Dr Lucy Campbell | University of Warwick

Prior to coming to Warwick she held teaching and research positions in Oxford (2016-18) and in Edinburgh (2015-16). She completed her PhD, "Action, Intention, and Knowledge" - in Cambridge, in 2015.

Title | 'Intending and Acting'

Abstract:

What is the relationship between intending and acting? The standard answer to this question is that given by the Causal Theory of Action: intentions are the efficient causes of the bodily movements which constitute our actions.

Anti-causalists think that this approach faces insuperable problems, fundamentally because it makes the relationship between our practical rationality and our actual actions a contingent one.

Recently, and particularly inspired by the work of Michael Thompson, a rather different approach to understanding agency and action-explanation has been gathering steam. This approach views the relationship between intending and acting not as contingent and causal, but as necessary, and mereological: to intend to PHI is just to be in progress towards PHI-ing.

But this - what I call the progressive view of intending - has its own problems, or so I argue. In my view, intending to PHI is neither a state of mind which causes PHI-ing, nor is a matter of being already in the process of PHI-ing. I outline a third way which, I argue, enables us to maintain the benefits, and avoid the pitfalls, of both the standard causal theory, and the progressive view of intending.

On my account, the relationship between intention and action should be understood through the idea of agency as a distinctively practical exercise of concepts.