New Essays on the Explanation of Action

New Essays on the Explanation of Action

Forthcoming By Constantine Sandis A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Wiley-Blackwell) (co-edited with Timothy O’Connor)

New Essays on the Explanation of Action Edited by

Constantine Sandis Oxford Brookes University and NYU in London

Editorial selection and matter © Constantine Sandis 2009 Chapters © their individual authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–52202–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–52202–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This volume is dedicated to Elizabeth Alice Sandis With all my love, in the year of our wedding

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Contents Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Constantine Sandis

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Part I Reasons and Causes 1 What Must Actions Be for Reasons to Explain Them? Fred Dretske

13

2 What Are Reasons for Action? Stephen Everson

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3 Was Sally’s Reason for Running from the Bear that She Thought it was Chasing Her? Rowland Stout

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4 Con-reasons as Causes David-Hillel Ruben

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Agential Reasons and the Explanation of Human Behaviour Peter Hacker

6 Reasons as Non-causal, Context-placing Explanations Julia Tanney 7

Interpretative Explanations G. F. Schueler

94 112

8 Anscombe on Expression of Intention Richard Moran and Martin J. Stone

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Can One Act for a Reason without Acting Intentionally? Joshua Knobe and Sean D. Kelly

169

Reasons: Explanatory and Normative Joseph Raz

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11 Reasons, Desires and Intentional Actions Maria Alvarez

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12 A Niggle at Nagel: Causally Active Desires and the Explanation of Action Charles Pigden vii

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Acting in Character Annette Baier

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14 Aquinas on Action and Action Explanation Stephen Boulter 15 Acting for Reasons – A Grass Root Approach Ralf Stoecker Part II 16

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Agency and Moral Psychology

Sub-intentional Actions and the Over-mentalization of Agency Helen Steward

295

17

Determinism, Intentional Action, and Bodily Movements Frederick Stoutland

313

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Free Agency, Causation and Action Explanation E. J. Lowe

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19 Gods and Mental States: The Causation of Action in Ancient Tragedy and Modern Philosophy of Mind Constantine Sandis

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20 Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Thinking A. W. Price

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Action in Moral Metaphysics Jonathan Dancy

396

22

Non-cognitivism and Motivation Nick Zangwill

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Index

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Contributors Maria Alvarez is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She has published widely on actions, reasons, and their relation. Her most recent book is Acts and Facts: Reasons, Desires and the Explanation of Action (Oxford University Press, 2009). Annette Baier was educated at the Universities of Otago and Oxford. She taught at the universities of Aberdeen, Auckland, Sydney, Carnegie-Mellon, and Pittsburgh, and held visiting appointments at Florida Gainesville, City University of New York, and Michigan. Since retiring she lives in Queenstown, her birthplace, and Dunedin. She has published much about Hume, on trust, and about the philosophy of mind. Her books are Postures of the Mind (1985), A Progress of Sentiments (1991), Moral Prejudices (1994), and The Commons of the Mind (1997). (The last were her Carus Lectures. She also gave Tanner Lectures, on trust.) She has just published a new collection of essays entitled Death and Character: Future Reflection on Hume. Stephen Boulter is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom. Prior to taking up his current post he was Gifford Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1998–1999. He is the author of The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and is currently working on a book on Medieval Philosophy. Jonathan Dancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he taught for 25 years at the University of Keele. He has written many articles on moral philosophy and on the philosophy of action, and his books include Moral Reasons (1993), Practical Reality (2000), and Ethics Without Principles (2004). He is currently working on a new account of the force of practical deliberation. Fred Dretske is Professor Emeritus at both Stanford University where he taught for 10 years and the University of Wisconsin where he taught for 25 years. He is currently a senior research professor (no teaching) at Duke University, United States. He has several books to his credit: He is the author of several books: Seeing and Knowing (1969), Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), Explaining Behavior (1988), and Naturalizing the Mind (1995) as well as numerous articles. Some of these articles have been collected in Perception, Knowledge, and Belief (2000). His current research interests centre on the nature of conscious experience and problems about self-knowledge.

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Contributors

Stephen Everson has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a lecturer at the University of York, United Kingdom. He has published on various topics in ancient philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of action. Peter Hacker is currently Emeritus Research Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, United Kingdom, where he was a Tutorial Fellow from 1966–2006. He is author of numerous books on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, including the 4 volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (1980–1996), the first two volumes of which were co-authored with Gordon Baker, Insight and Illusion (1972, 2nd edition 1986), Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (1996), and Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies (2001). He has also written extensively, together with Max Bennett, on philosophy and cognitive neuroscience: Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003), and A History of Cognitive Neuroscience (forthcoming 2008). His most recent work is Human Nature – the Categorial Framework (2007), which is the first volume of a projected trilogy on human nature. Sean D. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, United States. His work focuses on various aspects of the philosophical, phenomenological, and cognitive neuroscientific nature of experience. This gives him a broad forum: recent publications have addressed, for example, the experience of time, the possibility of demonstrating that monkeys have blindsighted experience, and the understanding of the sacred in Homer. He has taught courses on twentieth century French and German Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Perception, Imagination and Memory, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Literature. He also runs the Philosophical Psychology Lab at Harvard, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the NSF and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, among others. Joshua Knobe is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, United States. He works primarily in experimental philosophy and is especially interested in the ways in which people’s moral judgments impact their use of various apparently non-moral concepts. His research thus far has investigated the concepts of intentional action, causation, and consciousness, as well as the distinction between doing and allowing and the practice of reason explanation. E. J. Lowe is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, United Kingdom, specialising in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and action, the philosophy of logic and language, and early modern philosophy. Author of, amongst other things, Kinds of Being (1989), Subjects of Experience (1996), The Possibility of Metaphysics (1998), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (2000), A Survey of Metaphysics (2002), Locke (2005), The Four-Category Ontology (2006), and Personal Agency (2008).

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Richard Moran is the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, United States. He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (2001), and various articles the on philosophy of mind, action, aesthetics, and moral psychology. Charles Pigden was born in England and studied philosophy at Cambridge, before going on to do a PhD at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Since 1988 he has taught philosophy at Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand. He has published on a wide range of topics from conspiracy theories to the reality of numbers, but, if pressed, will admit to being a meta-ethicist with special interests in Russell, Moore, and Hume. He is the author of the entry on Russell’s Moral Philosophy in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is one of the very few academics to have published a philosophical dialogue in blank verse. A. W. Price is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom. He works on ethics and moral psychology, ancient and contemporary. He is the author of Mental Conflict (1995), Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (extended edition 1997), and Contextuality in Practical Reason (2008). Joseph Raz is professor at Columbia Law School, United States, and a Research Professor University of Oxford, United Kingdom. His books include The Authority of Law (1979), The Concept of a Legal System (2nd edn 1980), The Morality of Freedom (1986), Practical Reason and Norms ( 2nd edn 1990), Ethics in the Public Domain (1994), Engaging Reason (2000), Value Respect and Attachment (2001), and The Practice of Value (2003). He is also a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. David-Hillel Ruben has a BA in Philosophy from Dartmouth College, United States and a PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of Marxism and Materialism (1977 and 1979), The Metaphysics of the Social World (1985), Explaining Explanation (1990), Action and its Explanation (2003), numerous edited volumes, and many journal articles. Ruben was Professor of Philosophy for many years at the London School of Economics and is now Director of New York University in London and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom. Constantine Sandis is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University and New York University in London. He works on the philosophy of action and its explanation and is the author of numerous related articles and a forthcoming book. He is currently co-editing, with Timothy O’ Connor, A Companion to the Philosophy of Action. G. F. Schueler is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Delaware, United States. He is the author of Reasons and Purposes (2003) and Desire (1995).

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Helen Steward did her graduate work at the University of Oxford before becoming a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford in 1993. She moved to the University of Leeds in 2007. Her first book, The Ontology of Mind, was published in 1997. She is currently working on topics in the philosophy of action, specifically as they relate to the free will debate, and her next book, A Metaphysics for Freedom will be out in 2009. Ralf Stoecker is professor for philosophy, particularly applied ethics, at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Stoecker studied philosophy in Hamburg, Heidelberg and Bielefeld. He wrote a dissertation on the topic of events (Was sind Ereignisse?, Berlin, New York 1992) and a Habilitation on the brain death debate and its moral and metaphysical bearings (Der Hirntod, Freiburg 1999). His areas of specialisation are applied ethics, philosophy of personhood and action theory. Since the 1990s Stoecker published papers on various aspects of human action, in order to establish a radical non-standard account of agency that attempts to combine Davidson’s insights with those from, for example, Ryle and Wittgenstein. Martin J. Stone teaches Law at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University and Philosophy at the New School Graduate Faculty in New York, United States. He is the author of various articles on Wittgenstein, action, interpretation, and philosophy of law. Rowland Stout is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Prior to this he was based at Oxford then Manchester University. He works on problems in the philosophy of agency and the philosophy of mind, in particular on rationality, causation and emotion. He is the author of Things that Happen Because they Should (1996), Action (2005), and The Inner Life of a Rational Agent (2006). Frederick Stoutland is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at St. Olaf College, Minnesota, United States and Permanent Visiting Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden. His main interests are in philosophy of mind and action. His book on Recent Theories of Meaning was published in German in 1997. He has published papers and reviews on various issues in philosophy of action, on aspects of von Wright’s life and philosophy, on Davidson’s philosophy, on Wittgestein, and on truth. Julia Tanney was educated at UCLA and the University of Michigan. Now living in Paris, she is a Senior Lecturer and presently Head of Philosophy at the University of Kent, United Kingdom and holds visiting and guest professorships at the Université de Picardie (Amiens) and the Université de Paris-IV (Sorbonne), and is on the Philosophy planning board at the Université de Paris-I (Sorbonne-Panthéon). She has written numerous articles in philosophy of mind, focussing especially on reason explanation, normativity, rule-following, and self-knowledge. While continuing to insist on the relevance of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy to the contemporary debate,

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she has also contributed a number of pieces (in both French and English) – and is presently writing a book – on Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind and language. Nick Zangwill is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, United Kingdom. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Beauty (2001) and Aesthetic Creation (2007) as well as many papers on moral philosophy and philosophy of mind.

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Introduction Constantine Sandis

The essays collected here are new not only in the sense that they are previously unpublished but, more importantly, in representing the latest thoughts of a growing stream of philosophers whose recent work has challenged some of the most popular ways of thinking about action and its explanation. While many of these dominant conceptions have roots in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy, their most direct inspiration is Donald Davidson’s groundbreaking 1963 article ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes’, itself strongly indebted to C.J. Ducasse’s ‘Explanation, Mechanism and Teleology’ (1925) and Carl G. Hempel’s ‘Rational Action’ (1961–62). The latter challenged the ‘strong neo-Wittgensteinian current of small red books’ and similar-minded works1 by arguing that (a) actions are events, (b) the reasons that ‘rationalize’ action are causes of the events in question and (c) the explanation of action makes reference to known, strict, psychophysical laws. In proposing an account of action individuation (and to some extent also of intention) that was heavily indebted to G.E.M. Anscombe,2 while also denying the truth of (c), Davidson may be seen as making a concession to the enemy. Be that as it may, his influential defense of (a) and (b) was so immense that it has come to represent a crucial turning point in philosophical history, as instructively captured by Julia Tanney in her contribution to this volume. Notwithstanding a continued flux of books that denied these claims,3 the Davidsonian view prevailed. In due course it came to be modified and developed in a variety of conflicting directions by Davidson himself as well as by naturalist philosophers of mind as diverse as David Armstrong, Michael Bratman, Myles Brand, Berent Enç, Jerry Fodor, Alvin Goldman, Ernest LePore, Kirk Ludwig, Al Mele, Hilary Putnam, R. Jay Wallace, and what at some point began to seem like half the philosophical world,4 infiltrating moral philosophy with the help of Michael Smith’s landmark 1987 paper ‘The Humean Theory of Motivation’ which would later play an important structural role in his The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

1

2 Introduction

Both Davidson’s own thesis and the various views that it began rapidly evolved through rational selection to form what many (including Fred Dretske and Ralf Stoecker in their contributions to this volume) have come to call the ‘Standard View’. The view in question has two distinct parts: a theory of action and a thesis concerning the reasons for which actions are performed. The first maintains that actions are events that are identical to movements of the body caused, in a ‘non-deviant’ way, by a combination of beliefs and so-called ‘pro attitudes’; the second states that the primary reason for which an intentional action was performed is whichever combination caused the bodily movement in question. Each of the essays collected here focuses on one or more aspects of the Standard View. Many of them represent the culmination of an important fin de siècle movement of dissent. This included Rowland Stout’s Things that Happen Because they Should (1996), Bede Rundle’s Mind in Action (1997), Helen Steward’s The Ontology of Mind (1997), Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality (2000), Timothy O’ Connor’s Persons and Causes (2000), Paul Pietroski’s Causing Actions (2000), Rüdiger Bittner’s Doing Things for Reasons (2001), Jennifer Hornsby’s Simple Mindedness (2001), John Searle’s Rationality in Action (2001), David-Hillel Ruben’s Action and Its Explanation (2003), and G.F. Schueler’s Reasons and Purposes (2003), as well as additional papers by Arthur Collins, Giuseppina D’Oro, Dan Hutto, Bill Pollard, Josep Lluis Prades, Severin Schroeder, David Velleman and most of the contributors to this book (at least four of which are currently working on related monographs). Be that as it may, the essays are by no means the product of a single school of thought. Indeed, one cannot overemphasise the variety of backgrounds, stances, approaches, and methodologies that these contributors have brought with them. To give but a few examples, these include concerns relating to conceptual analysis and clarification (Alvarez, Everson, Hacker, Stoecker, Raz and Tanney), experimental philosophy (Knobe and Kelly, and Pigden), exegesis (Baier, Boulter, Moran and Stone, Price and Sandis), naturalism (Boulter, Dretske and Pigden), substance dualism (Lowe), and language use (Dancy, Dretske and Hacker). Nor are all of the contributors set on destroying the Standard View. Some merely wish to modify it, while others (such as Boulter and Pigden) defend aspects of it against criticism. Many bear testament to a recently revived interest in Anscombe’s work on the subject. The book divides into two named sections, each encompassing a further narrative of its own. The first deals primarily with the relation between actions and our reasons for performing them, the second with issues in moral psychology, focusing primarily on questions of control, agency and motivation. What follows is a brief overview demonstrating how these and other themes interrelate. Fred Dretske’s ‘What Must Actions be for Reasons to Explain Them?’ opens the volume with the important, but often neglected question, of what kinds of things actions must be if reasons are to explain them. He

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discuss various linguistic reasons for identifying actions with causal processes that (typically) have bodily movements as their result, contrasting it with the Davidsonian view (defended by Enç among others) that actions are these bodily movements, and concluding that this is the only way to give reasons explanatory purchase, thus also emphasising the dependence of a theory of action explanation on a theory of action: ‘if philosophers cannot agree about what action is, they cannot hope to understand the power of reasons to explain it’. Dretske’s analysis leads him to conclude that the reasons for which we act are to be identified with what we believe and desire, as opposed to our believing and desiring. In so doing he joins Raz, Dancy, Everson and others who form part of what the latter calls the ‘growing trend amongst philosophers of action to recognise that a reason for action is something that favours or makes valuable an action of the relevant kind, and that an action is not made valuable by the agent’s merely wanting to do it or believing that it would be good to do it’. This insight (whose flipside is Bernard Williams’ claim that ‘if there are reasons for action, it must be that people sometimes act for those reasons, and if they do their reasons must figure in some correct explanation of their action’5) invites questions regarding the ontological status of the so-called ‘contents’ of our beliefs and desires. It is with this in mind that in his essay ‘What Kind of Things are Reasons for Action?’ Everson revisits the debate between J.L. Austin and Peter Strawson on the differences and similarities between propositions, facts and states of affairs. He concludes that while ‘the concern to determine what reasons there are for some course of action is the concern to make sure that all relevant facts are taken into account’ which should not let this mislead us into thinking that the aim here is ‘to know how many reasons there are’. To think otherwise is to conflate two different notions of reason: a mass-notion and a count-notion. Stout’s ‘Was Sally’s Reason for Running from the Bear that She Thought it was Chasing Her?’ addresses a related worry concerning false belief that cuts across these ontological matters: if Sally believes falsely that the bear is chasing her, in what sense can the ‘content’ of her belief, however we wish to characterize it, be said to be her reason for running from it? Stout’s answer is that in such cases Sally is mistaken to think that she ran for the reason that she thought she had but that this does not imply that she did not run for a related explanatory reason, for example, because there was a noise in the undergrowth (which she rightly took as evidence for the belief that a bear was chasing her). This answers may be contrasted to Raz’s suggestion (in his contribution to this volume) that ‘when the belief is false ... as there is no reason making that belief true, no reason can be part of the explanation’. The issues that Everson and Stout’s essay devote themselves to are further discussed in the essays by Dancy, Hacker, Raz, and Stoecker. Another question one might ask about the reasons for which we act is whether or not these are best conceived of as causes of action. Peter Hacker, David-Hillel

4 Introduction

Ruben, G.F. Schueler and Julia Tanney all answer this question negatively. In ‘Con-reasons as Causes’ Ruben does so by introducing the concept of a ‘con-reason’ (a reason we have but which we do not act upon), persuasively arguing that if such reasons have no relevant causal effects then, given that they are ontologically identical to pro-reasons (reasons we act upon), the latter cannot have any either. The essays by Hacker, Tanney, and Schueler complement Ruben’s by offering various non-causal accounts of how actionexplanation works. These invariably revolve around the practice of placing action in intelligible contexts, but resist the notion that such contextplacement is in any way nomological. Thus, explanations of human behaviour in terms of agential reasons (Hacker outlines five other varieties) are what Tanney, in an essay which like Hacker’s also defends Wittgensteinian non-causalism, calls ‘non-causal context-placing explanations’. Likewise, Schueler maintains that such ‘interpretive explanations’ (to use his own term for them, which is also the title of his essay) ‘are both central to explanations of human action and irreducibly different in form from other commonsense explanations of events, as well as from explanations found in paradigm ‘hard’ sciences such as physics’, concluding that it is consequently ‘a mistake to think that interpretative explanations are somehow reducible to (or explicable in terms of) causal explanations’. One of the most common methods of rendering action intelligible is by redescribing it in a way that reveals the agent’s intention(s). This naturally leads to the task, famously associated with G.E.M. Anscombe, of providing an analysis of how to best capture the relation between action and intention. In ‘Anscombe on the Expression of Intention: An Exegesis’ Richard Moran and Martin J. Stone focus on some cryptic yet highly influential remarks by Anscombe. They work through various possible interpretations of what Anscombe might have had in mind, comparing her insights to those of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Davidson and Bratman, before settling for an account according to which Anscombe does not make the traditional behaviourist move of denying that intention is a mental state but rather denies only ‘that we understand how to apply the notion of a “state” here, on the basis of its application in other contexts like those of belief and desire’. In stressing, instead, the conceptual unity of ‘pure’ intending, intentional action, and intention-in-action, her achievement was to demonstrate that ‘no psychology will afford the right materials for explaining action which does not make use of a concept which applies throughout the spectrum of unfolding action, and which thus has same internal complexity as actions themselves’. Accordingly, Anscombe claimed that all action performed for a reason was intentional under some description (Intention, § 5) thus influencing Davidson6 who characteristically went further, adding that (conversely) all intentional action was done for reasons (a claim rejected by Anscombe and later also by Rosalind Hursthouse7). In ‘Can One Act for a Reason Without Acting Intentionally?’ Joshua Knobe and Sean D. Kelly apply the method of

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experimental philosophy with the aim of demonstrating that people’s intuitions do not conform to Anscombe’s thesis (that a behaviour cannot be performed for a reason unless that behaviour is performed intentionally). They next propose a system of principles that provides a better match for people’s intuitions. While they refrain from judging whether or not people’s intuitions in all these cases are actually correct they nonetheless take this to shift the burden of proof against Anscombe’s thesis. The somewhat weaker claim that ‘acting with an intention or a purpose is acting (as things appear to one) for a reason’ is defended by Joseph Raz in ‘Reasons: Explanatory and Normative’. As Raz notes, ‘while all actions with a purpose or intention are intentional actions, not all intentional actions can sensibly be said to be actions done with an intention’. In his essay he also argues that the normative reasons for which we act (which he identifies with facts) are also explanatory, their possession of the latter property being enabled by their possession of the former. In ‘Reasons, Desires and Intentional Actions’ Maria Alvarez distinguishes both normative and explanatory reasons from the reasons for which one acts (which, following Smith, Dancy, et al., she calls ‘motivating reasons’). Alvarez allows that a motivating reason may be both normative and explanatory, but argues that it need not be so. On her account, a reason for which I act need not explain why I act, nor need it be a reason for which I ought to act. She also denies, contra Raz, that a reason for which one acts that explains why the person acted need do so in virtue of (also) being a normative reason. Her main target, however, is the Humean view that ‘wanting something is part of the reason for which one acts’. While desire, on her view, is capable of explaining and/or motivating action, it cannot do so in virtue of being (even part of) a motivating reason for action since in all such cases the latter will be what she calls the desirability characterization of the action (viz. my reason for desiring to perform it), a point she traces back, through Anscombe, to the ancient and mediaeval view that what is wanted is always wanted under the aspect of the good. The weaker thesis that at least some desires are held for reasons forms part of Thomas Nagel’s famous argument for the view that beliefs can motivate alone (by producing ‘motivated desires’). In his ‘A Niggle at Nagel: Causally Active Desires and the Explanation of Action’ Charles Pigden defends a standard Humean position (not unlike the one attacked by Alvarez) from Nagel’s argument and the various uses it has been put to by Foot, McDowell, Cullity and Gaut, and Dancy. He does so by rejecting the suggestion that the alleged (conceptual) truth that ‘if I do X because I believe that it is likely to bring about Y, then I am acting out of a desire for Y’ is incompatible with the claim that the desire in question is causally efficacious. A separate question is whether Hume was himself a Humean about motivation (in any interesting sense). In her essay ‘Acting in Character’ Annette Baier describes a tension between Hume’s official account of

6 Introduction

action explanation and the numerous explanations of actual actions that he offers in his Histories. Its resolution, she maintains, lies in the realization that Hume’s conceptions of a ‘sentiments’ and ‘passions’ are far more inclusive than the modern notion of a pro-attitude ‘since they cannot all be characterized as “pro” or “con” something’. Baier also demonstrates that Hume interpreters have underestimated the explanatory role played by character in his overall system, arguing ‘that explanations that cite character to explain action do not necessarily reduce to belief-desire explanations’. So it is that she concludes that we would do best to abandon proto-Davidsonian readings of Hume, a far better modern counterpart being someone like (the non-reductive) David Velleman. Equally striking is Stephen Boulter’s account of ‘Aquinas on the Explanation of Action’. According to Boulter, Aquinas was a sophisticated causalist with a sufficiently rich account of the production of action to respond to the contemporary challenges to causalism raised by ‘deviant causal chains’ (discussed by Jonathan Lowe in his contribution to this volume) and the ‘normative constraint’ introduced above in relation to Dretske. Indeed, the overall account of action and its explanation presented here is not dissimilar to that of Dretske, although Aquinas’ hylomorphism also hints at the more ‘naïve’ naturalism of Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell. Having explored a variety of issues and views relating to reasons and causes the first (and largest) half of the volume closes with a ‘back to basics’ contribution, Ralf Stoecker’s ‘Acting for Reasons – A Grass Root Approach’. Stoecker invites us to abandon our philosophical preconceptions and return to the questions we began with namely (1) what is it to act? and (2) what is it to act for reasons? Like Dretske, Stoecker rejects the Standard View of agency. He replaces it with the following, tentative, proposal: ‘To say that a person acts is to claim that a particular fact can be explained with recourse (i) to the person’s ability to behave as if she were constantly engaged in a public practical deliberation about what to do, and moreover (ii) by giving some of the reasons for which she acts, i.e. by mentioning arguments the person could have put forward in the virtual deliberation that she is acting on’. In so doing he paves the way for the discussions of agency, deliberation and responsibility that constitute the second half of the volume. The first of these, Helen Steward’s ‘Sub-intentional Actions and the Over-mentalization of Agency’ denies ‘that it is a necessary condition of something’s being an action that it be associated with a reason-giving explanation’ or indeed with any kind of psychological explanation. To think otherwise, Steward maintains, is to over-intellectualize agency, typically by overmentalizing it. Doing so runs the dual risk of underestimating the extent to which it should be conceived of as an animal power and overestimating our understanding of how it is that we have this basic ability to control certain movements of our bodies, a phenomenon with regard to which she wishes to remain agnostic.

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Rational explanation of those bodily movements involved in intentional action is, according to Frederick Stoutland, prior to neurophysiological explanation (of the same movements). In ‘Determinism, Intentional Action, and Bodily Movements’ he argues that we must consequently reject the thesis of the completeness of physics which states that all situations are governed by precise laws (be they deterministic or probabilistic). While this thesis is irrelevant to rational explanation per se, it is ruled out by Stoutland’s account of the relation between rational and neuroscientific explanation. In contrast to Stoutland, who sees intentional action as the fundamental issue here, in his essay ‘Free Agency, Causation, and Action Explanation’, Jonathan Lowe focuses on a threat which he takes the so-called ‘scientific world-view’ to pose to free agency. In response, he argues that intentional actions are ‘neither mere chance occurrences nor events that are wholly causally determined by prior events’, offering instead an account of free agency that relies on a notion of human intervention that is irreducible to event causation. Rejecting classical agent causalism as ‘an unstable half-way house’ Lowe favours the view that ‘all causation is fundamentally substance causation’. My own essay, ‘Gods and Mental States: The Causation of Action in Ancient Tragedy and Modern Philosophy of Mind’ also rejects the ‘scientific world-view’ typically found in naturalist philosophy. In it I argue that ancient tragedy presents us with an alternative understanding of human agency that, contrary to popular opinion, is preferable to both the Standard View and the various accounts of identification put forward by Frankfurt et al. Aristotle’s understanding of the relation of thought to action is the theme of Anthony Price’s essay ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Thinking’. Price begins by outlining what Aristotle meant by an ‘intellect which reasons for the sake of something and is practical’ before asking whether we should conceive of deliberation as a kind of reasoning that is inherently practical and investigating how an action can stand as the conclusion of practical thinking. His interpretative aim is to demonstrate the plausibility of Aristotle’s work, thus motivating the conclusion that ‘there would be more reason to regret what he got wrong if philosophers had not often lost sight of what he got right’. An important subset of practical evaluation is moral evaluation. In ‘Action in Moral Metaphysics’ Jonathan Dancy brings action explanation to territory typically occupied by philosophers working in moral psychology. He asks what kinds of things actions must be if we are to at least be capable of relating to them morally, turning next to the question of what this tells us about explanation of both moral and non-moral action. Dancy defends a ‘deflationary’ account of actions, according to which actions, unlike events, ‘should not have identity criteria’. This is not to say, however, that there are no such things called ‘actions’ which people do for reasons (moral or otherwise), but only that these are not independent bearers of evaluative and explanatory properties.

8 Introduction

The volume closes with Nick Zangwill’s ‘Non-cognitivism and Motivation’, written in the Humean tradition of bridging the gap between moral psychology and meta-ethics. Zangwill, however, is no Humean. Indeed, he appeals to the phenomenon of ‘variable motivation’ – namely the fact that ‘the same moral judgements move different people differently, and they move the same person differently on different occasions’ – in support (through an inference to the best explanation) of cognitivist externalism with regard to moral motivation. In so doing, he also demonstrates just how far reaching the philosophical significance of work on action explanation can be. I would like to express the deepest of thanks to my co-contributors for their wonderful work, their enthusiasm and their helpful suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank Daniel Bunyard, Priyanka Pathak and Melanie Blair at Palgrave Macmillan: Dan for commissioning this volume and encouraging me to go ahead with it; Pri and Melanie for their subsequence patience and explanatory assistance. Thanks also to the three anonymous referees who read my original proposal and made numerous invaluable points and recommendations, and to Nafsika Athanassoulis, David Oderberg and John Shand for sound advice based on their own editing experiences. I’m also extremely grateful to Robert Vinten for preparing such a wonderful index and to Vidhya Jayaprakash and her team for all their hard work in production. Finally, I would like to thank The National Gallery of Ireland (and especially Camille Lynch) for the permission to reproduce Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid on the front cover. Never sold during Vermeer’s lifetime, it has apparently been stolen twice over the past thirty-five years, once by the IRA. Art critic Mark Harden writes that ‘the placid scene with its muted colours suggests no activity or hint of interruption’, but I prefer to think that the maid is observing someone through the window who has either just departed or is expected to arrive at any moment, as indicated by the empty seat. Perhaps this person is the cause and/or recipient of the letter that the woman is writing, no doubt with the intention of communicating reasons of some kind (an enigmatic still-life on the floor). CS Oxford, February 2008

Notes 1. ‘Hempel on Explaining Action’ (1976), reprinted in Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 261). Most of the works in question are referred to in the first footnote of ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes’ (op. cit., p. 4). Some (most notably William Dray’s) were inspired by R.G. Collingwood as much as by Wittgenstein. 2. Cf. ‘Agency’ (1971) reprinted in Davidson 1980 (op. cit. p. 59, fn. 19) for the account of action individuation upon which the claim that whether or not an action is

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5. 6. 7.

