Monday, 13 July 2009
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Setiya On Intentional Action
In this blog post I wish to articulate what I take to be the primary objection to Kieran Setiya's account of intentional action, as described in the first half of his book, Reasons without Rationalism. I begin by adumbrating a few of my own commitments, followed by a summary of Setiya's position, and I conclude with critical remarks.
I hold that intentional action is prototypically goal-directed action. On this view, the type of goal-oriented behaviour a cat engages in when it stalks a bird counts as intentional. By contrast, purely reactive behaviour, such as when a cat reflexively withdraws its paws away from a sharp object, is non-intentional. In sum, I take it to be paradigmatic of intentional action that it is purposive rather than merely reactive.
My primary reason for adopting the present definition of ‘intentional action’—one that conceives of it in terms of goal-directed action—is my belief that it closely matches our quotidian conception. Ordinarily, we identify an agent’s intention with the aim, purpose or goal they have in mind when carrying out some action. Moreover, I maintain that an agent may perform an action with a certain goal in mind even if that agent does not (or cannot) conceive of that goal as such. To conceive of a goal as such requires that one possess and deploy the concept of a goal. Thus, an account of intentional action that requires that an agent conceive of their goal as such would preclude non-linguistic animals—that lack such concepts—from acting intentionally. By contrast, to have a goal in mind is to be aware of one’s goal in the same sense in which one may be aware of the content of one’s perceptual experience. Since non-linguistic animals may be aware of the content of their perceptual experiences, there is nothing in the present account of ‘having a goal in mind’ that precludes its application to non-linguistic animals.
My second reason for defining ‘intentional action’ in the way that I have is that it roughly corresponds with that of Anscombe in her landmark text, Intention. Admittedly, Anscombe is not committed to the claim that intentional action just is goal-directed action since she holds that an agent may act intentionally even though she has no goal or end in view. However, she does take goal-directed action as the paradigm case of intentional action, such that there would be no such thing as intentional action if we did not sometimes act with an end in view. This is a subtlety in Anscombe’s account that I cannot fully explore here. But it is sufficient for our present purpose to note that Anscombe and I agree with respect to there being a conceptual connection between intentional action and goal-directed action. Significantly, Anscombe and I both concur that one may correctly ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals. She puts the point as follows:
The conception of intentional action employed in this blog post—one that defines intentional action in terms of goal-directed action—differs from that of Setiya, who sees the two terms as picking out fundamentally different domains of agential activity. According to Setiya, an agent φs intentionally only if that agent has the higher-order desire-like belief that she is φing for a reason. Setiya’s requirement seems to build on Anscombe’s insight that “intentional actions are ones to which a certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application.” In specifying precisely what that sense is, Anscombe notes that “this question is refused application by the answer: ‘I was not aware I was doing that’.” Setiya takes this to suggest a conception of intentional action according to which an agent must know that she is performing a certain action in order to count as performing that action intentionally. (I will refer to this as the knowledge requirement for intentional action.) However, after considering Davidson’s example of the teacher who intends to make 10 copies, but is unsure if he is pressing hard enough to successfully do so, Setiya concludes that the knowledge requirement is too strong. The assumption seems to be that since there are times we do not know that we are successfully performing an action we are intentionally performing, such knowledge cannot be a necessary condition for intentional action. He therefore falls back to a belief requirement, according to which one acts intentionally only if one believes one is performing said action.
