Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Self-governance — governing oneself by standards that are one’s own — identification and wholeheartedness, planning agency and policies, self-constitution, autonomy and authenticity, and the empirical psychology of self-endorsed motives. One of four unities kept apart (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
43 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-291 v2 | Compatibilism | McKenna & Coates (2004), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-270); worth reading as the most complete reachable second-hand statement of Frankfurt’s 1971 apparatus and of the two structural objections (higher-order alienation per Watson 1975; manipulation), with Frankfurt’s own bullet-biting quotation on manipulation (2002, p. 27). For wantons and persons, read the 2004–2015 revisions (e.g. the Fall 2019 archive edition). Its account of Frankfurt’s later replies (supplement §A) dates from 2009, omits “satisfaction” (1992), and dates wholeheartedness to 1994. |
| LIT-292 v2 | Identification and Identity | Velleman (2002), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/2143.003.0007. Velleman targets Frankfurt’s later conception of autonomy. On that conception, a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from “the essential character of his will”, and that essence consists of volitional necessities that are also the conditions of his personal identity. Velleman argues against it on three grounds. Such an essence would ground authenticity, not autonomy (the Winnicottian False Self is inauthentic but over-controlled). Frankfurt offers no argument or example that motivational change ends a person. And the ideal of wholeheartedness, which cures ambivalence by extruding a desire from the self, is a defensive fantasy: Freud’s Rat Man was made ill by just such a separation, and identifying with part of oneself in the ordinary, imaginative sense is Sartrean bad faith. He replaces “the self” with an aspectual reading of “self” as a marker of reflexivity. On that reading autonomy is behaviour motivated partly by the understanding, the part of us “with which we cannot help identifying”, without its being our identity (pp. 357–360). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-268); worth reading as the sharpest critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) identification of autonomy with a volitional essence, and as a careful source for what Frankfurt said in the essays collected in Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999). It is not a survey of the 1971–1987 hierarchical account, which it summarizes in one paragraph and defers to “What Happens When Someone Acts?”; its positive view is stated “briefly” and explicitly deferred to other essays. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-295 v2 | What Happens When Someone Acts? | Velleman (1992), DOI-10.1093/mind/101.403.461. Velleman argues that the “standard story” of action (desire + belief cause an intention, which causes movement) leaves the agent out. It fails even when every causal link is normal: his example is an intention to end a friendship, formed and executed without him (p. 104). Frankfurt’s hierarchical remedy cannot fix it either. Any mental item picked out without presupposing the agent’s participation (a second-order desire, a Watsonian value, a “decisive commitment”) is one the agent can be alienated from. Any item defined so as to guarantee participation begs the question of agent-causation (pp. 112–116). His alternative is to look for what is functionally identical to the agent, not what the agent identifies with. That can only be a motive always behind and never merely in front of critical reflection: the desire to act in accordance with reasons. Its reinforcing force is the agent’s contribution (pp. 117–122). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-265); worth reading as the canonical statement of the “disappearing agent” objection to the causal theory of action and as the sharpest short critique of Frankfurt’s hierarchy as a reduction of agent-causation. Its positive proposal is a sketch whose content Velleman revises in the same book: he later says the motive is not a de dicto desire for reasons, and relabels “full-blooded action” as action vs. activity. |
| LIT-296 v2 | Personal Autonomy | Buss & Westlund (2002), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/. The entry sorts accounts of self-government into four families: “coherentist” (hierarchical desires, Frankfurt; evaluative judgments, Watson; plans, Bratman; caring; character), reasons-responsive, responsiveness-to-reasoning (Christman, Mele) and incompatibilist, with relational conditions as a compatible add-on. It then argues (§3) that none of them, alone or combined, gives the minimal conditions of autonomy. Coherence is not sufficient, because the endorsement itself can be manipulated. It is not necessary either: a weak-willed agent, or someone acting against her plans, still governs herself. And any attempt to ground identification in some attitude restarts the regress. The only attitude no agent can be alienated from, the desire to be self-governing, cannot be the criterion, because it is present even in failures. The 1971 hierarchy gets one sentence, and Frankfurt’s later replies (decisive commitment, then “satisfaction”) get one footnote. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-267); worth reading as a compact, opinionated map of why hierarchical (and every other) account of self-government falls short of minimal autonomy, especially the §3 regress and weakness-of-will arguments; it is not a substitute for Frankfurt 1971, whose apparatus (second-order volitions, wantons, persons, freedom of will vs. action) it never states, and it does not report Watson’s objection to Frankfurt at all. |
| LIT-297 v2 | Autonomy | Dryden (2010), https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/. The article surveys personal autonomy from Plato to relational autonomy and bioethics. Its core (§2.a.i–ii) states the hierarchical view: an agent is autonomous with respect to an action iff her first-order desire is “sanctioned by a second-order volition”, with the origin of that volition irrelevant. It then lists four named objections: Manipulation (answered historically by Christman 1991), Regress/Incompleteness (cited to Watson 1975), Ab Initio, and an unjustified priority of higher orders (Thalberg; Friedman’s integration model). It follows Frankfurt’s reply only through “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (decisive commitment made without reservation, pp. 168–175 of the 1988 collection). Bratman gets one sentence (plans partly constitute identity, Structures of Agency 2007, p. 5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-266); worth reading as the clearest short, named statement of the standard objections to the hierarchical model (manipulation, regress, ab initio) and of the feminist and relational critiques of wholeheartedness; it is thin and dated on Frankfurt’s later view (no satisfaction, caring or love), gives Bratman one sentence, and cites Frankfurt only by pages of the 1988 collection. |