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intentional is a matter of description – as defended in ‘The logical Form of Action Sentences’ (1967, in op. cit., p. 121) – is based and ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes’ (op. cit., p. 5), for the related claim that all action done for reasons is intentional (under some description), discussed further below in relation to Knobe and Kelly’s essay. Davidson held on to these beliefs, all inherited from Anscombe, even after he came to reject her account of what it is to have an intention in 1978’s ‘Intending’ (1978, in op. cit., p. 83ff). Cf. Charles Taylor’s The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), A.R. Louch’s Explanation and Human Action (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), Richard Taylor’s Action and Purpose (Prentice-Hall, 1966), R.S. Peters’ The Concept of Motivation (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), Paul D.G. Brown’s Action (1968), G.H. von Wright’s Explanation and Understanding (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), Rom Harré and Paul F. Secord’s The Explanation of Social Behaviour (Blackwell, 1972), as well as papers by G.E.M. Anscombe (whose complex work had also influenced Davidson), Roderick Chisholm, Anthony Kenny, Keith Lehrer, A.C. MacIntyre, Norman Malcolm, John McDowell, A.R. White, and many others. See, for example, Jerry Fodor’s Psychological Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Random House, 1968), Alvin Goldman’s A Theory of Human Action (Princeton, 1970), Myles Brand’s Intending and Acting: Toward a Naturalized Action Theory (MIT, 1984), Michael Bratman’s Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Harvard, 1988), Al Mele’s Springs of Action (OUP, 1992), and Berent Enç’s posthumous How We Act: Causes, Reasons, Intentions (OUP, 2003). Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, reprinted in Moral Luck (Cambridge: CUP 1981) p. 102; quoted in Joseph Raz’s essay in this volume. See note 2 above (and all related passages). G.E.M. Ancombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957, § 17) and R. Hursthouse, ‘Arational Actions’, Journal of Philosophy, 1991, LXXXVIII, 2, pp. 57–68.

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Part I Reasons and Causes

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1 What Must Actions Be for Reasons to Explain Them? Fred Dretske

If philosophers cannot agree about what action is, they cannot hope to understand the power of reasons to explain it. Without such an understanding, the place of mind in a material world remains utterly mysterious.

1 The problem In a recent book, Berent Enç (2003) identifies actions with changes in the world that are caused by mental events. When reasons cause bodily movements or an external change of some sort in the right (nondeviant) way, we not only have behavior (snoring, blushing, hiccupping) but also action, and action is the movement or change that reasons cause.1 This Davidsonian view is widely accepted in philosophy of mind and action theory. I’ll call it “The Standard View.” The Standard View has much to recommend it. It fits nicely into a materialistic metaphysics. If beliefs, desires, and fears are physical events of some sort (presumably in the brain of the actor), as they certainly will be on a materialistic view of the world,2 then there is no problem in understanding how they produce the actions for which they provide (when the reasons are good) a rational justification. They cause them. Neurophysiologists provide, in increasingly rich detail, the electrical/chemical/mechanical details of just how this happens. So mental events are genuine players—via action—in the wider physical world in which they exist. However, this story doesn’t help one understand how reasons explain actions. As physical events in the brain, beliefs and desires can cause me to go to the fridge without my reasons for going to the fridge explaining my trip to the fridge. What I believe (that there is beer in the fridge) needn’t be true for this “fact” (that there is beer in the fridge) to be my reason, at least the reason I (wanting a beer) give, for going to the fridge. How does a false mental content—that there is beer in the fridge—explain a physical movement? If we do not understand how the content (whether true or false) 13

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of a mental state—the fact that I thought there was beer in the fridge— could explain a bodily movement, the fact that thoughts (being physical events) caused such movements provides absolutely no scientific or philosophical illumination. After all, we all know that spoken words—acoustic vibrations with meaning—cause things. They cause things in the same way as other sounds cause things. They exert pressure on them. That is not a problem. The problem, rather, is understanding whether—and if so, how— the meaning of these vibrations explains their effect. When I make some silly remark and my wife frowns, I understand reasonably well as to how my remark might have caused her to frown. My remark caused her eardrums to vibrate, a physical event that in turn caused electrical signals to be sent to her auditory cortex. I don’t know exactly how things proceed from this point forward, but it seems clear that eventually the motor cortex is activated and this, via electrical signals sent to facial muscles, produces a change of expression—a bodily change we describe as a frown. All this, in broad outline, seems reasonably clear and uncontroversial. What I don’t understand is how what I said, the meaning of the acoustic vibrations I produced, explains this effect. How does meaning explain her frown as it must if she is frowning not because I produced acoustic vibrations but because I said something silly? That, after all, is what she would give as her reason if asked to explain why she was frowning. Until we understand how meaning or content—what we say and believe—figures in the explanation of the physical events our utterances and beliefs produce (frowns and bodily movements), we will not understand the role of mind or meaning in the world. It is for this reason that I think it is a mistake to identify action with the external events (e.g., bodily movements) that are the effect of the reasons for which the action is performed. It makes it impossible for reasons to explain the action. Even if one assumed that bodily movements to the refrigerator are caused (in an appropriate way) by a belief and desire, these movements need not and, if we accept the scientific story, are not explained by what the person believed and desired. Not unless one assumes that the electrical/ chemical/mechanical explanations given by neurophysiologists are—and will always be—deficient or incomplete. If the neurophysiological story is correct, then actions must be something other than bodily movements if reasons are to explain them. Standard View theorists (like Enç) do, of course, carefully distinguish action from the result of action, the event or events which must occur for the action to occur but which can occur without any such action. The movement of my finger is the result of my moving my finger (the action), and there is a clear conceptual distinction between an action and its result. I can’t move my finger without my finger moving, but my finger can move without my moving it. You can move it. This distinction between an action and its result, although perfectly correct and useful, is of no help with the problem of understanding how reasons could explain actions. It is of no

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help because, on The Standard View, the action (moving one’s finger) is still identified with the result (finger movements) when the result is brought about by reasons. So when you move your finger deliberately, for reasons, then if someone can explain why your finger moved, then, since the finger movement (result) is one and the same event as your moving it (the action), they have explained why you moved it. This, it seems to me, is still the wrong result. Neurophysiologists may be experts on why fingers and other bodily parts move as they do, but are they also experts on why people move them as they do? A husband is conceptually (type-type) distinct from a man, yes, but this doesn’t prevent (token) husbands from being identical with (token) men. Susan’s husband is a man. It follows that if that man is Susan’s husband, explanations of why that man got drunk are explanations of why Susan’s husband got drunk. Likewise, if actions are a special class of bodily movements, movements brought about by reasons, explanations of why a bodily movement occurred are, perforce, explanation of why an action occurred when that movement is caused by reasons (i.e., when it is an action). The Standard View, therefore, has this unfortunate result. When I go to the fridge to get a beer, an electrical/chemical/mechanical explanation of why the bodily movements occurred that got me to the fridge are, necessarily, explanations of why I went to the fridge. As far as I can see, this leaves the explanatory role of my reasons for going to the fridge epiphenomenal. Even if I have reasons, they don’t explain anything.

2

Temporal considerations: Basic vs. nonbasic actions

The Standard View has additional problematic consequences when applied to nonbasic actions. What do we identify as the action of, say, kicking a field goal in football? The result of this action is, presumably, the football flying between the goal posts. One hasn’t kicked a field goal unless this event occurs, but this event can occur without one kicking a field goal. One hasn’t kicked a field goal if one (or somebody else) throws the ball through the uprights. But, surely, the action of kicking a field goal cannot be identified with this result even when this result is caused in the right way (by, say, an intentional kick of the ball). If we identified the action with this result (when caused in the right way), then the action would occur after the agent did everything (kicked the ball in the right direction) he could do to bring about this result. In fact, the kicker could have dropped dead before he kicked the field goal if kicking a field goal is to be identified with the result of kicking a field goal. It would, I admit, have to be a long field goal and a quick death for this to happen, but it could happen. Can you do things? Intentionally do things, after you are dead? I know your actions can have effects (results) after you are dead, but can you actually do things after you are dead?

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Enç (2003) was fully aware of this anomaly and for that reason refused to identify nonbasic actions with their result. That identification only works for basic actions. For nonbasic actions like kicking a field goal the action is identified not with the result of the act (the ball flying through the uprights) but with the result of the basic action by means of which the nonbasic action is performed. Assuming, then, that the basic act by means of which one kicks a field goal is kicking the ball toward the goal post with the appropriate intention, the action—kicking a field goal—is identified with the result of the basic act—the movement of the leg by means of which one kicks the ball. Since basic acts are identified with their results when these results are caused in the right way (by an intention), kicking a field goal is identified with leg movements when those leg movements are caused by an intention to kick a field goal and these leg movements in turn cause the ball to fly between the goal posts. So on this account one avoids the paradoxical result that one can kick a field goal after one kicks the ball, but it has the odd result that kicking a field goal occurs before the ball goes through the uprights. Consider a different example. On this variation of The Standard View killing X (having the result that X dies) is not to be identified with the result of this act (X’s death), but with the result of the basic act by means of which one causes X’s death. So if one kills him by dropping poison in his morning coffee, then killing X is to be identified with the result of the basic action by means of which one kills him, the finger and arm movements executed in placing poison in the coffee. Once again, we get the result that the person is killed before the person dies—perhaps, depending on the effectiveness of the poison, long before he dies. This didn’t sound right to me. That is why I used such examples (in Dretske 1988) to argue that actions (behavior in general) should not be identified with bodily movements (or the more distant effects of bodily movement) but with a causal process, the process in which internal events (reasons in the case of actions) cause such events. Kicking a field goal, for instance, should not be identified with the ball flying through the uprights (the result of this action). Nor should it be identified with the bodily movements that cause the ball to fly through the uprights (the result of the basic action by means of which this action is executed). It should rather be identified with a temporally extended causal process in which one thing—leg and foot movements or, even earlier, the reasons those movements are executed— causes the ball to fly through the uprights. An action, being a causal process, takes time, and the time it takes is the interval from the occurrence of the internal cause (the reasons one has for performing the act) to the result of the action. One hasn’t kicked a field goal until the ball goes through the uprights. One has not killed X until X dies. One starts to do these things at the moment one’s reasons initiate the causal process that ends up with that result, but one hasn’t done it until the result occurs.

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An interesting legal application of this distinction occurred in the state in which I reside. In the case of North Carolina State v. Detter (1979) the question arose as to whether a woman killed her husband at the time she administered the poison (February 1977) or at the time he died (June 1977). This turned out to be important since the law defining penalties for murder changed during this five-month interval. In February, the death sentence was not permitted. In June, it was permitted. So if the woman killed him in February, at the time she administered the poison, she could not be given the death penalty. If she killed him in June, when he died, she could. In an effort to comply with the prohibition against ex post facto application of the law, the court found that in this case the murder occurred at the time the woman administered the poison—in February—a time before the victim died. So the court held that she murdered him five months before he died. This, I admit, looks like the court is siding with The Standard View—at least Enc’s version of it. Nonetheless, the court also held that despite murder being a crime that requires both act (administration of poison in this case) and result (death), special considerations (of justice and fairness, presumably) may cause it to go one way rather than the other on this matter. In the case of North Carolina State v. Williams, for instance, when different legal considerations dominated (whether someone was an accessory after the fact to murder) the court identified the time of the murder with the time of death. So a person who rendered aid to the killer after the fatal blow was struck but before the resulting death could not be convicted of being an accessory after the fact to murder because the murder had not yet occurred (the victim had not yet died). The courts, we hope, are more interested in legal justice than terminological niceties, so I do not take this instance of judicial waffling as decisive. If it takes Sarah five months to kill Clyde, the courts are free to set the time of action wherever they please (in this five-month interval) to achieve fairness or justice in the application of the law. This is simply to say that courts aren’t in the business of making metaphysical judgments (although we hope that their judgments are in accord with commonsense metaphysics) anymore than the courts are in the business of making moral judgments (though, again, we hope their judgments are in accord with commonsense morality). The lesson of these examples, I’m afraid, is that the law isn’t of much help with this problem. It illustrates the problem; it doesn’t solve it. I don’t know how to adjudicate disagreements about ordinary language. It sounds wrong to me to say Sarah killed Clyde after Sarah was dead (which it makes sense to say if the time of Sarah’s action is the time of result—Clyde’s death). And it sounds wrong to say that she killed him before he died (which it makes sense to say if the time of action is the basic act Sarah performed that caused Clyde’s death). So I’m pushed toward the view that behavior is a causal process between basic act (or the mental antecedents of the basic act)

18 What Must Actions Be for Reasons to Explain Them?

and the result, a process that may take a long time. But others (like Enç), I know, see (and hear) things differently. So let me set aside this dispute about what it sounds odd to say and get to the real, the deeper, reason I think we have to identify behavior not (in the case of basic actions) with the results that reasons cause but with a causal process in which reasons cause these results. The real reason lies in the explanatory power of reasons. Without a process view of action, reasons are powerless to explain it.

3

Explaining action

I have been arguing that if basic action really is just bodily movement and change, then neuroscientists, not you and I, are (or will someday be) the authorities on why you and I do the things we do. Neuroscientists will tell us why our fingers and legs, our eyes and tongues, move the way they do because neuroscientists are, or will someday be, the experts on those electrical/chemical/mechanical processes that make these parts of our bodies move the way they do. If intentional psychology, explanations of behavior in terms of a person’s beliefs and desires, is competing with neuroscience for an explanation of bodily movement, then I, for one, don’t see much hope for intentional psychology. We should all pack up and move to San Diego. It will be neuroscientists (not the kicker) who will tell us why the kicker kicked the ball. It will be neuroscientists, not me, who will tell you why I went to the fridge. The only wayI know to avoid this result is to suppose that the sort of psychology that adverts to beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears in explaining (sometimes) why people behave the way they do is not playing the same explanatory game as neuroscience. Neuroscience may be able to tell us why our legs move the way they do, but we are better positioned, at least sometimes, to explain why we moved our legs that way. This strategy, though, requires distinguishing between the movement of a kicker’s legs and the kicker moving his legs. It requires distinguishing between the bodily movements that get me to the refrigerator and my going to the refrigerator. Once this distinction is in place, we can let neuroscientists explain the bodily movements. Reasons and the mental states that give us our reasons are playing a different explanatory game. Their business is the explanation of behavior. Nevertheless, how does this help? Whether we are talking about bodily movements or the causing of bodily movements, we are still talking about physical events (or processes) of some sort, and the question is: why are reasons any more relevant to the one than to the other. If neuroscientists are the experts on why our legs move, why aren’t they also the experts on why those events in the brain, whatever they are, cause the legs to move? I’ll give an analogy that I hope will be suggestive. It will be crude, but I hope the idea will come through.

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Coins are deposited in vending machines and they cause the machine to behave in certain ways. You deposit US$1 worth of coins in the machine, push a button, and a coke comes tumbling down the chute. There is little doubt about what causes the coke to be ejected. It is the coins you put in it together with the button you pushed. If you had put only 85¢ worth of coins, nothing would have happened when you pushed the button. Cokes these days cost US$1. So we routinely explain the machine’s behavior—giving us a coke—by describing the monetary value of the objects, the coins, we put in it. You have to put in a dollar, we say, to get a coke. Just 85¢ isn’t enough. That is why you didn’t get a coke. Put in 15¢ more and the machine will behave the way you want it to when you push the button. Now we all know, or think we know, why the machine really behaves the way it does. Despite our ordinary way of talking it isn’t that the objects we deposit in them have a certain monetary value—US$1 or 85¢ as the case may be—that explains why a coke comes (or fails to come) out when we push the button. It is the fact that these coins have a certain size, shape, density, or whatever other intrinsic properties machines are built to respond to. Slugs of no (legal) monetary value whatsoever will have exactly the same effect on the machine if they have the same intrinsic properties—that is, if they are perfect counterfeits. Monetary value is causally irrelevant, epiphenomenal, as far as the machine-behavior is concerned, and it is epiphenomenal despite our ordinary practice of invoking monetary value in our explanations of machine-behavior. We say that the machine didn’t give us a coke because we didn’t deposit the required US$1 despite our knowledge that it isn’t having a monetary value of US$1 that explains the result. It is, and we all know it is, the intrinsic physical properties of these coins, not their monetary value, that explains the result. The coins (together with pushing the button) cause this result, yes, but what it is about the coins that explains this result is physics, not economics. It is facts about shape, size, and weight, not facts about monetary value. As far as vending machines are concerned, economics is epiphenomenal. We are merely pretending it isn’t when we explain machine-behavior by describing economic facts. So if machine-behavior (giving us a coke) is identified with the result of a machine’s basic actions, with the external events or changes (cokes coming down the chute) brought about (in the right way) by the appropriate internal events (the coins we deposit in them), we would have to conclude that physics, not economics, was the place to go for explanations of (say) why the machine didn’t give me a coke. Physics, not economics, would tell us why machines behave the way they do because physics, not economics, tells us what it is about the internal causes (the deposited coins) that explains their effect on machine movement. What happens, though, if we identify machine-behavior not with the result of its basic actions (the external events the deposited coins cause), but with the temporal process in which these internal objects (coins) bring

20 What Must Actions Be for Reasons to Explain Them?

about this result? What if we identify the machine’s action of giving us a coke not with a coke’s appearance, but with internal coins causing cokes to appear? Ask yourself, why do objects having the intrinsic properties of our nickels, dimes, and quarters have this effect on machines? Why, when deposited in coke machines, do they cause cokes to appear? Well, pretty clearly, vending machines are designed and manufactured to be sensitive to objects having the size and shape (intrinsic properties) of our nickels, dimes, and quarters because an important extrinsic property, monetary value, supervenes on these intrinsic properties. Business being what it is, machines that dispense commodities like cigarettes, food, and drink would not be designed to yield their contents to objects having these intrinsic properties unless objects having these intrinsic properties had monetary value, for the most part. Remove the fact of supervenience (as a result of widespread counterfeiting, say) and objects with these intrinsic properties, our nickels, dimes, and quarters, would soon lose their causal efficacy. They would no longer produce the effects they now produce. They would lose their causal efficacy because machines would no longer be built to respond to them. The causal efficacy of objects having those physical properties (on machines— not to mention people) depends on the supervenience of monetary value on those intrinsic properties. Let value supervene on a different set of intrinsic properties and these other objects will, quickly enough, assume the causal powers of our current nickels, dimes, and quarters. So if what we want to explain is not why a coke came sliding down the chute (the shape and size of the coins deposited will explain that), but why objects having the size and shape of nickels, dimes, and quarters cause cokes to appear, why objects of that sort have effects of this sort, the answer lies, in part at least, in economics, not physics. It lies in the fact that there is a reliable correlation—at least it is a reliable enough correlation—between intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the internal cause. When we turn to the mind–body case, this fact is suggestive. If we think of ourselves as “vending machines” whose internal causal structure is designed not, as with vending machines, by engineers, but by evolution and learning, we get the following result: although it is the “size” and “shape” (the syntax, as it were) of the internal causes that makes the body move the way it does it is, or may be, the fact that a certain extrinsic property supervenes on that neurological “size” and “shape” that explains why internal events having these intrinsic properties have the effects they have. What explains why certain neurological events in the visual cortex of a chicken— those caused by an overhead hawk—cause the bodily movements we think of as cowering and hiding is the fact that these neurological events have a significant (to chickens) extrinsic property—the property of normally being caused by predatory hawks. It is the possession of this extrinsic property (what the internal events indicate about external affairs) that explains why objects having those intrinsic properties cause what they do.

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There is but a short step from here to the conclusion that it is the extrinsic, not the intrinsic, properties of internal events that causally explain behavior. All that is needed to execute this step is the premise that behavior is not the bodily movements that internal events cause, but the causing of these movements by internal events. All that is required is an appropriate distinction between the behavior that beliefs and desires explain and the bodily movements that are the result of that behavior. For, if moving your arms and legs (behavior) is not the same as the movements of the arms and legs, but rather an internal event causing the arms and legs to move, then although the intrinsic properties of our internal “coins” will explain (via activation of muscles) the movements of arms, legs, and tongue, the extrinsic properties, perhaps even the meaning or content, of these internal events will explain why we move them. Reasons get their hand on the explanatory wheel by distinguishing what reasons are supposed to explain—behavior—from the movements that are the result of that behavior. In the final analysis, then, it is not merely the temporal anomalies relating to when behavior occurs that is the reason we must insist on the distinction between behavior and the results of behavior, the distinction between moving your arm and the movement of your arm. Although these anomalies are, I think, important, they are not decisive. It is, at a deeper level, the need to understand the explanatory relevance of what we believe and desire, intend and fear that is the key.

Notes 1. I speak here of reasons causing actions. It would be better to speak of the mental states (belief, fear, desire, etc.) whose content constitutes our reasons as the cause (see Dancy 2000). When it is important to do so (it isn’t at the moment), I will be more careful in the way I describe these matters. 2. This is the unobjectionable (to most materialists) token-token identity, not the objectionable (to almost everyone) type-type identity where a belief in general (e.g., the belief that there is beer in the fridge) is identified with a certain type of brain state.

References Dancy, J. 2000. Practical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dretske, F. 1988. Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (A Bradford Book). Enç, B. 2003. How We Act. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 What Are Reasons for Action? Stephen Everson

1 When Donald Davidson published ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ in 1963 what was most striking in his article was the claim that an agent’s beliefs and desires could be the causes of, and not merely the reasons for, his actions. In more recent years, however, what has become more controversial is whether one can properly take an agent’s propositional attitudes to be reasons for his actions. There has been a growing trend amongst philosophers of action to recognise that a reason for action is something that favours or makes valuable an action of the relevant kind, and that an action is not made valuable by the agent’s desire to do it or belief that it would be good to do it. One’s belief may be false and one’s desire unmotivated, and in such cases there may be nothing to be said for the action they lead to. For ease of labelling, let us say that an account of reasons such as Davidson’s is psychologistic and that the opposing account is rationalist. Now, an obvious way to contrast psychologism and rationalism is to say that whilst the former takes reasons to be psychological states of agents, the rationalist rather takes them to be facts. For the psychologist my reason for writing to the Vice Chancellor will be something like my belief that he needs telling, or my desire to tell him what he most needs to hear, or some suitable combination of beliefs and desires, whilst for the rationalist the reason will rather be the fact that he needs to be told. Although I think that rationalism is correct, I do not intend to provide support for it here. My interest is rather in taking up the question of what kind of thing we should take reasons to be if rationalism is true. For whilst commitment to psychologism does settle that question – reasons, on this view, are psychological states of agents – rationalists may yet disagree about what kind of things are reasons for action. That disagreement is not settled by accepting that reasons are facts, since there may be prior disagreement over the nature of facts. So, Joseph Raz in

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defending the claim that reasons are facts rather than beliefs, proceeds to characterise facts in a rather Austinian manner: When saying that facts are reasons I am using the term ‘fact’ in an extended sense to designate that in virtue of which true or justified statements are true or justified. By ‘fact’ is meant simply that which can be designated by the use of the operator ‘the fact that ... .’ Similarly facts include the occurrence of events, processes, performances and activities. Given this wide use of ‘fact’, beliefs, though not their contents, are also facts.1 Others, however, will incline to a more Strawsonian understanding of facts, according to which ‘facts are what statements (when true) state; they are not what statements are about’2 – nor, we may add, are they what make a true statement true. On this view, facts will indeed be rather the contents of (true) beliefs than beliefs themselves, since they will be true propositions. There would, of course, be little point in pursuing a debate over which understanding of ‘fact’ gets closest to ordinary usage – it is unlikely that our ordinary talk of facts is, or needs to be, sufficiently coherent to allow any helpful theoretical morals to be drawn by reflecting on it. What is important is to note that one may talk about facts in these two different ways and to make sure that one does not slide between them. Having distinguished them, one may then consider the theoretical uses each is suited to – and, in this case, which of the two notions provides items suited to stand as reasons for action.3 Stipulatively, then, I shall follow Strawson and talk of facts as true propositions, using ‘state of affairs’ for the kind of thing taken by Raz to be reasons. The issue, then, is whether, having abandoned psychologism about reasons, the rationalist should think of reasons as facts or as states of affairs. Although Raz, as we have seen, effectively opts for the latter, this in fact constitutes little more than an aside in his argument, and he does not argue the point.4 Similarly, Jonathan Dancy in his recent Practical Reality, whilst declaring firmly that reasons for action, ‘are things like his self-satisfaction, her distress, yesterday’s bad weather, and the current state of the dollar. They cannot be abstract objects of the sort that propositions are generally supposed to be,5 does little to support this. He does say that propositions ‘are, as we might say, too thin or insubstantial to be able to make an action wrong’ – but does not then move to turn that metaphor into argument.6 This is disappointing, since the issue is not without interest. At the very least, working out what is at stake in the matter helps to clarify the different ways in which we talk of reasons. Although I favour a propositional account of reasons, I do not

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pretend that I here provide anything like a knock-down argument against taking reasons to be states. My aim is to provide what might serve as a starting point for more serious discussion of the issue.

2 In renouncing the idea that one can identify agents’ reasons for action with their own propositional attitudes, the rationalist opens up the possibility that the reasons agents have to act are quite independent of their own motivational states. That is to say, it may be that the relation between a consideration, an agent (or agents) and an act type, such that the consideration is a reason for the agent to perform an action of that type, may now hold independently of the psychological condition of the agent.7 Certainly, on the rationalist’s account, one need make no mention of the agent’s propositional attitudes in specifying that this relation obtains.8 However, whether or not reasons are psychologically constrained – whether, to use the current terminology, we are to understand reasons internally or externally – they are nevertheless able to enter into our thought. To engage in practical deliberation one must reflect on the reasons for and against acting in whatever way; to criticise what someone does is to place his action in the context of the reasons he had for acting, and to explain someone’s action may be, in part, to specify the reasons for which they acted. All of these activities require that we should have at least limited cognitive access to the reasons that agents have to act, and such access has seemed to some to require that reasons must themselves be propositional in character. So, Stephen Darwall appeals to the deliberative role of reasons to deny the Davidsonian claim that we can take an agent’s propositional attitudes to be themselves reasons for him to act. Darwall’s objection is that beliefs and desires are not the right kind of thing to play the role in deliberation that reasons need to: since reasons ‘are what people are to take account of in evaluating choiceworthy alternatives, they must be the sort of thing that can be thought or said on behalf of an act’, and this requires that ‘they must be propositional in form and expressible with a “that” clause’. More generally considered, reasons for someone to do something are a subclass of the things that can be said asserted, considered, judged, thought, and so forth. To have a convenient tag to refer to such items, and to preserve the association of reasons with things that can be said on behalf of acting, I shall say that reasons for someone to do something are dicta.9 The implication of this for a thesis such as Davidson’s are obvious enough. If reasons must be dicta – or, as I shall rather say, propositions – then beliefs and desires are not of the ‘appropriate ontological category’ to be reasons,

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and so the idea that ‘any reason for a person to do something must actually be a desire of his is therefore a nonstarter’.10 Although Darwall’s argument is directed against the psychologist about reasons, it functions as effectively against a rationalist who thinks that reasons are non-psychological states of affairs. Darwall’s argument is too hasty, however. Whilst it is certainly true that in practical deliberation one reflects on reasons for and against acting in whatever way, and so one must be able to think about reasons for acting, it is not a consequence of this that the reasons themselves must be able to stand as the contents of the thoughts one has about them, any more than it is a consequence of the need to think about the objects in one’s environment when deciding how to move around them that those objects should be propositional in character. An advocate of taking reasons to be states of affairs has no difficulty in describing what goes on when an agent deliberates. If it were Ian’s distress that favoured my telling him where I hid the wine, rather than the fact that he is distressed, then I can act on this reason by entertaining both the thought that Ian is distressed and that his distress favours my putting him out of his misery by revealing the wine. I need to think, that is, that the relevant state of affairs obtains – but I can do this consistently by thinking that the reason for revealing the wine is his distress itself. It is that state which I take to be the reason for acting – and since I think that it obtains and favours the action, I also think that I have a reason to reveal the wine. The point, then, is that whilst we of course need to be able to think about reasons, this does not mean that reasons must be what we think when we do so. We do not need reasons to be propositional in order to account for their role in deliberation or evaluation. They also, however, have a role in the explanation of action, and this would seem to provide more compelling grounds for taking them to be facts rather than states of affairs.

