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Human Agency, Reasons, and Inter-subjective Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2013

William Hasselberger
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Abstract

In this essay I ague that the mainstream ‘Standard Story’ of action – according to which actions are bodily motions with the right internal mental states as their causal triggers (e.g., ‘belief-desire-pairs’, ‘intentions’) – gives rise to a deeply problematic conception of inter-subjective action-understanding. For the Standard Story, since motivating reasons are internal mental states and bodily motions are not intrinsically intentional, an observer must ascribe internal states to others to make rational sense of their outwardly observable bodily motions. I argue this is both phenomenologically distorted and requires, on pain of infinite regress, a deeper, non-inferential, practical-perceptual form of understanding: ‘knowledge-how’, in a broadly Rylean sense. Recognizing the irreducible role of practical-perceptual knowledge-how in inter-subjective understanding, I argue, undermines core assumptions of the Standard Story concerning what an agent can directly perceive in interacting with others, and how our everyday practices of explaining actions with reasons function – and this opens the space for a radically opposed alternative view of inter-subjective action understanding.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 135 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013 

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References

1 A Standard Story view may claim, more elaborately, that motivating reasons are not the internal mental states themselves but the higher-order fact of an agent being in such psychological states. I don't see this elaboration as introducing any significant difference to the view, as far as the argument of this paper is concerned.

2 I borrow these phrases from Bratman, Michael, The Structures of Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 In what sense are mental states like desires and intentions inherently motivating (or ‘pushy’) on the Standard Story? A now-popular, reductive way of making this claim is in terms of functionally-describable dispositions to behavior and ‘directions of fit.’ An agent who desires to do/get X, ceteris paribus, tends, or is disposed to, do/get X; further, desires (unlike beliefs) do not purport to describe the world and are not criticizable for failing to ‘fit’ the world – rather the role desire in the psychic economy is to produce behavior aiming to alter the world so as to fit the desire's content. The direction of fit of a desire is directive (change the world to fit the mental state) rather than descriptive (change the mental state to fit the world).

4 Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem (Malden: Blackwell, 1994), 125Google Scholar. Alfred Mele and Michael Bratman both accord a role for intentions as distinctive internal states beyond desires. Mele, , Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 201Google Scholar; Bratman, Structures of Agency. See also Velleman, David, ‘What Happens When Someone Acts’, in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)Google Scholar. An odd feature of these views is that, though they are reductionist regarding agency and action, they often employ intentionalist and normative terms in talking about the mental states in terms of which actions are reductively explained: e.g., talking of the ‘rational roles’ or ‘norms’ of those states. But either those intentionalist/normative idioms are themselves reducible to non-intentional, non-normative (i.e., causal) ones, or they are not. But if they are not so reducible, why think actions are reducible in the first place? The reduction of agency is no more plausible, prima facie, than the reduction of intentionality and normativity, more generally. My suspicion is that, when push comes to shove, most Standard Story theories will be reductive as regards normativity, all the way down.

5 Davidson, , ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes’, in Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Anscombe, Elizabeth, Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000): 9–12Google Scholar. Anscombe famously picks out human actions are those aspects of a person's life history to this distinctive reasons-seeking sense of the ‘Why?’ question applies (though trivial, limiting cases may be answered simply, ‘no reason’).

7 Granted, of course, the interpreter's ‘folk psychological’ grasp of how such psychological states interact with one another and tend to produce behavior, as well the bedrock interpretive assumption that the agent will act in ways that are approximately rational, given her internal states. Within the Standard Story, the nature of the mental state ascription process is controversial: some theorists hold that we ascribe states to others on the basis of a psychological theory, potentially one that is biologically native to humans (the ‘theory-theory’); while others claim that it is the result of observers engaging in an empathetic procedure of ‘simulating’ pretend states in oneself and running one's reasoning processes ‘off line’ (the so-called ‘simulation theory’).

8 The Standard Story is not the only ‘naturalistic’ account of human action, of course. Both Instrumentalism/Fictionalism and Eliminativism about psychological discourse provide purely naturalistic accounts of agential concepts, or do away with such altogether.

9 Ryle, , The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 53, 33Google Scholar.

10 Anscombe, Intention, §16. Anscombe does admit, however, that there are limited, boarderline cases where reasons-talk and cause-talk are not sharply distinguishable. See also her ‘Practical Inference’, reprinted in Virtues and Reasons, eds., Hursthouse, , Lawrence, , and Quinn, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2–3, 27Google Scholar.

11 By ‘phenomenology’ I don't mean the narrow notion of attending to phenomenal ‘seemings’ or ‘qualia’ – but the broader (roughly Husserlian) notion of an ontologically neutral description of how a phenomena is directly presented in pre-theoretical experience, and what structures are inherent in that presentation. Ryle himself writes that The Concept of Mind ‘can be seen as an extended essay in phenomenology…’ See ‘Phenomenology versus the Concept of Mind’ in Critical Essays: Collected Papers, Vol. 1 (New York: Routledge Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

12 Wittgenstein, writes: ‘We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that [a person] is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of these features.’ Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)Google Scholar: Section 570.