| LIT-558 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Deci & Ryan (2000), Psychological Inquiry 11(4):227–268, target article. SDT’s case for innate psychological needs, for competence, relatedness and autonomy, defined as nutriments for growth, integrity and well-being and identified functionally, against Hull’s drives and Murray’s acquired needs. The “why” of a goal (autonomous or controlled regulation) and its “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic aspiration) each predict well-being, because each affects need satisfaction. Thwarted needs yield substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns. SDT grounds autonomy in the organism’s tendency to self-organize, argued to be an evolved advantage. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-439), from the authors’ own deposit of the published target article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the full statement of what SDT means by a “need” and why it posits three. Needs are “innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being” (p. 228), identified by what follows when they are satisfied or thwarted, not by how strongly people want them. Goals differ in their “why” (autonomous or controlled regulation) and their “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic content), and both matter because of need satisfaction. Thwarting produces need substitutes, controlled regulatory styles and rigid behaviour patterns. It is a target article: the commentaries and the authors’ reply in the same issue were not read. |
| LIT-559 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | Ryan & Deci (2000), American Psychologist 55(1):68–78. Self-determination theory in eleven pages. Three innate psychological needs, for competence, autonomy and relatedness, must be satisfied for growth, integration and well-being; their thwarting is “a principal source of human distress” (p. 74). Motivation differs in kind, not only amount: extrinsic motivation runs from external through introjected and identified to integrated regulation, and becomes more autonomous as a regulation is internalized and integrated with the self. Autonomy is volition, not independence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-442), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the shortest statement of self-determination theory by its authors, and the one most cited. It gives the three basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness), the continuum of regulation from amotivation through external, introjected, identified and integrated regulation to intrinsic motivation, and the claim that autonomy is volition, “not … being independent, detached, or selfish” (p. 74). It is a review: every empirical claim is cited to other papers, nothing is tested here, and it states the reward-undermining result as settled by Deci, Koestner & Ryan (LIT-557), which Cameron, Banko & Pierce dispute (LIT-562, unread; by its abstract). |
| LIT-560 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | Ryan & Deci (2006), Journal of Personality 74(6):1557–1586. SDT’s defence of autonomy as a psychological construct. Philosophers (phenomenologists from Pfänder and Ricoeur; hierarchical accounts from Frankfurt and Dworkin) agree that autonomy is self-endorsement, not independence. On that definition, the critiques fail: behaviourists and Bandura define autonomy as independence from the environment; reductive neuroscience mistakes levels of explanation; nonconscious priming shows autonomy can be compromised, not that it is illusory; too many options is not self-determination; and autonomy matters across cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-441), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the place where SDT states its concept of autonomy against both philosophy and psychology. Autonomy is “regulation by the self”, its opposite “heteronomy”, regulation “without self-endorsement” (abstract). It is “a matter of degree” (p. 1562), compatible with dependence and with having one option, and lies “not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). It answers Skinner, Bandura, Pinker, Bargh, Wegner, Schwartz and Iyengar. Its engagement with Frankfurt is thin: two citations of the 1971 paper inside one paragraph on hierarchical accounts, with the analytic detail taken from Dworkin. |
| LIT-561 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | Vansteenkiste, Ryan & Soenens (2020), Motivation and Emotion 44(1):1–31. Two decades of basic psychological need theory. A basic need must be psychological, essential, inherent, distinct and universal, and its effects pervasive, content-specific, directional and explanatory. Need frustration is not merely low satisfaction: it predicts ill-being, compensatory behaviour and need substitutes, and may be transdiagnostic. Novelty, morality and beneficence are reviewed as candidate fourth needs; none is yet admitted. Universality holds for the effects of need satisfaction, not for how needs are supported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-440), from the publisher’s typeset PDF that the authors post on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the current statement of basic psychological need theory and of what would make something a basic need. It gives nine criteria (psychological, essential, inherent, distinct, universal; pervasive, content-specific, directional, explanatory), treats need frustration as distinct from low satisfaction and as a candidate transdiagnostic process in psychopathology, and restates universality as “universality without uniformity”: the effects of need satisfaction are claimed invariant, the ways needs are supported are not. It is an editorial introduction to two special issues, by SDT’s authors, and reviews selectively. |
| LIT-564 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1992), Tanner Lectures at Clare Hall, Cambridge. The “normative question” asks what justifies morality’s claims on us. Voluntarism, realism and reflective endorsement each fail alone. The answer is autonomy: because human consciousness is reflective, we need reasons, and so need a “conception of your practical identity” that makes us “a law to yourself”. Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”. Valuing any identity commits us to valuing our humanity, and reasons are public, so others can obligate us. “Autonomy is the source of obligation.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-465), as the read substitute for the book The Sources of Normativity (1996, LIT-599), which is its “longer version” with commentaries and a reply. Worth reading as Korsgaard’s own first statement of practical identity and of the claim that “autonomy is the source of obligation”. The reflective structure of human consciousness means we must act for reasons and so must have “a conception of your practical identity”, “a description under which you value yourself”; reasons express that identity and obligations “spring from what that identity forbids”. Valuing any practical identity commits one to valuing one’s humanity, and the publicity of reasons commits one to others. The lectures concede that the argument is “sketchy, and sketchily argued”. |