3 Consider what Bernard Williams gives as one of the two ‘fundamental motivations’ for his internalist account of reasons: It must be a mistake simply to separate explanatory and normative reasons. If it is true that A has a reason to w, then it must be possible that he should w for that reason; and if he does act for that reason, then that reason will be the explanation of his acting. So the claim that he has a reason to w – that is, the normative statement ‘He has a reason to w’ – introduces the possibility of that reason being an explanation; namely, if the agent accepts that claim (more precisely, if he accepts that he has more reason to w than to do anything else). This is a basic connection. When the reason is an explanation of his action, then of course it will be,

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in some form, in his [actual motivations], because certainly – and nobody denies this – what he actually does has to be explained by his [actual motivations].11 If this argument were sound, and unless Williams is speaking loosely, it would settle the question of whether reasons are propositional. For explanations, or what are given in explanations, are facts, and so if reasons are to be able to be themselves explanations, they too would need to be facts – that is, true propositions.12 The idea that reasons are what one specifies in explaining actions is one that seems to have great intuitive appeal, and Williams’ argument here can be helpfully amplified by looking at John Searle’s more sustained treatment of these matters in his Nicod lectures. He states: The notion of a reason ... is embedded in at least three other notions, and the four can only be understood together as a family. The other notions are ‘why’, ‘because’, and ‘explanation’... . Stating a reason is typically giving an explanation or part of an explanation. Explanations are given in answer to the question ‘Why?’ and a form that is appropriate for the giving of a reason is ‘Because’.13 He then draws the conclusion from this that reasons must be propositional: The syntax of both ‘Why?’ questions and ‘Because’ answers, when fully spelled out, always requires an entire clause and not just a noun phrase. This syntactical observation suggests two semantic consequences. First the specification of both explanans and explanandum must have an entire propositional content, and second, there must be something outside the statement corresponding to that content. Reason-statements are statements, and hence linguistic entities, speech acts with certain sorts of propositional contents; but reasons themselves and the things they are reasons for are not typically linguistic entities. Reasons, then, are what reason-statements are true in virtue of – and there is ‘a general term to describe those features of the world that make statement or clauses true, or in virtue of which they are true, and that term is “fact” ’.14 However, action-explanations themselves show that one cannot maintain that all reasons are facts, since when the agent has false beliefs one cannot cite facts about the world to explain what he does. In those cases, one has to cite the belief itself as the reason. This, according to Searle, can still be accommodated within the general schema, since beliefs, like facts, have, he thinks, a propositional structure. ‘The formal constraint on being a reason is that an entity must have a propositional structure and must correspond to a reason statement’.15

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That Searle is moved to treat both beliefs and their contents as reasons for action should alert us to the fact that something has gone wrong here. For in addition to any formal constraint on what kind of thing can a reason be there must also be a substantive constraint, and this is that anything that is a reason should be such as to favour the action for which it is a reason. The worry here is not that Searle is assuming a psychologistic understanding of reasons: in accepting facts as reasons at all, Searle distances himself from that position. The worry is rather the inappropriateness of thinking that, for instance, the fact that Ian is distressed and my believing that Ian is distressed should both be such as to stand in the same reason-giving relation to my revealing the wine. A clue to what is going wrong in Searle’s discussion can be found in how he supports his contention that the notion of a reason is tied to that of explanation: ‘To the question, “Why is it the case that p?” the answer, “Because it is the case that q” gives the reason why p, if q really explains, or partly explains p. That is the reason why all reasons are reasons why.’16 Now, it is certainly true that in giving any explanation one will cite a reason for what one explains, but it does not follow from this that all reasons are reason why. In effect, Searle is just equivocating on the notion of a reason. Care needs to be taken in this context to distinguish between different kinds of explanatory role that reasons for action might play. Williams and Searle commit themselves to the claim that reasons for action are themselves explanations, but this is clearly not the only way to allow such reasons to play a role in explanations. In an earlier article Williams placed a condition on something’s being a reason for action that it should be able to ‘figure’ in an explanation of action17 – and that condition is uncontroversial precisely because it is so vague. To see how it might be met without moving to accept the claim that reasons are explanations, it is helpful here to consider the parallel case of causal explanation. For one can certainly accept that it is a condition on taking one event to be a cause of another that the first should be able to figure in the explanation of the occurrence of its effect – one cannot have a causal explanation that does not make manifest to some degree the cause of what is explained – but clearly one should not be led from this to the thought that the cause will itself be the explanation of its effect: to use a slightly old-fashioned jargon, causation is a ‘natural’ relation that holds between events (or if one prefers between states or objects), whilst explanation is a ‘rational’ relation that holds between facts.18 In the case of causation and causal explanation, it is fortunately easy to distinguish these different relations, since we have the terminology to do so: the relevant relata of the two explanations are causes in the first relation and reasons in the second. Clear discussion of the explanatory role of reasons is made more difficult by the fact that ‘reason’, unlike ‘cause’, suffers from a straightforward ambiguity – and, moreover, an ambiguity that is, in this context, capable of misleading even the most alert. For there is a general

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notion of a reason that permits us to say of an explanation of any type that it cites the reason for what it explains. The reason why my foot is swollen is that I dropped the dictionary on it; the reason why the train slid off the rails is that the points were loose. When the explanations are causal, we can readily distinguish between the reason which is explanans of the explanation and the cause of the effect whose occurrence we are explaining. The failure of the points was the cause of the derailment, whilst the reason the train was derailed was the fact that the points failed. When we come to rationalising explanations, in contrast, matters are terminologically more confusing, since one way such explanations work is by citing an agent’s reason for action. The notion of a reason here, however, is the notion of an item which stands in a justifying relation to an action, and this is at a level parallel to that of causes and not that of the ‘reasons’ of causal explanation. Let us say that a reason of this kind is a normative reason and that a reason of the other is an explanatory reason. Therefore, just as in the case of causal explanation, where we can say that one specifies the explanatory reason (some causally relevant fact) and in doing this cites the cause, in rational explanation one specifies the explanatory reason why someone did something, thereby citing their normative reason. It will now be seen just how treacherous it might be in this context to pose the question ‘What was the reason why a w-ed’, since this might properly be answered by citing either an explanatory or a normative reason, and it will be easy enough to be confused about which kind of reason has been offered. In this context also, then, it may seem less controversial than it should do to claim that someone’s (normative) reason for action will also be the explanation for his acting as he does. At least without further argument, there is no more reason to suppose that the normative reason for an action will be its explanation than there is to think that the cause of an event will be its. All explanatory reasons are reasons why, and to give the reason why someone did something may be to cite his reason for acting: but one can accept that all reasons why are facts whilst leaving it open whether reasons for are states of affairs or propositions.

4 Neither the role of reasons in deliberation nor in explanation, then, is such as to support taking them to be propositional in character. We certainly take reasons into account when deciding how to act, but this only requires that we are able to think about reasons and not that they should be themselves the contents of our thoughts when we do think about them. Similarly, although reasons for action do figure in our explanations of actions, they do not need to figure directly as one of the relata of an explanation, any more than do the actions whose occurrence is to be explained. Causal explanations similarly connect facts, but in doing so explain why some events come

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about as the result of others. Indeed, the advocate of taking reasons to be states of affairs is likely to be encouraged by the comparison with causation and causal explanation, since to take normative reasons to be states of affairs will allow the two kinds of explanation to run on satisfyingly parallel lines. Each kind of explanation will connect facts, whilst its underlying relation will be between spatio-temporally located items – events in the case of causation and states of affairs (and events) in the case of rationalising explanation. As it stands, of course, this is no more than suggestive – and whilst it is clear why causes cannot be propositions (as they must be temporally related to their effects and so themselves be temporally located), it is at least not obvious that reasons too need to be temporally related to the actions they favour. I shall return to that issue in the section 7. First, however, I want to consider a more direct line of argument for taking reasons to be states of affairs. Consider here Joseph Raz’s characterisation of what he calls the ‘classical approach’ to agency: this ‘takes acting for a reason to be the distinctive and central case of human agency ... . Reason is then explained in part by invoking value: valuable aspects of the world constitute reasons’.19 Now, the idea that reasons are at least determined by valuable features of the world should be common ground to all except those who favour a psychologism about reasons. If our actions, or the states or events they give rise to, did not have good or bad features, then we should not have reasons to act at all. And whilst Raz is fairly relaxed about what can be reasons – these, he thinks, may include ‘events, acts, states and more’ – all the possibilities he gives are concrete rather than abstract items. Indeed, it may be the link between reasons and value that underlies Dancy’s rather pre-Socratic remark, cited earlier, that propositions cannot be reasons because they are ‘too thin or insubstantial to make an action wrong’. 20 Whatever this quite means, it is clear enough that Dancy thinks that something can only be a reason for action if it is the sort of thing that can make an action wrong (or right, presumably) – and that condition might well seem more compelling if one accepts the dependency of reasons on ‘valuable aspects of the world’. Certainly, if it is correct, it would seem to provide the basis for an argument that reasons are concrete rather than abstract items. For it is surely plausible that what have value or disvalue are the states of affairs that obtain and the events that occur in the physical world and not facts about those states and events. It would be at best odd to maintain that what made it wrong to tell Brad the truth was not the distress he suffered as a result or the pleasure I took in causing it but rather the fact that he was distressed or the fact that I took pleasure in causing his distress. If it makes sense at all to think of those facts as having disvalue – which is hardly evident – that could only be derived from the disvalue of the states they are facts about. Is this not sufficient, then, to secure the claim that reasons are indeed states? In fact, the argumentative gap between these considerations

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and Dancy’s condition will be obvious enough.21 Reasons for action can be secured in the value and disvalue of events and states of affairs without their needing to be identified with the events and states that secure them. It is quite consistent to hold that whilst it is Brad’s distress which makes my action wrong and gives me a reason to comfort him, it is the fact that Brad is distressed that is the reason it gives. It is not as if there could be a relevant state or event without there being a relevant fact – and if it turns out that facts are better suited to stand as reasons for action than are events and states of affairs, this will in no way conflict with a classical approach to agency.

5 The discussion so far, then, has been both indirect and inconclusive. Various writers have looked to the relations between reasons and deliberation, reasons and explanation and reasons and value in the hope that these will show that reasons themselves must be either facts or states of affairs, but none of these has been sufficient to determine an answer. A different approach is needed – and to many the obvious strategy will be to investigate the semantic properties of the sentences we ordinarily use to ascribe reasons for action in the hope that these will favour setting one kind of item as reasons rather than the other. If one were to employ that method, this would probably favour facts over states of affairs. ‘One reason for you to give the money back is just that he saw you take it’ is, at least to my ear, much more natural than ‘One reason for you to give the money is his having seen you take it.’ Again, ‘You should take him out one night because he is miserable’ is more natural than ‘You should take him out one night because of his misery’. 22 Of course, two examples are certainly insufficient to make the general case, and even these may not sound so obvious to other ears. I shall not try to be persuasive on the point, however, since although I do think that if one were to treat ordinary usage as a metaphysical guide, this would support taking reasons to be facts, I also think that it would be madness to give it that role. The idea would have to be that at the time when usage was being fixed, speakers knew, or at least were somehow sensitive to, the nature of reasons for actions and adapted the way of ascribing reasons accordingly – and one only has to make that idea explicit to see just how implausible it is. The fact is that ordinarily people are pretty insensitive to the distinction between facts and states of affairs, as they are to that between facts and events, and there is no reason at all to think that, when those distinctions matter, the formal ontological commitments of everyday talk about reasons are more likely than not to be met. The method of truth is an important one in metaphysics, but unless one is careful to observe its limitations, its employment will result in a weirdly Jungian approach to determining the precise contours of

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reality, secured in the expectation of finding metaphysical truths in the collective unconscious of English speakers. 23 The consequence of this, of course, is that a great many of the claims we make about reasons may well turn out to be false. If I say, for instance, that one reason you should give money to your old college is that it cannot afford to fund its scholarships, then (assuming that the function of that-clauses is indeed to specify propositions) what I say is true just if the proposition that the college cannot afford to fund its scholarships stands as a reason for you to give money to your old college. If the state-theorist is right, no proposition stands in that relation to you: being a reason for action is a relation between agents, act-types and states of affairs, not propositions. Since at least much of our everyday ascription of reasons is done by means of constructions that introduce sentences to specify propositions as reasons, it will indeed be a consequence of the state-theorist’s view that much of what we currently say about reasons is in fact false. The state-theorist need not be embarrassed by this but it does raise an obvious concern which he needs to satisfy: the starting point for any account of reasons must be our ordinary ascriptions of reasons to agents – and so a theory that is systematically or widely inconsistent with those judgements stands in danger of being insufficiently constrained to be credible. Now, what makes it inappropriate to look to ordinary usage to reveal the metaphysics of practical reason is that our everyday talk is careless of ontological niceties – and the state-theorist can quite properly try to appeal to this to explain why people say the particular false things that they do. What he needs to show is that whilst it may be false to say, for instance, that Erika should give money to her old college because it cannot afford to fund its scholarships, this is only because of a perfectly understandable confusion of states and facts. Here the example of causal relations is again helpful. If a doctor tells you that your illness was caused by the fact that you were exposed to radiation, it would be absurd to think that since he has said something false, he has provided no information about the aetiology of your illness. Knowing that doctors are no more careful about ontological categories than anyone else, one can readily construct a causal claim that the doctor’s report gives one good reason to believe is true: that your illness was caused by your exposure to radiation. Similarly, although (if reasons are states) it will be false to say that you should give money to your old college because it cannot fund its scholarships, one can also readily construct from it a reason-statement that is true: that you should give money to your old college because of its inability to fund its scholarships. So, assume for the moment that the state-theorist is right and that reasons are indeed states of affairs. Let us say that a reason-statement is acceptable just if either it is true or, if it is false, it specifies a proposition as a reason for someone to do something and were one to reformulate the statement by

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replacing its specification of that proposition with a term that refers to a corresponding state of affairs, the revised statement would be true.24 Any false reason-statement that fails to meet this condition is unacceptable. Thus, when an acceptable reason-statement is false, this is only because it specifies a proposition as a reason when it should refer to a corresponding state of affairs. The statement ‘A reason for Erika to give money to your old college is that it cannot fund its scholarships’, though false, is acceptable. The challenge to the state-theorist is now to show that his account of reasons does not itself render unacceptable too much of what we think true about the reasons people have to do things.

6 What is at stake, then, is whether one could eschew all the propositionspecifying constructions that are used to ascribe reasons to people and still be able, in principle, to state what reasons people have to do things. Given a reason-statement of the offending kind that would ordinarily be accepted as true, the state-theorist should be able to show that it is acceptable because there is a suitable state or event to be the reason for the agent to do what, according to the statement, he has reason to do. Obviously, there are very many cases for which this presents no difficulty. If I should comfort Brad because he is distressed, my reason for action depends on the disvalue of his distress – had that state not been obtained, I would have no reason to comfort him. Again, if you should apologise because Brad was offended, your reason for action depends on the disvalue of Brad’s being offended. In such cases as these, the state-theorist will certainly have a candidate state of affairs which he can identify as the reason for action. It is easy enough, however, to find reason-statements that are much less tractable. Consider, for instance, ‘The reason for us to bury him in unconsecrated ground is that he died by his own hand’. Here it is an event, an action, that is the source of, and so the candidate to be, the reason for the action and the state-theorist can readily supply ‘The reason for us to bury him in unconsecrated ground is his dying by his own hand’ which, if true, will make the original statement acceptable. It will be true just if that event is a reason for those agents to bury him in unconsecrated ground – but in that case, the truth of the statement will not depend on how one refers to the agents or to the event. So, ‘The reason for us to bury him in unconsecrated ground is his dying’ will also be true, since his dying is the same event as his dying by his own hand. Similarly, ‘We should bury him in unconsecrated ground because he died by his own hand’ will be acceptable if ‘We should bury him in unconsecrated ground because of his dying by his own hand’ is true. But if that is true so is ‘We should bury him in unconsecrated ground because of his dying’. Now, the state-theorist might accept this – after all, the latter does indeed specify which event stands as the reason to act, even if it does

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not do so in a way that reveals why it so stands. He could point out that in causal statements too, one may refer to the causally related events in ways that are unhelpful to conveying why the cause was such as to produce its effect without thereby affecting the truth of the statement itself. The difficulty here, however, is that it does not answer to the way in which we do single out reasons. For in the example it would be both intelligible and true to say that reason for us to bury him in unconsecrated ground is not that he died but that he died by his own hand, and it would seem that distinction between what is the reason and what is not requires that both be propositions. Now, whether the state-theorist can adequately respond to this depends on how relaxed is his notion of a state of affairs – for if states of affairs can include states of events, he could then distinguish the state of the man’s death’s being self-inflicted from the event of the man’s death. The man’s death is not the reason but its being self-inflicted is. Nor would the appeal to states of events be just an ad hoc response to this particular difficulty, since we often cite as reasons facts about events and states. To make acceptable such statements as ‘I should take a stronger pain-killer because the pain is intense’ or ‘You should take a book because his speech will be interminable’, one would need to be willing to allow as reasons the intensity of my pain and the interminability of his speech. Indeed, one will need to be ready to find states of affairs at higher levels than these. Maybe I should only take a mild pain-killer because the pain will be intense briefly: is the real reason to be the brevity of the intensity of my pain? What if I should tell the doctor because my pain was unexpectedly briefly intense – is the reason here to be the unexpectedness of the brevity of the intensity of my pain? No doubt with a certain ingenuity and patience one could come up with examples of even greater complexity and the state-theorist could come up with suitably complicated definite descriptions that purport to refer to states of affairs. At a certain point, however, the states that the theorist would claim to have discerned by means of the constructed definite descriptions look less like genuine individuals than gerrymandered items whose only role is to satisfy the demands of a particular theory of reasons. Indeed, if the state-theorist is to have any serious chance of discerning states of affairs to match the range of our judgements about reasons, he will need to count more dubious items than these as states. Consider here an example where the reason for action relates to a future state of affairs. So, when Jane is packing for a holiday in Brussels, one might say that she should pack an umbrella because it will certainly rain several times while she is there. Now, to many the need to find that future states are reasons for present actions will seem sufficient to reject the state-theory – requiring as it does that an event which has not yet occurred or a state that has not yet obtained already stands in the relevant relation to an agent. Even if one were to grant the coherence of this for the sake of argument, however, the state-theorist would have to explain how we are able to identify the reasons

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that are, on his view, future states. Here the force of the move from a propositional specification of reasons to one that refers to corresponding states of affairs is important. If I say that the reason to lock the dogs inside is that it will thunder this afternoon, I make no reference to any particular event – for ‘it will thunder this afternoon’ to be true, there will need to be at least one clap or growl of thunder during the afternoon, but there may be several. Often, of course, what grounds the thought that an event of a certain kind has occurred, is occurring or even will occur is that we know that a particular event of that kind has occurred, is occurring or will occur. Certainly, we can identify particular future events and states: I may know that the forthcoming wedding of two friends will be expensive and their marriage short lived. More usually, however, our beliefs about what will happen in the future are not grounded in this way. So, at the time when the reason-statement is made, neither the speaker nor the state-theorist is in a position to single out any of the downpours that will occur during Jane’s trip and so although Jane then has a reason to pack her umbrella, the theorist cannot specify that reason. This will not matter if one relaxes the conditions for the acceptability of reason-statements so that the revised statement may quantify over states and events. So the original statement will be acceptable since it is true that there will be at least one downpour during Jane’s trip and any such downpour is a reason now for Jane to pack an umbrella. The difficulty, of course, is that this (potentially) multiplies the number of reasons for Jane to take her umbrella. Where originally there was one reason for Jane to do this – the fact that it would rain – the state-theorist’s version will produce as many reasons as there are downpours during her trip. Indeed, if the state-theorist is right, rather than knowing, as one thought one did, what reason there is to pack the umbrella, one knows only that there is at least one reason of a certain kind to do this, without knowing which reason any is nor how many of them there are. The state-theorist could avoid this if he were willing to count sets of events as events – for then the reason for Jane to pack the umbrella will be the event that is the set of downpours that occur in Brussels during her trip. This matches our initial intuition in finding a single reason and one that can be identified at the time of the original statement. What would be needed to secure this, however, is some independent motivation for taking sets of events to be themselves events (and presumably, to deal with parallel cases, sets of states of affairs to be themselves states of affairs), and it is at least dubious whether that could be found.25 Nor do the state-theorist’s problems stop there. For it would certainly be wrong to think that Jane only has reason to pack an umbrella if it will rain during her trip – perhaps she should pack it because it is likely to rain or even just because it might rain. If the reason to pack the umbrella is that it is likely to rain, then that reason holds independently of any actual future

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downpours, of which there may be none. This, albeit by an all too circuitous route, brings one to the central difficulty for the state-theorist. Often, when one deliberates about how to act, one considers the reasons for and against acting in some way and considers both the value of what one will bring about by acting in that way and the value of how things will be if one does not act in that way: so, the reason to call my friend now is to find out which article he suggested I read and the reason not to call him is that it is the middle of the night and I would wake him up. In deliberating, I balance the value of my finding this out and the disvalue of his being woken up. I have a reason to call and a reason not to call, but neither depends on an actual future state of affairs. For Dancy, the main objection to the idea that reasons are facts is that ‘those who announce that all good reasons are propositions seem thereby to lose contact with the realities that call for action from us’.26 If to maintain the thesis that all reasons are not propositions but states, the state-theorist is forced not only to look to states of states of states and sets of states and events but also to states and events in close (and maybe distant) but not actual possible worlds in order to find the reasons we have to do things, that objection is unlikely to carry much weight.

7 One difficulty with taking states of affairs to be reasons, then, is that they would need to be reasons even before they obtain. Facts, in contrast, are not temporally located and this too might seem problematic, given that what is a reason for doing something at one time can cease to be a reason. If reasons are facts, this would require the possibility that abstract items should undergo change – that what is true of an abstract object at one time is not true of it at another – and that itself may be thought sufficiently unattractive a consequence still to favour states of affairs over facts, despite everything else. We may first question whether it is actually true that in taking reasons to be facts, one would thereby be committed to thinking that a fact may change in respect of its being a reason for action. Certainly, one needs to have some kind of temporal index in statements of reasons for action, but it is not obvious that this should be an index for when a fact is a reason. Consider the ambiguity of the sentence ‘There is a reason now to comfort Brad’. This might signify that some consideration is now, and may not have been before, a reason for comforting Brad, but it might also signify that that some consideration is a reason for comforting Brad now. So, one can distinguish between ‘There is reason now to comfort Brad tomorrow’ and ‘There is reason now to comfort Brad now’.27 Having made this distinction explicit, however, it is questionable whether one needs after all to have the ‘now’ in the first sentence or the first ‘now’ in the second. Let us say that it is the fact that Brad is distressed during the morning of the 23 July 2002 that is the

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reason for comforting him: this fact will favour actions of comforting him during that time, but will not favour such actions done before or afterwards. We do not, then, need to say that this fact becomes a reason for comforting him on that morning, or that it ceases to be a reason after he has been cheered up by lunch. It will rather be timelessly true that the fact is a reason for comforting him during the morning of that day – although of course there is a limited period during which one can act on that reason. Similarly, the fact that Celia is upset on the morning of her fortieth birthday favours organising something before her birthday to cheer her up when she wakes, but does not favour organising anything once it is too late for any plan to come to fruition on her birthday. Again, it is not that the fact becomes a reason at some point before her birthday and ceases to be such just before she reaches forty: it is timelessly a reason for performing acts of organisation during some period before her birthday (and we can note that what period that is may vary depending upon which type of organisation is in question).28 If we assume a timeless pattern of facts and triples of act-types, agents and times then we do not need to allow that facts may become or cease to be reasons for action. If there is a difficulty to be found in this response, it will be that it requires what many will regard as an excessively robust view of future contingents. For if it is to work, one needs to find in this pattern not only facts about the present and the past, but contingent facts about the future as well. Say that on Monday morning I am invited to a party to be held many miles away on Tuesday evening. To get to the party, I shall have to drive for three hours and so shall need to set off on Tuesday afternoon. So far, this is readily accommodated within the present treatment: the fact that I am invited on Monday morning is a reason for me to go to the party on Tuesday evening, and so to set off for the party on Tuesday afternoon. Just as I am leaving, however, I am called and told that the house where the party was to be held has burnt down and the party is cancelled. It seems that the reason I had for setting out for the party has now lapsed, since there will be no party to go to. To admit this appearance, however, is to move back to thinking that facts may change in respect of their being reasons for action. It is still, of course, a fact that I was invited on Monday morning, but whilst that fact was a reason for my setting out on Tuesday afternoon, it is not so once the house has burned down. Now, it is indisputable, I think, that once the party has been cancelled, I do not have reason to set out, and so if the advocate of timeless reason-relations is to save his position, he needs to deny that the fact that I was invited to the party was ever a reason for going to it on Tuesday. This can be done readily enough if he can make use of the fact the party is cancelled on Tuesday afternoon: an invitation to a party that is not to happen provides no reason to set out for it. What would have been the reason-giving character of the fact that I am invited on Monday is cancelled by the fact that the party is called off on Tuesday. Since the party was never going to

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happen, I had no reason to go to it, or to do anything to prepare for going to it. Until the phone call, of course, and not knowing the future, I believed that I had reason to go to the party, and this explains why I should have begun to get ready for it: my belief, however, was false, and made false at the time by the fact that the party would not take place. The vulnerability of this account lies in its reliance on facts about future contingents: for it to work, one has to assume that at the time of the invitation (and, indeed, before) it was a fact that the party would not take place.29 Whilst this is not obviously wrong, it is certainly controversial. Someone who believes that the truth-value of a proposition may vary over time, and who denies that bivalence holds for contingent propositions about the future will not accept it.30 To hold that view, however, is to undercut the motivation for moving to the tenseless understanding of reasons at all. For the anti-realist about future propositions precisely accepts the possibility of abstract objects’ changing over time: the whole point of the position is that a proposition can lack a truth-value at one time but not at another. Such a theorist cannot, then, find it worrying in principle that a proposition may at one time be a reason for someone to act in some way but not be such a reason at another. Indeed, the idea that a proposition may change in respect of being a reason is, if anything, less worrying than the idea that it may become true. For, depending on how one understands what it is for a proposition to be true, one will need to find that, in becoming true, a proposition changes in respect either of a non-relational property, or of a relation to another abstract object, that is, a truth-value.31 To be a reason, in contrast, a fact stands in relation to a concrete particular, that is, an agent, and to change in respect of this relation is correspondingly less problematic. Accepting this possibility is no more difficult than allowing that the same proposition may be believed by someone over a period of time, but rejected by him after that, or that whilst some positive number may be the number of books read by the president of the United States, it may yet cease to be such after a year or so. If we are going to allow the possibility of relations between abstract objects and concrete particulars at all, we have to allow for the possibility of changes in respect of those relations.

