According to a popular view, intentional actions are intentional under a description. Against current orthodoxy, I argue that the analogous view holds true of intentional attitudes: Beliefs, desires and emotions are intentional under a description, too.

Consider the following case:

Mistaken Identity. Alex aims a firearm at a silhouette which he mistakenly takes to be Bernard’s. Only after pulling the trigger does Alex realise that he in fact shot Chris.

There is unanimous agreement across both common law and civil law jurisdictions that Alex is to be held liable for the intentional killing of Chris. After all, the argument goes, Alex intended to shoot the person in front of him and succeeded in doing so. And although the identity of the victim may bear on Alex’s motive, it is entirely irrelevant to his intention.

In my paper, I argue that the legal orthodoxy is action-theoretically misguided. The above claim would hold true only if Alex intended to shoot the person in front of him as a particular. But, as I argue, we rarely intend particulars; most frequently, we intend under a description. And once we understand Alex to have intended to {kill the person in front of him}, both a de dicto and de re reading become available, each of which has different implications for the precise scope of his intention. I spell out these implications and assess their upshots for the question of Alex’s liability.

The settling thesis about belief says: the functional role of belief is to settle whether p for the purposes of reasoning and action. The thesis has an intuitive problem. Many belief ascriptions represent ascribees, explicitly or implicitly, as insufficiently confident to rely on their belief in reasoning and action. Contra likely expectations generated by the settling thesis, these ascriptions are felicitous and common.

In fact, they are. I argue that this is no problem for the settling theses. Unsettled belief ascriptions ascribe doxastic seemings, i.e., states in which it seems to the ascribee that p, given all the evidence they know. This is revealed in the similarity (and appropriate difference) of unsettled belief ascriptions involving “believe” to ascriptions of ordinary seemings. The paper also distinguishes two belief-believer relationships. In one, beliefs are doxastic seemings, suspending the other, more common one, in which in they fulfill their functional role.

Inner speech is often said to be a by-product of motor control, the product of a forward model driven by an efference copy of a cancelled motor command to speak. The auditory imagery of inner speech is said to arise when the product of this forward model becomes conscious. This conception of the genesis of inner speech founders on some very basic questions about the auditory imagery of inner speech and about the interaction between inner speech and episodes of imagination. Further, the empirical evidence cited in support of this theory falls short. An alternative starts with a general conception of constructive imagination, which is our capacity to produce mental images (visual, auditory, etc.) of objects and events that do not exist. Inner speech may be conceived as a species of constructive imagination. The auditory imagery of inner speech is the conscious form of inner speech. We become conscious of inner speech because doing so provides targets for acts of attention. Inner speech represents speech that does not actually exist. Inner speech also indirectly represents events in the world, inasmuch as the nonexistent episodes of speech represented would do so if they existed.

I aim to argue for the distinctiveness of a form of valuing, which I call existential valuing, the main function of which is to justify living one’s distinct life rather than regarding questions of interest. Self-interested and altruistic or moral valuing are forms of valuing concerned with what is in people’s interest – either one’s own or other people’s respectively. Existential valuing is pre-eminent with respect to questions of interest in the sense that, whilst it often overlaps with self-interested and altruistic valuing, it also provides an affirmative and definitive answer to the Existential Question “What justifies, in your eyes, living your distinct life?” Existential valuing grounds the possibility for one’s life to be perceived as meaningful, whereas self-interested valuing and altruistic valuing do not necessarily contribute to one’s life’s meaningfulness in terms of justification for living one’s distinct life. After having clarified the notions of valuing and of existential valuing in particular, I will show how the objections that have been raised against the distinctiveness of meaning in life as an evaluative domain independent from self-interest and morality do not apply to existential valuing, encouraging understanding the psychology of meaning in life in terms of existential valuing.

Traditionally, deliberation - linked to terms like ‘controlled’, ‘reflective’, or ‘conscious’ - is seen as uniquely human, and cashed in terms of abstract, intellectual processes (Kahneman, 2012; Broome, 2013). Nonhuman animals are denied such capacities: their minds are commonly considered as limited to unconscious, automatic processing. While Buckner’s (2019) deflationary account of deliberation, which involves minimal executive and cognitive control challenges this intellectualist view, and renders minimal deliberation attributable to nonhuman animals (e.g., uncertainty monitoring or inhibition), I take a step further and argue for ‘beyond minimal’ deliberation in nonhuman animals. I analyze the evidence from Osvath & Osvath’s (2008) study: apes chose between an immediate small reward and a tool enabling future access to a larger reward that is not perceptually available nor cued. Since the decision-making process involves comparing the decoupled value of the absent reward against the immediately tempting smaller reward, I argue that the apes' choice in this study suggests a capacity for deliberation that goes beyond the minimal executive control and actually involves reflection or metacognition. In this proposal, I also reconceptualize the metacognitive process involved - as affective metacognition, which involves evaluating values of different options through felt preferences.