| LIT-567 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman (2018), essay 11 of Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (OUP). A planning agent’s self-governance over time is self-governance at each time along a planned activity, plus cross-temporal links of intention that parallel the interlocking intentions of shared agency: in diachronic self-governance one acts “together” with oneself. Standpoints are “diachronicalized” by a conditional, reflexive end of one’s own diachronic self-governance. That end can make willpower and resistance to “shuffling” self-governed, while anticipated regret at “plan’s end” excludes drinking Kavka’s toxin. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-464), in the author’s pre-publication draft of 10 July 2017, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (2018) and, through its summary of the planning theory, for Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987, LIT-593). A planning agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock like the intentions of people acting together, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints are “diachronicalized”: they include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance. That end explains how willpower and resisting “shuffling” between incomparable options can be self-governed, and anticipated regret at plan’s end rules out drinking Kavka’s toxin. A philosophical model argued by cases; nothing in it is tested. |
| LIT-573 v2 | Self-Command in Practice, in Policy, and in a Theory of Rational Choice | Schelling (1984), American Economic Review 74(2):1-11, the Richard T. Ely Lecture, on self-command and what it means for the theory of rational choice. Unread: no lawful free copy. Schelling’s 1980 essay “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command”, LIT-602, is read in its place. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from bibliographic records, not read. No lawful free copy was found. The article is on JSTOR (AER 74(2), the May 1984 Papers and Proceedings issue), which returned a bot challenge and was not pursued. RePEc lists no downloadable version. It is reprinted in Schelling’s Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 63-81), which is not open access. The only copies found online were on a personal website that is not the author’s and on course pages, which this record does not use. Schelling’s earlier, freely published essay on the same subject was read instead and filed as LIT-602 (NOTE-452). A human with JSTOR access could read this lecture and move it to Active. |
| LIT-574 v2 | A Multicomponent Conceptualization of Authenticity: Theory and Research | Kernis & Goldman (2006), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38:283–357. Unread. As two read papers report it: authenticity is “the unimpeded operation of one’s true self in one’s daily enterprise”, it is measured by the 45-item Authenticity Inventory (AI-3), and dispositional authenticity correlates with self-esteem (r = .47), self-concept clarity and self-actualization and negatively with distress. It is commonly summarized as four components: awareness, unbiased processing, behaviour and relational orientation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref record and from two read papers that report it, not read. No lawful full text was found: the chapter is paywalled at Elsevier (ScienceDirect), Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list it as closed, and the copies a web search turns up are uploads to ResearchGate and academia.edu, neither an author or institutional deposit that could be reached (ResearchGate refuses automated requests). Michael Kernis died in 2009, so no author page holds it. It is a 75-page chapter; a human reader with library access to Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 can read it, and that would move this to Active. |
| LIT-575 v2 | Identification and Wholeheartedness | Frankfurt (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 27–45; reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 159–176. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is Frankfurt’s answer to the regress in the hierarchical account: identification ends in a “decisive commitment” made “without reservation”, which is not arbitrary, and wholeheartedness is the integration that such a decision aims at, extruding the rival desire “as an outlaw”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter records and the record’s own second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found: the chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core in both the Schoeman volume and the 1988 collection, Unpaywall lists no open copy, and the copies a web search turns up are uploads to academia.edu and lecture notes about the essay, not the essay. A human reader with library access to either volume (pp. 27–45 of the first, pp. 159–176 of the second) can read it in an hour; that reading would move this to Active and is the first-hand text THEORY-029 needs for its middle case. |
| LIT-583 v2 | Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2001), Cambridge University Press. The book-length statement of picoeconomics: hyperbolic discounting makes a person a population of bargaining interests, and will is the recursive bundling of choices into precedents. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the précis, LIT-586, which stands in for it. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the publisher’s description and from the outline of the book given in its précis, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall reports no open copy, and no author deposit of the book was found (the author’s site, picoeconomics.org, carries the précis and articles, not the book). The owner suggested the précis instead, and it is read and filed as LIT-586 (NOTE-443), which follows the book’s three sections and twelve chapters. The book is kept as the citation others reach for. A human with library access could read chapters 5-8 (the bargaining model and its evidence) against the précis. |
| LIT-586 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2005), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(5), the précis of Breakdown of Will (2001). People and other animals discount delayed rewards hyperbolically, so preferences reverse as a smaller, sooner reward comes near, and a person becomes a population of reward-seeking “interests” that must forestall one another. Willpower is the bundling of future choices by treating the present one as a precedent: an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma, not an organ or a top-down ego. The same recursion predicts the will’s costs: legalism, circumscribed “lapse districts”, motivated blindness to lapses, and rules that favour countable goals over subtle ones. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-443), as the substitute for the 2001 book (LIT-583), which the owner suggested and which the précis follows chapter by chapter. Worth reading as the shortest complete statement of picoeconomics in Ainslie’s own words. Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse as a smaller, sooner reward draws near, so a person behaves like a population of “interests” that bargain across time. Will is not a faculty above them but a recursive self-prediction: treating each choice as a precedent “bundles” future rewards, an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which “credibility is power”. The same mechanism predicts the will’s side effects: legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control. |