8 Given the variety of temporal relations between reasons and the actions they are reasons for, facts are thus better placed than concrete particulars to stand as reasons for action. If there are still concerns about the suitability of facts to stand as reasons for action, these will not be because facts are abstract items, but because of the kind of abstract item they are. If facts are true propositions, and have concepts as constituents, then in Fregean terms, they inhabit the realm of sense rather than that of reference – and it would not be mere prejudice to think that this is the wrong metaphysical kingdom to

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find reasons for action. Holding to the view that reasons are states of affairs, one can take the relation between reasons and the actions they are reasons for to hold independently of how they are conceived, but this would seem to be compromised if one rather takes reasons to be facts. According to advocate of states of affairs, it is, say, the distress of that woman that is the reason for avoiding her. If that woman is Baroness Thatcher, then Baroness Thatcher’s distress is the reason for avoiding her, as is the distress of Dennis Thatcher’s wife. In discerning the reason to avoid her, it will not matter how we single out the relevant state of affairs: ‘C is a reason for a to w’ will, like ‘e is the cause of f’ to be extensional. In contrast, the fact that Dennis Thatcher’s wife is distressed and the fact that Baroness Thatcher is distressed are distinct – and this presents the apparently unwelcome possibility that one but not the other might be a reason for comforting the woman in question.32 This possibility would be unwelcome, for instance, if we thought that reasons should be what might be called ‘perspective-independent’.33 I take that term from Christopher Peacocke, and it is helpful here to compare an argument he gives for ‘the perspective-independence of truths about causation and explanation’: Suppose you ask me why there is a cloud of steam in the air, and I answer, pointing to a metal container, ‘Because that boiler is leaking’. We then walk around to the other side of the same boiler, and I add, ‘But the cloud isn’t there because that boiler is leaking’, while manifestly pointing to the same boiler. You would rightly be totally baffled. You would insist that what does the explaining is at the level of reference, not the level of sense, so that a true explanatory statement is insensitive to which modes of presentation are used to pick out the objects, events, properties, and relations being talked about.34 We can, it would seem, apply similar considerations to reason-statements. Let us take a reason-statement to be one that can figure in the context ‘A should w because ...’ to produce a true sentence.35 So, if you should see your mother because she is missing you, then ‘she is missing you’ states the reason for you to go to see her, and if you should save for a pension because state provision has been all but withdrawn, then ‘state provision has been all but withdrawn’ states the reason for you to save. 36 We could, then imagine an example parallel to that offered by Peacocke: walking over Hungerford Bridge, we find someone injured. I say ‘We should call an ambulance because that woman is hurt’. As we walk past her, I then say, manifestly indicating the same woman, ‘But it is not because that woman is hurt that we should call an ambulance’. You would undoubtedly be baffled, and if you were to respond in a similar spirit to Peacocke’s interlocutor, you would insist that reasons are at the level of reference, not the level of sense, so that a statement of a reason for action is insensitive to

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which modes of presentation are used to pick out the objects, events, properties, and relations being talked about. At first sight, it might look as if this argument is guilty of a straightforward ignoratio elenchi: to claim that a context is intensional is to claim that substitution of a constituent term, preserving its reference but not its sense, can change the truth-value of the sentence of which it is a constituent. Clearly, one is not committed to claiming that such substitutions must change its truth-value (not least because there may be more than two terms which share reference but not sense). It is not, however, that we are supposed to take the first speaker – Peacocke, as it might be, in the example – as holding that in thinking of the boiler under a different demonstrative mode of presentation, he is not in a position to refer to the boiler in order to explain the steam. Rather, the idea must be that if we take the ‘because’ to create an intensional context, then we should always be able to make sense of someone’s taking opposed attitudes to sentences occurring within that context and which differ in that their constituent terms have the same referents but different senses. This is why it does not beg the question for Peacocke to specify that he points to what is manifestly the same boiler when he utters the two token sentences. So, I may know that Hesperus is Phosphorus and still find it intelligible that someone else believes that Hesperus is bright when he does not believe that Phosphorus is bright. In the case of the ascription of propositional attitudes, it does seem right to maintain that given any two terms T1 and T2, which differ in sense but not in reference, it will be intelligible to find that someone believes one proposition, expressible by a sentence S1 containing ‘T1’, but disbelieves another proposition, expressible by a sentence S2 that differs from S1 just in that it contains ‘T2’ where S1 contains ‘T1’. Care is needed in articulating this thesis, however. For there is obviously a crucial difference between thinking that, given any such pair of sentences, one can imagine circumstances in which a subject may hold one to be true but the other false, and thinking that this will make sense in any circumstance. So, our ability to find that someone believes that Hesperus is bright and that Phosphorus is not bright depends on our believing that he does not believe that Hesperus and Phosphorus are the same heavenly body (indeed, it will itself count as evidence for this). In Peacocke’s example, in contrast, both the speaker and his interlocutor know that the boiler demonstrated in the two utterances is the same. Now, this in itself is not problematic for Peacocke, as it would have been if the speaker had simply said ‘That boiler is leaking’ and then ‘That boiler is not leaking’. Someone who opposes Peacocke’s account of explanation and maintains that explanatory truths are perspective-dependent, must be prepared to accept that it can be true that p1 because S1 but false that p1 because S2, even though he knows that ‘T1’ and ‘T2’ refer to the same thing. What he does not need to accept, however, is that, for any such pair of

40 What Are Reasons for Action?

sentences, it will always be possible to find an explanandum such that if one explains it the other will not, nor that it will always be intelligible to ascribe the belief to someone that one sentence has an explanatory role which the other lacks. The point here is that distinctions in sense are secured by the need for cognitive differences between propositions, but there is no reason to think that explanatory relevance must cut as finely as that. One can deny that coreferring terms may always be substituted salva veritate in sentences occurring in explanatory contexts without thinking that any such substitution will be such as to produce a sentence that, in principle, has a different explanatory role, or could intelligibly be taken by someone to do so. So, in the example, a safer, because more cautious, response on the part of Peacocke’s interlocutor would be to express bafflement that Peacocke should think that the shift from one visually demonstrative mode of presentation of the boiler to another could affect the explanatory relevance of the resulting thought. If one may explain the fact that the room is steamy by singling out the responsible boiler by means of a visually demonstrative mode of presentation, then it should not matter which such mode of presentation is employed.37 For a theorist who maintains that the truth of explanatory statements is sensitive to the senses of the terms employed, a part of his theory will be to give some account of the kinds of change of modes of presentation that might be such as to change the truth-value of the explanation.38 Similarly in the case of reason-statements. That facts are individuated at the level of sense does not mean that if one takes reasons to be facts, one will thereby need to find intelligible someone’s holding that any two facts differ in respect of which actions they are reasons for. Again, the specification of one’s reason to call an ambulance will not depend on which perceptually demonstrative mode of presentation is used to pick out the injured woman, and one would be duly baffled if someone thought that it did. In other cases, however, it would be less baffling if someone were hesitant to allow substitution of co-referring terms when specifying reasons for action. Thus whilst Oedipus should go to the church because his fiancée is waiting there to marry him, it is dubious that he should go because his mother is waiting there to marry him.39 If there are such cases, then this will be sufficient to motivate the claim that reasons are to be found in the realm of sense – even if many reason statements will tolerate perfectly happily the substitution of co-referring terms.

9 These considerations are important because they bear on how we should think about the relation between accounts of reasons and theories of propositions. Consider a final argument against taking reasons to be propositions rather than states of affairs – that doing so will result in an absurd

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inflation in the number of reasons one has to act. Allow that facts as propositions are to be individuated at the level of sense: then, if ‘S1’ and ‘S2’ differ in sense, the fact that S1 will differ from the fact that S2. Taking reasons to be facts that favour courses of actions, then if the fact that S1 favours my w-ing, that fact will be a reason for me to w. Similarly, if the fact that S2 favours my w-ing, this too will be a reason for me to w. It is, of course, unproblematic that someone may have more than one reason to do something, but we have here the materials for generating many more reasons for action than is tolerable. So, it may be that the fact that Jane is waiting at the church to marry Jack is a reason for him to go to the church. If Jane is Theresa’s daughter, then it will also be a fact that Theresa’s daughter is waiting at the church, and this too will be a reason to go to church. Do we want, however, to say that the fact that Theresa’s daughter is waiting at the church is a further reason for Jack to go there over and above the fact that Jane is waiting there for him? Should Jack reflect on the reasons he has not to pull out of the wedding, that doing so would distress his mother does seem to be an extra reason beyond the fact that it would distress Jane, whereas the fact that it would distress Theresa’s daughter does not. And, since no doubt Jane, like anyone else, will satisfy indefinitely many definite descriptions, this would mean that there are indefinitely many reasons for Jack to do the same thing. What this line of objection assumes is that, having decided that reasons are propositions, one will need to appeal to some prior account of propositions in order to individuate reasons. So, if the fact that p is a reason to w, and if the fact that q is a reason to w, in order to tell whether that p is the same reason to w as that of q, one will need to determine just whether the proposition that p is the same as the proposition that q. Identity and difference of reasons will simply fall out of an account of the identity and difference of propositions. A general theory of propositions, however, is answerable to the needs of a theory of thought: in so far as it is possible to believe that p but not to believe that q, ‘p’ and ‘q’ will express different propositions. We will, that is, also want to appeal to a theory of propositions to secure our judgements as to when people believe and assert the same things, as well as to when they have the same reasons for action. If it is possible to believe that Jane is waiting at the church but not to believe that Theresa’s daughter is waiting at the church, then the proposition that Jane is waiting at the church must be different from the proposition that Theresa’s daughter is waiting at the church. If, however, these are different propositions, and reasons are propositions, then they are different reasons and the theory runs into the problems just identified by the advocate of states of affairs. Even if we leave aside the need for propositions to serve as reasons for action, however, this model mis-represents the theoretical role of a theory of propositions. So, whether we take two people to assert the same proposition depends on whether we take them to say the same thing and this

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depends on whether we take them to be, in Davidson’s terms, ‘same-sayers’. What the model just given rests on is the idea that there can be only one set of criteria relevant for judging whether people are same-sayers, or, if one likes, same-believers. That idea, however, is hardly self-evident. Sometimes our interests will be such that if people believe of the same thing that it has some property then this will be sufficient to find them same believers, even if they think of that thing in different ways. In other contexts, we should judge them to believe different things.40 It would be a mistake to think that the task of a theory of propositions must be to set out criteria of identity and difference for entities of a single kind: rather, it may be to bring some theoretical clarity to the different contexts where we will explain sameness of judgement or assertion by appealing to sameness of what is asserted or judged. Such clarity may be gained by finding that there are different kinds of proposition, because different criteria for identity and difference of propositions determined by different contexts in which we are interested in interpreting subjects and their utterances.41 It is one thing, however, to allow that there may be a kind of proposition – ‘robust propositions’, say – such that ‘the robust proposition that p’ allows for substitution of co-referring terms in the sentence which expresses it, and another to think that reasons for action will be propositions of that kind. At the end of the previous section, I suggested that whilst the fact that Oedipus’ fiancée is waiting at the church to marry him is a reason for him to go to the ceremony, the fact that Oedipus’ mother is waiting at the church to marry him is not. Since these two propositions are distinct only in virtue of differences in the senses of the terms in the sentences that express them, this would require that reasons are not robust. On reflection, however, it is less obvious that the two facts do differ in respect of what they are reasons for Oedipus to do: given that his fiancée is his mother, that she is waiting at the church to marry him is not a reason for him to go to the church – and certainly not to marry her. Since ‘Oedipus’ fiancée is waiting at the church to marry him’ and ‘Oedipus’ mother is waiting at the church to marry him’ express the same robust proposition, the example may after all be consistent with taking reasons to be robust propositions. There is clearly much more to be said about that issue, but in fact there is no need to settle it here. For even if it does turn out that reasons are not robust – and it is difficult to see how considerations that would support this could be of any comfort at all to a theorist who wanted to take reasons to be states of affairs – this is not in fact worrying in the way the objection claimed it to be. It would only be worrying if an aim of deliberation were to determine how many reasons there are for and against some possible action, but it is not. We operate with two different notions of reason: one is, as we might say, a count-notion whilst the other is a mass-notion. So, we can ask whether this reason for w-ing is the same as or different from that reason for w-ing, and we can also ask how much reason there is to w or whether there

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is more reason to w than there is not to w. Certainly, when we decide how we should act, we will be concerned to determine what reasons there are for and against some course of action, but it would be a very crude mistake to think that if there are more reasons to w than there are not to, this would provide even prima facie support for inferring that there is more reason to w than not to w. The concern to determine what reasons there are for some course of action is the concern to make sure that all relevant facts are taken into account; it is not to know how many reasons there are. Rather, it is only when one has determined which facts are relevant that one can decide whether there is more or better reason to w than not to.42

Notes 1. J. Raz, Practical Reasons and Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15–16. This was originally published in 1975. For Austin’s views, see his ‘Unfair to Facts’, reprinted in S. Blackburn and K. Simmons (eds), Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 183–99. See also G.H. von Wright, Norm and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 25–7. 2. P.F. Strawson, ‘Truth’, reprinted in Blackburn and Simmons, Truth, 162–82, p. 167. 3. So Strawson’s complaint against Austin was not that he had misunderstood what a fact is, but rather that facts as Austin conceived them could not do the work he required of them in explicating truth. 4. Which is perhaps fair enough, since nothing in what he goes on to argue turns on this. Having formally identified ‘facts’ as what are designated by ‘The fact that ...’, he proceeds simply to cite facts using that-clauses so that neither his formulations nor his arguments are hostage to his understanding of what facts are. (Indeed, some of his formulations rather go against that understanding, as when he gives as a possible reason to drive slowly ‘the fact that unless one drives slowly an accident will occur’ (21–2) and it is not obvious how one will find a state of affairs to stand as the denotatum of that.) 5. Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115. 6. In Dancy’s case, something does turn on his claim about the nature of reasons: he makes it as part of an attempt to rebut the idea that one might co-ordinate the psychological and rationalising explanation of actions by taking normative reasons for actions to be the contents of the beliefs that give rise to actions. In view of the importance of his claim it is unfortunate that he does so little to argue for it. 7. I use ‘consideration’ just to provide a term that is neutral between ‘fact’ and ‘state of affairs’. 8. Such independence is not, of course, an immediate consequence of rationalism: it will still be open to the theorist to argue that practical reasons are ‘internal’, in that whether something will count as a reason for someone to do something will depend on whether he believes that it is or could in some suitable way be brought to do so. For such an argument, see B. Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–13. An effective rebuttal of Williams’ argument is provided by Derek Parfit in his ‘Reasons and Motivation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 71 (1997), 99–130, 9. S.L. Darwall, Impartial Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 31. Similar claims are made by T. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 56–7.

44 What Are Reasons for Action? 10. Impartial Reason, p. 33. 11. ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’. In his Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35–45, 39. Italics added. 12. At least that would seem to be the implication of this, given that the relata of an explanation are facts. There is a tension between this and his claim that reasons can ‘in some form’ themselves be in the agent’s motivational set – which might seem rather to suggest that he would agree with Davidson in taking them to be psychological states. Whether there is a conflict here will depend on how loose the conditions are for something’s being in the set: for instance, it might be that it can be there as the content of a belief rather than as a belief or desire itself. Williams himself is, for these purposes, unhelpfully vague about what kinds of things do make up a motivational set: ‘desires, evaluations, attitudes, projects, and so on’ (‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity if Blame’, 35). It would be helpful here to be told whether something, perhaps a ‘project’, can be an element in someone’s motivational set without being an element in his psychology – and, if so, how. 13. J. Searle, Rationality in Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 100. It cannot be said, I think, that these claims support the idea that we can properly talk of the notions ‘Why” ’ and ‘Because’, but Searle’s argument can lose this idea without damage. 14. Rationality in Action, 101. 15. Rationality in Action, 103. 16. Rationality in Action, 100. Italics added. Taken strictly, this last claim seems inconsistent with Searle’s claim that one may have a good reason for doing something without knowing it: if one had a reason for doing something but did not know that one did, then one would not have acted on that reason, and so the reason would not have been a reason why one acted. Rather, then, than saying that all reasons are reasons why, it would be better to maintain with Williams that all reasons are such that they can be reasons why: this would allow Searle his formal constraint on being a reason, but would allow that not all reasons actually enter into explanations. 17. ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–13, 102. 18. See P.F. Strawson, ‘Causation and Explanation’, in B. Vermazen and M.B. Hintikka (eds), Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 115–36, 115. 19. ‘Agency, Reason, and the Good’, p. 22. 20. Dancy, Practical Reality, p. 115. Compare Raz: ‘reasons are facts in virtue of which those actions are good in some respect and to some degree’ (‘Agency, Reason, and the Good’, p. 23). Raz is here to be understood, I think, as again using ‘fact’ in an Austinian way: see above, p. 23. 21. This is not an argument that Dancy himself offers to support his view, however, and not all the examples he cites of states that can be reasons – ‘his self-satisfaction, her distress, yesterday’s bad weather, the current state of the dollar’ – are readily taken as having value or disvalue independently of particular goals. It would give him an argument for his position, though. 22. The first of these does not contain a that-clause, but it still uses a sentence to specify the reason. ‘That’ is not required here since ‘because’ itself connects to a sentence directly. Nor should one be misled by the ‘because’ into thinking that this is an explanation and so must relate facts: if it is an explanation it is along

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24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

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the lines of an Aristotelian formal explanation so that the ‘because she is miserable’ has the force here of ‘in virtue of this reason: that she is miserable’. Dancy himself recognises that we use that-clauses in the relevant contexts: ‘Of course we do, or at least can, say such things as “That she is in distress is what made his action callous, and that she is in distress is a proposition.” ’ (pp. 115–6). He counters this by pointing out that ‘we also say things like “That the cliff was unstable was a consequence of the heavy rain, and that the cliff was unstable is a proposition” ’ and pointing out quite rightly that ‘we would be unwise to conclude from this that a proposition was a consequence of the heavy rain’. Disappointingly, rather than seeing that this shows ordinary usage to be, from a stern metaphysician’s point of view, worryingly lax about the categorical niceties, Dancy thinks that it shows that ‘though we use that-clauses to specify propositions, not all uses of such clauses are in the proposition-specifying business’. Clearly, if this notion of acceptability were made to bear any great theoretical weight, it would be necessary to define the relation of correspondence between facts and state of affairs that it relies on. I shall not attempt to do that here since if my argument is right, the prospects for a successful defence of a state-theory of reasons are so dim as to make it pointless. For a hostile discussion of that possibility in the case of events, see Jennifer Hornsby, ‘Physicalism, Events, and Part-Whole Relations’, in her Simple Mindedness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 46–62. Dancy, Practical Reality, 114–5. Of course, it is unlikely that anyone would ever utter the second sentence, since there is a general presumption that when one says that someone has a reason to do something this will be reason for acting at the time of utterance or as soon as is possible or appropriate thereafter. One might wonder why the advocate of states-of-affairs should not help himself to the same kind of timeless relations in order to allow the possibility that future states might stand as reasons for present actions: but part of the point of taking reasons to be items that are spatio-temporally located is to disallow their standing in such timeless relations. Cp. E.J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89. Note here Michael Dummett’s distinction between the use of the future tense to talk about present ‘tendencies’ and what he calls the ‘genuine future tense’. So, he finds the former in a standard form of newspaper announcement – ‘The marriage that was arranged between X and Y will not now take place’: ‘The presence of the “now” indicates a use of the future tense according to which, if anyone had said earlier, “They are going to get married”, he would have been right, even though their marriage never subsequently occurred.’ He contrasts this with the case where someone offers a bet by saying ‘ “I bet they will not be married on that date” ’, employing the genuine future tense. (‘Bringing about the Past’, in Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), 333–50, 336; the same distinction is made by means of the same example in ‘Truth’, and in ‘Realism’, 21, 152). It must be the genuine future tense that would be in question for the example in the text. For a discussion of different possible semantic treatments of future-tense statements, see M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn, (London: Duckworth, 1981), 390–400. See also ‘Realism’, 152–3.

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31. Which may be why Frege was so opposed to allowing that a proposition might change its truth-value: see his Kleine Schriften, ed., I. Angelelli (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967), 338. 32. Of course, seeing that some woman is distressed, I might think that the fact that that woman is distressed is a reason to comfort her, but, on discovering that that woman is Baroness Thatcher I might think that the fact that Baroness Thatcher is distressed is not a reason to comfort her (she might, for instance, think that such behaviour was feeble): this would, however, be to revise my original judgement. It is not that I am left thinking that the fact that that woman is distressed is a reason for helping her, but the fact that Mrs. Thatcher is distressed is not such a reason. Whether I have a reason here is dependent on who is distressed and not on how I identify or think about him. 33. This would not be to deny that reasons are relative to agents: it is quite consistent with this to maintain that some consideration can be a reason for one person to do something but not a reason for another to do it. The point will just be that if it is true that C is a reason for a to w, it will not matter how one thinks of the relata of that relation. 34. C. Peacocke, Being Known (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1999), 73–4. 35. If the connective ‘because’ renders this an explanatory context, it will be one of formal or constitutive explanation: it is of the same type as, for instance, ‘This is a piece of furniture because it is a chair’ or ‘He is careless because he does not pay sufficient attention to semantic details’. 36. Note that it doesn’t follow from this that the reason itself is propositional, any more than it follows from the ability to say that the floor is wet because it’s raining that the cause of the wet floor is propositional. 37. Which is why one might think that Peacocke is right to say that explanatory truths are not perspective-dependent: the point would be that it is too hasty to move from this claim to the claim that they are at the level of reference rather than of sense. 38. Pursuing this matter further for the case of causal explanation will take me too far away from the topic of reason-statements. We should note, however, that an explanans of the kind that Peacocke gives in the example is indeed likely to be more robust than one that refers directly to a causally responsible event. Suspicion of a purely extensionalist account of explanation is likely to be motivated by the worry that a true explanation should be such that the knowledge of it will provide some level of causal understanding of what is explained, and that there are ways of thinking about the cause which will not be such as to provide this. So, to take a familiar example, one can reasonably doubt that knowledge that the event described on page four of the Times caused the event described on page nine of the Tribune is sufficient to provide the basis for knowledge of an explanation: to suppose that it is true that the event described on page four of the Times happened because the event described on page nine of the Tribune happened is to suppose that knowledge of this would constitute understanding of why the first event happened, and this is certainly deniable, as it would also be in the case of ‘The event described on page four of the Times occurred because its cause did’. The difficulty, of course, is that neither of these would give the least sense of what about the two events was relevant to their standing as cause to effect: in contrast, ‘the flooding occurred because the boiler exploded’ does help to make this clear, since the explanans here specifies that an event of the relevant kind occurred. Once this is

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done, then there will be no difficulty in accepting that one might present that kind by means of a different mode of presentation, if one is available. 39. Compare here Anscombe on causal explanations: let us assume that ‘There is an international crisis because the President of France made a speech’ is true, and that de Gaulle, the President of France, is also the man with the biggest nose in France. Is ‘There is an international crisis because the man with the biggest nose in France made a speech’ also true. As Anscombe points out, our objection to this last would be ‘But surely not because he is the man with the biggest nose in France?’ As she also goes on to point out, a case of this kind ‘cries out for a Russellian kind of treatment’, so that one will distinguish between Concerning the man with the biggest nose: there was an international crisis because he ... and There was an international crisis because the man with the biggest nose ... ‘– the latter, since it is differentiated from the former, now being false – unless, as we say, “it was because his was the biggest nose” ’ (‘Causality and Extensionality’, in her Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 173–9, 175–6. Similarly, if one says that Oedipus should go to the church because his mother is waiting there to marry him’, one’s doubt about the truth of this will be expressed by saying ‘But surely it is not because she is his mother that he should go to marry her?’ 40. In Joseph Moore’s interesting discussion of these matters (‘Propositions without Identity’, Nous 33 (1999), 1–29), he contrasts cases of reported speech where we are interested in the subject’s psychological states ‘only in so far that they carry useful information about the world outside’ and cases where one is rather interested in predicting the actions of the subject (pp. 7–9). Cases of the first kind will allow one to substitute co-referring terms in the sentences that report the belief, whilst cases of the second will not. 41. See Jane Heal, ‘On Speaking Thus: The Semantics of Indirect Discourse’, in her Mind, Reason and Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 174–95, pp. 189ff. 42. An earlier version of this paper was given to a conference organised at the University of York by Christian Piller. I am grateful to him and to others at the conference, especially David Velleman, for helpful discussion. I am also grateful to Joseph Raz, Tom Baldwin, Marie McGinn and Ian Rumfitt for commenting on a very early draft. I was led into thinking about these matters as part of working on a larger project about explanation and ontology in the Philosophy of Mind – a project whose progress has been greatly facilitated by a grant from the AHRC which allowed me a term’s relief from teaching.

3 Was Sally’s Reason for Running from the Bear that She Thought it was Chasing Her? Rowland Stout

Sally thinks she is being chased by a bear, and runs away. Let us suppose that running away makes sense in the circumstance.1 It seems clear that her reason for running is that a bear is chasing her. But it also seems that her reason for running is that she thinks a bear is chasing her.2 Indeed it is sometimes asserted that her real reason cannot be that a bear is chasing her, but must be merely that she thinks or believes that a bear is chasing her. For example, Michael Smith has argued as follows: Given that an agent who has a motivating reason to w is in a state that is in this way potentially explanatory of her w-ing, it is then natural to suppose that her motivating reason is itself psychologically real. ... By contrast with normative reasons, then, which seem to be truths ... motivating reasons would seem to be psychological states, states that play a certain explanatory role in providing action. (Smith 1994, p. 96) The question now for this psychological sort of approach to reasons for action is what sort of thing the reason is supposed to be. Is it a psychological state, as Smith has it here – for example, Sally’s state of believing that a bear is chasing her? Or is it the fact that she is in this psychological state – the fact that she believes a bear is chasing her? And is her belief that a bear is chasing her, the same as one of these or something else and perhaps a better candidate for being Sally’s reason for running. Smith (1994) does not distinguish between the belief and the psychological state. And John Searle makes nothing of the distinction between the belief and the fact that the subject has that belief. He claims (2001, p. 102) that ‘we can say either the fact that I believed it is the reason or my belief is the reason’. However Roger Crisp (2006, p. 38) is careful to say that my reason for acting is my belief but not my having that belief.

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The advantage of thinking of Sally’s belief as her reason is that it seems to combine elements of both the fact that a bear is chasing her and the fact that she believes a bear is chasing her. Sally’s belief that a bear is chasing her has the same content as the fact that a bear is chasing her – the belief and the fact both are that a bear is chasing her. So one might think that they both justify her behaviour in the same way. At the same time it looks as though the belief is a better candidate for being her reason for running since it has that psychological element that Michael Smith is after. It seems that her belief that a bear is chasing her can both justify and explain her running. Nevertheless I think that the idea of Sally’s belief is metaphysically indeterminate in a way that gives the impression that it can have this dual role but really means that this impression is just a confusion. When we can say that Sally believes that a bear is chasing her we can then also say that she has the belief that a bear is chasing her. But saying that she has this belief is saying nothing more than that she believes it. There is no independently identifiable entity – her belief – that we can observe somehow in her possession and in virtue of which we say she has it Talking of Sally’s beliefs is completely derivative from talking of what Sally believes. Once we start talking about beliefs we can begin to think about identity conditions for those beliefs. But there are several choices here none of which is really forced on us. If Sally and I share a belief that a bear is chasing her does that mean that there is just one belief here that is literally being shared? If so, then, it is not psychologically real in the sense that Smith is after. If we say that there are two beliefs here – Sally’s and mine – what about their identity over time? Suppose Sally has a belief, stops having it, then believes exactly the same thing again. Does she have the same belief as she had before, or a different belief with the same content? Our talk of beliefs is not determinate with regard to these questions. (Nor do I think is our talk of states of believing.) Sally’s belief is a sort of hybrid between what she believes and the fact that she believes it. We might translate the phrase ‘Sally’s belief’ roughly as ‘what Sally believes being believed by Sally’. This can be true or false in line with whether what Sally believes is true or false but at the same time can explain things in line with whether the fact that Sally believes it explains these things. Given this derivativeness and indeterminacy in the idea of Sally’s belief I will not consider it as a candidate for what her reason for running might be but consider just two other candidates, the second of which represents the psychological approach: a. that she is being chased by a bear; b. that she thinks/believes that she is being chased by a bear.

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I will argue that there is a case against (b) being her reason for running away which is effective. The problem is that there also seems to be a pretty good case for thinking that (b) is her reason for running away. So we have an apparent contradiction. Sorting out this contradiction promises to provide some insight into the nature of reasons for action and the relationship between normative and motivating reasons.3 The first thing to consider is how the word ‘for’ is used in this context. As is often remarked, there are in fact at least two quite distinct uses corresponding respectively to the two phrases, ‘reason for an action’ and ‘acting for a reason’. We say that such-and-such is a reason for Sally to run. We also say that Sally runs for such-and-such a reason. And these mean quite different things. So consider the following: A. A reason for Sally to run is that such-and-such. B. Sally runs for the reason that such-and-such. In the first phrase, ‘reason for’ is similar in meaning to ‘reason in favour of’; ‘for’ is the opposite of ‘against’ here. There could be a reason for, or in favour of, Sally running even if she does not run. Such reasons do not need to be explanatory, since there may be such reasons even when there is nothing to explain – for example, when Sally does not run. A reason for Sally to run – one that favours her running – is often described as a normative reason. The existence of such reasons generates the possibility of Sally getting things right or wrong, succeeding or failing, acting correctly or making a mistake. We talk of reasons for action in order to set up norms for action. Rüdiger Bittner (2001) however denies that such reasons are really normative at all; they are merely states of affairs to which actions might be responses. This connection between reasons and responses is remarked independently by others too – in particular Stoutland (1998). But although the English language is not definitive about this the notion of a response itself appears to be normative; it is precisely responses rather than reactions which we can describe as appropriate or inappropriate. This does not mean that it follows from Sally having a reason to run that she should run. But it does mean at the very least that there is a systematic way of determining appropriate and inappropriate responses – a way of deriving recommendations for her actions – which given the reasons and in the absence of countervailing considerations yields the recommendation that she should run. This makes room for the possibility that the system of deriving recommendations is a bad one. For example, consider a West Ham football club hooligan’s system of justification, according to which someone being a Chelsea supporter is a reason to attack them. There are different sorts of claims that can be made here. We could make the existential claim that there is some system of justification relative to which it is recommended that he attack the Chelsea fan. This would be a very weak claim to make

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however, since, if we allow bad systems of justification, then it would be true of just about every possible recommendation for action. Bittner takes reason-giving statements to be very weak existential claims of this sort. We could also say however that relative to a certain system of justification – perhaps the West Ham hooligan’s one – it is recommended that he attack the Chelsea fan. If we say of the hooligan that he has a reason to attack the Chelsea fan we may mean that according to his system of justification he has a reason to do so. Such a claim is relatively normative. I think that Bernard Williams (1981) is concerned with such claims in his discussion of internal and external reasons. If a reason is only a reason relative to the agent’s system of justification then in a sense it is internal to that agent’s motivational system. The third sort of claim that might be made here is an absolutely normative one. Instead of making a claim about a system of justification, we might be endorsing a particular system of justification (say the hooligan’s one) and making the absolute (and absolutely false) claim that attacking the fan is recommended. This sort of claim is straightforwardly normative. Saying that there is a reason to attack the Chelsea fan sounds like an example of this sort of claim. That the fan is a Chelsea supporter is in fact no reason to attack him in this sense. I think Parfit (1997) and Dancy (2000) are contemplating this sort of claim when they describe reasons as both external and normative. We can also use the phrase ‘reason for’ without any of these normative connotations. Consider the following: A*. A reason for the water running out of the tank is that there is a leak in the tap. There can be no such reason unless the water actually runs out of the tank, and there is no sense in which the water either succeeds or fails with respect to this reason. The fact that there is a leak in the tap favours the process of the water running out of the tank only in as much as we can infer that the water will run out of the tank from that fact. We can also say the following: A**. A reason for the water to run out of the tank is that there is a leak in the tap. To my ear at least there is an ambiguity in this sentence. On the one hand it might be used to state a possible explanation of something that may or may not happen. It is like A* but in a hypothetical mode. On the other hand the sentence might be used to express the absurd idea that the water might have a reason – a normative reason – for action. It is not difficult in any case to limit our use of the phrase ‘reason for’ to cases where what is described is a normative reason, and keep formulations such as A* and A** out of the picture. In B on the other hand the reason is simply explanatory. If Sally runs for the reason that a bear is chasing her or that she thinks a bear is chasing her

