Abstract Despite growing appreciation in recent decades of the importance shared intentional mental states as a foundation for everything from divergences primate evolution, to institution communal norms, trends development modernity sociopolitical phenomenon, we lack an adequate understanding relationship between individual and intentionality. At same time, it is widely appreciated that deonti...

In this paper, I provide a logical framework for defining conventions, elaborating on the game-theoretic model proposed by David Lewis. The philosophical analysis of some of the key concepts in Lewis’s model reveals that a modal logic formalization may be a natural one. The paper will develop on the analysis and critique of such concepts as those of common knowledge, indication, and the distinc...

The paper argues that the standard decision theoretic account of strategies and their rationality or optimality is much too narrow, that strategies should rather condition future action to future decision situations, that practical deliberation must therefore essentially rely on a relation of superiority and inferiority between possible future decision situations, that all this allows to substa...

Rational requirements have a special status in the theory of rationality. This is obvious in one sense: they supply the content of that theory. But I want to suggest that rational requirements have another special status—as objects of the theory of rationality. In slogan form, my thesis is: Fixed Point Thesis: Mistakes about the requirements of rationality are mistakes of rationality. The key c...

In this essay I argue that a broadly Kantian strategy for demonstrating and explaining the existence, semantic structure, and psychological function of essentially non-conceptual content can also provide an intelligible and 10 defensible bottom-up theory of the foundations of rationality in minded animals. Otherwise put, if I am correct, then essentially non-conceptual content constitutes the s...

Valuations are ubiquitous. We may be for or against genetically modified food; we find some politicians irresponsible; we prefer Beethoven to rock ‘n’ roll or vice versa; some enjoy bird-watching while others find it boring; and we may think that we have to tighten up on green-house gas emissions. Valuing is pervasive and often we are not even aware that we are valuing. However, many of our val...