Setiya’s makes a second modification to Anscombe’s knowledge requirement. He claims that one not only believes that one is performing a certain action, but that one also believes that one is performing it for some specific consideration that one takes as one’s reason (insofar as one is performing it for a reason at all). This leads him to distinguish between two aspects of what it means to take the consideration that P as one’s reason to φ. The “practical” aspect involves a desire-like attitude towards the proposition: the consideration that P is my reason to φ. The attitude in question is “desire-like” in that it motivates one to φ. The “epistemic” aspect of taking the consideration that P as one’s reason is the non-observation based belief that the consideration that P is my reason to φ. The practical and epistemic aspects combine to form what Setiya refers to as a “desire-like belief”:
In an astonishing display of pluck, Setiya describes his approach as a “simple psychological theory” (Italics mine), according to which “taking something as one’s reason is a matter of taking one’s belief in that reason to play a causal-motivational role in explaining one’s action”. Whatever the merits of such an account of intentional action, it is clear that it precludes the possibility that non-linguistic animals may act intentionally. The requirement that one believe that one’s belief that P is playing a “causal-motivational role in explaining one’s action” is not one that non-linguistic animals (and even a few philosophers) can meet. Moreover, Setiya’s account precludes the possibility that intentional action is prototypically goal-directed action since a wide range of goal-directed actions (e.g., those performed by non-linguistic animals and pre-linguistic human infants) involve no such second-order beliefs. This clearly puts Setiya at odds with the account of intentional action we find in Anscombe, and (therefore) out of step with what I have been calling the philosophically orthodox conception. I believe this represents a problem for Setiya’s account because when he criticises Anscombe and advocates of the belief-desire model for their accounts of intentional action, it is not clear that he is talking about the same thing as those he criticises.
More importantly, the fact that Setiya’s account of intentional action (1) denies the prototypical connection between intentional action and goal directed action, and (2) precludes the ascription of intentions to non-linguistic animals, suggests that his account is revisionary with respect to our quotidian conception. This presents Setiya with the following dilemma. On the one hand, if his account of intentional action is supposed to coincide with our ordinary usage of the term, then his theory implies that the vast majority of competent English speakers are simply mistaken when they ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals. This may of course be the case, but we would need very compelling reasons for thinking that this is so along with an error theory of some kind. Setiya provides neither. On the other hand, if his account is not supposed to coincide with our ordinary usage of the term, then the relevance of his account is called into question. Why should we be concerned with this new concept Setiya is attempting to introduce? Moreover, why does he risk confusing the reader by using the expression ‘intentional explanation’ to refer to this novel conception, without the least indication that he is using it in an unconventional way?
I hold that intentional action is prototypically goal-directed action. On this view, the type of goal-oriented behaviour a cat engages in when it stalks a bird counts as intentional. By contrast, purely reactive behaviour, such as when a cat reflexively withdraws its paws away from a sharp object, is non-intentional. In sum, I take it to be paradigmatic of intentional action that it is purposive rather than merely reactive.
My primary reason for adopting the present definition of ‘intentional action’—one that conceives of it in terms of goal-directed action—is my belief that it closely matches our quotidian conception. Ordinarily, we identify an agent’s intention with the aim, purpose or goal they have in mind when carrying out some action. Moreover, I maintain that an agent may perform an action with a certain goal in mind even if that agent does not (or cannot) conceive of that goal as such. To conceive of a goal as such requires that one possess and deploy the concept of a goal. Thus, an account of intentional action that requires that an agent conceive of their goal as such would preclude non-linguistic animals—that lack such concepts—from acting intentionally. By contrast, to have a goal in mind is to be aware of one’s goal in the same sense in which one may be aware of the content of one’s perceptual experience. Since non-linguistic animals may be aware of the content of their perceptual experiences, there is nothing in the present account of ‘having a goal in mind’ that precludes its application to non-linguistic animals.
My second reason for defining ‘intentional action’ in the way that I have is that it roughly corresponds with that of Anscombe in her landmark text, Intention. Admittedly, Anscombe is not committed to the claim that intentional action just is goal-directed action since she holds that an agent may act intentionally even though she has no goal or end in view. However, she does take goal-directed action as the paradigm case of intentional action, such that there would be no such thing as intentional action if we did not sometimes act with an end in view. This is a subtlety in Anscombe’s account that I cannot fully explore here. But it is sufficient for our present purpose to note that Anscombe and I agree with respect to there being a conceptual connection between intentional action and goal-directed action. Significantly, Anscombe and I both concur that one may correctly ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals. She puts the point as follows:
Since I have defined intentional action in terms of language—the special question ‘Why?’—it may seem surprising that I should introduce intention-dependent concepts with special reference to their application to animals, which have no language. Still, we certainly ascribe intention to animals. The reason is precisely that we describe what they do in a manner perfectly characteristic of the use of intention concepts. . . . the cat is stalking the bird in crouching and slinking along with its eye fixed on the bird and its whiskers twitching. . . . Just as we naturally say ‘The cat thinks there is a mouse coming’, so we also naturally ask: Why is the cat crouching and slinking like that? and give the answer: It’s stalking that bird; see, its eye is fixed on it. We do this, though the cat can utter no thoughts, and cannot give expression to any knowledge of its own action, or to any intention either.Since Anscombe is the locus classicus of the contemporary discussion of intention, I take her usage of the term to have the greatest claim to philosophical orthodoxy. Of course, we may find the need to make adjustments to her conception along the way; but I think one can hardly go wrong (from a methodological point of view) in taking her as a starting point. Moreover, I will take Anscombe’s observation that we ordinarily ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals as a touchstone for determining whether or not a particular theorist is working with the philosophically orthodox conception of ‘intentional action’. My reasons for this are far from arbitrary. It rests on the thesis that those theorists who deny the ascription of intentions to non-linguistic animals are actually working with a very different concept (and are therefore talking about something quite different) to those who affirm such ascriptions. When this fact is combined with a certain lack of self-awareness with regards to the differences in the concepts being deployed, the upshot is that theorists on both sides are often simply talking past each other. The preceding claim is not one I can fully defend here; so a dogmatic statement of my position will have to suffice. However, the central criticism I will be advancing against Setiya in this post does not depend on the undefended assumption.