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then the fact that a bear is chasing her or that she thinks a bear is chasing her explains her running. In this phrase, ‘for such and such a reason’ means something like ‘on account of such and such a reason’. It is an awkward kind of expression, and we would usually employ one of the following expressions instead: ‘Sally runs because a bear is chasing her’; or ‘The reason why Sally run is that a bear is chasing her’. The target of my argument here is a different construction – a combination of A and B. C. Sally’s reason for running is that such-and-such. This means that a reason for Sally to run is that such-and-such and she runs for that reason. The reason simultaneously favours and accounts for her running. It is both normative and explanatory; in this respect it is often described as a motivating reason. And it is this joint role that gives rise to the philosophical tension that I described at the beginning. The consideration that favours her running away appears to be that a bear is chasing her, not that she believes that a bear is chasing her. But the consideration that appears to explain her running away – at least according to the line of thought I am rejecting in this essay – is that she believes a bear is chasing her rather than that a bear actually is chasing her. Let me begin with the question of whether the fact that Sally believes that a bear is chasing her is a (normative) reason for her to run away – whether the fact that she has that belief favours her running away. What can be accepted without much difficulty is that her having that belief makes her running away rationally intelligible. Learning that she thinks a bear is chasing her I can make sense of her running away; I can see that her behaviour is rational. But this does not in itself mean that the fact that she has that belief favours her running away. Learning that Sally has a pathological fear of furry animals makes her running away rationally intelligible; what she does makes sense in the light of her having this fear. But the fact that she has a fear of furry animals does not favour her running away; it is no reason for her to run away (assuming for the sake of argument that she is trying to fight this phobia rather than going with the flow). We could say that the fact that she has a fear of furry animals is a reason why she runs away rather than a reason for running away. This distinction is made by several people in the literature including Darwall (1983, p. 29) and Dancy (2000, pp. 5–6). Bernard Williams (1981) represents a classic source for this distinction. His example is someone putting tonic in a glass of petrol, thinking it is gin, and drinking it. Williams says that the man’s desire for gin is not a reason for him to drink that liquid, but if his belief that it was gin had been true, that desire would have been a reason.4 Yet for the man who inadvertently drinks petrol ‘we do not only have an explanation of his doing so (a reason why he did it), but we have such an explanation which is of the reason-for-action form’. (Williams 1981, p. 102). To summarise

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Williams’s position here, there is an explanation of the man drinking that liquid, which is petrol. It cites a reason why the man drinks the liquid. And it is of a reason-for-action form. But it does not cite a reason for drinking the liquid. So it is of a reason-for-action form even though it does not appeal to anything that is actually a reason for action. It is not clear what Williams really means by the idea of an explanation of reason-for-action form that does not cite a reason for action. One possibility is that he is marking a distinction between reasons that are merely causal and reasons that put the action in a rational light, just as reasons for actions do. One reason why the man is drinking this liquid may be that he woke up late; this set off a causal chain that resulted in him being where he is with a glass of clear liquid in front of him. But this reason does not put his action in a rational light, whereas the facts that he believes the liquid is gin and that he wants to drink a gin and tonic form part of a causal explanation of his action that does put it in a rational light. Likewise, that Sally had a pathological fear of furry animals would put her running away in a rational light. What these reasons do not do is favour the action.5 What does favour the action is the fact that a bear is chasing her. There is a way of making recommendations for action – one that applies to Sally – that allows one to infer from the fact that a bear is chasing Sally that she should run away. In its simplest form we can think of that system just as the rule: if a bear is chasing you then run away. The rule can be justified by reference to a bit of bear psychology. It is a rule that Sally herself may acknowledge commitment to. Is Sally’s behaviour also responsive to a way of making recommendations that applies to her that allows one to infer from the fact that Sally believes that a bear is chasing her that she should run away – one that includes the rule: if you think a bear is chasing you then run away? If you were following such a rule you would have to establish first whether you thought a bear was chasing you and then act accordingly. But clearly Sally is not following nor should be following a rule which requires that of her. She should not attend to her psychological states in order to establish how to act; she should attend to the outside world – to whether a bear is actually chasing her. Of course it is possible to follow a rule which recommends action on the basis of whether you have a belief or not; but such a rule would have a very limited application. For example, there may be a rule: if you think that a bear is chasing you you should take your anti-psychotic medication. It does not matter that a bear is not chasing you; you should take your anti-psychotic medicine just in virtue of the fact that you think a bear is chasing you. But this is a peculiar sort of case.6 We can assume that in the case under consideration what does matter to Sally is whether a bear is actually chasing her. If a bear is not chasing her even though she believes one is she will make a mistake to run away. And if a bear is chasing her even though she does not believe it she will make a mistake not to run away. The rule that is operative

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for Sally in the case under consideration is one that makes reference to the fact that she is being chased by a bear, not to whether she believes it. Now one might respond that the fact that she believes a bear is chasing her itself makes it more likely that a bear is actually chasing her, assuming some degree of reliability in her belief-forming mechanisms, and so indirectly favours her running away. Suppose Sally is accompanied by Susan, who does not believe that a bear is chasing them but then sees that Sally does believe it. Susan may or may not go on to form the belief that a bear is chasing them. But in either case the fact that Sally believes a bear is chasing her favours running if the expected cost of running is outweighed by the expected cost of not running. Given that Sally believes a bear is chasing her, it may be a good bet to run away if Susan is not absolutely sure one way or the other. If Susan had such a reason for running then so presumably would Sally. But for Sally such a reason will always be redundant. If she has the belief for a reason then it is this reason for thinking that a bear is chasing her that is also her reason for running away; her having the belief does not add any reason to this. And if she does not have a reason for believing that a bear is chasing her then she has no reason to run away either. It might be possible to construct a bizarre scenario in which it is genuinely the fact that Sally believes that a bear is chasing her rather than the fact that a bear is chasing her that gives her a reason for running away. But even if such an example might be constructed it would not be possible to derive a general case for it always being the fact that she has the belief rather than the fact believed that is the reason for Sally to run. For, when Sally’s belief is not reliably formed the fact that Sally believes a bear is chasing her is not a reason for her to run. If Sally is walking through the English countryside, has just watched a film about someone being chased by a bear, and is a very suggestible person, then when she feels the hair rising on the back of her neck she may believe that a bear is chasing her. But this fact in these circumstances does not itself favour running away. The normative quality of reasons for action requires some separation of reasons from motivation. Kant expressed this by contrasting the way everything in nature works according to laws with the way that rational beings have the power to act according to the idea of laws – that is, according to principles (Groundwork, 36). Even if we accept the sort of internalism recommended by Williams (1981) and claim that reasons for Sally to act must be grounded in some way in her motivational state, we must still take them to exist independently of her motivational state. Her will must be able to respond to such reasons and be sensitive to them. And this means that she must be able to make mistakes about such reasons as well as being able to succeed in lining up her intentions according to them. If facts about what she believed constituted her normative reasons then they would not be properly independent of her motivational state.

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Raz (1975) makes the same point when arguing that such facts cannot be used as guides for behaviour: It should be remembered that reasons are used to guide behaviour, and people are to be guided by what is the case, not be what they believe to be the case. To be sure, in order to be guided by what is the case a person must come to believe that it is the case. Nevertheless it is the fact and not his belief in it which should guide him and which is a reason. (1975, p. 17) Williams too is very clear about this. The fact that the man in Williams’s example believes that the stuff in his glass (petrol) is gin does not mean that he has a reason to add tonic to it and drink it, even if he wants a gin and tonic. If reasons for action – normative reasons – must be such that they may exist even when the agent is not aware of them, then the fact that Sally believes that a bear is chasing her is not such a reason. And most philosophers who make the distinction between normative and motivating reasons agree. Normative reasons are worldly considerations that favour a certain sort of action; they are not generally facts about an agent’s beliefs about such worldly considerations.7 However, many such philosophers go on to say that motivating reasons are different; they are taken to be facts about the agent’s beliefs and desires. If a motivating reason is just an explanatory reason, as for example Michael Smith takes it to be (Smith 1994), then this makes sense. But if a motivating reason is taken to be a reason for which one acts (as I have been taking it to be) then it is not clear how to make room for this possibility. For if the fact that Sally believes that a bear is chasing her is not a reason for her to run how can it still be her reason for running? The reasons given in formulations like C seem to be normative reasons that motivate. If the fact that Sally believes a bear is chasing her is not a normative reason for her to run given the reasoning system she is committed to in her motivational state, then it is not a motivating reason either. Derek Parfit considers the possibility that he falsely believes his hotel is on fire and so jumps into the canal. He baldly states that in this case ‘my motivating reason was provided by my belief; but I had no normative reason to jump. I merely thought I did’. (1997, p. 99) But he makes no attempt to explain why we should say that he is actually motivated by a reason in this case rather than just that he thinks he is. By allowing motivating reasons to be provided by beliefs, as he puts it, he is denying that motivating reasons are simply reasons for action for which one acts. He is extending the notion of motivating reasons, but it is not clear what guides this extension, assuming that the idea of a motivating reason is distinct from that of an explanatory reason. For R to be a motivating reason for S to w R must be S’s reason for w-ing. S must w in the light of R. R must be a reason or consideration that motivates

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S to w.8 For any of these conditions to be the case R must be a consideration that is taken by S to favour w-ing. For R to be S’s motivating reason for w-ing, R must be taken by S to be a normative reason for w-ing. It follows that motivating reasons must meet what Jonathan Dancy (2000, chapter 5) calls the normative constraint. This requires that a motivating reason, that in the light of which one acts, must be the sort of thing that is capable of being among the reasons in favour of so acting; it must in this sense be possible to act for a good reason. (2000, p. 103) If the fact that Sally believes a bear is chasing her were her reason for running then she would have to at least take it to be a reason for running, and this means that it would have to be the sort of thing that was capable of being among the reasons in favour of running. But, as we have seen, the fact that she believes a bear is chasing her is not, except in bizarre cases, capable of being among the reasons in favour of running. Sally could not take it to be such. So it cannot be her reason for running away. If motivating reasons must be potentially normative reasons, it cannot be the case that normative reasons are facts about the world and motivating reasons are only ever facts about the agent’s psychological state. So why is there such a powerful inclination to say that Sally’s reason for running is that she believes/thinks that a bear is chasing her? We have seen one source of this inclination right at the start in Michael Smith’s argument that motivating reasons must be psychologically real. What makes reasons psychologically real according to Smith is that they are beliefs. But in response to this argument one could propose instead that what makes a reason psychologically real is simply that it is believed rather than that it is itself a belief. The fact that a bear is chasing her can be psychologically real for Sally just by virtue of her believing it. Most people, presumably including Smith, accept that the fact that Sally is being chased by a bear can explain at the very least the fact that she believes a bear is chasing her. So why not also accept that it can explain her behaviour? There is another explanation for the strong inclination to think that it can only be the fact that Sally believes a bear is chasing her that is her reason for running. It is the plausibility of an argument we can call the Argument from False Belief. Jonathan Dancy articulates the argument clearly in the course of his rejection of it: The main reason for saying [that the things we believe cannot be the reasons that motivate us] is a worry about the case where things are not as the agent conceives them to be. Surely, in such a case, we cannot say that his reason for acting as he did was that p. We have to say that his reason for acting was that he believed that p. Accepting this for the case

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where the relevant belief is false, then, we might still hope that ‘that p’ can indeed be the explanation where it is the case that p, but that where it is not the case that p the explanation can only be ‘that he believed that p’. But, as Bernard Williams puts it (1980: 102), the true–false distinction should not be allowed to affect the form of the relevant explanation. Supposing, therefore, that our explanation should take the same form whether it is or is not the case that p, and having already accepted that the correct explanation in cases where it is not the case that p, is ‘that he believed that p’, we are driven to say the same where the relevant belief is true rather than false. (2000, p. 121) This is my paraphrase applied to Sally’s case. 1. (Premise) When Sally’s belief that a bear is chasing her is false her reason for running is not that there is a bear chasing her. 2. (Interim conclusion) So, in the case where Sally’s belief that a bear is chasing her is false, Sally’s reason for running can only be that she believes a bear is chasing her. 3. (Premise – Williams’s Principle) The true–false distinction should not be allowed to affect the form of the relevant explanation. 4. (Conclusion) So, even when Sally’s belief that a bear is chasing her is true her reason for running away can only be that she believes a bear is chasing her and not that a bear is actually chasing her. Dancy rejects the conclusion and accepts everything else in the argument except the first premise. He makes the bold move that even when a bear is not chasing her Sally’s reason for running is that a bear is chasing her. This is bold because Dancy accepts a fairly standard way of linking reasons for action and explanations of action. This is that when someone acts for a reason then their reason for acting that way explains their acting that way. So Dancy’s denial of 1, commits him to accepting that even when no bear is chasing Sally it is still true that what explains her running away is that a bear is chasing her. So, as Dancy puts it, this sort of explanation is not factive. Dancy grants that this would not be acceptable if action explanation was causal. Causal explanations appeal to real things and genuine facts. But Dancy thinks action explanation is not causal, so it need not be factive. Still it must be considered a last resort to accept that that a bear is chasing her explains her running away even when no bear is chasing her. Can we find something else in the argument to attack? Let me start with the premise in line 3 which I call Williams’s principle. Williams produces this principle early on in his article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in a section where he is making some fairly fine distinctions in order to clarify his terms before launching his main argument for the claim

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that reasons for acting must be internal in his sense. Dancy takes Williams’s principle to show that reasons for acting must be the same in the case where the belief is true and in the case where the belief is false. But this is certainly not what Williams takes his principle to show. Williams claims that an agent’s reasons for action are different depending on whether the belief is true or false, although the form of the explanation is the same. Certainly Williams’s principle should not be treated in the way Williams himself treats it if it is to serve Dancy’s purpose. Dancy is not concerned with the form of an explanation but with which reasons actually figure in an explanation. What he needs is the principle that the true–false distinction should not be allowed to affect what actually count as reasons for action. According to this principle, the reasons for running that Sally has when her belief that a bear is chasing her is false are still her reasons for running when the belief is true, and her reasons for running when a bear really is chasing her are still her reasons when the belief is false. So we should substitute 3* for 3, where 3* is as follows: 3*. (Premise) The truth or falsity of Sally’s beliefs does not affect her reasons for action. So Sally’s reasons for running when her belief that a bear is chasing her is false are also reasons for running when it is true. And her reasons for running when her belief is true are also reasons for running when it is false. Accepting this gives us just two options concerning Sally’s reasons for running. Either her reason for running whether the belief is true or false is that a bear is chasing her. Or her reason for running in neither case is that a bear is chasing her, which leaves the only plausible conclusion being that in both cases her reason for running is that she believes a bear is chasing her. So 3* gives Dancy his conclusion, although 3* should certainly not be attributed to Williams, since he clearly denies it.9 If, like Williams, we say that Sally has no reason for running if there is no bear then we must deny 3* (assuming that we ever have reasons for action). But note that 3* has two parts. It is the second part that would be rejected by Williams who thinks that the true believer may have a reason for acting that the false believer does not, but merely thinks they have. At the same time Williams would reject 2. Rejecting the first part of 3* too is a move that might be made by someone who was impressed with John McDowell’s (1982) disjunctive approach to appearances that is supposed to defeat the Argument from Illusion in epistemology and who thought it could be carried over to the philosophy of action to defeat the Argument from False Belief. The way the disjunctive approach might be applied here is as follows. When it is said that the reason why Sally is running is that she believes a bear is chasing her there are two distinct (but to Sally indistinguishable) things that might be going on and there is no highest common factor between them. Either Sally’s reason for

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running actually is that a bear is chasing her or Sally’s reason is that she merely believes that a bear is chasing her. On this view the true believer is both better off and worse off than the false believer with respect to her reasons for action. She has the extra reason that a bear is chasing her, but she lacks the reason that she believes that a bear is chasing her. But this seems wrong too. It is easy to see how a true believer may be better off than a false believer; there is an extra reason in the world for her to be sensitive to. But how can the fact that the world turns out to be the way you think remove one of your reasons for action? A sort of inclusive disjunctive account might reject only the second part of 3* while holding on to 2. On this view the true believer has two reasons for running away – both that a bear is chasing her and that she believes a bear is chasing her, while the false believer’s reason for running is just that she believes that a bear is chasing her. This would not be vulnerable to the problem just raised since the true believer would not lack any reasons that the false believer had. But one might worry instead that there are too many reasons in this case. The true-believing Sally’s behaviour does not appear to be doubly justified. The fact that the bear actually is chasing her seems to be a quite redundant addition if the fact that she merely believes that a bear is chasing her is sufficient to count as a reason for her to run. In any case the arguments presented earlier against thinking of motivating reasons as facts about what agents believe apply whether the beliefs are true or false. This does not mean that Dancy’s rejection of 1 is after all the most reasonable way to respond to the Argument from False Belief given one has an argument against its conclusion. For we still have to look at the inference from 1 to 2. To invalidate this inference we need to show that when Sally’s belief is false it is possible for Sally’s reason for running to be neither that a bear is chasing her nor that she believes that a bear is chasing her. One way this might work is if, like Williams (1981) in the first two or three pages of ‘Internal and External Reasons’, we say that Sally has no reason for running when her belief that a bear is chasing her is false. The true-believing Sally’s reason for running is that a bear is chasing her. The false-believing Sally has no reason for running. This is akin to the disjunctive account in as much as it denies that there is a Highest Common Factor between the false-believing Sally and the true-believing Sally’s reasons for running. It does not have the problematic implication of the exclusive version of the disjunctive account that the true believer is worse off in some respect than the false believer with regard to their reasons for action. And it does not fall foul of the arguments that I have developed in this essay against thinking that facts about what Sally believes should count as reasons for her to act. Now if Sally has no reason for running it does not follow that she is irrational. There still may be reasons why she runs, reasons which put her behaviour in a rational light even if they do not justify or favour her behaving that way. She does not have a reason for running that she thought

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she had, but her behaviour can still be explained in a way which reveals her rationality. Sally, after she finds out that there was no bear, may feel foolish; she thought she had a reason for running away but it turns out she didn’t. It is also worth pointing out that even though the false-believing Sally’s reason for running was neither that a bear was chasing her nor that she believed a bear was chasing her, there may be other reasons we can find for her running. Her reason for running might be that there is evidence that there is a bear chasing her; for example, that there is a noise in the undergrowth might be her reason for running. This may be a slightly different explanation of her running than the one that cites the fact that there is a bear chasing her. Sally might say: I am not concerned with whether or not there really is a bear chasing me; the existence of this evidence is a good enough reason for me to run. Also, given that we are allowing bad systems of justification to provide reasons for action (reasons relative to those systems) we can say that there is a system of justification embedding the false belief that a bear is chasing Sally from which we can derive the recommendation that Sally should run given the fact that one should run when bears are chasing. So her reason for running might be that one should run away from chasing bears. This, though true (we are assuming), is a bad reason in the circumstances; but can still count as normative (in the relative sense described earlier) and motivating.

Notes 1. Had it been a grizzly bear running away would have been ill-advised, but with a black bear it might make sense. 2. For a small sample of moral philosophers who would take her reason for running to be that a bear is chasing her and not that she believes a bear is chasing her see Raz (1975, chapter 1), Williams (1981), Darwall (1983), Skorupski (1997). And although philosophers of action often take reasons for action to be facts about beliefs and desires, some – especially those represented in this volume – do not; apart from myself (Stout, 1996, 2006), see in particular Jonathan Dancy (2000), Rüdiger Bittner (2001) and Fred Stoutland (1998). 3. The real significance of this issue as far as I am concerned derives from the fact that agency essentially involves sensitivity to reasons for action. If we think of such reasons as psychological then we are led to the wrong conception (as I see it) of the relationship between action and the mind. See Stout (2006). 4. Like Dancy (2000, chapter 2) I do not think that the agent’s desires need be included as reasons for action even in the case where his beliefs are all true, but Williams’ claim is perfectly innocuous if all that he means is that the fact that that he felt like a glass of gin and tonic would have been a reason for him to drink that stuff if the glass had had gin in it. 5. It is precisely because it is not clear whether Donald Davidson (1980, essay 1) is talking about reasons for action or reasons why someone acts which are of a reasons-for-action form, when he claims in ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ that primary reasons are constituted from a belief and a pro-attitude, that I do not want to make his position the target of my attack in this essay although on the

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6. 7. 8.

9.

face of it it does look like the sort of psychological approach to reasons that I am attacking. This example reflects Jonathan Dancy’s argument in (2000, p. 124). See Parfit (1997) for example. Notice there is a difference between some psychological state motivating you and the fact that you are in that state being a motivating reason. You may be motivated by greed or pathological fear; yet the fact that you have greed or pathological fear is not a reason that motivates you. It is wrong to say that you act in the light of having greed or fear or that your reason for what you do is that have that greed or fear. Likewise we could accept that Sally’s belief or state of believing motivates her while denying that the fact that she has the belief is a motivating reason. Bittner (2001) follows Dancy in misattributing this principle to Williams.

References Bittner, R. 2001, Doing Things for Reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crisp, R. 2006, Reason and the Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancy, J. 2000, Practical Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwall, S. 1983, Impartial Reason, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davidson, D. 1980, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 1948 edition, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Paton, H. as The Moral Law, London: Hutchinson. McDowell, J. 1982, ‘Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68, 455–79. Parfit, 1997, ‘Reasons and Motivation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 71, 99–130. Raz, J. 1975, Practical Reason and Norms, London: Hutchinson. Searle, J. 2001, Rationality in Action, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Skorupski, J. 1997, ‘Reasons and Reason’, in Gullity, G. and Gaut, B. (eds), Ethics and Practical Reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 345–67. Smith, M. 1994, The Moral Problem, Oxford: Blackwell. Stout, R. 1996, Things That Happen Because They Should, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stout, R. 2006, The Inner Life of a Rational Agent, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stoutland, F. 1998, ‘The Real Reasons’, in Bransen, J. and Cuypers, S. (eds), Human Action, Deliberation and Causation, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Williams, B. 1981, Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4 Con-reasons as Causes David-Hillel Ruben

An agent’s having of a reason for an action (hereafter, simply ‘a reason’) is often said to be amongst the causes or causal conditions of the action for which it is a reason (in this wide sense, ‘action’ includes many cases of inaction)?1 Hereafter, this view is referred to as (1). The reasons that (1) is about are sometimes called ‘explanatory’ reasons in contradistinction to ‘justifying’ reasons, or ‘motivating’ reasons in contradistinction to ‘normative’ reasons, or ‘internal’ reasons, in contradistinction to ‘external’ reasons.2 These are three different distinctions, related to one another in complicated ways. The reasons required by (1) are surely motivating: these are the reasons that have actual psychological ‘purchase’ on the agent, and not just merely in principle available to the agent in some wholly objective sense. A well-known view, which is also adopted by the position I am considering, asserts that the only reasons that could play the causal role required by the idea of motivation, and hence explain why the agent did what he did, are the agent’s internal psychological states. So the reasons required by (1), as I construe it, are internal, explanatory and motivating. According to (1), the idea of an agent’s being motivated by a reason, or a reason having ‘purchase’ on an agent, is a causal idea, and the explanation of action by citing the agent’s reason is causal explanation. But even if (1) divested itself of the idea that the explanatory causes of action were the agent’s internal psychological states, it is at least committed to the view that whatever it is that explains and motivates action must be some item which is capable of being caused and causing other things.3 (1) is consistent with almost any view about the mind–body relation. As far as (1) goes, that psychological event or state might (or might not) be identical to a physical one. An agent can, of course, have a reason for an action without its being a cause of that action, but in the case in which the agent performs the action because of that reason, the reason is said, on this view, to cause the action. Donald Davidson’s well-known argument attempts to demonstrate just this: ‘If ... causal explanations are ‘wholly irrelevant to the understanding we 62

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seek’ of human actions then we are without an analysis of the ‘because’ in ‘He did it because ...’, where we go on to name a reason’.4 The (motivating, explanatory, internal) reasons Davidson focuses on, in this argument and elsewhere, are reasons which function as ‘pro-reasons’, in two closely connected senses: (a) these are reasons relevant to the action the agent does in fact take; (b) they are reasons which favour that action. Davidson’s reasons consist of a belief and a desire, the desire being a pro-attitude towards the kind of action the agent does. Other views might identify intentions or some other mental items as these reasons,5 but precisely which causal items count as reasons will not concern me here. The literature in action theory has tended to overlook the fact that reasons function in another way too.6 (a*) One can have reasons for an action that one does not take; (b*) one can have reasons which disfavour an action taken (a ‘con attitude’, to parallel Davidson’s ‘pro attitude’). Sometimes a person has conflicting reasons for acting, one set of which is a set on which he does not act, and both sets of conflicting reasons can be rationally or deliberatively relevant to the same choice situation and rationally or deliberatively relevant to the same action finally chosen. Each set justifies or supports a different proposed action on the agent’s part, and the agent is not able to perform both actions, because it is impossible to act in both ways at the same time. So the agent chooses to act in one of those ways rather than in the other(s). The reasons might strongly conflict, in the way in which a reason to do some token act of type A (or, as I sometimes elliptically say, a reason to A) and a reason not to do any token act of type A conflict; or the reasons might weakly conflict, in the way in which a reason to do some token act of type A and a reason to do some act of type B (or, as I sometimes elliptically say, a reason to B) conflict on any occasion on which one cannot as a matter of fact do both. On an occasion on which one cannot do both, a reason to do an act of type B must also be a reason not to do an act of type A, but only modulo the additional information that one cannot do both acts in the circumstances. In the case of strong conflict, no additional information is similarly required. Suppose that X has a reason to do a token action of type A and a reason to do a token action of type B, where the two reasons weakly conflict. Suppose further that X chooses to perform a token action of type A. The first reason, which favoured doing A, was rationally or deliberatively weightier (in the circumstances, of course) than the second, which favoured doing B; the first counted for more, as far as X was concerned. As we say, all things considered, X chose to perform a token action of type A. Both the pro- and the con-reason are, as I shall say, ‘rationally or deliberatively relevant’ to, or bear on, the same eventual choice made or action taken. (I write as if choice precedes every action, but my argument would be unaltered if choice were not ubiquitous in this way.) The single final choice made or action taken is made

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or taken because of the pro-reason and in spite of the con-reason. Indeed, that is what ‘all things considered’ must mean: because of the one set of reasons and in spite of the other. As Dancy says about these con-reasons: ‘But still I was influenced by them [the con-reasons] and they do figure in my motivational economy’.7 A con-reason is also a pro-reason in its own right for the action not taken, and is a con-reason only in the sense that it counts against the action which was taken. Similarly, a pro-reason is only a pro-reason for the action taken and is itself also a con-reason for the action not taken. In what follows, to simplify terminology, I will only use the idea of a pro-reason to be the reason which counts for the action one takes, and the con-reason to be the reason which counts for the action one does not take, the reason which gets outweighed.8 In the light of this, it would be wrong to think of pro-reasons and con-reasons as two different sorts of reasons. I was careful above only to say that reasons can function in these two different ways, depending on context. We use the language of reasons, weights and strength, in describing our deliberations. Such language is metaphorical, but, metaphorical or not, it certainly seems irreplaceable. We can order reasons for action by their strengths: one reason can be stronger than another, weaker than a third. But the whole truth about reasons for action can’t be exhausted just by this type of relational, ordinal information. We can speak of a case in which we have only one reason to do something, and say of it that it is strong or weak. Even in a case of conflicting reasons with both a pro-reason and a con-reason, we can imagine another similar situation in which the pro-reason remains at the same strength but the con-reason gains in strength so that the latter will now outweigh the pro-reason. In such a case, the pro-reason will not have changed its strength, only the con-reason would have, and hence the ordinal facts will have changed. This suggests that the relative strength of reasons for action is grounded in some sort of intrinsic weight they have. However, for purposes of deliberation, it is the relational, ordinal information that is crucial, even though there seems to be an underlying reality about the strength of reasons on which that relational information is based. The notion that reasons are causes, as I have explained that view above, ties rationality and causality in an obvious way. On that view, if an agent has a pro-reason for doing A and a con-reason for doing B, and does an action token of type A because of that first reason, the strength of that rationally or deliberatively stronger reason on which he acts is reflected by the fact that it is that reason that is the reason that causes an action, his A-ing, and the relative rational weakness of the reason on which he does not act is reflected by that other reason’s failure to cause an action, in its failing to lead to his B-ing. For a proponent of (1), that one reason rationally outweighs another is reflected in the causal sufficiency of the first but not of the second for action. Rational or deliberative strength and causal strength are tied together.

