Stephen Butterfill
Biographic Data
| ID | 963169 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Butterfill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Butterfill |
| SIGNATURE | BUTTERFILL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4283-6987 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Three strategies for shared intention: Plural, aggregate and reductive
When deciding on a strategy for explicating shared intention, we all face two fundamental questions. First, can an intention or any other mental state have more than one subject? A positive answer to this allows the plural subject strategy: shared intention is a matter of there being one mental state with two or more subjects. Mental states are shared in the same sense that siblings share a parent; no simpler view exists. A negative answer blocks…
Intuitions about joint commitment
In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action themselves perceive commitment as essential? Attempts to answer this question have so far been hampered by clashes of intuition. Perhaps this is because the intuitions in question have mostly been investigated using informal methods only. To explore this possibility, we adopted a more formal approach to testing intuitions about joint action, sampling …
Principles of belief acquisition. How we read other minds
Reading other minds is a pervasive feature of human social life. A decade of research indicates that people can automatically track an agent's beliefs regardless of whether this is required. But little is known about the principles t guide automatic belief tracking. In six experiments adapting a false belief task introduced by Kovács et al. (2010), we tested whether belief tracking is interrupted by either an agent's lack of perceptual access or …
Effort-based decision making in joint action: Evidence of a sense of fairness
As humans, we are unique with respect to the flexibility and scope of our cooperative behavior. In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to investigating the psychological mechanisms which support this. One key finding is that people frequently calibrate their effort level to match a cooperation partner's effort costs - although little is known about exactly why they do so. We hypothesized that people calibrate with the ultimate go…
Motor representation in acting together
People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in prepa…
Goals and targets: A developmental puzzle about sensitivity to others’ actions
Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal tracking appear to …
Towards a Blueprint for a Social Animal
Perceiving expressions of emotion: What evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states
On a puzzle about relations between thought, experience and the motoric
How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind
What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need …
Intention and Motor Representation in Purposive Action
Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Som…
Joint Action and Development
Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a dif…
Psychological Research on Joint Action
A minimal architecture for joint action
Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states?
The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans' capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years of age (H. Wellman, D. Cross, & J. Watson, 2001; H. Wimmer & J. Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false-belief tasks at 13 or 15 months (K. H. Onishi & R. Baillargeon, 2005; L. Surian, S. Caldi, & D. Sperber, 2007). Nonhuman animals al…
Self-Knowing Agents
Book Review| July 01 2009 Self-Knowing Agents Lucy O'Brien, Self-Knowing Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xi + 231. Stephen Butterfill Stephen Butterfill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2009) 118 (3): 413–415. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2009-013 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Butterfill; Self-Knowing …
Cue competition effects and young children’s causal and counterfactual inferences
The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Children's cou…
Two Kinds of Purposive Action
It is normally assumed that there is only one kind of purposive action. This article argues that there are two kinds of purposive action, which require different models of explanation. One kind of action is done without awareness of reasons; another kind of action is done because the agent is aware of reasons for that action. The argument starts by noting that philosophers disagree about what explains action. Some claim that actions are explained…
Intention and Motor Representation in Purposive Action
Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Som…
Joint Action and Development
Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a dif…
Effort-based decision making in joint action: Evidence of a sense of fairness
As humans, we are unique with respect to the flexibility and scope of our cooperative behavior. In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to investigating the psychological mechanisms which support this. One key finding is that people frequently calibrate their effort level to match a cooperation partner's effort costs - although little is known about exactly why they do so. We hypothesized that people calibrate with the ultimate go…
Goals and targets: A developmental puzzle about sensitivity to others’ actions
Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal tracking appear to …
On a puzzle about relations between thought, experience and the motoric
Two Kinds of Purposive Action
It is normally assumed that there is only one kind of purposive action. This article argues that there are two kinds of purposive action, which require different models of explanation. One kind of action is done without awareness of reasons; another kind of action is done because the agent is aware of reasons for that action. The argument starts by noting that philosophers disagree about what explains action. Some claim that actions are explained…
Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states?
The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans' capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years of age (H. Wellman, D. Cross, & J. Watson, 2001; H. Wimmer & J. Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false-belief tasks at 13 or 15 months (K. H. Onishi & R. Baillargeon, 2005; L. Surian, S. Caldi, & D. Sperber, 2007). Nonhuman animals al…
Self-Knowing Agents
Book Review| July 01 2009 Self-Knowing Agents Lucy O'Brien, Self-Knowing Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xi + 231. Stephen Butterfill Stephen Butterfill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2009) 118 (3): 413–415. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2009-013 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Butterfill; Self-Knowing …
Cue competition effects and young children’s causal and counterfactual inferences
The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Children's cou…
A minimal architecture for joint action
Psychological Research on Joint Action
Intention and Motor Representation in Purposive Action
Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Som…
Joint Action and Development
Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a dif…
How to Construct a Minimal Theory of Mind
What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need …
Perceiving expressions of emotion: What evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states
On a puzzle about relations between thought, experience and the motoric
Towards a Blueprint for a Social Animal
Goals and targets: A developmental puzzle about sensitivity to others’ actions
Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal tracking appear to …
Motor representation in acting together
People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in prepa…
Intuitions about joint commitment
In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action themselves perceive commitment as essential? Attempts to answer this question have so far been hampered by clashes of intuition. Perhaps this is because the intuitions in question have mostly been investigated using informal methods only. To explore this possibility, we adopted a more formal approach to testing intuitions about joint action, sampling …
Principles of belief acquisition. How we read other minds
Reading other minds is a pervasive feature of human social life. A decade of research indicates that people can automatically track an agent's beliefs regardless of whether this is required. But little is known about the principles t guide automatic belief tracking. In six experiments adapting a false belief task introduced by Kovács et al. (2010), we tested whether belief tracking is interrupted by either an agent's lack of perceptual access or …
Effort-based decision making in joint action: Evidence of a sense of fairness
As humans, we are unique with respect to the flexibility and scope of our cooperative behavior. In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to investigating the psychological mechanisms which support this. One key finding is that people frequently calibrate their effort level to match a cooperation partner's effort costs - although little is known about exactly why they do so. We hypothesized that people calibrate with the ultimate go…
Three strategies for shared intention: Plural, aggregate and reductive
When deciding on a strategy for explicating shared intention, we all face two fundamental questions. First, can an intention or any other mental state have more than one subject? A positive answer to this allows the plural subject strategy: shared intention is a matter of there being one mental state with two or more subjects. Mental states are shared in the same sense that siblings share a parent; no simpler view exists. A negative answer blocks…
Psychology (16 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (8 works) · Cognitive science (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Action (physics) (6 works)