Responsibility

In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’ could bolster philosophical resistance to the tempting view that the human mind is possessed of metaphysically ‘occult’ powers and properties. This temptation is powerful in the context of accounting for the special qualities of responsible agency. Incompatibilists indulge the temptation; compatibilists resist it, using a variety of strategies. One recent strategy, reminiscent of Ryle’s, is to exploit a more sophisticated understanding of dispositional properties to account for these qualities. But ‘new dispositionalists’ run up against a ‘hard problem’ that threatens the approach. This paper argues that the threat may be averted by embracing a yet more radical ‘Rylean’ view of the distinctive dispositional nature of intelligent capacities.

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative"
"view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view” (encompassing both theory- theory  and  simulation  theory,  as  well  as  hybrid  variations).  On  the  regulative  view, folk-psychology  is  conceptualized  in  fundamentally  interpersonal  terms  as  a  “mind- making”   practice   through  which   we  come   to   form  and   regulate   our  minds  in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms.  It  is  not,  as  the  standard  view  maintains,  simply  an  epistemic  capacity  for coming  to  know  about  the  mental  states  and  dispositions  already  there.  Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view:  (1) the problem of “first- person authority”  –  accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and (2) the problem of “reactive responsiveness”  –  accounting for our deep concern with calling"
"one another to account for normatively untoward behaviour, both generally and in the moral domain.