13 Ryle offers several different regress and reductio arguments against ‘intellectualism’, the view that knowledge-how, skill, or practical intelligence, can be reduced to knowledge that certain propositions are true. It's clear that commonsense sides with anti-intellectualism, at least to a great extent. However, there have been recent attempts in epistemology to formulate intellectualist accounts of knowledge-how that meet Ryle's regresses. I'll set this debate aside below and assume the soundness of Ryle's knowledge-how/knowledge-that distinction.

14 Anscombe concurs: she writes that modern philosophy errs in neglecting ‘practical knowledge’. ‘A man has practical knowledge who knows how to do things; but that is an insufficient description, for he might be said to know how to do things if he could give a lecture on it, though he was helpless when confronted with the task of doing them.’ And, at her most Rylean, Anscombe writes: ‘In the case of practical knowledge the exercise of the capacity is nothing but the doing or supervising of the operations of which a man has practical knowledge…’ Anscombe, Intention, 57, 88. Note that Anscombe seems to use ‘practical knowledge’ in a distinct sense, with a unclear connection to knowledge-how, of the knowledge an agent has of what she's doing; this is the knowledge an agent has, Anscombe says, of her own actions immediately and without self-‘observation’ (this point may suggest an important divergence from Ryle).

15 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 54 (emphasis original).

16 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 61 (emphasis added).

17 Anscombe, Intention, 8 (emphasis added). For a discussion of the ‘immediately meaningful’ phenomenology of intentional human phenomena like actions, signs, and speech that connects it with Husserlian phenomenology and current disputes about social cognition, see Zahavi, Dan, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008)Google Scholar, chapters 6 and 7; see also Bermudez, Jose-Luis, ‘The Domain of Folk Psychology’ in O'Hear (ed.), Minds and Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Gallagher, Shaun, ‘The Practice of Mind: Theory, Simulation, or Primary Interaction?’ in Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, No. 5–7, 2001Google Scholar.

18 The supposed necessity of Standard Story interpretation seems even more phenomenologically incongruous if we consider the phenomenology of inter-subjective action-understanding in contexts involving not one-on-one interpretation but many agents acting in inter-related ways: seeing a team playing and responding to one another, or a jazz-band interactively performing. The Standard Story seems to require second-order meta-representations here: beliefs about what others believe about other's mental states. This raises worries about the cognitive tractability of inter-subjective understanding as characterized along the Standard Story. For this objection, see Bermudez, ‘The Domain of Folk Psychology’.

19 The claim that I don't ‘really’ perceive people performing certain actions but only ‘really’ perceive surfaces, bodies, undergoing changes, is not itself a claim within the physics of vision, say, but a metaphysical claim. And, as Moore or Reid might have put it: the complex metaphysical theory that leads to the denial of the manifest facts, like the fact that I can see people smiling or playing games, is in greater need of justification that the facts it purports to deny. I return to the motivations behind the Standard Story in my concluding remarks.

20 The Standard Story might try to ‘bite the bullet’ and hold that these initial sensitivities to psychologically salient features of situations are not themselves a distinctive form of first-person knowledge at all, but the results of some theorietically-posited ‘mechanical’ internal process (e.g., a cognitive ‘processor’ with content fixed, causally, by such-and-such environmental stimuli, perhaps with the biological function of detecting these stimuli). This raises well-known objections concerning the normativity and genuine (non-derived) intentionality of such ‘content’. It would also follow, implausibly, that this direct sense of psychological meaning – e.g., responsiveness to emotional expressions – is not an aspect of distinctively human intelligence. Consider particularly emotionally and psychologically perceptive people: intuitively, even their immediate, spontaneous senses of others' emotions, meanings, inflections, etc., are exercises of intelligence – indeed, a highly subtle and discerning way of seeing things aright – not merely the causal upshot of a brute mechanism.

21 Anscombe, Intention, 80.

22 Anscombe writes: ‘if you want to say at least some true things about a man's intentions, you will have a strong chance of success if you mention what he actually did or is doing [since] whatever else he does, the greater number of things which you would say straight off a man did or was doing, will be things he intends.’ Anscombe, Intention, 8.

23 Anscombe, Intention, 80, 84 (emphasis original).

24 To use Anscombe's famous example: ‘I'm pushing down on the pump handle’ because ‘I'm pumping the pump’ (a wider process unfolding in the world); and I'm doing thatbecause ‘I'm pumping poisoned water into the house's cistern’ (wider process); and I'm doing thatbecause ‘I'm poisoning the Nazi leadership’ (wider process). Notice that, here, the ‘because’ that relates explanans and explanandum is not that of efficient causality – a mental event ϕ being a prior (extrinsically-related) causal condition of a bodily event φ occurring; rather, the ‘because’ is calculative or rational in nature: the hand motion constitutes a step or part of pumping the pump, which is a step or part of filling the house's cistern with poison, which is a step or part of…etc (She calls this the ‘ABCD’ order). Michael Thompson elaborates on the Anscombean idea of a structure of reasons internal to action itself (as a developing process) in Life and Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google ScholarPubMed, section 2, esp 106–108, 112. See also Moran, Richard and Stone, Martin, ‘Anscombe on Expression of Intention’ in Ford, , Hornsby, , and Stoutland, (eds), Essays on Anscombe's Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

