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The article focuses on certain relevant aspects of normativity and further clarification or elaboration of certain important lines in the arguments. It mentions Donald Davidson's causal theory of action (CTA) and relevant issues concerning the possibility of weakness of will or other forms of irrationality. It also mentions steps which have successive pairwise counterfactual dependence relation in the backward direction.

This essay critiques or engages a wide range of existing works on the ancient and well-contested issue of weakness of will, from a new perspective of comparative philosophy combined with a focus on a largely neglected Davidsonian paradox of irrationality. It aims at revealing the interplay between the descriptive and the normative in the very notion of critical interpretation, as well as a special relation between holding-true and making-true which helps to explain the non-accidentalness of the descriptive coat of the Plato Principle and some of the Mencian paradigmatic tenets. By the same token, it also sheds light on some holistic picture about a certain implicit type of dynamic normativity, which seems evidently applicable to, for example, the Mencius-Xunzi 荀子 dispute on human nature, but scarcely noticed or articulated in contemporary contexts of comparative philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contrasts a picoeconomic approach to the explanation of akrasia with Davidson's divided-mind approach and defends the former in a wider context. The distinctive merits of a picoeconomic model of mind lie in the following aspects: First, it relies on a scientifically well-grounded discovery about motivational dynamics of animals for its explanation of preference change, which elucidates or materializes some philosophers' speculations both about the possible mismatch between valuation and motivation and about the relevance of temporal factors to akrasia. Second, it grounds the necessity of endogenous higher-order constraints, expressible in forms of judgment, in an intrapersonal dynamic process of interactive first-order temporary preferences. Thus the motivational basis for the normative construction of the rationality of `best judgment' can also be illuminated with this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]