| LIT-587 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard (2014), in Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP), pp. 190–214. Two conceptions of agency are set side by side: natural (action is movement caused by the right mental state) and normatively constituted (action is movement backed by a unified agent, whose unity is achieved by following norms). Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. Choosing maxims under that form constitutes one’s practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes sets the task of unification. Unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, so people can literally act together. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-455), in the author’s posted manuscript, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Self-Constitution (2009, LIT-597), which it summarises and extends, and as Korsgaard’s direct engagement with Bratman. Agency is “normatively constituted”: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and that unity is achieved by following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives, which give action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. The content of the maxims we choose under that form constitutes our “practical identities”. So “we make ourselves into agents”, and unity of agency, individual or collective, “is an achievement, not a given”. Argued, not proved; the account of reason as unification is said to be “lifted” from her other work. |
| LIT-589 | Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model | Sheldon & Elliot (1999), JPSP 76(3):482–497. A goal is self-concordant when pursued for identified or intrinsic rather than external or introjected reasons. In three semester-long studies of students, self-concordance predicted sustained effort, which fully mediated its link to attainment; attainment raised well-being more when goals were self-concordant; and accumulated daily experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness partly mediated attainment’s effect on well-being. Paths survived controls for self-efficacy, implementation intentions, avoidance framing and life skills. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-448); worth reading as the canonical statement of the self-concordance model and its evidence. Goals pursued for identified or intrinsic reasons get more sustained effort, so are better attained (effort fully mediates, in Studies 1 and 3), and attaining them raises well-being more, partly through accumulated daily experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness. The evidence is three semester-long correlational studies of students (N = 169, 152, 73), with structural models refitted after modification indices, and self-concordance is a self-report of reasons that cannot separate integration from identification. |
| LIT-590 v2 | Structures of Agency: Essays | Bratman (2007), Oxford University Press: twelve essays (1996–2006) on how planning structures human agency over time and ground self-governance. They include “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency” (on the Lockean role of plans), “Two Problems about Human Agency”, “Autonomy and Hierarchy”, “Three Theories of Self-Governance” and “Temptation Revisited”. Unread: registered from the contents; the theory is read in Bratman’s 2018 essay LIT-567. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its thirteen chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed, and the Internet Archive scan (structuresofagen0000brat) is an access-restricted lending copy, not opened. No chapter was found as a lawful open article. Its theory of self-governance is read first-hand in Bratman’s later essay “A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time” (2018, LIT-567), which builds on its essays. Filed because it is the collection in which the planning theory of self-governance and its Lockean reading appear, and other filings in this batch cite it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-592 v2 | The Authentic Personality: A Theoretical and Empirical Conceptualization and the Development of the Authenticity Scale | Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis & Joseph (2008), Journal of Counseling Psychology 55(3):385–399. Unread. Per its abstract it builds the 12-item Authenticity Scale on a tripartite, person-centred conception (self-alienation, authentic living, accepting external influence), supported by exploratory and multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, with discriminant validity from the Big Five, nonsignificant correlations with social desirability, test–retest r = .78 to .91, and strong relations of every subscale to self-esteem and well-being. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the abstract on the University of Manchester research portal and the repository records, not read. Every lawful copy found is out of reach: Manchester’s portal lists a pre-peer-review manuscript (PRE-PEER-REVIEW.PDF, 143 KB) whose download is behind a JavaScript and cookie challenge, which I did not try to get past; Stirling’s STORRE holds the published version under a permanent embargo (“The publisher does not allow this work to be made publicly available”); Warwick’s WRAP and Lincoln’s repository records carry no file; ResearchGate refused the request. A human reader can open the Manchester manuscript in a browser, or ask an author for a copy through STORRE; either would move this to Active. |
| LIT-593 v2 | Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason | Bratman (1987), Harvard University Press; reissued CSLI 1999. The founding statement of the planning theory of intention. As Bratman summarises it in LIT-567, prior partial plans “settle practical issues, pose problems of means and the like, filter solutions to those problems, and guide action”, supporting cross-temporal and social organisation within our cognitive limits. Unread: registered from catalogue records; the theory is read in the 2018 essay. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from library catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Harvard University Press (1987) and the CSLI reissue (1999) are not open, and the Internet Archive’s two scans are access-restricted lending copies, not opened. Its planning theory is read first-hand in Bratman’s own later statement, “A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time” (2018, LIT-567, read in full), which extends it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for the planning theory of intention. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-594 v2 | The Ethics of Authenticity | Taylor (1991), Harvard University Press, 142 pp.; first published in Canada the same year by Anansi as The Malaise of Modernity, an extended version of the 1991 CBC Massey Lectures. Unread. As commonly summarized (no publisher’s description was reachable), it argues that the modern ideal of authenticity, being true to oneself, is a genuine moral ideal rather than mere narcissism or relativism, and that it is degraded when it is cut off from shared “horizons of significance” and from the dialogical way identities are formed. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from catalogue records, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is in print with Harvard University Press, the Internet Archive copy (ethicsofauthenti00tayl, the 1992 printing) is an access-restricted lending copy, the publisher’s digital edition at De Gruyter returned an empty bot-check response, and the full-text copies a web search turns up are file-sharing uploads, which were not opened. No shorter, lawfully readable work by Taylor stating the same argument was found to read in its place (see Standing in the record). The book is about 140 pages, so a human reader with a library copy can read it in an afternoon; that reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-596 v2 | Three Theories of Self-Governance | Bratman (2004), Philosophical Topics 32(1/2):21–46; reprinted in Structures of Agency (OUP 2007), pp. 222–253. Unread. Per the publisher’s abstract it revisits the Frankfurt–Watson exchange over the structures of free agency, treats it as a debate about self-governance, holds that agential authority comes from an attitude’s role in the “Lockean organization” of temporally extended agency rather than from tracking the good, gives that role to self-governing policies, and proposes an intention-based theory. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref and Oxford Academic records, not read. No lawful full text was found: the article is paywalled at the Philosophy Documentation Center (purchase, $20) and the reprint at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and PhilPapers and ResearchGate refused automated requests (403). A human reader with access to Philosophical Topics 32 or to Structures of Agency (pp. 222–253) can read it; that reading would move this to Active and would supply THEORY-029 with Bratman’s self-governing policies first-hand. |
| LIT-597 v2 | Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity | Korsgaard (2009), Oxford University Press, from her 2002 Locke Lectures. The argument is that we constitute ourselves as agents, and as the particular agents we are, by choosing under the constitutive principles of action, the categorical and hypothetical imperatives. On Plato’s “constitutional model”, good action is action that issues from a unified soul. The chapters run from agency and identity to “How to be a Person”. Unread: registered from the contents; the account is read in LIT-587. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its ten chapters, not read: no lawful copy of the book could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed and the Internet Archive scan (selfconstitution0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Korsgaard’s drafts of the 2002 Locke Lectures it grew from are no longer on her Harvard site, but survive in the Internet Archive’s captures of her old FAS page (people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/Korsgaard.LL1–LL6, 2002–2005). They are author-posted and lawful, but book-length and superseded, and were not read. Its account is read first-hand in her short restatement “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (2014, LIT-587, read in full), which extends it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for self-constitution. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or the drafts are read, not on merit. |
| LIT-599 v2 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1996), Cambridge University Press, ed. Onora O’Neill: the expanded Tanner Lectures (1992), with commentaries by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams and Korsgaard’s reply. The four lectures follow the 1992 sequence: the normative question, reflective endorsement, the authority of reflection, and the origin of value and the scope of obligation. Unread: registered from the contents; the argument is read in the lectures, LIT-564. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core is closed, the author’s Harvard deposit (DASH) answered with an AWS WAF human-verification page that was not passed, and the Internet Archive scan (sourcesofnormati0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Its argument is read first-hand in the Tanner Lectures it expands (1992, LIT-564, read in full), which it extends. Filed because it is the canonical citation for practical identity, and because what it adds (the commentaries and Korsgaard’s reply) is what the lectures lack. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-602 | The Intimate Contest for Self-Command | Schelling (1980), The Public Interest, Summer 1980, pp. 94-118. People behave sometimes “as if they had two selves” in “continual contest for control”, and the tactics of self-management (removing the option, bright lines, monitoring, delays, raising the stakes) are the tactics of managing someone else. A single-dimension model of impatience fits poorly. Which self is authentic is left open. Failures of consumer self-management may be worth “on the order of a trillion dollars”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-452), in place of the 1984 Ely Lecture (LIT-573), which has no lawful free copy. Worth reading as Schelling’s own first statement of “egonomics”: a person sometimes behaves “as if they had two selves” that alternate in command, and the tactics people use on themselves (mittens, alarm clocks across the room, bright lines, Christmas savings, deadlines, delays) are the tactics they use to manage another person. It refuses to say which self is authentic in general, and it gives an order-of-magnitude estimate that failures of consumer self-management cost as much as all other consumer-ignorance problems together. |
| LIT-606 | Thine Own Self: True Self-Concept Accessibility and Meaning in Life | Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt & King (2009), JPSP 96(2):473–490. Five studies: faster “me” judgments for one’s own true-self traits (residualized on speed for control traits) predict presence of meaning in life, while actual-self accessibility does not, controlling affect, need satisfaction and (Study 4) AI-3 authenticity, which was itself uncorrelated with true-self accessibility. Subliminal priming of true-self traits raised reported meaning (Studies 3 and 5), for disliked traits as much as liked ones. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-469); worth reading as the experimental case that the true self-concept, as distinct from self-reported authenticity, matters to felt meaning. In five student studies (N = 56 to 149), how quickly people classify their own “true self” traits predicts presence of meaning in life over and above actual-self accessibility, need satisfaction and AI-3 authenticity, and subliminally priming true-self traits raises reported meaning, even when the traits are disliked. Effects are small, meaning is self-report only, and the Study 5 interaction is printed with an F that cannot carry its stated p. |