The conception of intentional action employed in this blog post—one that defines intentional action in terms of goal-directed action—differs from that of Setiya, who sees the two terms as picking out fundamentally different domains of agential activity. According to Setiya, an agent φs intentionally only if that agent has the higher-order desire-like belief that she is φing for a reason. Setiya’s requirement seems to build on Anscombe’s insight that “intentional actions are ones to which a certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application.” In specifying precisely what that sense is, Anscombe notes that “this question is refused application by the answer: ‘I was not aware I was doing that’.” Setiya takes this to suggest a conception of intentional action according to which an agent must know that she is performing a certain action in order to count as performing that action intentionally. (I will refer to this as the knowledge requirement for intentional action.) However, after considering Davidson’s example of the teacher who intends to make 10 copies, but is unsure if he is pressing hard enough to successfully do so, Setiya concludes that the knowledge requirement is too strong. The assumption seems to be that since there are times we do not know that we are successfully performing an action we are intentionally performing, such knowledge cannot be a necessary condition for intentional action. He therefore falls back to a belief requirement, according to which one acts intentionally only if one believes one is performing said action.
Setiya’s makes a second modification to Anscombe’s knowledge requirement. He claims that one not only believes that one is performing a certain action, but that one also believes that one is performing it for some specific consideration that one takes as one’s reason (insofar as one is performing it for a reason at all). This leads him to distinguish between two aspects of what it means to take the consideration that P as one’s reason to φ. The “practical” aspect involves a desire-like attitude towards the proposition: the consideration that P is my reason to φ. The attitude in question is “desire-like” in that it motivates one to φ. The “epistemic” aspect of taking the consideration that P as one’s reason is the non-observation based belief that the consideration that P is my reason to φ. The practical and epistemic aspects combine to form what Setiya refers to as a “desire-like belief”:
Taking something as my reason is a kind of “desire-like belief”. It is a belief-like representation of P as my reason to act, and at the same time a decision to act on that reason, something by which I am led to do so.In order to avoid the charge of circularity, Setiya later modifies the content of the desire-like belief from the proposition: the consideration that P is my reason to φ, to the proposition: my belief that P is my reason to φ. In short, the desire-like belief is a second-order belief; it takes as its object the belief that P is one’s reason to φ.
In an astonishing display of pluck, Setiya describes his approach as a “simple psychological theory” (Italics mine), according to which “taking something as one’s reason is a matter of taking one’s belief in that reason to play a causal-motivational role in explaining one’s action”. Whatever the merits of such an account of intentional action, it is clear that it precludes the possibility that non-linguistic animals may act intentionally. The requirement that one believe that one’s belief that P is playing a “causal-motivational role in explaining one’s action” is not one that non-linguistic animals (and even a few philosophers) can meet. Moreover, Setiya’s account precludes the possibility that intentional action is prototypically goal-directed action since a wide range of goal-directed actions (e.g., those performed by non-linguistic animals and pre-linguistic human infants) involve no such second-order beliefs. This clearly puts Setiya at odds with the account of intentional action we find in Anscombe, and (therefore) out of step with what I have been calling the philosophically orthodox conception. I believe this represents a problem for Setiya’s account because when he criticises Anscombe and advocates of the belief-desire model for their accounts of intentional action, it is not clear that he is talking about the same thing as those he criticises.