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Weakness of the will constitutes an apparent exception to this claim, and indeed it is just this which makes weakness of the will an important topic for someone who upholds (1). The essay will not focus on questions about weakness of the will, so let us say that, with this admitted exception, (1) otherwise combines the idea of reasons as causes with the view, (1*) that the rational or deliberative strength or weakness of a reason is captured by the causal sufficiency of the reason for action, or the lack thereof. Rationally stronger reasons lead to the actions they support, and the reasons they are stronger than do not lead to the actions they support. Davidson himself says that ‘if reasons are causes, it is natural to suppose that the strongest reasons are the strongest causes’.9 I refer to the conjunction of (1) and (1*) as causalism (in the philosophy of action). I am not just asserting that (1*) makes the vacuous claim that stronger reasons, rather than the reasons they are stronger than, cause actions unless they don’t. I am saying that (1*) makes the substantive claim that stronger reasons cause actions and the ones weaker than them do not, except in cases of weakness of will. Weakness of the will is a specific and delineable phenomenon. I intend to show that (1) and (1*) are false, and my argument relies on certain general features of causation. It does not rely on, and I do not use any examples of, weakness of the will to show this. If the reader is happy to accept that weakness of the will would constitute a further argument against (1) and (1*), I am happy to accept that as well. My argument, if successful, shows something about (1) and (1*), in addition to whatever weakness of the will shows. What exactly is the connection between (1) and (1*)? Without claiming that (1) entails (1*) even for cases other than weakness of the will, I think that anyone who holds (1), when asked about the phenomenon of con-reasons, is bound to accept (1*) as well (in Davidson’s words, they ‘naturally’ go together). Surely, on this view, the pro-reason causes the action it supports, and the con-reason does not cause the action it supports, because the proreason is a rationally stronger or weightier reason than the con-reason (again, neglecting the case of weakness of the will, but I shall cease repeating this qualification hereafter). If degree of rational support and causation are not tied in the way in which (1*) proposes, then we are owed an alternative account by the proponent of (1) of why it is that a rationally weaker conreason does not typically or even always, and not just in limited cases of akrasia, cause the alternative action that it supports, when an agent has both a rationally stronger pro-reason and a weaker con-reason. The central question I wish to address in this essay is this: if reasons are causes of actions, and if the rational strength of a stronger reason is captured by its causal sufficiency for action, what can we make of the idea of the causality of rationally weaker con-reasons? The point that I shall want to make will be the reverse, in a sense, of Davidson’s famous argument, mentioned above, in which he claims that unless having reasons for acting is understood

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causally, there is no way to cash out the idea of the reasons because of which one acts. The argument advanced in this essay is twofold: (2) first, that there are at least some cases in which there is no way to understand as causes, modulo some other plausible assumptions to be adumbrated, the rationally weaker con-reasons that disfavour the actions one does take but that do favour the actions that one does not take; (3) second, if such con-reasons cannot be understood as causes, then neither can pro-reasons. So, to paraphrase Davidson and simplify somewhat, the argument here is that there is no way in which to cash out the idea of the causality of the rationally weaker reasons on or for which one does not act, and thus, no way to cash out causally the idea of acting for any reason at all. I start by arguing the first point, (2), which will occupy the bulk of the essay. (1) stated that an agent’s having of a pro-reason for an action is a cause or amongst the causal conditions of the action for which it is a reason. On (1), like a pro-reason, a con-reason (the agent’s having of that con-reason) is meant to be a state or event. This must be so, since pro- and con-reasons are not two distinct sorts of items. If a con-reason had been rationally weightier than it was, it would have caused the action for which it is a reason. But it can’t be that some item is not an event or state but would have been an event or state in other circumstances (e.g. if it had been weightier). So if a pro-reason is an event or state, so is a con-reason. Metaphysically, pro- and con-reasons must be cut from the same cloth. States and events have causes and cause things. Consider (4): if an agent’s having of a con-reason is an event or state, then it is a cause, either of that action for which it is a con-reason or a cause of something else. If a con-reason is part of the causal order of things at all, the con-reason must surely cause something (so I do not consider an acceptable response by the causalist to be that con-reasons have causes but in turn cause nothing). The con-reason will have some actual effects or other. It is true that the view encapsulated by the conjunction of (1) & (1*) by itself places no constraints on what it is that conreasons must cause. It is only committed to finding some effect(s) or other of the rationally weaker of the reasons that does not lead to action, effects which in some way hopefully mirror that relative rational weakness. Of course, nothing in what follows is meant to be inconsistent with the perfectly plausible view that if an agent has a con-reason, certain counterfactuals must be true in virtue of that fact. For instance, if the agent has a con-reason to B when he in fact A’s, then the having of that con-reason lowers the agent’s probability of doing A, even though he still does A, below what it would have been in the absence of the con-reason.10 But none of this need be given a causal reading and the argument that follows will try and convince the reader that it should not be given such a reading. On the causal story, there will certainly be a causal chain that leads from the pro-reason to the action the agent took. Clearly, the con-reason cannot cause the action that it favours, because that action never happened, and if

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it did not happen, nothing can cause it. The chain going from the con-reason to the action it favours is merely a counterfactual chain. However, there might be cases in which the con-reason also causally contributes to the action taken, the action which it disfavours (to repeat: NOT on the action it favours, which occurs only on the counterfactual chain but not on the actual one). Did his con-reason so modify his action that it was different from what it would have been had he only had a pro-reason to do it? Well, it might have. Perhaps if he had not had his con-reasons, he would have chosen or acted a bit differently – perhaps he would have chosen or acted more quickly, more assertively, more decisively, or less hesitantly. So the con-reason, we might suppose, affects the action the agent does take, by making it indecisive or hesitant or whatever. Buridan’s Ass is in fact a special case of this.11 On the Buridan supposition, had the ass only had reason to choose hay pile A (and hence had no reason to choose hay pile B), he would have chosen pile A. Had he only had reason to choose hay pile B (and hence had no reason to choose hay pile A), he would have chosen B. But when he has both reasons, the causal chains (if such there are) converge and cancel each other out, and he chooses neither, rather like the body which remains stationary under the effect of balancing forces. So in the special, ‘Buridan’ case, the reason to choose pile B would not merely modify his choice of pile A; it supposedly would eliminate it entirely, in favour of inaction. (The same can be said for his reason to choose hay pile A and his choice of pile B.) Hence, so the argument runs, there cannot be converging and mutually cancelling causal chains in such a case, since we know that even asses do not starve – they select one hay pile or another, long before starvation sets in. The problem with this as a general solution to our problem about the causal power of con-reasons is that although something like this might be true, and indeed no doubt is true in some cases, it need not be. It seems that there can certainly be intrinsically qualitatively identical choices or actions, differing only extrinsically in whether or not the chooser also had a reason to do something else. So, let it just be stipulated that we are considering a case in which the agent does something in the circumstances in which he does have conflicting reasons, but that he would have also done it in an intrinsically qualitatively identical manner had he only had the one set of reasons. His ‘opposing’ reason does not make him hesitate, or dither, in doing whatever it is that he does, in any way.12 There must, therefore, be cases in which the con-reason is not causally necessary for the actual action taken, if it is a cause at all; indeed, I speculate that this would be so in the vast majority of cases. If we assume that the con-reason does not also contribute to the causation of the action it disfavours, but rather would have to cause something else, there are any number of possible candidates as the effects of con-reasons available to the causalist. Perhaps a person’s con-reason directly causes

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regret,13 or causes some other change in his mental landscape (his dispositions to act, for example) or causes some psychological illness in him. He does the action favoured by the pro-reason but since he had reasons against it, his con-reason ends in him regretting what he did, or some such. Or perhaps the effect of the con-reason is not even at the personal level at all. Might its effect not be some physiological or brain event, one of which the actor is perhaps ignorant or unaware?14 (Or, ‘some further physiological or brain event’, if the having of a con-reason is such a physical event too.) The important feature of all these candidates is that they require a second causal chain, in addition to the one that goes from the stronger reason to the action taken. If so, there would be one causal chain leading from his having a pro-reason to his subsequent action. There would be another quite distinct causal chain leading from his con-reason to his subsequent regret, or illness, or to some (further) physiological or similar event. The causal chains would not converge causally on the final choice or action, as they would if both pro- and con-reasons causally contributed to the same action taken, as we sketched above. On this rather simple picture, the pro-reason initiates a causal chain leading to the action; the con-reason initiates a wholly independent, second causal chain, leading to the regret or brain state or whatever. One thing to note about this view is that it might not permit us to capture causally the idea that both pro- and con-reason are rationally or deliberatively relevant to the same token final choice or action. The con-reason might not be a reason against acting in a certain way in virtue of whatever causal role it plays. A con-reason would not be the con-reason it is (a reason not to do what was done) in virtue of its causing something else other than that action. At the level of reasons for choice and action, the two reasons bear differently on (one favours and the other disfavours) the same choice or action, but the causal story might not mirror this in any way. There are just two distinct causal chains, each of which leads to a different result; one leads to an action, the other to some psychological or neurophysiological or dispositional state. But perhaps a causal model of how pro- and con-reasons work in choice situations need not capture within the causal model this fact about the rational significance of both types of reasons to the same action or choice, so I don’t take this as an objection to the suggestion under discussion. The causal picture it suggests has so far been kept somewhat simplistic. This causal story seems to be exhausted by these two facts: the pro-reason causes the action via one causal chain, the con-reason causes something else via an independent causal chain leading to something else, whatever that might be. First, consider the actual situation, c. In c, the pro-reason to A is rationally weightier for the agent than the con-reason to B. Causally, therefore, if (1*) is true, it is the pro-reason that causes the agent to A, rather than the con-reason causing the agent to B (so the con-reason causes something else).

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But now consider a counterfactual situation, c*. c* is just like c, save in one feature, and whatever is a causal consequence of that one feature: in c*, although the pro-reason retains the same weight that it has in c, the con-reason becomes much weightier. I think that this sort of scenario is very common. At a later time, an agent can assess a reason as having more ‘gravitas’ than he earlier imagined it had. It might weigh more with him than it did before. So in c*, the con-reason counts more for the agent. The reason to B now rationally outweighs the reason to A in the agent’s deliberations, so the agent now B’s rather than A’s. At the level of decision, choice and reason, this is all straightforward. Notice how the deliberative story includes truths which are relational and comparative, as we described at the beginning of the essay: one reason is weightier than another, or is weightier than it was, counts more than another or more than it did. Even if underlying deliberation there are non-relational truths about the strength of reasons, it is relational, ordinal information about reasons that is crucial for understanding the deliberative story. If we have both proand con-reasons, we want to know which reason wins the deliberative contest. But causation is not relational; it does not come in degrees, nor is it comparative. A cause either causes an effect or it does not; a cause can’t cause something more or less, or more or less than something else. Something can’t be more of a cause than another thing. So how should we represent the subsequent causal facts of the matter in c* (in order to obtain a coherent causalist story)? In c*, since the reason to B has now become the strongest reason, according to (1*), the reason to B will cause the agent to B. In c*, there will be a causal chain leading from the reason to B all the way to the agent’s B-ing. But what does the reason to A now cause in c*? Remember that we are supposing that the only difference between c and c* is the increased intrinsic weight of the reason to B, and, as a consequence, the fact that the reason to B now outweighs the reason to A. Since the reason to A is just as strong in c* as it was in c (albeit now outweighed), and since the reason to A was sufficient to cause A in c, then the reason to A should cause the agent to A in c* as well (with one exception, described below). If it was strong enough in c to cause the agent to A and it has the same intrinsic strength in c* (albeit now outweighed), it should still cause in c* whatever it caused in c, given that there are no relevant differences between c and c* other than the increased weight of the reason to B and the relative weightings of the two reasons. In particular, the reason to A has the same intrinsic weight in c* as it had in c. If the reason to A has the same weight in c and c*, then its effects should be the same in both circumstances. So why doesn’t the agent do A in c*, just as he did in c? If the reason to A is strong enough in c to cause the agent to A, and if it has the same rational intrinsic strength in c* that it had in c, then it should still cause the agent to

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A in c*. True, the reason to B gains in intrinsic deliberative strength in c* (and so the ordinal facts about the relative strength of the reasons will change from c to c*) and hence what the reason to B causes will change from c to c*. So the reason to B should also cause the agent to B in c*. There should be, in c*, as far as we can tell, a stand-off: the agent should be caused both to do A and to do B. To be sure, the agent can’t do both A and B; by assumption, they are weakly incompatible. But in the counterfactual situation, causally speaking, there should be no grounds for thinking that the con-reason will now win out over the pro-reason. The con-reason is now strong enough to cause the agent to B, but the pro-reason remains at the same intrinsic strength and hence, if (1*) is true, is still strong enough to cause the agent to A. So why should we expect the agent to do one or the other? Why doesn’t the agent do A rather than B, even in the counterfactual situation, since his reason to do A remained in principle strong enough to cause him to do A, or why doesn’t he do nothing at all, as in a Buridan case, since the two causes might cancel themselves out? What we are finding is that there is a misfit between the non-relationality of causation and the relational, ordinal character of rational strength in deliberation. I mentioned one exception, above, to the claim that ‘since the reason to A was sufficient to cause A in c, then the reason to A should cause the agent to A in c* as well’. We need to take note of this qualification. Suppose that in c* the reason to B, in addition to causing the agent to B, is able to interrupt the causal chain that would otherwise lead from the reason to A to the agent’s A-ing, and that explains why the agent does not, after all, do A in c*. There would be some flexibility in deciding just where, in c*, the requisite inhibitor blocked or stopped the chain commencing with the reason to A from leading to its ‘natural’ conclusion, A, as long as the chain did not get all the way to that action. For the sake of argumentative simplicity, let us suppose that the reason to B inhibited the very next link on the chain. On such a chain, let m be the node that would have followed immediately after the reason to A. So let us say that, in the counterfactual situation, what happened is that the reason to B inhibited or prevented m from occurring, prevented or inhibited the reason to A from causing m, and hence prevented the action A. That is why the agent B’s instead of A’s in the counterfactual situation, and why his reason to A does not lead to his A-ing in c*, an explanation entirely consistent with (1) and (1*).15 The problem with this solution is simply that it is not true to the phenomenological facts of the case. Sometimes indeed an agent’s reason gets blocked from leading to the action to which it would otherwise have led. Even apart from cases of weakness of the will, there are an indefinitely large number of ways in which an agent’s deliberative decisions can be thwarted. Bad luck affects us all. A typical sign of this happening is agent frustration. If my reason to A does not lead to action only because the causal chain leading

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from it to action is blocked in some way, the agent will feel thwarted in doing what he really wants. Recall that on this view, the reason to A is meant to be as causally powerful in c* as it was in c, and so that reason would drive the agent to do A, in equal measure, both in c and c*. If the agent failed to A in c*, only because the causal efficacy of his reason to A had been blocked, even though by another reason, the agent would feel this as some sort of failure. But what we are trying to do is to give a causal model for the case in which the agent B’s, because his reason to B has become weightier even though his reason to A has retained its original weight. In this case, nothing needs to be thwarted and the agent need feel no frustration. The fact that his reason to B now outweighs in his own mind his reason to A is not a potential source of frustration to the agent. He is doing what he most wants, which is to B. He gladly surrenders his reason to A, at least in the circumstances, to his now-superior-because-weightier reason to B. It is not true that his reason to B prevents or blocks him from acting on his reason to A. In the case at hand, he chooses not to do A, because he takes his reason to do A as relatively of less importance or weight than his reason to do B, and in the case as we have constructed it, I do not see how this fact can be modelled causally. There is, I submit, no fully convincing way causally to model decisionmaking which includes con-reasons, for at least some cases. It is the element of weight, comparative strength, which cannot be captured causally, at least in those cases in which the con-reason does not contribute causally to the action taken. As long as one thinks only about pro-reasons for action causing the actions they favour, the point is not salient. But once con-reasons are introduced, it becomes clearer that there is no plausible causal modelling for all the ways in which con-reasons work in our deliberation scheme. Let me now move, briefly, to the second part of my overall argument. Suppose that I have showed some credibility in the view that there is no causal model for con-reasons, (2). (3) asserted that if con-reasons cannot be causes, then neither can pro-reasons be. Why not hold a divided view: Davidson’s argument only purported to show that the pro-reasons were causes; he did not address the issue of causality and con-reasons at all. Why can’t pro-reasons be causal items, but con-reasons play no part in the causal order at all? The answer to this is to remind ourselves that pro-reasons and con-reasons are not two different sorts of items. There is no such thing as a set of reasons which are always pro-reasons and a set of reasons which are always con-reasons. In different situations, in different contexts, a motivating reason will function now in one way, as a pro-reason, now in the other, as a con-reason. Thus, there are a series of true counterfactuals of the following type: Concerning some pro-reason r for an action A that an agent did, if r had been

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a less weighty reason, the agent might not have A-ed but have done something else, B-ed. In such a hypothetical situation, r might have been (only) a con-reason for his B-ing, that is, a con-reason for what the agent then would have done. Concerning some con-reason r* for an action A that an agent did, if r* would have been weightier, the agent might not have A-ed but done something else; he might have B-ed instead. In such a hypothetical situation, r* might have been a pro-reason for his B-ing, that is, a pro-reason for what the agent then would have done. It is this which makes, I think, divided views on the causality of reasons unacceptable. How could it be that a reason r plays a (or, no) causal role but had it been a weightier or less weighty reason, it would have lacked (or gained) a causal role, a place in the causal order? Had the con-reason had more or less motivational ‘oomph’, it would have gained or lost its status as a causal item. I know of no view about causation that would make that sort of divided story about reasons at all attractive. Changes in context can’t draw an item of some sort (think of numbers or propositions, for example) from being an a-causal item to being a causal one. I think this gives us reason for thinking that con-reasons, and hence reasons of both kinds, fail to be causes.16 If the having of reasons are not causes, what sort of item are they? I don’t intend to say much about this here. Some may want to persevere with the psychologistic view that reasons (or, the having of them) are psychological states of an agent, and the acquiring of the reasons or ceasing to have the reasons are psychological events which happen to the agent (even if they had no effects). Others will see the implication of my argument as demonstrating that the having of a reason cannot be any kind of event or state at all, and moving us to a non-psychologistic view of reasons and the having of them.17

Notes 1. (1) is understood here to speak of causation, not necessarily only of deterministic causation. The causation in question might be probabilistic or stochastic. What are causes? No paper can do everything and, with that, I intend to beg off any responsibility for explicating the idea of causation. I am presupposing a fairly standard account of causation, on which causes are token events or token states, and that a causal chain is a series of such. Finally, there is an important distinction between the full cause of something and merely a part of the full cause. The causal items I discuss here are surely causes only in the latter sense, causes in the presence of a large number of background conditions. Again, this distinction does not, I think, make any difference to what I say here. 2. On this distinction, see Williams, Bernard, (1981) ‘Internal and External Reasons’, reprinted in Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 3. Are states causes? I invoke Davidson’s rejoinder to this question in his ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, reprinted widely and for example in White, Alan R., (1968) The Philosophy of Action, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 87–8. States, dispositions, and conditions ‘are frequently named as the causes of events’. Still, there

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

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13. 14.

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must be in addition to them a preceding event and ‘in many cases it is not difficult to find events very closely associated with’ the state or disposition. Onslaughts of states and dispositions, as well as items such as noticing, becoming aware, perceiving, learning, and remembering, provide obvious examples of associated events.’ Op.cit., pp. 86–7. See von Wright, G.H. ‘On So-called Practical Inference’, reprinted in Raz, Joseph, ed. (1978) Practical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 46–62. Although Jonathan Dancy notes their existence. Dancy, Jonathan (2004) Practical Reality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 4: ‘but still I will normally speak as if all the reasons that do motivate all pull in the same direction’. Ibid. In what follows, reasons have been so individuated that X has two sets, a pro-set and a con-set. It will make no difference to the argument if one speaks instead of one overall set of reasons with ‘pro’ and ‘con’ parts. The issues will be the same. It may appear that I assume that each set has only one reason as a member. More typically, this is not so and the set of pro- or con-reasons contains many members. Davidson, Donald (2001) ‘Introduction’, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. xvi. I am indebted to Richard Bradley, LSE, for helping me see this point. In fact, Buridan, it seems, was not responsible for the standard presentation of this case, wrongly named after him. For a discussion of Buridan-type cases, see Kane, Robert (1998) The Significance of Free Will, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 198–9. Of course, the choice to A that he would have made or the A-ing he would have performed had he not had a reason to B must differ from the choice to A that he did actually make or the A-ing he actually did do in at least one way, simply in virtue of the fact that it would have been a choice made in the absence of having a conflicting reason to B. The qualification, ‘in some intrinsic way’, is meant to exclude such trivial differences. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck, p. 27 and ff. I do not think that one should underestimate the importance of the shift from the personal to the subpersonal level, in order to maintain (1) and (1*), broadened to include con-reasons. It is a major concession on the part of the causalist. I do not intend to develop the point here, but certainly the hope that lay behind the causalist programme for reasons for action was that reasons could be construed as causes, yet doing so was compatible with understanding reasons and actions in their own terms, sometimes called ‘the space of reasons’. This programme was not necessarily committed to construing reasons and actions as ‘really’ about brain states and gross behaviour (even if they turn out to be identical to brain states and gross behaviour). The language of psychology and action was meant to have an internal coherence and integrity all its own. To that extent, this option can easily take the causalist programme somewhere it had not intended to go. Note that this example is not one of pre-emption, as some have suggested to me. If it were a case of pre-emption, one would have two reasons both favouring the same line of action, the first of which causes the action and the other of which did not cause the action but would have caused the same action, had one not had the first reason. This is certainly not the case we are considering. But, arguably, all

74 Con-reasons as Causes cases of pre-emption involve some sort of causal inhibition or prevention, as does the case we are considering. In causal pre-emption, the inhibition or prevention is by the pre-empting cause of some node on the chain that would have led from the pre-empted cause to the effect. In the case under consideration, the inhibitor might belong to the first, ‘pro’ set of reasons but might also arise from some other quarter entirely. It will not matter which is true, for the argument. For the sake of the argument here, all that matters is that there be some inhibitor or other that interrupts the causal chain leading from the con-reason and which would have led to an alternative course of action had it not been blocked or inhibited. 16. In Goldman’s ‘A Causal Theory of Knowing’, Goldman expresses the hope that ‘inference is a causal process, that is, when someone bases his belief of one proposition on his belief of a set of other propositions, then his belief of the latter propositions can be considered a cause of his belief of the former proposition’ (p. 73). Goldman is speaking of reasons for belief, not for action, but I think many of the issues transpose to a Goldman-type programme for the causal modelling of reasons for belief from what I argue for causal modelling of reasons for action. In deciding what to believe, the epistemic agent is often confronted both by disconfirming as well as confirming evidential beliefs. Both the confirming and disconfirming evidence is deliberatively relevant to the same belief, and yet, if the confirming evidence causes my eventual belief, there is an analogous problem about what the disconfirming evidence is meant to cause. Goldman, Alvin (1967) ‘A Causal Theory of Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy, 64, pp. 355–72. 17. Dancy, op.cit. chapters 4–6.

5 Agential Reasons and the Explanation of Human Behaviour Peter Hacker

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Explaining human behaviour

Human behaviour is varied in type, reflecting both the manifold abilities of mankind and the complexity of social forms of life and associated institutions. The vocabulary of act-descriptions is correspondingly rich and variegated. We need, and often want, to understand our fellow human beings – for we are social creatures, living in close contact with, and in various forms of cooperative and competitive relationships with others. So, when their behaviour is not transparent, or when a tale of their behaviour is opaque, we ask for explanation. Correspondingly, we give others an account of our own behaviour. We strive, sometimes, to make ourselves intelligible to others. We tell others fragments of our autobiography – for amusement, to elicit sympathy or induce interest, to vindicate or exculpate, as example or counterexample. In the course of so doing, we explain our behaviour (as well as our thoughts and feelings) in a variety of ways, of which explanation in terms of agential reasons is but one. What we thus explain can be variously characterized in terms of control, intellect and will, on the one hand, and in terms of a variety of forms of context-sensitive descriptions on the other. These constrain in various ways the kinds of explanations that are possible and delimit the scope of explanation in terms of reasons. So, before we examine the categories of explanation of behaviour, we must first sketch the various ways of characterizing the explananda. (a) Behaviour: control, intellect and will – Human behaviour can be mere doing that falls short of action. We may slip, stumble, choke – these are not actions we perform voluntarily, not voluntarily or involuntarily. Some of the things we do are unchosen reactions, such as blushing, weeping, laughing, sneezing and trembling. Some of these, although not such as can be initiated at will, can often be stopped or partially suppressed at will. To that extent they verge upon the voluntary. The category of human action is the category of the kinds of things human beings can do or refrain from doing at will.1 75

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Accordingly, acts can be chosen, attempted and intended. One can deliberate whether to V, decide to V, be asked or ordered to V. Depending upon the disposition of one’s will and intellect, one can V impulsively, intentionally, deliberately, willingly or reluctantly, thoughtfully or thoughtlessly. Action can be voluntary without being intentional: (i) If it is an inhibitable reaction which one has not inhibited, such as a yawn or sneeze. (ii) If it is done knowingly but neither because one wanted to do it nor for a further reason, as when one whistles while one works or gestures while one speaks (and knows one is so doing). (iii) If it is knowingly done as an unwanted (or not wanted) consequence or by-product of intentional action, as when one crushes the grass beneath one’s feet while walking across the lawn or wakes one’s wife when putting the cat out at night. Intending belongs to a family of concepts that includes being about to, meaning to, having it in mind to, proposing to and planning to. The objects of intending are varied: one may intend to V; one may intend another to V if one has a form of authority over them; one may intend, or intend another, to be or become a so-and-so; and one may intend a certain state of affairs to obtain if one has appropriate control over whether it comes about or is maintained. Intentional actions, like voluntary actions, are an exercise of two-way powers. An intentional action need not be voluntary (action done under duress is not) but it cannot be involuntary. One may form an intention in advance of acting and then act on it (or fail to, because, e.g., one is prevented, one forgets or changes one’s mind). Such intention-formation may be the upshot of deliberation and decision. But one may act intentionally without any antecedent deliberation or decision. If an agent V-s intentionally, he must know that he is V-ing and must be doing so either because he simply wants to, feels inclined to or feels like it, or because he has a reason or further reason for V-ing. An agent may V with a further intention of X-ing. The further intention in the act may be merely concurrent (as when one goes to the cinema with the intention of having a drink afterwards), or V-ing may be a means to X-ing (as when one climbs up a ladder in order to change a light bulb). In the latter case, but not necessarily in the former, to X is A’s reason for V-ing, and ‘X-ing’ (or, in some cases, ‘trying to X’) is a further description of what A is doing. To say that A’s V-ing is intentional is not to give A’s reason for V-ing; but to say that A V-ed in order to X is. Here, to X is A’s purpose in V-ing and his reason for V-ing. One may also V with the intention of doing X, without V-ing intentionally, if one V-s accidentally or by mistake – as Tyrrel accidentally killed the king, intending to kill a stag. Clearly, one may V intentionally, on purpose, without V-ing for a purpose, as when one V-s with the intention of V-ing, as opposed to V-ing unintentionally

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(unknowingly, by accident or by mistake) or not intentionally (knowing that one is V-ing but not wanting to V, as when one wakes up one’s wife while letting the cat out). That one V-s with the further intention of X-ing does not imply that one’s purpose in V-ing is to X. When one goes to the cinema with the intention of catching the 10:30 bus home, one’s purpose in going to the cinema is not to catch the bus home. So specifying a further intention with which one V-s need not give one’s reason for V-ing. Specifying one’s purpose in V-ing, however, does. For one cannot V with the purpose of V-ing, but only V with the purpose of doing something else. To specify the purpose for which one did something is to explain why one did it.2 Is every intentional act done for a reason? That depends on whether one takes V-ing ‘just because one feels like it’, or ‘because one feels inclined to’, as V-ing for a reason. If so, then all intentional action is done for reasons. If not, then one must distinguish between knowingly doing something just because one felt like it, ‘for no particular reason’ as we sometimes say, from acting intentionally for a reason. Certainly to feel a sudden urge or impulse to V is not necessarily to have a reason for V-ing, and to V because one feels an urge or impulse to is not necessarily to act for a reason. The urge, impulse or craving may be ‘quite mad’, that is, completely irrational. The consequences of our intentional actions may themselves be intentional, unintentional (if not foreseen) or not intentional (e.g. if foreseen but not part of the agent’s purpose) and the agent’s action may accordingly be redescribed in terms of its consequences. For example, if the agent opened the door, as a consequence of which the room cooled down, then he intentionally, unintentionally or not intentionally cooled the room down by opening the door. The act, thus described, obviously admits of various kinds of explanation, depending on whether it is intentional or not, and, if not intentional, whether done knowingly or unknowingly, voluntarily or not voluntarily, by accident or by mistake, and so forth. The cognitive and volitional character of the behaviour under consideration can often restrict the range or even determine the character of the explanation that might be offered for it. One cannot have a reason for doing something involuntarily or a motive for doing something inadvertently, and one cannot ask for the point of someone’s doing something unknowingly. One can ask for the purpose of an intentional action, but not of an unintentional one. (b) Behaviour: alternative descriptions – Human behaviour can be described in a large variety of ways. Often it can be described in terms of physical movements. Whether the movements are merely the movements of the agent’s limbs and body (‘his knee jerked’) or whether they are movements the agent makes (‘he moved his leg’) constrains the kinds of explanation appropriate. But there are many things human beings do, and for which we may want an explanation, which are not movement-involving, such as thinking of a solution or planning a move; looking at a painting, watching a scene, listening

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to or for a noise; waiting for a bus; keeping the door open, holding tight, gripping firmly; concentrating on a problem, a lecture or on what one is looking at; omitting, abstaining or refraining from doing something. Whether or not behaviour is movement-involving, it can be described or redescribed in many different ways, by reference to its antecedents (as is patent in such verbs as: to reply, repeat, re-enter, requite), its consequences (e.g. such causative verbs as to break, mend, dry, wet, open, close, pacify, irritate, console) or its circumstances. The varieties of ways in which acts can be described or redescribed in terms of their circumstances is large, and can be variously classified. Describing an act in terms of its circumstances specifies it, often as a species of a larger genus of a given kind of act. Commonly, actdescriptions can be analysed in terms of a simpler act and the specifying circumstance, as perjury, for example, is telling a lie in the circumstance that one is under oath, or bigamy getting married in the circumstance of already being married. The circumstances of an act can be construed narrowly, so as to exclude such subjective factors as voluntariness, knowledge and intention (and their negations), or it can be stretched to include these. Many moral and legal act-descriptions incorporate such factors: to steal is taking something, knowing one has no title to it; to lie is to tell an untruth with intent to deceive. Acts can also be described in terms of the manner of their performance (e.g. to mumble one’s thanks, to hurry to school), or in relation to the identity or some feature of the patient affected by their performance (suicide determines the identity of the patient with the agent, rape requires the unwillingness of the patient). A multitude of acts, as is evident from the foregoing examples, are described by reference to social, moral or legal norms that prohibit them (e.g. murder, trespass), require them (pay taxes, obtain a license), or make them possible (marry, make a will, score a goal, checkmate one’s opponent). The character of the description of the behaviour that requires explanation commonly excludes certain kinds of explanation. Acts that by their nature can be performed only once (such as suicide), cannot be explained in terms of tendency or frequency explanations, such as habit and custom (a suicidal tendency is not a tendency to commit suicide, but a standing temptation to do so). Acts that by definition or description are mistakes or accidents cannot be explained in terms of reasons, purposes or motives; nor can involuntary acts or doings that are not acts (such as slipping or stumbling). Acts that can be performed only intentionally, such as cheating, lying, forging exclude explanation in terms of inadvertence and inattention. Certain kinds of omissions can be explained by reference to lack of legal power or right. But possession of legal (or other normative) power does not explain why an agent exercised it on an occasion, it explains only that it was possible for him to do so. (c) The varieties of explanation – Citing an agent’s reasons for thinking, feeling or doing something explains why he thought, felt or did what he did. It

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is one form, perhaps the most distinctive and important form, of explaining human thought, feeling and action. But it is not the only form, and before we examine its conceptual character in further detail, we should bring to mind the variety of explanations of human behaviour. ‘Why did A V?’ is the most general form of a request for an explanation of A’s doing what he did, and it can accordingly elicit any form of explanation of human behaviour, depending only upon the constraints imposed by the description of what the agent did. The kinds of answers that can be offered to explain behaviour are delimited not only by the description of the act, but also by the kind of question. For commonly, the speaker phrases his question in a manner that restricts the possible answers. ‘What did A V for?’ is a request for the point and purpose of an act and it presupposes its intentionality. It precludes various forms of efficient-causal explanation, as well as explanations in terms of ignorance and inadvertence. ‘What made A V?’ can be asked if V-ing was not an act of A, but something he did (such as stumble, slip or choke) or if it was an act, but one which was distinctly uninviting, unreasonable or irrational – something which A would not have done but for the explanatory factor. In the first kind of case, the question invites a causal explanation: A slipped because the pavement was icy; he fell because he was pushed; he choked because a piece of bread got stuck in his throat. In the second kind of case, an explanation in terms of an obliging factor is invited: he divulged the secret because he was threatened; he took the slow road because the motorway was closed. But a causal explanation is also possible in some cases, for example, he acted as a result of post-hypnotic suggestion. We can distinguish (non-exhaustively) the following forms of explanation of behaviour:3 i. Explanations in terms of constitutive redescription: We are sometimes puzzled at certain kinds of ritualized, semi-ritualized or otherwise rulegoverned activities. Why are these people gathered together and behaving thus? – They are engaged in a political demonstration, a trade union dispute, or celebrating a victory, commemorating an event, attending a wedding, a funeral or memorial service, playing a game and so forth. Here the explanation consists in redescribing the behaviour in its broader social setting and with reference to social norms. In this setting, behaving thus counts as doing so and so. Understanding what they are doing in these terms often resolves our puzzlement, for we may need no further explanation of why they are doing what they are doing thus described. ii. Explanation by polymorphous redescription: A different kind of explanation by redescription is explaining a specific activity in terms of its polymorph, as when we explain someone’s shutting the door as obeying an order, someone’s singing as practising for a recital, someone’s visiting as his keeping his promise.

