One kind of temporally extended agency involves planning your action in advance. This paper argues that there is also a different kind of temporally extended agency, characterised by planning that is partly retrospective in nature. Incorporative agency constitutively involves an agent planning to continue acting in such a way as to integrate some of their earlier activity into a to-be-completed extended action. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility of incorporative agency, explicate the distinctive mechanism through which (...) it is possible, and outline several kinds of conditions under which it can be rational to exercise. Finally, I argue that attending to the possibility of incorporative agency enables us to answer two sceptical challenges, concerning intentional skilled action that is initiated by automatic motor responses and intentional mental activity under content-involving descriptions. (shrink)

Ethical Criticism is the practice of pointing towards a flaw in the ethical content or character of an artwork as a reason why this artwork is aesthetically faulty in some respect. This paper develops novel account of the mechanism by which this critical practice works. In contrast to the standard approach, this does not involve positing an interaction between the intrinsic ethical value and aesthetic value of an artwork. The argument runs as follows. Narrative artworks are sometimes criticizable on the (...) grounds that they make inaccurate presuppositions about the actual facts. There are ethical facts, at least in a minimal sense. Therefore, artworks are sometimes criticizable on the grounds that they make mistaken presuppositions about the ethical facts. I argue that this Factual Criticism approach gives a satisfactory diagnosis of the examples that initially motivate the philosophical debate about ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper argues that ethical propositions can legitimately be used as evidence for and against empirical conclusions. Specifically, I argue that this thesis is entailed by several uncontroversial assumptions about ethical metaphysics and epistemology. I also outline several examples of ethical-to-empirical inferences where it is extremely plausible that one can rationally rely upon their ethical evidence in order to gain a justified belief in an empirical conclusion. The main upshot is that ethical propositions can, under perfectly standard conditions, play both (...) direct and indirect evidential roles in (social) scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Plausible probabilistic accounts of evidential support entail that every true proposition is evidence for itself. This paper defends this surprising principle against a series of recent objections from Jessica Brown. Specifically, the paper argues that: (i) explanationist accounts of evidential support convergently entail that every true proposition is self-evident, and (ii) it is often felicitous to cite a true proposition as evidence for itself, just not under that description. The paper also develops an objection involving the apparent impossibility of believing (...) P on the evidential basis of P itself, but gives a reason not to be too worried about this objection. Establishing that every true proposition is self-evident saves probabilistic accounts of evidential support from absurdity, paves the way for a non-sceptical infallibilist theory of knowledge and has distinctive practical consequences. (shrink)

I develop an account of the nature of improvisation, as a distinctive form of temporally extended agency. In contrast to the standard view, which says that agents perform extended actions by means of planning them in advance, I argue that improvising involves planning one’s actions contemporaneously with their performance, or equivalently, planning these actions after one has already begun performing them. >> Improvisation is psychologically distinctive because it involves the adoption of backward-looking intentions, or retroplans, which represent the actions that (...) an agent has already performed as to-have-been performed under new descriptions, in relation to how these actions constitute parts of the larger action into which they are subsequently improvisationally incorporated. >> Improvisation is metaphysically distinctive because it involves exercising a special kind of diachronic agential control over the temporally extended action that one is performing. By means of continuing to act, as guided by a holistic improvised plan with backward-looking components, one can genuinely incorporate one’s previously-performed actions into a larger temporal whole, and thereby retroactively determine that these actions were (intentionally) performed under new descriptions. This is possible because of the temporally emergent metaphysical nature of the action-types that are improvisable. >> Improvisation is normatively distinctive because it enables new possibilities for temporally extended action, such as flexibly responding to unpredictable information in the course of acting and the retainment of a distinctive kind of self-curiosity during action. The progressive temporal structure of improvisation also raises a number of distinctive deliberative constraints that can be fruitfully modelled in general terms. >> Finally, improvisation is existentially distinctive, in the sense that an agent’s entire life can be understood as one grand-scale improvisational performance, where they gain existential unity and responsibility for the entire shape and meaning of their life by means of the successful improvisation of a self-constituting project over the course of their existence. Applying the account of the nature of improvisation at the level of a whole human life enables us to improv(is)e on existing existentialist and narrativist treatments of meaningful unity in life, and also to give a novel, systematic account of a series of existential crises and challenges. (shrink)