More importantly, the fact that Setiya’s account of intentional action (1) denies the prototypical connection between intentional action and goal directed action, and (2) precludes the ascription of intentions to non-linguistic animals, suggests that his account is revisionary with respect to our quotidian conception. This presents Setiya with the following dilemma. On the one hand, if his account of intentional action is supposed to coincide with our ordinary usage of the term, then his theory implies that the vast majority of competent English speakers are simply mistaken when they ascribe intentions to non-linguistic animals. This may of course be the case, but we would need very compelling reasons for thinking that this is so along with an error theory of some kind. Setiya provides neither. On the other hand, if his account is not supposed to coincide with our ordinary usage of the term, then the relevance of his account is called into question. Why should we be concerned with this new concept Setiya is attempting to introduce? Moreover, why does he risk confusing the reader by using the expression ‘intentional explanation’ to refer to this novel conception, without the least indication that he is using it in an unconventional way?
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Reply to Holmen on Williamson
In his review of Jennifer Hornsby’s “Belief and Reasons for Acting”, Holmen briefly considers Williamson’s example of the burglar who persists in searching for a diamond in a house at great risk of being caught. Holmen takes the burglar example to establish the following claim:
In my previous post, I expressed reservations about whether Williamson’s burglar example establishes the conclusion Holmen claims it does. I consider the burglar’s psychophysical doppelgänger, who displays the same level of psychological conviction and engages in the same exact behaviour, but who nevertheless lacks knowledge because his belief has been rendered false by a highly improbably quantum occurrence. I maintain that so long as we keep his level of psychological conviction the same as that of the original burglar, we are equally able to explain (i.e., make sense of) and predict his behaviour. The upshot is that knowledge attribution is not necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the burglar’s conduct. What knowledge attribution adds (if anything at all) is not explanatory or predictive power, but rather a justificatory dimension—it helps us to understand why the burglar who has knowledge was justified in his conduct.
In his follow-up post, "Knowledge in Explanation: A reply to Avery Archer", Holmen attempts to sidestep my criticism by arguing that the fact that we can explain an agent’s conduct even when she lacks knowledge does not undermine the claim that knowledge is sometimes necessary for explaining or predicting an agent’s conduct. His point seems to be that, at best, my argument shows that something other than knowledge can explain or cause the burglar’s conduct. Even so, I have not shown that knowledge is not the explanation or cause of the agent’s behaviour in the particular example Williamson posits. Holmen summarises what is problematic about my argument as follows:
We may effectively refute (1)-(2) if it could be shown that:
Now Holmen’s point seems to be that my claim that beliefs are equally able to explain or predict an agent’s conduct does not entail that knowledge is not a cause. This is of course true if one assumes that I am offering a positive argument in which the conclusion “knowledge is not a cause” is supposed to directly follow from the claim that “things besides knowledge may also be causes”. But to construe my argument along these lines would be to overlook the dialectical fact that I am simply challenging one of the premises in Williamson’s argument (i.e., a purely negative endeavor). To see that this is so, we may summarise Williamson’s burglar example in terms of the following single-premise argument:
[K]nowledge sometimes must figure in the best explanation for why some agent F-d. According to him [Williamson], attributions of knowledge may be a better predictor for determining someone’s actions by lending more probability to a certain way of conduct.Roughly, the idea is supposed to be that the burglar’s persistence can only be satisfactorily explained by attributing him with knowledge. Consequently, it is alleged that knowledge attribution allows us to better explain or predict what the burglar would do.
In my previous post, I expressed reservations about whether Williamson’s burglar example establishes the conclusion Holmen claims it does. I consider the burglar’s psychophysical doppelgänger, who displays the same level of psychological conviction and engages in the same exact behaviour, but who nevertheless lacks knowledge because his belief has been rendered false by a highly improbably quantum occurrence. I maintain that so long as we keep his level of psychological conviction the same as that of the original burglar, we are equally able to explain (i.e., make sense of) and predict his behaviour. The upshot is that knowledge attribution is not necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the burglar’s conduct. What knowledge attribution adds (if anything at all) is not explanatory or predictive power, but rather a justificatory dimension—it helps us to understand why the burglar who has knowledge was justified in his conduct.
