Topics on the bordergrounds of action∗

Thanks are due to the managing editor, Alastair Hannay, and to my colleagues, Alan Donagan, Wright Neely, and James Wallace.

The psychological conceptualization of phenomena involves characteristic explanations of animal movement. Conscientious attention to this fact results in a kind of behaviorism I call ‘conceptual epiphenomenalism’. This doctrine at once explains the characteristic ‘opacity’ of psychological predicables and helps to show the way around difficulties opacity is felt to create, and it also frees our thinking from the tyranny of the distinction between necessity and contingency, too often misapplied to facts rather than to things said or thought. An important challenge to conceptual epiphenomenalism is to account for the facts of introspective certainty and privileged testimony. This challenge can be met by identifying the nature of and displaying the behavioral conditions for the various grades of self‐consciousness or reflective knowledge. The methodology of conceptual epiphenomenalism is schematically applied to elucidate first the general conception of animal action and then a variety of phenomena plausibly thought to be exponible by reference to the conception of action, specifically the broader category of animal behavior, intention, and hoping and wishing.

Notes

Thanks are due to the managing editor, Alastair Hannay, and to my colleagues, Alan Donagan, Wright Neely, and James Wallace.