Promoting healthy snacking is important in addressing malnutrition, overweight and obesity among an ageing population. However, little is known about the factors underlying snacking behaviour in older adults. The present study aimed to explore within- and between-person associations between determinants (i.e. intention, visibility of snacks, social modelling and emotions) and snacking behaviours (i.e. decision to snack, health factor of the snack and portion size) in older adults (60+). Conducting a two-part intensive longitudinal design, data were analysed from forty-eight healthy older adults consisting of (1) an event-based self-report ecological momentary assessment (EMA) diary every time they had a snack and (2) a time-based EMA questionnaire on their phone five times per day. Analysis through generalised linear mixed models indicated that higher intention to snack healthily leads to healthier snacking while higher levels of social modelling and cheerfulness promote unhealthier choices within individuals. At the between-person level, similar results were found for intention and social modelling. Visibility of a snack increased portion size at both a within- and between-person level, while the intention to eat a healthy snack only increased portion size at the between-person level. No associations were found between the decision to snack and all determinants. This is the first study to investigate both within- and between-person associations between time-varying determinants and snacking in older adults. Such information holds the potential for incorporation into just-in-time adaptive interventions, allowing for personalised tailoring, more effective promotion of healthier snacking behaviours and thus pursuing the challenge of healthy ageing.

According to Action-First theorists, like Jonathan Dancy, reasons for action explain reasons for intentions. According to Intention-First theorists, like Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way, reasons for intentions explain reasons for action. In this paper, I introduce and defend a version of the Action-First theory called “Instrumentalism.” According to Instrumentalism, just as we can derive, using principles of instrumental transmission, reasons to ψ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between ψ-ing and ϕ-ing), we can derive reasons to intend to ϕ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between intending to ϕ and ϕ-ing). After providing some defense of Instrumentalism, I turn to two recent, important arguments for the Intention-First theory advanced by McHugh and Way, and I argue that neither of them succeed. I conclude that we should reject the Intention-First theory and that we have grounds for optimism about the Action-First theory.

Verb semantics has been widely approached as a dichotomy of manner and result. However, from a cognitive perspective, manner and result are often linked by intention, as captured by the ‘fulfilment type’ property formulated in the Realisation event domain in Talmy’s event integration theory. The four ‘fulfilment types’ (intrinsic-, moot-, implied-, and attained-fulfilment) indicate different degrees of result certainty in verbs. This study investigates whether manner/result complementarity is cognitively less dichotomous and more nuanced, as the four fulfilment types in verbs could indicate more than two mental representations of verbs. Through two psycholinguistic experiments, we examine whether fulfilment types influence the cognitive salience of manner and result in novel verb meaning interpretation (Experiment 1) and the semantic relatedness between English verbs with different fulfilment types (Experiment 2). Our results demonstrate that manner and result in the mental lexicon act less like a dichotomy but more like a cline. This blur between manner and result verb statuses has consequences for a language’s typological stance in the Realisation domain and implications for how Talmyan event research should be extended beyond well-studied Motion.

In the sixth chapter of his Tianzhu shiyi (天主實義, “The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven”), Matteo Ricci offers a critique of the anti-intentionalistic thread that he detects in the Chinese philosophical tradition. In this brief essay, I offer an analysis of a noteworthy archery analogy that Ricci employs to describe the nature of ethical action as an intentional process with a conscious aim. I trace how Ricci skilfully combines Western and Chinese images and categories to craft this simile. Before that, I set the stage by offering some preliminary comments that contextualize Ricci's interest in the question of intentional vs. non-intentional conduct.

In its updated Commentaries on the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) embraces the ‘external’ interpretation of Article 1 common to the four Geneva Conventions, according to which States have certain negative (complicity-type) and positive (prevention/response) obligations to ‘ensure respect’ for the Conventions by other actors. This interpretation has been gaining support since the 1960s, though the ICRC's new Commentaries have served as a catalyst for some States recently to express contrary views. This article focuses on two major methodological shortcomings in the existing literature, offering a much firmer foundation for the external obligation under common Article 1. First, it demonstrates the overwhelming support in subsequent practice for external obligations. Previous studies have failed to explain the method by which this practice is taken into account, given the existence of some inconsistent practice. This article addresses this general question of treaty interpretation, critiquing the approach of the International Law Commission that relegates majority practice to supplementary means of interpretation and proposing instead a principled approach that better fits and justifies the judicial practice here. Secondly, the article challenges two common assumptions about the travaux: first, that an original, restrictive meaning was intended, and secondly that the travaux of Additional Protocol I offer no support for external obligations. Given the ubiquity of military assistance and partnering, these findings have far-reaching consequences for the liability of States.

A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B.

Punishment is an important method for discouraging uncooperative behavior. We use a novel design for a public goods game in which players have explicit intended contributions with accidentally changed actual contributions, and in which players can apply costly fines or ostracism. Moreover, all players except the subject are automated, whereby we control the intended contributions, actual contributions, costly fines, and ostracisms experienced by the subject. We assess subject’s utilization of other players’ intended and actual contributions when making decisions to fine or ostracize. Hierarchical Bayesian logistic regression provides robust estimates. We find that subjects emphasize actual contribution more than intended contribution when deciding to fine, but emphasize intended contribution more than actual contribution when deciding to ostracize. We also find that the efficacy of past punishment, in terms of changing the contributions of the punished player, influences the type of punishment selected. Finally, we find that the punishment norms of the automated players affect the punishments performed by the subject. These novel paradigms and analyses indicate that punishment is flexible and adaptive, contrary to some evolutionary theories that predict inflexible punishments that emphasize outcomes.

In reply to Dalton (2016), we argue that bullshit is defined in terms of how it is produced, not how it is interpreted. We agree that it can be interpreted as profound by some readers (and assumed as much in the original paper). Nonetheless, we present additional evidence against the possibility that more reflective thinkers are more inclined to interpret bullshit statements as profound.

When people predict their future behavior, they tend to place too much weight on their current intentions, which produces an optimistic bias for behaviors associated with currently strong intentions. More realistic self-predictions require greater sensitivity to situational barriers, such as obstacles or competing demands, that may interfere with the translation of current intentions into future behavior. We consider three reasons why people may not adjust sufficiently for such barriers. First, self-predictions may focus exclusively on current intentions, ignoring potential barriers altogether. We test this possibility, in three studies, with manipulations that draw greater attention to barriers. Second, barriers may be discounted in the self-prediction process. We test this possibility by comparing prospective and retrospective ratings of the impact of barriers on the target behavior. Neither possibility was supported in these tests, or in a further test examining whether an optimally weighted statistical model could improve on the accuracy of self-predictions by placing greater weight on anticipated situational barriers. Instead, the evidence supports a third possibility: Even when they acknowledge that situational factors can affect the likelihood of carrying out an intended behavior, people do not adequately moderate the weight placed on their current intentions when predicting their future behavior.