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iii. Regularity explanations: We commonly explain behaviour as an instance of a regularity. Why is Emma going for a walk? – It is a habit of hers to go for a walk every afternoon. Why is Mr Darcy changing his clothes? – It is customary to dress for dinner at Pemberley. Why did Fanny Price hesitate to ask Sir Thomas? – Because she is timid (a disposition and character trait). It is noteworthy that these different kinds of regularity explanations are not causal and the explanation is not subsumption-theoretic despite the fact that the behaviour is explained as instantiating a regularity. They do not exclude explanations in terms of agential reasons, but they indicate that the behaviour is not exceptional. In many cases, no further explanation is required. iv. Inclination-explanations: We often explain behaviour as exemplifying a preference (that may be without reason) or liking either for the specific thing or activity in question, or for things or activities of the kind in question, or a dislike for some thing or activity. The inclination-explanation, in the cases of likings and dislikings, may also refer to a regularity. Sometimes we explain behaviour by reference to feelings that involve inclinations, as when we attribute A’s outburst to his feeling indignant (hence feeling inclined to protest) or greedy (hence feeling inclined to take a second helping of pudding). Occurrently felt emotions and attitudes such as anxiety, fear, tenderness, pity, amusement, curiosity are all associated with inclinations to behave, and conduct is commonly explained by reference to such a felt inclination. Hence, someone may be trembling out of fear, laughing with amusement, their tears may be tears of tenderness or pity. The behaviour that we explain thus is not caused by the emotion but is an expression of it. v. Causal explanations: Causal explanations obviously play a significant role in rendering human behaviour intelligible – but not the ubiquitous role that philosophers who conceive of reasons as causes suppose. We explain doings that are not actions, such as stumbling, slipping or blushing, in terms of causes. We explain many involuntary or only partially voluntary actions causally: he laughed because he was being tickled, cried out because he was hit, sneezed because he had taken snuff. Whether, in what sense and to what extent, intentional action can be explained causally will be examined in Section 3 below. vi. Explanations in terms of reasons: Intentional action is the primary object of explanation of behaviour in terms of agential reasons. Saying ‘I just intended to V’, unlike saying ‘I just wanted to’, does not explain one’s V-ing. But specifying one’s purpose (which is one kind of ‘intention with which’) does. However, there are many other kinds of factor that can be an agent’s reason for acting. We can classify them in numerous different ways: facts and values, norms and obligations, backward- and forward-looking reasons (past facts, prospective consequences, purposes and goals). It is a moot point whether desires, wants and preferences, on the one hand, and beliefs (the believing, not what is believed), on the other, should be regarded as reasons for doing anything. Some philosophers have argued that all reasons are

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desires and beliefs, or combinations thereof. Others insist that desires are not reasons at all – it is the reason for wanting to V that is a reason for V-ing; and believing is rarely a reason for acting – it is what is believed that is normally a reason. We shall examine this below. vii. Motive explanations: Motive explanations are more specialised than explanations in terms of reasons.4 To give A’s motive for V-ing (e.g. revenge) need not be the same as giving his reason (e.g. that B killed his father). Acting out of a given motive is not the same as exemplifying a disposition – A may act out of revenge on a single occasion without being of a vengeful disposition. To act out of irritability, timidity or conceit is not to act from any particular motive. Motives are not feelings, even though a person’s behaviour can be explained by reference to the motive of pity or love. One may feel pity or love, overflow with compassion or affection – but one cannot feel one’s motives or overflow with them. To say that someone acted out of anger is not to explain his behaviour by reference to a motive, but by reference to an emotion. Motives, unlike feelings and emotions, cannot be pleasant or unpleasant, do not wax and wane, and do not occur at a given time or place. They are not kinds of mental event or state, but kinds of explanation. One salient type of motive-explanation specifies a pattern of backward- and forward-looking reasons. To say that A V-ed B out of gratitude is to explain A’s V-ing by reference to B’s having intentionally benefited A (a form of backward-looking reason), and A’s V-ing in order to requite B’s generosity. But A’s specific reason, for example, that A gave him a generous loan when he needed one, is not mentioned. Similarly, to explain A’s V-ing B as done out of revenge is to explain the action in terms of B’s having harmed A or an interest of his, and A’s acting in order to harm B in return. But A’s specific reason for V-ing B, for example, that B killed his father, is not specified. In many cases, the pattern is of a remedy-demanding antecedent circumstance that provides a backward-looking reason for acting, an action with a certain intention, and a prospective consequence that is thought to remedy the prior condition – thus providing a forward-looking reason. Differences between motives (e.g. between ambition, greed, patriotism, vindictiveness, gratitude) are then evident in the kinds of antecedent remedy-demanding condition and the kinds of prospective values or advantages aimed at. Some motives, such as revenge, friendship or gratitude, involve not merely acts done with an intention that exemplifies a pattern, but acts that can be done with the intention of exemplifying a pattern. Here one can speak of acting in order to wreak vengeance or to show friendship or gratitude. To these forms of explanation of action we may add further forms of explanation distinctive of inaction: i. inability, physical, technical (skill) or intellectual ii. prevention, natural or human

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iii. iv. v. vi. vii.

lack of equipment lack of opportunity ignorance of opportunity forgetting one’s intention lack of normative power

The question of why A did not V may be just as pressing as the question of why he did. It should be noted that some factors can be cited when offering one kind of explanation which may be logically excluded from another. So anger may be a factor in an explanation in terms of a passion, and timidity a factor in a regularity explanation, but neither can occur in a motive explanation. Values (fairness, filial piety, friendship) and norms (obligation, duty, rightness) may be cited as factors in explanations in terms of reasons, but not as factors in causal explanations.

2

Explanation in terms of agential reasons

A person’s reason for V-ing can be given by means of a nominal clause ‘that p’ or by means of infinitive clauses ‘in order to W’ or ‘to attain G’ (‘His reason for going to London was to see the Queen’, ‘To attain fame was Hume’s reason for writing the book’, ‘He went to Egypt for no other reason than to see the Great Pyramid’). We commonly use the infinitive clause when we explain why A V-ed by specifying his reason in the form of his goal or purpose (that for the sake of which he acted). But we also explain A’s behaviour in terms of his reasoning (actual or counterfactual). Here we give his reason in the form of a nominal clause that can appear, denominalized, as a premise in reasoning that supports the conclusion to V. So the infinitive clause that was used in explaining that he V-ed in order to attain G will find its correlate in a premise citing a goal or desire for an end. A’s reason for V-ing can be that p or in order to W or to attain G only if A knows or believes that p or that V-ing is a way of W-ing, or a means to W, or necessary to attain G.5 A reason, specified in sentential form, is a step in reasoning. If that R is A’s reason for V-ing, then R, in conjunction with other premises, must support, or be thought by A to support, the conclusion to V. But it would be mistaken to suppose that whenever A V-s for the reason that R, he goes through a process of reasoning ‘in his head’, let alone aloud. Often what is to be done is too obvious to require, or too pressing to allow, any deliberation, yet one can give reasons for one’s action. Often what is done is spontaneous – but not therefore without reason. To give one’s reasons for V-ing is not the same as reporting one’s reasoning. There are various criteria for something’s being A’s reason for V-ing. Typically, they consist in the antecedents and context of his action. Often a person’s reason for doing what he does is patent – seeing that it is raining,

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he puts up his umbrella; having been told that a ticket costs a pound, he hands over a pound coin; wanting a drink, he says to the bartender ‘May I have a scotch’. There is nothing mysterious about our ability to discern immediately the reasons for much of our fellow human beings’ behaviour. We see the actions of other human beings, in the contexts in which they are embedded, as intentional, purposive and commonly conventional, that is, governed by constitutive rules that define the act and its meaning. We do not see them as mere ‘bodily movements’ (similarly, we see the world around us as consisting of relatively persistent coloured material substances in objective space and time – not as expanses of colour, here, now, in one’s ‘subjective’ visual field).6 But sometimes it is not obvious what another person is doing, or it is opaque what his reasons are for doing what he is doing. So we may ask him. If he sincerely says that his reason for V-ing is that R, then, normally, that R is his reason for V-ing. Looked at askew, this can seem mysterious. If the agent’s answer is not a report on the reasoning he has just gone through, on what he said aloud or to himself, what exactly is it? How does he know what his reason is or was? Is it a hypothesis of his that his reason was that R? Why should his word be accepted? What sort of authority (if any) does his word have, and whence does it derive? One way to approach these questions is ‘analytic-genetic’, that is, to reflect on how we might conceive of the roots of the language-game of giving reasons for our actions. A human child, like other young mammals, finds a multitude of things in its environment attractive or repulsive, sources of pleasure or of fear and dislike, and objects of curiosity with regard to his ‘interference’ in the course of things. He learns to act in pursuit of what he wants, and, as his rudimentary linguistic skills develop, he learns to supplement his frustrated strivings and screamings to get with a ‘Want!’, and subsequently to substitute for them an ‘I want’ and later still ‘I want the (or a) so-and-so’ (such utterances, it should be noted, are not reports on his mental state). As his motor skills develop he learns to manipulate objects in his environment, and learns what happens when he acts on (pokes, pushes, pulls, throws) them. Rapidly he, like any other young mammal, learns to bring about such-and-such by doing so-and-so. But unlike other young mammals, he is learning to speak. Once he has mastered the rudiments of speech, the child may be asked what he is doing or trying to do, why he wants to do what he is trying to do, what his purpose is in doing what he is doing. He learns to describe his actions. Later he learns a new language-game: the practice of announcing an action: ‘I’m going to V’ – for which he must learn that when one says ‘I’m going to V’ one must go on to V. Here lies the primitive roots of intention-formation in advance of action, of our non-inductive knowledge of our own future actions, and of the relative predictability of the action of others on the basis of announced intention. (If announced intentions for the immediate future were not typically followed by the intended action, the very concept of intention would lose its point.)

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Once this language-game is in place, there is room for further questions namely: ‘Why are you going to V?’, and for answers of the form ‘In order to W’, ‘To get X’ and ‘Because I want X’, that is, specification of one kind of reason, namely the purpose of V-ing, that for the sake of which the V-ing is to be done. The answer ‘Because I want X’ invites the question: ‘Why do you want X?’ and the child learns to specify what it is about X that is attractive or appealing – it learns to give a further kind of reason, namely to specify a desirability characteristic. And the child also learns to specify what it wants X for – for example, to eat it, or to play with it or as a means to a further end. Here we have the beginnings of reasoning and of giving reasons. It is noteworthy (and not contingent) that reasoning marches hand in hand with intention-formation. The transition from voluntary and purposive action that lies within the competence of mere animals to intended and deliberative action is an aspect of the emergence of rationality. The child’s emergent rationality is his growing ability to reason from given data to conclusions. A criterion for his reasoning thus is his answering such questions. To learn to answer such questions, to learn what counts as an adequate answer, is itself to learn to reason. In sincerely saying that his reason for V-ing is that R, the agent need not be recounting the reasoning he has just gone through – he may not have gone through any. So what makes R his reason for V-ing? He makes it his reason. For although one cannot choose to have a reason to V, one can, reflecting on the reasons one has, choose or decide to V, for such-and-such a reason (rather than from another reason (that one has)). It is this reason, not that one, that one takes to be decisive, or that one takes to justify, one’s V-ing. It is by reference to this factor, not that one, that one would justify one’s decision and that one would subsequently cite to explain why one did what one did. It is not that he decides to-V-for-the-reason-that-R, but rather for the reason that R (and not for the reason that S), he decides to V. If A is told to leave the room by B, he may say, ‘I am leaving the room because you told me’, or he may say ‘I am leaving the room, but not because you told me’.7 What his reason is for leaving the room is a matter of his reasoning – he decides to V for that reason, and his avowal of his reason characterizes his action. Each reply, in different scenarios, may indicate very different things. The first may indicate A’s compliance and willingness to obey; or it may signify resentment (since he would not have left the room otherwise); or it may be meant to shift responsibility for A’s absence onto B. The second reply may signify A’s indignation at something that preceded the order to leave; or outrage at B’s impertinence; or to notify B that A was going to leave anyway; or to remonstrate that despite appearances A would not dream of taking orders from B. In sincerely giving his reason, A provides others with an interpretation of his behaviour – a particular way of understanding it; but he does not interpret it. The way of understanding he thus provides them with is his way of

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understanding his own behaviour – the way he conceives it. In saying that he is V-ing because it is the case that R, A is not merely citing R as a reason for him to V, he is declaring it to be his reason for V-ing, endorsing a particular teleological/hermeneutic explanation of his V-ing, and taking responsibility for it under the description ‘V-ing, for the reason that R’.8 Patently, his reason for V-ing is not something he discovers to be such, nor is it a hypothesis of his – although he may lie to others and may deceive himself. What is sometimes denominated ‘first-person authority’ in these contexts is mischaracterized thus. The agent is not ‘an authority’ on his own reasons for acting, as he might be an authority on Sanskrit literature. His sincere word is a criterion for his reason’s being that R, but not because he infers this from evidence he has which others lack. He has no epistemic authority, but rather verdictive power. This hermeneutic account illuminates cases of an agent’s giving his reasons for V-ing ex post actu where he went through no reasoning, and where his giving his reasons is neither recounting his reasoning nor reporting an explicit decision to V for the reason that R. Here, one might think, the agent’s ability to explain or justify his action by citing his reason is mysterious. For if there is nothing for him to remember by way of reasoning, how can he now say what his reason for V-ing was? One might suggest that in declaring R to have been his reason, he is averring that he would have cited R as his reason had he been asked. This can be misleading. Although it may be true that had he been asked, he would have given R as his reason, this counterfactual is not a hypothesis based on past experience. After all, the normal form of thus giving one’s reasons for a past action is not ‘I think my reason was that R’, or ‘Judging by my reason for V-ing last time, it is probable that my reason was that R’. Indeed, were someone to respond thus in standard cases we would doubt his sanity. Nor is saying that his reason was that R a matter of ‘inner observation’ – as if he were, so to speak, reporting a causal connection ‘seen from the inside’. For there is no such thing as introspectively observing his reason ‘at work’, so to speak, since introspection is not a form of observation, and reasons don’t ‘work’ – they are neither causal agents nor mental events. The ability to give one’s reasons ex post actu should be compared with the ability a speaker has to say what he meant by an utterance (e.g. ‘He is by the bank’) or whom or what he meant by a demonstrative or indexical in his utterance (e.g. ‘He’ll be there then’). The question of how the speaker knows what his reasons are or were, in the standard case, should be rejected as being as misconceived as the question of how a person knows what he means or meant. The agent’s avowal of a reason ex post actu must render intelligible the intention in the act. For it must present the reasoning that he holds to warrant the act, even though, ex hypothesi he went through no reasoning. It must provide his rationale for having performed it. So the reason he gives

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must cohere with the context of his action, the motivational background and his subsequent behaviour. (Failure so to cohere, and, in some cases, failure to cohere with his general behavioural dispositions, may cast doubt on his sincerity or on his self-understanding and self-knowledge.) The agent, we assume, knows now what he then knew or was aware of (which others, trying to understand why he acted as he did, may not know), and he knows now what he then believed (otherwise he may say that he cannot recollect why he V-ed). He also knew what he was doing (otherwise he was not acting intentionally) and still knows, and knows whether he succeeded or failed to do what he was aiming to do (so he can, in appropriate cases, say what he was trying to do). Thus citing his purpose as the reason why he V-ed is little more than being able to elaborate what his intention in the action was. Citing backward-looking reasons for his V-ing (e.g. that he was responding to B’s X-ing and not to C’s Y-ing), none of which he stated (either overtly or sotto voce) at the time since he acted purposefully without reflection or deliberation, is not to interpret his action. That is something others may do, or he may do under very special circumstances of self-doubt. Rather, it is to determine its character. In saying that his reason for V-ing was that R, he is making a connection between the facts as he knew them and his action (or his action and recollected purpose). In making that connection, he is endorsing a certain kind of description of his behaviour, and taking responsibility for it under that description. Where an agent has (or had) multiple reasons for V-ing and avows that he is V-ing (or V-ed) for one reason rather than another (because it would help Jack, not because Jill was looking; because it was right, not because it was also profitable), doubts may arise. He may be lying. He may be deceiving himself with regard to his own motivation. Or his motivation may be intrinsically, not epistemically, opaque. Here is an aspect of human behaviour and its understanding that can be constitutionally indeterminate. A may insist, in all sincerity, that he V-ed for the reason that p, but B may repudiate A’s explanation, insisting that he V-ed for the rather less reputable reason that q. A may persuade B of the correctness of his explanation (it never even occurred to him that q). Alternatively, B may convert A to seeing his own behaviour differently, perhaps in the light of facts about his character or facts about his past that he had not brought to mind. Or their disagreement may remain unresolved. Sometimes the failure of resolution may not be epistemic. The facts of the case may all be known, and yet lend themselves to more than one perfectly plausible story. In such cases, the disagreement may, sometimes tragically, be unresolvable.

3

Causal mythologies

We have displayed human action for reasons as a form of teleological behaviour (behaviour done for a purpose, for the sake of a goal), even

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though it often incorporates backward-looking reasons. But even when an agent acts for backward-looking reasons, for example, thanks B because B did him a favour, or benefits B because B acted meritoriously, A does so in order to express gratitude or reward desert – that is his purpose. We have emphasized the role of reasons in reasoning, either in advance of acting or after the event. An agent’s citation of his reason for V-ing presents a warrant for his behaviour. But the most popular philosophical account of acting for reasons is causal (i.e. in terms of efficient causation). Reasons are held to be causes, and explanation in terms of reasons is argued to be a form of causal explanation.9 This conception needs to be confronted. It is bizarre to suppose that reasons are causes, since in reflecting on the reasons for and against doing something or other, one is surely not reflecting on what will cause one to do what reason dictates, but rather trying to decide what reason dictates. And in recounting, after the act, for what reason one V-ed, one is not describing or explaining what caused one to V, but what one’s rationale for V-ing was. Moreover, if one’s reason for acting were a cause of one’s behaviour, it would be puzzling how it is that one normally knows this cause (save in cases of ‘mixed motives’, self-deception or forms of pathology). For although one can know immediately what startled one (the sudden explosion made one jump) or what caused one to slip (the banana skin made one slip), it is far from obvious that knowing that one’s reason for going to London is to see the Turner exhibition (but nothing made one go) or knowing that one’s reason for staying home is that one promised to do so (but nothing made one stay at home), is comparable. The causal theorist cannot argue that when one cites one’s reason for V-ing, either in advance of, or after, acting, the reason is the cause of one’s acting. For it is clear that reasons are not causes. One’s reason for going to London may be in order to see the exhibition, but in order to see the exhibition cannot be a cause of one’s going; one’s reason for taking an umbrella may be that it is going to rain, but that it is going to rain cannot be the cause of one’s now taking an umbrella; one’s reason for writing ‘25’ in the questionnaire may be that √625 = 25, but that √625 = 25 cannot cause one to write ‘25’. We attribute reasons to an agent: a person can be said to have reasons for V-ing or for refraining from V-ing – but cannot be said to have a cause for V-ing. The reasons a person has may be good or poor, selfless or selfish, moral or immoral – but causes cannot be any such thing. Reasons justify or purport to justify the action for which they are a reason, causes do not even purport to do so. Accordingly, reasons may be convincing, defensible, weighty, compelling, persuasive, weak or barely acceptable. But causes can be none of these. The fact that p may not have been A’s reason for V-ing, yet it may be a reason for V-ing for all that; but one cannot say that if event e1 was not the cause of e2 it was a cause for e2 for all that. The causal theorist may shift ground and argue not that reasons are causes, but that explanation in terms of reasons is a form of causal explanation. His

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claim would then be that if an agent wanted goal G and believed that V-ing was a way to attain G, and V-ed for this reason, then his wants and beliefs conjunctively caused the agent to V. ‘If the connection between desire and action is not some kind of causal connection, what kind of connection can it be?’, the causal theorist may exclaim, ‘Perhaps the adoption of the causal framework is not a mistaken choice, not because it is the correct choice, but because it is inevitable’.10 It is inevitable, so it is claimed, because no noncausal analysis of acting for a reason can explain the difference between: i. A’s having a reason (construed as a combination of belief and desire) to V and Ving, but not V-ing for that reason. and ii. A’s having a reason to V and Ving for that very reason. Only a causal account of acting for a reason can make the relationship between an agent’s reason for V-ing and his V-ing for that reason intelligible.11 But, as should now be clear, that is wrong – the choice is not inevitable, only mistaken. The causal account, as its main defender admitted, cannot explain the relationship. But the hermeneutic account can. The causal theorist’s claim is that reasons are combinations of beliefs and desires. But that is mistaken. That I believe that p can be a reason for me to V, for example, if someone says ‘Would everyone here who believes that p please raise their hand’, then that I so believe may be a reason for me to raise my hand. But normally it is not my believing that p that is my reason for acting, it is what I believe, namely that p. Indeed, normally the kinds of factors I might cite as my reasons are not even what I believe but what I know (and it is debatable – though will not be debated here – whether, if I know that p, it follows that I believe that p). Nor is it true that my wanting to V, as such, is a reason for me to V. If I want to V, then my reason for V-ing is whatever reasons I may have for wanting to V. The causal theorist may claim that beliefs and desires are mental states, and it is they, or their ‘onset’ that cause an agent to act when he acts for a reason. But to believe something is not to be in a mental state. Felt desire (feeling thirsty, hungry, lustful) may qualify as a mental state, but the feeling is not itself a reason at all, although that one has it may be. And wanting to attain a certain goal is not a feeling. Mental states are paradigmatically moods, occurrent emotions, agitations, being in pain, concentrating on something. They obtain when one is awake and lapse with loss of consciousness. They have degrees of intensity, and may wax and wane. They can be interrupted by distraction of attention and later resumed. But if one believes that Hastings was fought in 1066, one does not cease to believe this when one falls asleep, there are no degrees of believing that Hastings was fought in 1066 (I can’t believe more than you, only be more or less convinced than you), and one’s belief cannot be interrupted by distraction of

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attention and later resumed.12 If believing that p were a mental state, then it would make sense to say, ‘I believe that p [thus referring to my own mental state B], but it is not the case that p’. It would similarly make sense to say, ‘I believe that p [am in mental state B], but as to whether it is the case that p, that, as far as I am concerned, is an open question (or: that is a matter on which I take no stand)’. But these make no sense. For to assert that one believes that p is normally to take a stand on whether it is the case that p.13 So to believe something (a fortiori to know something) is not to be in any kind of mental state. The contemporary causal theorist may hold that the efficient causes of action are neurophysiological states and events that allegedly are (contingently token-identical with) mental states of believing and wanting. But believing that p could not be a neural state, since a neural state could not have the consequences of believing. Asserting that one is in a given neural state S is compatible with going on to deny that p, or withholding judgement on whether it is the case that p. But asserting that one believes that p is not. The only thing such neurophysiological states and events could explain are movements consequent upon muscular contractions, not actions. A neurophysiological explanation of why one’s fingers moved may be available, but not an explanation of why one was playing the piano or of why one was playing the Hammerklavier, let alone one that renders one’s playing intelligible in terms of polymorphous redescription, for example, that one is practising for tomorrow’s Beethoven concert or keeping a promise. A mere bodily movement is typically insufficient to determine what act was performed, and its neurophysiological explanation cannot explain whatever act was performed in or by moving voluntarily or intentionally. Reasons, by contrast, explain acts and omissions. It is true that the agent’s wanting to W or to attain G is commonly a factor in explaining his V-ing. But this explains the agent’s action not its constitutive movements. If we are puzzled by a chess-player’s gambit, we want an explanation of his move, not of his movement. Neural events in the brain may explain how it is that the chess-player is able to move his hand. If they did not occur as normal, he would not be able to move or control the movements of his hand. But neural events cannot explain his move – only those principles of chess strategy that he was aware of can do that. Nor can they warrant the redescription of his action in terms of its normative consequences, for example, that he checked his opponent. The notion of wanting is polysemic. ‘I want/He wants’ can be employed to signify the agent’s wish, inclination, failed attempt, felt desire (which may be an appetite, a drive, a craving, an urge), endeavour or purpose. The explanatory role of reference to what the agent wants or wanted can be correspondingly various. Sometimes ‘I did it because I wanted to’ serves merely to exclude other explanations, in particular causal ones. It excludes the possibility of my V-ing’s being an involuntary start, a nervous twitch or an

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electrical innervation. It identifies what I did as a voluntary action, therefore as something for which it makes sense to ask for my reason for doing it. It is no more a causal explanation of what I did than ‘I did it on purpose’. With such addenda as, ‘but not because you told me to’, it both identifies the action as voluntary and excludes one kind of reason. Often, ‘I V-ed because I wanted to V’ or ‘He is V-ing because he wants to’ intimates, in its context, that the agent finds V-ing in one way or another attractive or appealing, that he likes or enjoys V-ing. These desirability characteristics are reasons for wanting to V. So, if he V-ed because he wanted to, his V-ing was not instrumental – he was not V-ing with any further intent or purpose. His reason for V-ing is whatever reason he had for wanting to V. In such cases, normally, V-ing successfully yields satisfaction or gratification. In this use of ‘want’, a criterion for someone’s V-ing because he wants to V is that he is pleased to be V-ing or to have V-ed. (Sadly, it sometimes happens that we want to V and do so, only to find it disappointing. Here one’s want is satisfied, but that gives one no satisfaction at all.) ‘I V-ed because I wanted to attain G’ does explain the speaker’s V-ing by giving his reason. But the reason given is his purpose, that is, to attain G. ‘He V-ed because he wanted to attain G’ describes the aim of his act, not its psychological cause – one could just as well say ‘He V-ed in order to attain G’. And to say that he V-ed in order to attain G is not to specify a cause of anything. It characterizes his act of V-ing as a means (or supposed means) to a goal. It does not signify that the agent V-ed out of a desire to V. Here one can say ‘I didn’t want to V at all, I did it only in order to attain G’. Did he not ‘want the means’ (to V), given that he wanted the end (to attain G)? That would be misleading. Certainly the agent’s V-ing was an action of his, something he could have refrained from doing – but if it was done under duress, it was not voluntary at all (though not involuntary either). The victim did not want to hand over his money to the gunman – he chose to, in order to save his life. But there is no reason to assimilate choice to want. We often choose to do things we don’t want to do at all (and in the ‘thin’ sense in which a philosopher may insist that we want to do whatever we intentionally do, we may want not to do it much more than we ‘want’ to do it – judging by any normal criteria for strength of want.) So, when an agent V-es for a further reason, that does not mean that he V-es because he wants to V. As just noted, he may V under duress – his reason being to avoid the evil consequences of refusing to V. He may V because he has to (it is part of his job), because he promised to, because he was ordered to or because it is right. He may find V-ing odious, tiresome, may much prefer to do other things. But the reason for V-ing may outweigh all other considerations. He is not acting because he wants to V but because it is his duty. Does he not want to do his duty? No doubt; but that is not his reason for V-ing – which is rather that it is his duty to V.