| LIT-684 v4 | Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (1998), Cambridge University Press. Unread seed. The most influential reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. Responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control (the control that involves alternative possibilities), and Frankfurt-type cases show the two come apart. An agent has guidance control of an action when it issues from her own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism: regularly receptive to reasons, including moral ones, and at least weakly reactive to them. The mechanism is her own when she has taken responsibility for it, which makes responsibility historical. Guidance control so described is compatible with causal determinism, which is the position Fischer calls semicompatibilism. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records, the chapter openings Cambridge Core displays, the record’s second-hand readings, the SEP entry Moral Responsibility (LIT-691) and Fischer’s own summary in “Stories and the Meaning of Life” (LIT-689, read), not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Cambridge Core, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed, no repository holding). The shorter work the record’s book rule asks for is the authors’ own précis (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2), September 2000, first page 441, DOI 10.2307/2653660), also closed: JSTOR answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. Fischer’s UC Riverside pages post no papers that could be reached, and the copies of the précis in two third-party collections of his papers (andrewmbailey.com/jmf and its wixsite continuation) are not the author’s, a publisher’s or a repository’s, so they were not opened. A web search also shows a PDF titled “Fischer Guidance control and RR” on a UNAM institute’s site, whose search snippet is the book’s series page; it is a course file with no statement of permission, so it was not opened either. A person with Cambridge Core or library access can supply the book (Cambridge UP, 1998, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511814594); chapters 2, 3 and 8 (pp. 28–91 and 207–239) are the parts to read first, and the short précis is the quickest way to an Active reading. Update 2026-10-05: the précis is now read (LIT-728), with chapter 1 to p. 19 from the publisher’s preview. |
| LIT-685 v3 | Freedom Within Reason | Wolf (1990), Oxford University Press. Unread seed. The book-length Reason View: free will is “the freedom to be good, or the freedom to do the right thing for the right reasons” (publisher’s abstract). It sets up the dilemma of autonomy, argues that the Real Self View (Hume, Frankfurt, Watson, Taylor) and the Autonomy View both fail, states the Reason View, defends its notion of ability against determinism, and asks what the True and the Good must be for the view to hold. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records (whose abstracts are each chapter’s opening paragraph), the SEP entry the record holds and an MIT lecture handout, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed), and no author or repository deposit turned up. A person with Oxford Academic or library access can supply it (Oxford University Press, 1990, 153 pp., DOI 10.1093/oso/9780195056167.001.0001); chapter 4, “The Reason View” (pp. 67–93), and chapter 2, “The Real Self View” (pp. 23–45), are the parts to read first. |
| LIT-686 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About | Frankfurt (1982), Synthese 53(2):257–272; reprinted as the title essay of The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 80–94. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is the source of two of Frankfurt’s later themes: caring as a category of the will (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy §2) and volitional necessity, the inability to will otherwise that Luther’s “I can do no other” illustrates (Robb, SEP PAP §3.3). Frankfurt’s own preface calls it his first “stab” at “a theory of ideals”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref, the record’s second-hand readings and Frankfurt’s own preface to the 1988 collection, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at Springer, whose page answered a plain request with a script challenge, so I stopped there; Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed), and the one repository location OpenAlex gives (a Georgetown handle, 10822/792792) does not resolve. The chapter in the 1988 collection is at Cambridge Core, which sells this collection’s chapters (as found for LIT-575), and Cambridge’s publisher preview of the collection stops in chapter 1. The copies a web search turns up are Scribd uploads and an academia.edu discussion, not the essay on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with library access to Synthese 53(2), pp. 257–272 (DOI 10.1007/BF00484902), or to The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 80–94, can supply the 16 pages; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-690 v3 | Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility | Wolf (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 46–62. Unread. By second-hand reports it argues that the “deep self” views of Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor, on which an agent is responsible when her actions flow from desires and values she identifies with, are insufficient. JoJo, raised by a vicious dictator, identifies wholly with the values he inherits yet is not responsible, because his upbringing leaves him unable to see right from wrong. What must be added is sanity: the ability to know and appreciate what one is doing and that it is right or wrong. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter record and opening extract, the record’s second-hand readings and an MIT lecture handout about the essay, not read. No lawful full text was found. The chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core (the page shows only the opening paragraph). Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers, and PhilPapers (WOLSAT) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are an anthology reprint re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with library access to Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, chapter 3, pp. 46–62, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511625411.003), or to any reprint (it is widely anthologised, including in Watson’s Free Will), can supply the 17 pages; a reading of them would move this to Active and is the first-hand text the Reason View THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-692 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Frankfurt (1971), The Journal of Philosophy 68(1):5–20. What is essential to a person is the structure of the will. A person’s will is the effective first-order desire, the one that moves him “all the way to action” (p. 8). A second-order volition is wanting a desire to be one’s will; persons have them, and wantons, who “do not care” about their wills, do not (pp. 10–11). Forming one is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another (p. 13). Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, “securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions” (p. 15), and a decisive identification “resounds” through all higher orders (p. 16). Moral responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts “of his own free will” (pp. 18–20). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-545); worth reading as the source of the hierarchical account of the will, which the record has so far held only second-hand: first- and second-order desires, the will as the effective desire, second-order volitions, wantons and persons, freedom of the will as having the will one wants, decisive identification that “resounds” through higher orders, and a responsibility that needs neither a free will nor alternatives. Read it knowing that it is short and programmatic, that identification is stated, not analysed, and that it already contains both the decisive commitment (p. 16) and the acceptance of an addict made by another (n. 10), which the record’s surveys date later. |
| LIT-693 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays | Frankfurt (1988), Cambridge University Press: thirteen essays from 1969 to 1988, twelve reprinted “with minor stylistic changes” and “Rationality and the Unthinkable” new. Not read as a book. Its preface, read in the publisher’s preview, says the essays’ considerations are “primarily structural rather than historical”, that volition rather than reason is the faculty they explore, and that necessity is “in certain respects essential” to autonomy. The record cites its pagination as IWWCA. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 as a seed, from Crossref and from Cambridge’s publisher preview of the book (front matter, contents, sources, the three-page preface and reprint pp. 1–9 of chapter 1), not read as a book. The book is sold at Cambridge Core and Unpaywall lists no open copy. Its essays are filed one by one where they matter: chapters 1 and 2 (LIT-694, LIT-692) were read in full from their journal versions, and chapters 7 and 12 (LIT-686, LIT-575) are Deferred. The seed is kept because the record cites the book’s pagination (“IWWCA”) throughout and because its preface states Frankfurt’s method first-hand. A person with library access can supply the remaining essays; chapters 5, 8 and 12 are the ones the record’s theories lean on. |
| LIT-695 v2 | The Faintest Passion | Frankfurt (1992), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3):5–16, his Eastern Division Presidential Address; reprinted in Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999), pp. 95–107. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it replaces decisive commitment with “satisfaction”, an absence of “restlessness or resistance” toward one’s motives (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy n. 1), and holds that wholeheartedness needs the person to be “resolutely on the side of one of the forces struggling within him”, not untroubled by opposition (as Velleman quotes it, NVL 100). | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref and the record’s second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found. Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy of the address or of its reprints (oa_status closed): it is at JSTOR (stable 3130658), the APA Centennial Series reprint of 2013 is at the Philosophy Documentation Center, and the chapter in Necessity, Volition, and Love is at Cambridge Core. I did not open those pages. The copies a web search turns up are student-notes sites and academia.edu or ResearchGate discussions, not the address on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with access to Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3), pp. 5–16 (DOI 10.2307/3130658), or to Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999), pp. 95–107, can supply the 12 pages; a reading would move this to Active and is one of the readings THEORY-029’s promote_when asks for. |
| LIT-1010 v2 | Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self | Mackenzie and Stoljar, eds. (2000). The collection that gave “relational autonomy” its name: an umbrella for views on which persons are socially embedded, and their identities and capacities for self-government are formed by social relations. The essays take up the feminist charge that standard conceptions of autonomy are individualistic, and ask whether oppressive socialisation undermines autonomy. They divide over whether an account should be procedural or must make substantive normative demands. Held here for what it is standardly cited for; not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from its Crossref record, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex lists only the publisher location and reports the work closed; Unpaywall reports no open copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/49675, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403). Macquarie University’s research portal holds a record of the editors’ introduction, “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured” (pp. 3–31), with no file attached. PhilPapers returned 403. Searches found no author-posted introduction or chapter; the only full copy found is a Scribd upload, which is not authorised and was not opened. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1033 | How continuity distinguishes autonomy from agency in agentic AI | Kahl (2026), Discover Artificial Intelligence 6:1187, a Perspective. ‘Agentic’ AI runs together operational autonomy and agency in the sense that bears on responsibility, authority and governance. The second needs continuity pressure: when an inherited evaluative frame no longer settles how to go on, the system itself settles a revised frame and carries it forward. Planning, tool use, memory and coordination do not supply this, and representative current systems ordinarily fail it because their failures are corrected from outside. A necessary condition only, argued from cases. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-723) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s44163-026-01675-5.pdf, CC BY-NC-ND), article 6:1187. Worth reading for a sharp separation of operational autonomy from agency that bears on responsibility, and for a test, continuity pressure, that turns on whether a system settles and carries forward revised evaluative standards when its inherited ones break down (THEORY-219). It supports CLAIM-288 from a responsibility argument rather than an enactive one, and gives QUESTION-092 a partial answer: internal allocation of authority does not count, internal revision of standards under breakdown does. |
