In this paper I offer a defence of absence causation in response to a central challenge: the problem of profligacy. Focussing on two related cases of absence causation, holes and surface absences, the account of absence causation offered for these cases has the following attractions: it captures the central features of many of our common-sense judgments about absence causation in these cases; it doesn’t appeal to norms; and is grounded in salient features of the metaphysics of the cases. As such, there’s a metaphysically respectable, principled criterion for absence causation that solves the problem of profligacy for these cases.

Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) classic study in social cognition, the so-called ‘stocking case’, is a long-lasting authority that has often been interpreted as providing empirical support for the claim that introspection regarding mental processes such as the decision-making process is untrustworthy. In this article, I argue that such interpretations fail to identify the appropriate targets of introspection or appropriate object of criticism, thus leading to the emergence of several sceptical views. I show that researchers erroneously view the psychological causes of mental processes, rather than the processes themselves, as the targets of introspection and erroneously equate introspection about the decision-making process with mechanisms such as reasoning and retrospection. Therefore, sceptical views concerning the trustworthiness of introspection about the decision-making process ultimately commit two fallacies pertaining to – what I call – equivocal targets and equivocal mechanisms.

This paper argues in favour of a desire-based account of normativity. In addition, it demonstrates that the view is particularly well-placed to answer ‘bootstrapping’ objections. Such objections have previously been taken to be a problem not just for desire-based accounts, but for a variety of other subjective accounts of practical normativity.

I will begin by explaining desire-based accounts of normativity, and then by explicating two different kinds of bootstrapping objection: one about normative conflicts, and one about normativity coming from the wrong kind of source. Both objections, I will show, can be answered with a clear explanation of what makes desire-based accounts of normativity so attractive: their ability to explain practical normative force. As such, this paper aims to go further than simply being a new response to a popular objection, or a new argument in support of a controversial view. It will also contribute to a better understanding of practical normativity itself, and how the nature of the normativity depends on and changes with the corresponding desire.

What do we make of someone who claims not to believe something, and yet whose behaviours suggest belief – such as someone who claims not to believe in ghosts, yet refuses to walk through the graveyard at night, or someone who claims to know that they have switched off the oven, yet feels the need to go and check? Some have proposed treating cases like these in terms of states of ‘half belief’ or ‘in-between’ belief. We propose that sometimes these cases are best understood not as an epistemic matter concerning such compromised belief states, but rather as an aesthetic matter concerning imaginative states and what they enable us to appreciate about the actual world. Anxiety over the graveyard, or over the oven, can be characterised in terms of the explanatory structures the person is disposed to imagine – explanatory structures which the person knows are non-actual, but which would explain were the world to work differently. Overactive imagination is where one’s preoccupation with imagining a non-actual explanatory structure takes priority over things that it should not. Underactive imagination is where a person is insensitive to how aspects of the world support the imagining of non-actual explanatory structures.

Although it is far from uncharted territory, some contemporary thinkers have been pushing the idea that imagination plays a central role in perception; specifically, as that which explains the phenomenon of perceptual presence. I agree with this general idea. However, there is a tendency among thinkers to place the vague notion of mental imagery at the core of their understanding of what it is to imagine; and attempts to explain perceptual presence in imagistic terms are incompatible with the phenomenology. I will consider another view that attempts to explain perceptual presence in terms of our possession of a form of implicit bodily knowledge of the ways one can access the world. Although it does not encounter the same issues as the imagery view, I will argue that there is much more to the phenomenon of presence than can be accounted for on the access view. I will propose an alternative that can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty. This alternative involves both appeal to a form of bodily knowledge and an imaginative capacity for entertaining the possibility of being situated otherwise; that, when exercised, gives rise to the presence of objects in experience as the objects that they are.