Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language

2003/07/01 by J. Knobe, Joshua Knobe · 693 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Action (physics) #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Epistemology #Free Will and Agency #Linguistics #Ordinary language philosophy #Philosophy #Philosophy and Theoretical Science #Physics #Psychology

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/analys/63.3.190

published in Analysis 63(3), 190-194 (Oxford University Press)

openalex publication_date 2003/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases. g

Cited by

• Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences
• Knowledge entails dispositional belief
• The Wicked and the Ill
• Diversity and disagreement: Agreeing to disagree about disagreement
• The role of stakes in lying: an empirical investigation of the robustness of the folk concept of lying
• Experimental Philosophy
• Intent’s role in moral responses to White actors’ behaviors toward Black and White targets
• What is the folk concept of discrimination? Discriminators and comparators
• Do we think others are truly good?
• The Moral Standing of Created Agents: Bad Is More Owned Than Good
• The Logic of Intention Reports
• No need for an intention to deceive? Challenging the traditional definition of lying
• Does the Phineas Gage effect extend to aesthetic value?
• With great(er) power comes great(er) responsibility: an intercultural investigation of the effect of social roles on moral responsibility attribution
• Does it Pay to Be Good...And Does it Matter? A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship between Corporate Social and Financial Performance
• Folk Intuitions, Slippery Slopes, and Necessary Fictions: An Essay on Saul Smilansky's Free Will Illusionism
• Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality
• Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review. [europepmc]
• Investigating conceptions of intentional action by analyzing participant generated scenarios. [europepmc]
• Editorial: From Is to Ought: The Place of Normative Models in the Study of Human Thought. [europepmc]
• Attributions of Responsibility and Blame for Procrastination Behavior. [europepmc]
• Anticipated regret and health behavior: A meta-analysis. [europepmc]
• Commentary: Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment. [europepmc]
• The Food Warden: An Exploration of Issues in Distributing Responsibilities for Safe-by-Design Synthetic Biology Applications. [europepmc]
• The Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID): A novel stimulus set for the study of social, moral and affective processes. [europepmc]
• Forget the Folk: Moral Responsibility Preservation Motives and Other Conditions for Compatibilism. [europepmc]
• Sense of Personal Control Intensifies Moral Judgments of Others' Actions. [europepmc]
• Deciding Without Intending. [europepmc]
• Visualizing pathogens: Disfluent shapes of pathogens increase their perceived complexity and danger while realism and disfluency boost the credibility of visualizations. [europepmc]
• Are some cultures more mind-minded in their moral judgements than others? [europepmc]
• Hiding Behind Machines: Artificial Agents May Help to Evade Punishment. [europepmc]
• The genetic technologies questionnaire: lay judgments about genetic technologies align with ethical theory, are coherent, and predict behaviour. [europepmc]
• Feeling One Thing and Doing Another: How Expressions of Guilt and Shame Influence Hypocrisy Judgment. [europepmc]
• Moral contamination: Perceptions of good (but not bad) deeds depend on the ethical history of the actor. [europepmc]
• Intelligence brings responsibility - Even smart AI assistants are held responsible. [europepmc]
• Broad, subjective, relative: the surprising folk concept of basic needs. [europepmc]
• Blame framing and prior knowledge influence moral judgments for people involved in the Tulsa Race Massacre among a combined Oklahoma and UK sample. [europepmc]
• Methodological concerns underlying a lack of evidence for cultural heterogeneity in the replication of psychological effects. [europepmc]
• The impact of action descriptions on attribution of moral responsibility towards robots. [europepmc]
• The Dual Process model: the effect of cognitive load on the ascription of intentionality. [europepmc]
• How does reasoning influence intentionality attribution in the case of side effects? [europepmc]
• Which Matters More: Intention or Outcome? The Asymmetry of Moral Blame and Moral Praise. [europepmc]

Related

• Effects of Intentional Motor Actions on Embodied Language Processing
• The fanciest sort of intentionality: Active inference, mindshaping and linguistic content
• Precis of Making It Explicit
• Pragmatic Side Effects
• Eligibility and Inscrutability