25 See Michael Thompson, Life and Action, section 2, esp. 90–92, 120–124; Anscombe, Intention, 90–94.

26 For example, I take myself to directly perceptually ‘recognize’ someone eating, but in fact the agent isn't really eating at all but taking part in a performance-art ‘happening’ with fake food. A Standard Story theorist might claim this kind of error shows that what I ‘really’ perceive are bodily occurrences that are then given a post-perceptual mental-state interpretation. But this doesn't follow. We shouldn't assume without argument, that what's ‘directly grasped’ in both successful cases of action-understanding and cases of error is, indeed, the same underlying thing – i.e., mere bodily motions – and, thus, that action-understanding must be built out of perceptual materials common to both veridical and non-veridical cases. Anti-psychologism can hold, ‘disjunctively’, that the veridical case is of principal significance in action-understanding, with failures requiring distinct treatment. Action-understanding is the exercise of a basic capacity – practical-perceptual knowledge-how – whose successful deliverances are conceptually primary. We should not project the psychological structure at play in breakdowns of this capacity back onto the successful cases: breakdowns of the capacity are distinct cases that require special explanation.

27 However, not all or even most cases of inter-subjective understanding could involve genuinely ‘hidden’ motives or deception – without our losing our grip on everyday cognitive practices themselves: cases of opaque, hidden, deceptive motives are intelligible as what they are only against the explanatorily primary background of an everyday world of mundane, perceptible action-intelligibility

28 Davidson essentially challenges ‘anti-causalists’ to give a non-causal account of how an agent's reasons could really explain her action (see his ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes’). On a suitably minimal sense of ‘cause.’ few if any philosophers would disagree: on a minimal view, a reason is a ‘cause’, and an explanation citing that reason is ‘causal’, if that reason is a particularly relevant explanatory factor – i.e., the agent's reason, whatever it is, will figure into a satisfying explanation of the action. The claim that reasons-explanations must be causal to be genuinely explanatory becomes far more problematic when ‘reasons’ are treated as psychological particulars inside an agent (states like belief-desire-pairs) and ‘cause’ is given a stronger sense of a single, generic efficient-causal relation between particular events or states.

29 Note that explicitly citing the mental goings-on of an agent to explain her behavior can suggest a problem, confusion, or error (compare: ‘He is writing on the blackboard because he's teaching a lesson’ as opposed to ‘He is writing on the blackboard because he believes he's teaching a lesson’ or ‘…because he thinks he's the teacher’). Moreover, there are various uses for terms like ‘desire’, ‘want’, ‘intention’ that don't imply they refer to internal states. For example, to say that ‘I did ϕ because I wanted to’ can be just to rebuff the ‘Why?’ question (essentially, ‘I don't want to explain myself, leave me alone’). Or, to say that ‘I'm doing ϕ because I want to do ψ’ can be to say I am in the early stages of ψ-ing.

30 Michael Thompson writes that, ‘the type of explanation of action at stake in action theory, whether naïve or sophisticated, is uniformly a matter of locating the action explained in what might be called a developing process…’ – i.e. as a step or part of an action-in-progress. Thompson, Life and Action, 132. See also Tanney, Julia, ‘Reasons as Non-Causal, Context-Placing Explanations’ in Rules, Reasons, and Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

31 Anscombe calls the inherently normative dimension of action-understanding seeking a ‘desirability characterisation’ of the action – this ‘makes an end to the questions “What for?”’ by revealing to interpreters (at least minimally, in outline) what made it seem to the agent attractive, desirable, sensible, worthwhile, fit to choose. Anscombe, Intention, 74, 75. It's consistent with Anscombe's view that an inquirer simply stop posing the ‘Why?’ question before an intelligible desirability characteristic is reached – she may assume that an intelligible point is in the offing (lose interest, move on to other things). This is our default attitude towards the behavior of agents in midst, what's involved in assuming our fellow humans to be rational agents. I discuss this idea of a constitutive condition of social/inter-subjective intelligibility on ‘full-fledged’ action in my ‘Agency, Autonomy, and Social Intelligibility’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (2012): 255–278CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Davidson emphasizes: ‘the ordinary notion of cause which enters into scientific or commonsense accounts of non-psychological [non-action] affairs is essential also to what it is to act with a reason, to have a certain intention in acting, to be an agent… Cause is the cement of the universe.’ Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, xv.

33 Thanks to the many people who provided helpful comments and discussion on this essay: Talbot Brewer, Matthew Crawford, Bryan Cwik, Cora Diamond, Samuel Duncan, Paul Nedelisky, and, especially, Rebecca Jakob.