Trying to Act

Hornsby, Jennifer

doi:10.1002/9781444323528.ch3

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…I take as my point of departure the account of trying defended by Jennifer Hornsby (, p. 19), who defines trying to do something as roughly “doing what one can to do the thing”. I will call this the Hornsby account of trying .…”

Section: Responding To Brunero's Objectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trying Cognitivism: A Defence of the Strong Belief Thesis

Archer

2018

Theoria

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According to the Strong Belief Thesis (SBT), intending to X entails the belief that one will X. John Brunero has attempted to impugn SBT by arguing that there are cases in which an agent intends to X but is unsure that she will X. Moreover, he claims that the standard reply to such putative counterexamples to SBT – namely, to claim that the unsure agent merely has an intention to try – comes at a high price. Specifically, it prevents SBT from playing the kind of explanatory role the cognitivist requires. This article meets Brunero's challenge to SBT by offering an account of trying and intending to try that not only saves SBT from Brunero's criticism, but does so in a way that preserves the explanatory significance that cognitivists typically take SBT to have.

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Section: Responding To Brunero's Objectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trying Cognitivism: A Defence of the Strong Belief Thesis

Archer

2018

Theoria

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“…On the standard view, trying to Φ is an essential ingredient of the action of Φ-ing. The view comes in two main versions: Either trying to Φ is held to be a common ingredient in both the action of Φ-ing and the failed attempt to Φ (Armstrong, 1973; Broadie, 1966: 29; Gorr, 1979: 237; Grice, 1991: Chap.1; McCann, 1975; Peacocke, 2008: 249); or trying to Φ is held to be identical to the action of Φ-ing in case of success, but to be a sui generis mental event in case of failure (various versions of that disjunctive approach have been developed by Faulkner, 2014; Hornsby, 1980: 34–39; 2010; L. O’Brien, 2007: Chap.…”

Section: Research On Effort: An Interdisciplinary Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a definition of efforts.

Massin¹

2017

Motivation Science

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Although widely used across psychology, economics, and philosophy, the concept of effort is rarely ever defined. This article argues that the time is ripe to look for an explicit general definition of effort, makes some proposals about how to arrive at this definition, and suggests that a force-based approach is the most promising. Section 1 presents an interdisciplinary overview of some chief research axes on effort, and argues that few, if any, general definitions have been proposed so far. Section 2 argues that such a definition is now needed and proposes a basic methodology to arrive at it, whose first step is to make explicit the various tacit assumptions about effort made across sciences and ordinary thinking. Section 3 unearths 4 different conceptions of effort from research on effort so far: primitive-feelings accounts, comparator-based accounts, resource-based accounts and force-based accounts. It is then argued that the first 2 kinds of accounts, although interesting in their own right, are not strictly speaking about effort. Section 4 considers the 2 most promising general approaches to efforts: resource-based and force-based accounts. It argues that these accounts are not only compatible but actually extensionally equivalent. This notwithstanding, it explains why force-based accounts should be regarded are more fundamental than resource-based accounts.

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“…prayer) that strongly resonates with the Aristotelian notion of the weakness of the will ( akrasia ). In a sense, this is the most straightforward way of failing : not being able to cause something to happen yet trying to act, which involves reflexivity about a possibility of failure, and/or an actual failure (Bach : 51; Hornsby : 19).…”

Section: Incapacity and The Weakness Of The Willmentioning

confidence: 99%

A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia

Oustinova-Stjepanovic

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Understood in terms of action and efficacy, the regnant notion of agency in anthropology is juxtaposed with an ethnographic category of failure. Agency is problematized and refined through the fieldwork‐grounded analysis of a faltering reform of a Sufi order in Macedonia, where failure was perceived and racially marked as the intrinsic incapacity of ‘Gypsies’ to commit to ritual action and overcome their propensity towards vice, thus achieving a desired self‐transformation into virtuous beings.

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Trying to Act

Cited by 14 publications

References 17 publications

Trying Cognitivism: A Defence of the Strong Belief Thesis

Trying Cognitivism: A Defence of the Strong Belief Thesis

Towards a definition of efforts.

A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia

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