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Arm Raising and Arm Rising

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Jennifer Hornsby
Jennifer Hornsby
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Extract

I. It is a necessary condition of the truth of ‘I raised my arm’ that my arm rose; but it is not a sufficient condition. Is there some further necessary condition which, when conjoined with the condition that my arm rose, does give a sufficient condition of the truth of ‘I raised my arm’?

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 55 , Issue 211 , January 1980 , pp. 73 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1980

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References

1 At p. 160 in The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, Blackwell, 1958).Google Scholar

2 See Grice, H. P. ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXXV (1961), 121–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 ‘Trying (as the Mental “Pineal Gland”)’, Journal of Philosophy LXX, No. 13 (19 07 1973), 365–386.Google Scholar (Note that I disagree with O'Shaughnessy about what arm raisings are.)

4 Cp. Harman, G., Thought (Princeton University Press, 1973), 191.Google Scholar

5 See e.g. Danto, , ‘Freedom and Forbearance’ (in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Lehrer, K., New York: Random House, 1966), 57Google Scholar; and Davidson, , ‘Agency’ (in Agent, Action and Reason, eds. Binkley, R. et al. , Oxford, Blackwell, 1971), p. 24.Google Scholar

6 James, William, Principles of Psychology, 1890. (See p. 490 of Vol. II of the 1950 Dover edition.)Google Scholar

7 This is Richard Taylor's view of the newly paralysed man. Action and Purpose (Prentice Hall, 1966), 77–85.Google Scholar

8 This is not to say that no one ever tries to do what he knows to be impossible. Someone might have a motive for trying to ø which was additional to any motive that he had for ø-ing; and our reason for thinking that such a person will try to ø is then not undermined by learning that he believes that he cannot ø.

9 By Vesey, G., ‘Volition’, Philosophy 36 (1960), at pp. 363 and 364.Google Scholar

10 I read this paper to a conference on Wittgenstein held by the Austrian Institute in Trinity College, Cambridge, March 1978. The claims made here and the view of action of which they constitute one part are defended at greater length in my Actions (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).Google Scholar The research was completed during my tenure of the Sarah Smithson Research Fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge.