Conference Agenda

Understanding how humans navigate social interactions is central to social cognition research. Traditional folk psychology, grounded in Theory of Mind (ToM), emphasizes inferring mental states as critical for predicting and coordinating behavior. However, this mindreading-centric approach faces growing criticism for over-intellectualizing social cognition and neglecting simpler, adaptive strategies. Studies in behavioral ecology and distributed cognition suggest that humans often rely on heuristics and context-sensitive strategies to reduce cognitive demands. Social scripts emerge as a compelling alternative framework, offering structured, context-dependent templates that simplify social coordination by embedding shared norms and practices. They function as evolutionary adaptations, scaffolding social learning and facilitating efficient coordination without taxing cognitive resources. Recent interdisciplinary work highlights scripts’ grounding in neural processes, their normative role, and their flexibility across contexts. Building on these insights, I propose the MIND Script framework, which reconceptualizes scripts as Modular, Interdependent, Negotiable, and Distributed. This framework unifies diverse script approaches, incorporates the often-overlooked affective dimension, and emphasizes scripts as foundational mechanisms for social cognition. Using real-world scenarios, such as cross-cultural dining and classroom settings, MIND Script demonstrates how individual agency, collective practices, and environmental scaffolding interact dynamically, offering a unified, ecologically valid perspective on structured yet flexible social interactions.

Difficult actions, such as quitting smoking, pose a paradox for rational confidence. Statistical evidence suggests that failure is likely, leading to the intuition that agents should have low confidence in success. Yet successfully quitting smoking requires sustained high confidence to maintain perseverance. This creates a tension between epistemic and practical rationality—should one be less confident based on evidence or more confident to be able to succeed?

In response to this paradox, I introduce a novel account, Confidence Dualism, which distinguishes between epistemic confidence (grounded in degrees of belief) and practical confidence (grounded in degrees of acceptance).

First, I show why orthodox monistic-epistemic approaches to rational confidence struggle to resolve the paradox. Some argue that epistemic rationality is a form of instrumental rationality. Yet this leads to the incommensurability problem and fails to explain how one can simultaneously have epistemic reasons for low confidence and practical reasons for high confidence.

Then, by extending Bratman’s model of the agent’s cognitive background of deliberation to include degrees of acceptance, I argue that practical confidence is grounded in degrees of acceptance. This enables agents to rationally pursue difficult actions without epistemically overestimating success, thereby resolving the paradox of difficult action.

This paper argues for the existence of a kind of action, involving multiple agents, that is not captured by our accounts of joint action. In these cases, one agent acts in support of another, rather than the two agents acting together to realise a shared intention. It argues that the extant accounts of joint action involve a symmetry between the agents, each acting with the same intention, which is a feature not just of the accounts but of the phenomenon they describe. Following this, examples of ‘dependent intentional action’ are offered, to illustrate that this kind of action is commonplace. These are cases of ‘direct helping,’ but not in the course of a joint or collective action. Moreover, dependent actions lack the necessary symmetry to themselves be instances of joint action. Rather than each agent acting with the same intention, one acts with an intention to φ, and the other to help the first to φ. The supported agent, acting with an intention to φ, also has a guiding role over the action as a whole that adds to this asymmetry. These actions complicate the picture we have of the ways we can act alongside one another.

In this paper, I propose a framework to analyze ordinary acting from an action-theoretical perspective that focusses on the first person as agent and creator of their very own everyday life. My first thesis is that any plausible theory of ordinary acting has to explain three salient features of everyday life: everyday life is shaped by experience and education; it is produced through repetition and internalization; it is characterized by stable expectations and certainty in acting. My second thesis holds that Quill R Kukla’s notion of embodied stances can be used to develop a more specific notion of stable embodied stances to understand how people navigate their ordinary lives. Stances are embodied strategies for interacting with the world, shaped by experience and education and ingrained through repetition. These stances form stable patterns of action which allow people to perform actions without effort and with a sense of certainty. My third thesis is that we should differentiate between two paradigmatic types, habits (quasi-automatic stances) and routines (more complex, knowledge-based and intentionally controlled stances). Finally, stable stances do not limit individual freedom but enable it. Individuals can consciously shape their lives by choosing which stances to develop and by reviewing established stances.

The discussion of negligence in moral philosophy literature is often one-sided as a result of a primary focus on the agent's risk assessment. To be sure, negligence is characterized by culpably lacking knowledge. However, most of the literature only focuses on the riskiness of the action with regard to harm. Further reference points for culpable ignorance are often neglected.

The following questions are to be answered: Which reference points can this lack of knowledge possibly have? Do the common characterizations of negligence apply to all possible points of reference? I argue that more of these are relevant than discussed in literature. The two reference points I focus on are, firstly, the knowledge of the ability to intervene if required , and, secondly, culpably erroneous knowledge of justifying circumstances. Both cases show that there is negligent action with full awareness of the risk of harm.

Furthermore, the diversity of duties of care that play a role in negligence is often overlooked. These duties can have various content. A satisfactory understanding of negligence requires taking this diversity into account and recognizing duties of care as secondary obligations to ensure compliance with more general primary duties such as preventing harm.