliminativist. In keeping with the naturalistic trend in the sociology and philosophy of science, I show that neuroscientists routinely rely on folk psychological procedures of intentional state attribution in applying epistemically reliable standards of scientific evaluation. These scientific contexts place ordinary procedures of attribution under greater stress, producing evidence of folk psychological success that is less equivocal than the evidence in mundane settings. Therefore, the dependence of science on folk psychology, when combined with an independently plausible explanatory constraint on reduction and an independently motivated notion of theoretical stress, allows us to reconstitute the charge of (neurophilic) eliminativist inconsistency in a more sophisticated form. (shrink)

I here describe meanings attributed to the term consciousness, extracted from the literature and from recent online discussions. Forty such meanings were identified and categorized according to whether they were principally about function or about experience; some overlapped but others were apparently mutually exclusive - and this list is by no means exhaustive. Most can be regarded as expressions of authors' views about the basis of con-sciousness, or opinions about the significance of aspects of its con-tents. The prospects for reaching (...) any single, agreed, theory independent definition of consciousness thus appear remote. How-ever, much confusion could be avoided if authors were always to spec-ify which aspects of consciousness they refer to when using the term. An example is outlined of how this can be done. (shrink)

I review recent empirical findings on knowledge attributions in lottery cases and report a new experiment that advances our understanding of the topic. The main novel finding is that people deny knowledge in lottery cases because of an underlying qualitative difference in how they process probabilistic information. “Outside” information is generic and pertains to a base rate within a population. “Inside” information is specific and pertains to a particular item’s propensity. When an agent receives information that 99% of all lottery (...) tickets lose (outside information), people judge that she does not know that her ticket will lose. By contrast, when an agent receives information that her specific ticket is 99% likely to lose (inside information), people judge that she knows that her ticket will lose. Despite this difference in knowledge judgments, people rate the likelihood of her ticket losing the exact same in both cases (i.e. 99%). The results shed light on other factors affecting knowledge judgments in lottery cases, including formulaic expression and participants’ own estimation of whether it is true that the ticket will lose. The results also undermine previous hypotheses offered for knowledge denial in lottery cases, including the hypotheses that people deny knowledge because they either deny justification or acknowledge a chance for error. (shrink)

The scope of this short paper is to show that the examples Ilhan Inan uses to undermine Donnellan's distinction (primarily, the attributive uses of definite descriptions in general) fall short on account of wrong interpretation those examples were provided with in his paper. Whilst Ilhan Inan showed how complex definite descriptions (having an embedded referential term) may cause doubts as to which category they should be put in, these referring terms only play a secondary role. I argue that all of (...) his three key examples are, in fact, sheer attributive uses of definite descriptions and have to be taken as such, which seriously diminishes the pedestal Inan places his argument on. (shrink)