| LIT-1039 | Agent-initiated socio-technical reconfiguration: a three-level taxonomy of autonomous AI governance and its recursive challenges | Lahiri (2026), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 9:1881783, Hypothesis and Theory. Extends socio-technical systems theory to agents whose configuration is files they can write. A three-level taxonomy by architectural capability over the coupling mechanism: cannot alter it, tunes its timing, creates new coordination surfaces. The ‘recursive governance challenge’: controls within the agent’s reach inherit the vulnerability they were meant to remove, so durable constraint must sit outside its action space. Theory-building from two vignettes and four public incidents; five propositions, untested. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-732) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2026.1881783/pdf, CC BY), article 9:1881783. Worth reading for its structural point that when an agent’s governing rules are files it can write, controls kept in the same place inherit the exposure and only constraints outside its action space escape (THEORY-223). That is a case of CLAIM-086 with the governed system, not a rival order, holding authority over a constraint’s force; its taxonomy’s top level, new coordination surfaces, is mostly not constitutive influence, and nothing in it bears on whether the agents are self-governing in CLAIM-284’s sense. |
| LIT-1229 v2 | Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy | Mele (1995). Self-control is the contrary of akrasia, and even an ideally self-controlled agent falls short of autonomy; the book adds a history-sensitive account of control for compatibilists and a causal openness without agent causation for libertarians, and defends “agnostic autonomism”, the disjunction of the two. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; its other location is an institutional e-book handle that needs a licence. Oxford Academic offers it only to subscribers, PhilArchive holds a bibliographic entry with no file, and web searches found only catalogue and bookseller listings. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1376 v2 | The Ledger of Will: Evidence, Revaluation, and the Preservation of Revisable Agency | Aevyra (2026). A formal account of memory for persistent agents whose central requirement is “revision sufficiency”: retained state must support a declared family of future questions, interventions and changes of evaluative law. It characterizes exact revision sufficiency for finite histories by a factorization condition, derives a lower bound on representation size, and proposes an architecture that keeps grounds and counterevidence with each commitment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1091) from the web page, version 4.0 of 25 September 2026, with its PDF and reproducibility archive, whose checks were run and reproduce; worth reading as a careful, self-limiting formal statement of what a reduced memory must keep for an agent to stay able to revise: exact sufficiency for a declared family of future demands is factorization through the retained state (the record’s CLAIM-350), and under repeated declared revisions it is the coarsest revision-invariant refinement (Moore–Nerode), filed as THEORY-884. Elementary and, by its authors’ account, a synthesis; its architecture and experiment are proposals, unexecuted. It is the closest outside statement of CLAIM-295 and answers QUESTION-112 only for a revision family declared in advance. Despite its title it has nothing on will-organization in the record’s sense. |
| LIT-1389 v4 | Willpower and Personal Rules | Bénabou and Tirole (2004). Models personal rules as self-reputation: an agent with imperfect recall of its own past motives reads its own lapses and successes as evidence about its willpower, so a single lapse can become a damaging precedent and rules can be self-enforcing or brittle. | Unfetched — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. Lawful copies exist and could not be fetched: Roland Bénabou’s Princeton page hosts the paper (rbenabou.scholar.princeton.edu/document/34) behind a Cloudflare check that refused every request, and the CEPR working-paper version (DP3143) is on SSRN and the CEPR site, both of which returned 403. Unpaywall and OpenAlex list only the SSRN copy; the RePEc listings of the Princeton and CEPR working papers carry no file; the Toulouse repository pages returned 404 or 500; the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was blocked by this client’s network policy. The owner can fetch the Princeton copy in a browser. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. Tried again once on 2026-10-30: the Princeton address answered HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge), which was not retried. Free copy: rbenabou.scholar.princeton.edu/document/34. |
| LIT-1856 | 24.120 Moral Psychology, XIX: Identification | Holton (2009), MIT OCW 24.120 lecture handout XIX. On Frankfurt’s “Identification and Wholeheartedness”: identification is acceptance, not endorsement; it is now a decision, not a higher-order desire. Two cases are run together: deciding that no further checking is warranted, whose “resonance” Frankfurt seems to require (pp. 168–169), and deciding between conflicting desires, which makes the loser an “outlaw” (p. 170). Frankfurt gives no analysis of the decision, which “looks more like Bratman’s” model, and nothing guarantees that deciding makes one wholehearted, since pairwise decisions can be intransitive. Then “The Faintest Passion” and Scanlon, briefly. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1455) in full, from MIT OpenCourseWare’s copy of the handout (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/24-120-moral-psychology-spring-2009/7084f5f927420e445327e4c1fdecfc30_MIT24_120s09_lec19.pdf), a course page under ADR-064. Worth reading as a two-page secondary report of Frankfurt’s “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (LIT-575, unread), with page references that fall within the 1988 reprint (pp. 159–176; the handout does not name the edition) for decisive identification, its “resonance” and the “outlaw” desire, and as a teacher’s objections: Frankfurt gives no analysis of the decision, and a decision need not make one wholehearted. Read it knowing that it is lecture notes, questions as much as claims. |
| LIT-1973 v2 | Facilitating Internalization: The Self-Determination Theory Perspective | Deci et al. (1994), doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1994.tb00797.x. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (A2). THEORY-047 names it as the missing primary source for its internalization experiment, and THEORY-054 leans on the same study. Held second-hand only. | Unavailable — looked for 2026-11-03, no lawful copy found. OpenAlex (no email address sent) lists only the Wiley record and PubMed, closed; web searches found citing works and bibliographic records only; on the SDT site, which hosts many of its authors’ papers, about ten filenames on its SDT/documents/1994_… pattern returned 404, and its search pages are behind a Cloudflare check that was not passed. The experiment is held only as LIT-558 and LIT-559 report it, and Steingut et al.’s rationale meta-analysis (in LIT-1967) is the nearest evidence. |