Graded abilities and action fragility

Recent work by Alfred Mele, Romy Jaster and Chandra Sripada recognizes that abilities come in degrees of fallibility. The rough idea is that abilities are often not surefire. They are liable to fail. The more liable an ability is to fail, the more fallible it is. Fallibility is plausibly significant...

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Main Author: Storrs-Fox, D
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Springer Nature 2023
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author Storrs-Fox, D
author_facet Storrs-Fox, D
author_sort Storrs-Fox, D
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description Recent work by Alfred Mele, Romy Jaster and Chandra Sripada recognizes that abilities come in degrees of fallibility. The rough idea is that abilities are often not surefire. They are liable to fail. The more liable an ability is to fail, the more fallible it is. Fallibility is plausibly significant for addiction, responsibility, and normative theorizing. However, we lack an adequate account of what fallibility consists in. This article addresses that problem. Perhaps the most natural approach is to say (roughly) the fallibility of your ability to F is the proportion of scenarios in which you do not F, among those in which you try to F. I argue that this approach (in all plausible versions) is mistaken. I then introduce the notion of an action’s “fragility,” and propose that we use that new notion to understand fallibility.
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spelling oxford-uuid:472383b3-6987-4009-8868-5f08e9d2db4d2025-01-17T11:56:57ZGraded abilities and action fragilityJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:472383b3-6987-4009-8868-5f08e9d2db4dEnglishSymplectic ElementsSpringer Nature2023Storrs-Fox, DRecent work by Alfred Mele, Romy Jaster and Chandra Sripada recognizes that abilities come in degrees of fallibility. The rough idea is that abilities are often not surefire. They are liable to fail. The more liable an ability is to fail, the more fallible it is. Fallibility is plausibly significant for addiction, responsibility, and normative theorizing. However, we lack an adequate account of what fallibility consists in. This article addresses that problem. Perhaps the most natural approach is to say (roughly) the fallibility of your ability to F is the proportion of scenarios in which you do not F, among those in which you try to F. I argue that this approach (in all plausible versions) is mistaken. I then introduce the notion of an action’s “fragility,” and propose that we use that new notion to understand fallibility.
spellingShingle Storrs-Fox, D
Graded abilities and action fragility
title Graded abilities and action fragility
title_full Graded abilities and action fragility
title_fullStr Graded abilities and action fragility
title_full_unstemmed Graded abilities and action fragility
title_short Graded abilities and action fragility
title_sort graded abilities and action fragility
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