How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love J. David Velleman

I am currently writing my term paper for Philosophy of Action, a paper due in 16 hours. Only four pages to go, so I should finish on time even given my usual exponential decay of productivity. Anyway, at first I was very suspicious of Velleman's account of agency and action, saying that the constitutive aims for belief and action at the center of that theory "felt like a giant hack." I'd like to think I've changed my mind because I have come to more fully appreciate the logical force of his arguments, but it could very well be that I've just been seduced by passages like this one:

One further drawback [of conventional Davidsonian accounts of make-believe] is that the desire-belief explanation fails to account for children's ability to invent and to understand novel ways of pretending. An especially imaginative child may come up with his own way of pretending to be an elephant, but not by considering which behaviors would be most suitable to an elephant-act, as if he were an impressionist honing some zoological schtick. Rather, the child's method is to imagine being an elephant - weighing a ton, walking on stumpy legs, carrying floppy ears - and then to wait and see how he is disposed to behave.

The image of a child trying, Method-style, to put himself in the mindset of an elephant, and then waiting to see how he is disposed to behave - that's something straight out of Calvin and Hobbes. And that phrase in the middle! "as if he were an impressionist honing some zoological schtick," ah, to write like that! Velleman continues:

Similarly, this child's playmates do not appreciate his inventions by recognizing that they are especially similar to the behavior of real elephants, and hence good choices for an aspiring elephant-impersonator. On the contrary, success at pretending to be an elephant need not involve behavior that is really elephant-like at all. What it requires is rather behavior that's expressive of elephant-mindedness - expressive, that is, of vividly imagining that one is an elephant.

All this and more in the essay On the Aim of Belief, page 257 of The Possibility of Practical Reason.

UPDATE: V-man blogs over at Left2Right.

UPDATE 2: Hey, look. One of my professors is a Left2Right co-blogger. I took Competing Theories of Justice from Debra Staz sophomore year. I got a B.