New book from Peter

Demanding a new account of mental states and action.

Congratulations to Peter Carruthers, whose new book with Cambridge University Press, Explaining Actions, was released this summer. In it Peter argues that  widely accepted accounts of the mental states and processes explaining action are in need of a complete make-over. The full blurb is below. Professor Nicholas Shea from the University of London, praising the book as "a mammoth achievement" that is "refreshishingly concise," writes that it "will be an indispensable resource for philosophers of any stripe working on agency."

We often explain our actions and those of others using a commonsense framework of perceptions, beliefs, desires, emotions, decisions, and intentions. In his thoughtful new book, Peter Carruthers scrutinizes this everyday explanation for our actions, while also examining the explanatory framework through the lens of cutting-edge cognitive science. He shows that the 'standard model' of belief–desire psychology (developed, in fact, with scant regard for science) is only partly valid; that there are more types of action and action-explanation than the model allows; and that both ordinary folk and armchair philosophers are importantly mistaken about the types of mental state that the human mind contains. His book will be of great value to all those who rely in their work on assumptions drawn from commonsense psychology, whether in philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology, ethics, or psychology itself. It will also be attractive to anyone with an interest in human motivation.