In his follow-up post, "Knowledge in Explanation: A reply to Avery Archer", Holmen attempts to sidestep my criticism by arguing that the fact that we can explain an agent’s conduct even when she lacks knowledge does not undermine the claim that knowledge is sometimes necessary for explaining or predicting an agent’s conduct. His point seems to be that, at best, my argument shows that something other than knowledge can explain or cause the burglar’s conduct. Even so, I have not shown that knowledge is not the explanation or cause of the agent’s behaviour in the particular example Williamson posits. Holmen summarises what is problematic about my argument as follows:
Avery's case is more like saying that "Shakespeare did not write Macbeth since there is a doppelgänger case where Macbeth gets written but by Marlowe." And even granted the presence of such a case Shakespeare surely wrote Macbeth and is the cause of Macbeth's existence. Likewise, there could be dozens of cases where the burglar acts in the same way but for other reasons than that he knew P. They say nothing whatsoever about whether Kp is the cause in our case for his behaviour.However, it seems to me that Holmen mischaracterises the dialectical context in which my objection to the burglar example is articulated. He depicts my argument as attempting to establish a positive conclusion when the conclusion it seeks to establish is purely negative. This point may be illustrated by considering the following single-premise argument:
(1) The biological complexity we observe can only be satisfactorily explained by the existence of a Divine designer
(2) Therefore, there is a Divine designer
We may effectively refute (1)-(2) if it could be shown that:
(1*) The biological complexity we observe can be satisfactorily explained by natural selection.If true, (1*) impugns (1)-(2) by revealing (1) to be false. However, (1*) only establishes the negative conclusion that (1)-(2) fails to establish its conclusion. It is not (nor should it be taken to be) a positive argument showing that (2) is false. For example, the following is clearly a bad argument:
(1*) The biological complexity we observe can be satisfactorily explained by natural selection.The lesson is that the same consideration can be effective in a negative argument (i.e., one intended to show that a specific argument fails to establish its conclusion) but ineffective in a positive argument against that same conclusion. It is therefore important to get clear on the aim of an argument (whether it is negative or positive) before one can evaluate its cogency. Since my objection only targets the efficacy of Williamson’s burglar argument it is clearly a negative argument.
(2*) Therefore, there is no Divine designer.
Now Holmen’s point seems to be that my claim that beliefs are equally able to explain or predict an agent’s conduct does not entail that knowledge is not a cause. This is of course true if one assumes that I am offering a positive argument in which the conclusion “knowledge is not a cause” is supposed to directly follow from the claim that “things besides knowledge may also be causes”. But to construe my argument along these lines would be to overlook the dialectical fact that I am simply challenging one of the premises in Williamson’s argument (i.e., a purely negative endeavor). To see that this is so, we may summarise Williamson’s burglar example in terms of the following single-premise argument:
(3) The burglar’s conduct can only be satisfactorily explained by attributing him with knowledge.What Williamson’s burglar example alleges to show is that there are certain kinds of conduct (such as the burglar's persistence in the face of countervailing evidence) that simply cannot be satisfactorily explained without attributing knowledge to the relevant agent. (In this regard, his argument is analogous to the creationist who insists that a Divine designer is the only satisfactory explanation of the observed biological complexity.) Construed along these lines, all one needs to do in order to impugn Williamson’s argument is to show that the very same conduct can be satisfactorily explained without attributing knowledge. Since the agent’s conduct is one of the things that is held fixed between the burglar and his doppelgänger, then our ability to explain the doppelgänger’s conduct without attributing knowledge to him shows that knowledge attribution is not necessary to satisfactorily explain or predict the original burglar’s conduct. Thus, we arrive at my counterclaim:
(4) Therefore, knowledge is sometimes necessary for a satisfactory explanation of an agent’s conduct.
(3*) The burglar’s conduct can be satisfactorily explained by attributing to him a belief with the appropriate level of psychological conviction.If true, (3*) shows that (3)-(4) fails to establish its conclusion by revealing (3) to be false.
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