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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Habits, Skills, and Know-How

  • Peter Carruthers, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book:
    Explaining our Actions
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025, pp 20-45

  • Summary

    This chapter is partly about how actions are executed and how the details of people’s behavioral performance should be explained. But it also introduces some classes of action that find no place within the standard belief-desire model. These include habitual actions as well as speeded skilled actions, including many speech actions. To the extent that philosophers have addressed these kinds of action at all, their theories have run the gamut from complete mindlessness to full-blown intellectualism. The chapter critiques some influential accounts of the latter sort, after emphasizing that skilled actions are as distinctively human as are our rational capacities.