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Wanting can be a mental state, as when one is gripped by desire, overcome by appetite or beset by a craving. But then it is not a reason for acting, although to give quietus to one’s craving or appetite may be. More commonly, wanting is not a mental state at all – both when reference to it is merely indicative of purpose (in which case the verb can often be replaced by ‘in order to’), and when reference to it is indicative of liking or favouring. To explain an act by reference to wanting to do it, or wanting a further end, is neither to give a causal (nomological) explanation, nor is it to intimate that there is one. To explain that a person V-ed because he wanted to attain G, that is, that he V-ed in order to attain G, is not to explain his reason for aiming to attain G. That is explained by the desirability characteristics of G. The incoherence of the causal tale is made manifest by an argument of Wittgenstein’s.14 Suppose I form the decision to pull the bell rope at five o’clock (I want to call the butler and believe that by pulling the bell rope I shall do so). The clock strikes five. Should I now wait patiently for my arm to go up? If my wants and beliefs can be causes of my behaviour, then I should be able to sit back and let them bring about the movement of my arm. Should I, bearing in mind my antecedent decision, describe what happens with the words ‘and see! My arm goes up when the clock strikes five’? No; the upshot is not that my arm rises, but that I raise it – if I act in order to get what I want. Were the causal story true, I should, at least until the novelty has worn off, be surprised that when I have such-and-such wants and beliefs, such-and-such movements eventuate. Were the causal story true, how would an agent know whether he was acting voluntarily or moving involuntarily? For, as we have seen, one might have all the relevant beliefs and desires (the ‘primary reason’) and the appropriate movement might ensue, yet the question of whether I moved my limb would still be open. The causal story cannot distinguish between an agent’s limb’s moving because he has a certain reason and his moving his limb for a reason. But that is precisely what is explained by the altogether unmysterious rational-teleological account of human action in terms of reasons. Explanation of action in terms of agential reasons is a form of teleological explanation or an adjunct thereof. It enables us to understand the agent’s behaviour idiographically rather than nomothetically. Knowing his reasons for doing what he did, we may come to know what kinds of things weigh with him in his deliberations, and what kinds of considerations move him to act. We can see the extent of his rationality and the degree of his reasonableness, as well as the values for the sake of which he is prone to take action. Such explanations enable us not only to judge the agent and evaluate what he did, but also to judge his character. It enables us to understand our fellow human beings as persons.15

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Notes 1. So, perceiving in its various generic modes is not action, although watching, looking, gazing and peeking, and listening to, as well as listening for, are. Similarly, deciding, changing one’s mind, and in some cases, thinking and imagining are exercises of two-way powers and can be done at will (voluntarily, intentionally, on purpose). But we would not count them as forms of behaviour, and in some contexts not even as acts or action. It is noteworthy that certain kinds of success-descriptions, e.g. ‘win’, ‘solve’, ‘discover’, do not signify actions but only things done. Accordingly one can ask for the reason why A won, but one cannot ask for A’s reason for winning, solving or discovering (see A.R. White ed., The Philosophy of Action (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1968),’Introduction’ p. 3). 2. See A.R. White, Grounds of Liability: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985), pp. 73–5. 3. For illuminating discussions of hermeneutics to which I am much indebted, see A.J.P. Kenny, Action, Emotion and the Will (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963) and Will, Freedom and Power (Blackwell, Oxford, 1975), Bede Rundle, Mind in Action (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997), G.H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1971) and Practical Reason (Blackwell, Oxford, 1983), essays 1–5, and A.R. White, Philosophy of Mind (Prentice Hall, New York, 1967), chapter VI. 4. See Kenny, Action, Emotion and the Will, chapter 4 and White, The Philosophy of Mind, chapter 6. Note that motive explanations must not be confused with motive attributions which typically specify forward-looking reasons, as when we say that A had a motive for the crime, namely that he stood to inherit the victim’s estate. Having a motive, in this sense, amounts to there being a reason for the agent to V, and unlike acting for a reason, does not imply that the agent performed the deed at all. 5. In certain cases, that p may be A’s reason for V-ing even though it makes no sense for A to know (or not to know) or believe (or not to believe) that p, for example, if his reason is that he is in pain. For examination of these kinds of cases, see P.M.S. Hacker, ‘Of knowledge and of knowing that someone is pain’, in A. Pichler S. Säätelä eds, Wittgenstein: the Philosopher and his Works (WAB, Bergen, 2005), pp. 203–35. 6. In both cases, what is presented by philosophers as a foundation is actually an abstraction. 7. The example is Wittgenstein’s, see Investigations §487. 8. An account of this kind was intimated by Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §§487–9 and developed by G.H. von Wright, ‘Of Human Freedom’, repr. in his In the Shadow of Descartes (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1998), pp. 20–7. 9. The locus classicus for the causal conception is D. Davidson’s ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ of 1963, repr. in his Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980). He held that ‘failing a satisfactory alternative, the best argument for a [causal] scheme ... is that it alone promises to give an account of the “mysterious connection” between reasons and actions’ (ibid., p. 11). He did not consider the hermeneutical account we have proposed, but only the so-called ‘logical connection argument’.His paper re-instated the Vienna Circle’s methodological monism and the Cartesian/ empiricist account of action for reasons as movement caused by a mental act, event or state. The promise of an adequate causal account, however, was never fulfilled.

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

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For Davidson ‘despaired’, as he put it, of distinguishing V-ing for the reason that R from V-ing because R (i.e. the right from the wrong causal chain), as when one’s desire to bring it about that p causes one to tremble, which brings it about that p. So ‘the best argument’ for a causal account of acting for a reason turned out to be no argument at all. D. Pears, ‘Sketch for a Causal Theory of Wanting and Doing’, repr. in his Questions in the Philosophy of Mind (Duckworth, London, 1975), p. 98. Davidson held that ‘cause and effect form the sort of pattern that explains the effect, in a sense of ‘explain’ that we understand as well as any. If reason and action illustrate a different pattern of explanation, that pattern must be identified’ (ibid., p. 10). But, as is evident from interminable controversies among philosophers about causation, the causal explanation is surely not generally understood ‘as well as any’, and the pattern of explanation in terms of reasons is no more problematic. It is no easier to gain an overview of the conceptual field of causes than to attain an overview of that of reasons. For detailed defence of the claim that believing that p is not a mental state, see P.M.S. Hacker, ‘Of the Ontology of Belief’, in Mark Siebel and Mark Textor, Semantik und Ontologie (Ontos Verlag, Frankfurt, 2004), pp. 194–202. See A.W. Collins, The Nature of Mental Things (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1987), chapter 1–3. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §627. This paper is a slightly modified fragment of chapter 7 of my book Human Nature: the Categorial Framework (Blackwell, Oxford, 2007).

6 Reasons as Non-causal, Context-placing Explanations Julia Tanney

I It is widely supposed that everyday explanations couched in terms of reasons, motives, intentions, and so on for an agent’s actions depend upon law-governed causal relations between states, events or properties which ordinary mental terms are alleged to pick out or in causal relations between to-be-discovered realisers of those supposed states.1 But this conception of the use of mental terms and of the kind of explanation they serve was disputed by philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein: those who conceived their task to be the untangling of philosophical perplexities thought to arise from inattention to logical or ‘grammatical’ detail. Such philosophers pointed to differences between the employment of mental concepts in everyday reason-explanations and of their (alleged) counterparts in psychological theories – those psychological theories, at least, which resonated to the ‘comfortingly causal talk characteristic of the hard sciences’.2 They argued that the everyday employment by teachers, lawyers, priests and doctors of mental concepts explain in a different sense of ‘explain’ from that favoured by the hard sciences. Wishing to emphasise the unlikeness between the two senses, these philosophers drew attention to the differences by contrasting reasonexplanation with causal-explanation and by insisting on important qualifications to the suggestion that reasons, motives and intentions are causes. It looked to some commentators that these philosophers were taking for granted a hopelessly simplistic and clearly mistaken view both about the concept of causation and about how causation works in non-mental domains. Thus, a number of philosophers today, though somewhat sympathetic with the writings of Wittgenstein and those he inspired, nonetheless refuse to fight the battle over causation.3 Although I shall not have much to say against these (in many ways kindred) positions, my hunch is that there may be good reasons for resisting the assimilation of importantly different senses of ‘explain’; such differences, I suspect, tend to be obscured by the appropriation by both camps of the concept of causation. 94

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In this essay, I would like to trace the decline of the ill-understood Wittgensteinian perspective – paying close attention in particular to the writings of Melden, Ryle and Anscombe – in order to bring this particular orientation back into view. In Section II, I shall sketch my own understanding of the position, and, in so doing, answer some of the criticism of Davidson and Fodor. In Section III, I shall contrast the Wittgensteinian view with the instrumentalist and realist ones associated with Daniel Dennett as well as with the behaviourism (mistakenly) attributed to Ryle. I suggest that because on the Wittgensteinian/Rylean view mental concepts discharge their explanatory role other than by referring to a state, relation, event or property whose nature is in question, the position fails to find its place on the metaphysical map charted by realists and their irrealist opponents. In Section IV, I shall offer some hypotheses as to why reason-explanation as non-causal, contextplacing explanations have been resisted.

II Causation, Melden (1961) said, is one of the ‘snare’ words of philosophy. Looking carefully at how this word is used will not allow us to distinguish it from ‘reason’ or even from ‘explanation’: indeed, some use the words ‘causation’ and ‘explanation’ interchangeably.4 On this use, to deny that the mental is causally efficacious is to deny that the mental is explanatory and this (correctly) strikes most people as absurd. Nonetheless, there was (and, as we shall see, still is) a certain attraction to a broadly Humean view about causation; enough so that it will be worthwhile to bring out the differences between the explanations.5 On this broadly Humean understanding, causation is a relation between two logically and temporally distinguishable events. This is sometimes accompanied by the idea that the relation is explanatory insofar as it is subsumable under natural laws or law-like generalisations, which it is the business of the empirical sciences to discover. Let us agree to stipulate for the purposes here that we will understand a causal relation minimally as a relation between two logically and temporally distinguishable events. The position I wish to bring back into focus says that what it is for an action to be in execution of an intention or for it to be explicable by reasons is not a matter of there being a causal relation (in this sense) between intention or reasons and action. If causation is to be thus understood, the pattern in virtue of which a person’s intentions, motives or reasons explain her action is not eo ipso causal.6 For Melden, the motivation to construe motives, intentions and reasons as constituents in a causal-explanation of action is symptomatic of a misguided attempt to give an account of how an event construed as a mere bodily movement (an arm’s rising) can be construed as an action (someone’s raising his arm). No further description of the performance in respect of its

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properties as a bodily movement could possibly disclose that additional feature that makes it an action. This, Melden tells us, is for two reasons. First, the occurrence of a mere bodily happening (say, an event in the brain) does not have the logical force to turn a bodily movement into an action (and this would be so even if events of the one kind enter into lawful relations with events of the same type as the bodily movement to be explained). But, second, if we hypothesise the occurrence of something with the right sort of logical force (and call it an intention, a motive, a reason or a belief– desire pair) then we must, in doing so, presuppose the relation between it and the action that this mental occurrence was invoked to explain. Why? Because in order for motives, intentions and reasons to be explanatory, they must be motives, intentions or reasons for the action in question. But if motives, intentions and reasons are introduced in the first place to explain how a bodily movement (the arm’s rising) becomes an action (someone’s raising his arm) then the specification of the motive or intention cannot simply presuppose the action, on pain of circularity. A motive is a motive for some action either performed or considered; hence a motive, far from being a factor which when conjoined with any bodily movement thereby constitutes an action, actually presupposes the very concept of an action itself. (1961, 83) This is the kernel of Melden’s argument but it is not easy to understand and in any case is unlikely to move the contemporary philosopher of mind who learned in her first, introductory course on the subject that intentional states enter into both logical relations with other states (in virtue of their content) and causal relations with other states (in virtue of their form). To such a philosopher, Melden’s criticism amounts to the denial of a philosophical platitude. So more work is needed, it seems, in order to make the argument clearer. The gist of the argument I shall develop is this. Correctly to ascribe an intention, motive, or reason in such a way as to display its logico–grammatical relation to action is already to attempt an explanation of the action by putting it into a context that makes it understandable. To suppose that there are events that are designated by the reason- or motive-expression is not only unnecessary; it obscures the way reason-explanation functions. Davidson claims that it would be a mistake to conclude from the fact that placing the action in a larger pattern explains it, we now understand the sort of explanation involved, and that ‘cause and effect form the sort of pattern that explains the effect in the sense of “explain” that we understand as well as any’ (1980, 10). Davidson challenges the opponents of the causal view to identify what other pattern of explanation illustrates the relation between reason and action if they wish to sustain the claim that the pattern is not one of cause and effect. Let us try to meet this challenge. The

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Wittgensteinian position starts out, I claim, by assuming that motives, intentions and reasons can be used successfully in explanations of actions and then it asks, when they are successful, how they explain. In many cases, attributions of motives, intentions and reasons explain a performance by characterising it as an action of a certain kind. This is already to distinguish an explanation in terms of motives and intentions from a causal-explanation, Melden tells us, since a causal-explanation suggested by the Humean picture usually takes it for granted that the event to be explained is already fully characterised as the kind of event it is; a causal-explanation offers us ‘an account of how it is that an event whose characteristics are already known is brought to pass’ (1961, 88). Of course it is consistent with this, as Melden himself immediately acknowledges, that the effect-event can be described in terms of its cause as an injury to the shoulder, say, might be described as a sunburn. But there must, on this view, be two logically independent (and therefore independently describable) events that enter into the causal relation. This is a condition that Davidson accepts;7 so, too, does Fodor: It is, of course, true that if X is the cause of Y, then there must be some description that is true of X and that is logically independent of the description ‘Y’s cause’, and there must be some description that is true of Y and that is logically independent of the description ‘X’s effect’. (1968, 35) Fodor adds, however, that this demand would be satisfied if the materially sufficient conditions for having a certain motive could be formulated in neurological terms; indeed, it would be satisfied by the existence of any state of affairs that is associated one to one with a psychological state by laws, empirical generalisations or even by accident. Thus, Fodor alleges, the appeal to Humean strictures is too weak for Melden’s purposes. But both Davidson and Fodor seem to interpret Melden’s claim that a cause must be ‘logically distinct from the alleged effect’ (1961, 52) as dictating the vocabulary that must be used to pick out the supposed mental event which – in order for it to count as a cause at all (it is agreed by everyone here concerned) – must have some logically independent description (whether we know what it is or not). But I read Melden, by contrast, as calling into question the idea that such a mental event or occurrence must exist. His argument, as I see it, is that the existence of such occurrences is not required for the concepts of intention, motive, reason and so on to discharge their explanatory role, thus throwing into question the whole idea that this explanatory role is causal. This, in any case, is the argument I shall develop. In order to bring to light some of the features of a contrasting, non-causal pattern of explanation, let us consider a simple case first – one removed from the context of reasons, intentions and motives. A chemistry student

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who had to leave the class early might find it puzzling why his teacher wrote CAT on the board. We can imagine his puzzlement relieved when his classmate explains, ‘Because she was writing “catalyst” – you left the room before she completed the word.’ This ‘because’ introduces an explanatory context, but it is not the sort of explanation in which one event (logically independent or not) follows another. Intuitively speaking, there is one event (the writing of ‘catalyst’) which has not been understood.8 The answer serves to re-characterise what happened so that it – as newly described – is no longer puzzling. The chemistry teacher’s writing ‘catalyst’ on the board is, I assume for the sake of the example, more understandable than her writing ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. This is not because we have now made out any mysterious connection between the occurrences of two contingently related events–the writing of ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’, on the one hand and the writing of ‘catalyst’, on the other. For even if these were considered (implausibly) two distinct events, they would not be contingently related: writing the English word ‘catalyst’ entails writing the letters ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. Nor is there any reason to expect that we may find some other description of the performance of writing the letters that would qualify it as a logically independent event, in such a way that events of this newly described kind enter into a law-like connection with events typed as the writing of the word ‘catalyst’. The performance was puzzling only because it was conceived or described as the writing of the letters ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ or as the word ‘cat’ instead of as the writing of the word ‘catalyst’. The teacher’s writing ‘catalyst’ on the board is not puzzling, I assume, because it is part of a general pattern of behaviour that ‘belongs to’ or ‘is at home in’ a chemistry lesson. The ‘because’ in ‘She wrote the letters “c,” “a,” and “t” because she was writing “catalyst” ’, then, signals a different pattern of explanation from the causal pattern in which one event follows another. Here we have a clear-cut case of a non-causal, context-placing explanation.9 This case can be used as a model to develop an elucidation of the explanatory role of our concepts of intention, motive and reason. Melden’s famous example concerns a man who raises his arm. To the question, ‘Why did he raise his arm?’ the answer ‘In raising his arm, he intended to signal’ serves to re-characterise a performance first described as the driver’s raising his arm as an act of signalling. ‘Raising his arm’ and ‘signalling’ are different descriptions, each with different ‘implication threads’ (to borrow an expression from Ryle (1971)). Although there may be any number of (muscular, physiological, neuronal) events leading up to and forming part of a causal chain resulting in the arm’s rising there is no reason to characterise (or identify) any of these events as the motive, intention, will or reason to raise the arm. Such a characterisation in any case would not permit the redescription of the arm’s rising as either the driver’s raising his arm or as the act of signalling without adverting to the very background circumstances that I am here trying to show may be sufficient for such a redescription, and thus for a non-causal, context-placing explanation.

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Wittgenstein thought that we tend to be misled into thinking that there must be such an event – even if hidden from view – because we are focussing on one way that language functions to the exclusion of others. The concepts in question do indeed allow us to speak, for instance, of a person who comes to a decision, forms an intention, or admits that such-and-such reasons for acting are overriding. These uses encourage the thought that having an intention or reasons results from having formed an intention or from having considered and accepted the reasons and these in turn are construed, reasonably enough, as mental events. Now it is true that a full elucidation of the concept of intention and of reason and its cognates would have to include these uses.10 The formation of an intention or the consideration and acceptance of reasons might also figure in a causal-explanation of an action.11 But it would be a mistake to form a general picture of the nature of intention or reason from this use alone, and require that every time we ascribe these concepts, there must have been a moment when the intention was formed or the reasons considered. Davidson argues for the former in his account of intention (1978);12 those working in the spirit of Davidson today have argued for the latter.13 We have seen that a rather different way of understanding the explanatory power of the response ‘He intended to signal’ is by the placement of the performance first described as the man’s raising his arm in the wider circumstances of his driving a car and being about to make a turn. The response will succeed in explaining the man’s raising his arm, however, only to the extent that a description that puts it into this context is more understandable than a description that leaves this context out. If the one who is puzzled does not understand our driving practices or why anyone who is driving and approaching a turn should signal, then this re-characterisation of the action will not satisfy her. Now Davidson acknowledges that a logico–grammatical relation is in place between the contents of the relevant attitudes (the belief and pro-attitude which, for him, constitute the agent’s reason) and the action-type that it recommends. He also holds – what I am here calling into question – that attitude or reason-ascriptions function by designating events (or standing states and triggering events). His (positive) argument for construing this relation as causal is that the logico–grammatical relation exhibited in the content-description is an ‘anaemic’ justificatory one: insufficient for accommodating the case in which the agent has a reason for acting in a certain way, acts in that way, but not because of that reason. For example, even though the driver had reason to signal – he was approaching his turn – he may have raised his arm for another reason – say, to wave to his friend. If so, then the re-characterisation of his action as a case of signalling will fail to explain the action. Davidson (1963, 11) presumably had this sort of case in mind as a counterexample to Melden.14 But the fact that a context may be imagined in which the redescription fails to explain the action presents no threat to the argument. For it is no

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part of Melden’s job to insist that every context-placing redescription will succeed. Melden need only argue that when such an explanation does succeed (because it enables the one who is puzzled to see the action in a new, sense-making light) it may be the kind of context-placing explanation just described; one that does not depend upon or cannot be understood as requiring the existence of mental events – let alone (in principle describable) logically independent ones – that are alleged to constitute the reason or intention. And, although it is true that the redescription would not succeed unless the requisite motives, intentions, beliefs and desires could also be ascribed, there is no obligation to construe the deployment of these related concepts as the identification of events or standing states; let alone (in principle describable) logically independent ones. When context-placing explanations such as these are unsuccessful we may need to probe further for a different or more far-reaching context-placing explanation that will succeed or possibly give up the initial expectation that the action can be explained by reasons – but not assume that having reasons, intentions and motives must be a matter of the instantiation of properties which may be in some sense hidden (e.g. tokenings of conscious or non-conscious mental events or of their alleged realisers).15 The problem in assuming that the motive, intention or reason is (in principle describable as) a logically independent, temporally antecedent, causally efficacious event (perhaps identified with its alleged ‘onset’) is that it mis-assigns the explanatory function of these concepts. The position commits us to postulating an event, unobservable to others and possibly even to the agent herself that would, if known, provide the sought-after reason-explanation for the agent’s action. In such cases, as Ryle insisted, an epistemological puzzle arises as to how anyone could ever know whether a person acts for reasons or what, if she does, her reasons are, since the hypothesis is not even in principle testable. Not only do we not, in everyday situations, have access to these hidden events, but even if we were, say, to monitor the neural activity of someone’s brain or access their stream of consciousness, we would never be able to set up the kinds of correlations that would establish a particular occurrence as an instance of a particular reason without already having a way of deciding whether someone acted for a particular reason in order to make the correlation. The foregoing considerations suggest that mental concepts such as intention, reason and motive operate very differently from causal concepts – say, that of a gene. We might say that Morgan’s concept of a gene was the concept of something whose nature was to be discovered, responsible for the transmission of heritable characteristics. The DNA molecule, it was later found, plays that role. But the argument of this essay is that the concepts of intention, reason and so on are not like this, for they discharge their explanatory role without designating anything; let alone causally efficacious states or events; let alone causally efficacious states or events whose nature awaits discovery.16

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III This, I think, is the correct way to understand the arguments of Wittgenstein, Melden, Anscombe and Ryle. But it is difficult to know how to place this view within the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind because it so rarely makes an appearance in today’s discussions. A student of philosophy of mind today might ask, for example, if this makes the view about intentions realist or irrealist, instrumentalist or behaviourist. In order to facilitate my aim of re-introducing Wittgensteinian territory into the contemporary landscape, it will be worthwhile taking a brief look at the temptation to plot this position with a particular metaphysical compass and suggest a reason why this temptation should be resisted. We were introduced to instrumentalism in the early work of Daniel Dennett. In ‘Intentional Systems’ (Dennett 1978) he describes the intentional stance by considering a chess-playing computer. In taking the intentional stance towards this machine, one is instrumentalist about propositional attitudes insofar as ‘we find it convenient, explanatory, [and] pragmatically necessary for prediction, to treat it as if it had beliefs and desires and was rational’.17 A machine for playing chess, however, is not like a man or animal: ‘its “rationality” is pinched and artificial’ (1978, 8). This was Dennett’s position in the 1970s. A decade or so later, his position seemed to change: [A]ll there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behaviour is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation. (1987, 29) These two characterisations are, on the face of it, inconsistent. On the first, there really is something to being a believer over and above being predictable by the intentional stance and on the second there is nothing to being a believer than being thus predictable. On the first characterisation there seems to be an implicit acceptance that mental terms like ‘believes’ pick out underlying, possibly causally efficacious states or events. According to this picture, there is a difference between low-grade computers and people: people really have the underlying states (etc.) to which mental terms purport to refer. Instrumentalism on this construal is like an ‘error theory’ in Mackie’s sense. Just as, for Mackie, moral terms purport to pick out moral facts, but do not really (and nonetheless serve their jobs) so do mental terms purport to pick out inner states, but sometimes do not really (and nonetheless serve their jobs). On the second characterisation, however, there may be no implied commitment to such underlying states in our use of mental expressions (on the contrary – this seems to be denied by the locution ‘all

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there is to being a believer...’). If there is no such commitment, this view would not be instrumentalist, since there would be nothing real to contrast with what is supposed to be instrumental. Is the second position a form of realism then? According to Devitt and Sterelny (1999, 293) Dennett’s later view is a form of ‘philosophical behaviourism’. Although usually construed as a type of fictionalism or instrumentalism about the mental, philosophical behaviourism is understood by them, in the context of discussing Dennett, as the realist doctrine that mental terms refer to (real) patterns of behaviour. But however appropriate or not this might be as a description of Dennett’s later position, it would not be a fair description of the view I have characterised as Wittgensteinian. On this latter view, to ascribe an intention, motive or reason for some particular action may not involve an attempt to refer to anything; the concepts may function rather to explain an action by placing it in a context that renders it less puzzling.18 Nor, for similar reasons, would it be fair to characterise Ryle’s view in The Concept of Mind as a form of philosophical behaviourism even though he is widely (and misleadingly) credited with introducing us to this doctrine.19 Ryle’s dispositions play the same role as the ‘sense-making pattern’ or the ‘wider circumstances’ play in the view I have just described. Ryle agrees with his interlocutor that when we use mental concepts to describe a performance, we are not merely taking into account ‘muscular behaviour’, because the same muscular behaviour in other circumstances could not be so described. A remark by a parrot, for example, could not be described as intelligent or witty. But it does not follow that in order to be credited with wit or intelligence the muscular behaviour must be accompanied by some mental act. In judging that a particular performance is intelligent, it is true that we look beyond the performance itself; but not into some ‘hidden counterpart’ performance, taking place behind the scenes. We are considering, according to Ryle, the abilities and propensities of which this particular performance was an actualisation. ‘Our inquiry is not into causes (and a fortiori not into occult causes), but into capacities, skills, habits, liabilities and bents’ (1949, 45). For Ryle, many of our ‘mental-conduct’ verbs are correctly applied to a performance or an action because it is the actualisation of a disposition. But talk of dispositions complicates the matter. According to Ryle, the particular mental conduct terms whose logical geography he was attempting to map discharge their explanatory role by helping to situate the agent and her actions within a pattern that can be articulated by an indefinitely long series of hypothetical (and mongrel-categorical) statements about what she could be expected to do, think, feel and so on, given her background (e.g. training) and the present circumstances. This is what he means in this context by noting that mental-conduct verbs are applied to performances that are actualisations of a disposition.

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But the introduction of dispositions will, for others, take us right back to the realm of hidden, underlying causes.20 Quine (1977), for example, was dissatisfied with dispositional statements because they, like general causal statements, depend upon an intuitive or unanalysed notion of similarity or kind. Dispositional statements, best understood as subjunctive conditionals, are not amenable to paraphrase in the canonical (extensional) language in which Quine held that all serious scientific statements could be expressed.21 Quine suggested that when the disposition is of theoretical interest, then a mature science can dispose of this intuitive similarity notion by finding the underlying structure that will tell a more straightforward story in a way that renders the dispositional one obsolete. ‘Sometime, whether in terms of proteins or colloids or nerve nets or overt behaviour, the relevant branch of science may reach the stage where a similarity notion can be constructed capable of making even the notion of intelligence respectable. And superfluous’ (1977, 174). Attraction to some of the aspects of Quine’s programme may be among the reasons scientific realists look deeper than observable patterns of dispositions and search for a common underlying structure in the kinds of things that manifest those patterns. In certain cases, this may be essential: if the dispositional concept is a theoretical concept it arguably needs the discovery of a ‘realiser’ to vindicate it (as the discovery of the DNA molecule presumably was needed to vindicate the concept of gene). But it is precisely this way of construing mental concepts that is under dispute. When Ryle spoke of the ‘higher-grade’ dispositions of people as ‘multi-track dispositions the exercise of which are indefinitely heterogeneous’, and when he used the example of Jane Austen’s representation of pride ‘in the actions, words, thoughts and feelings of her heroine in a thousand different situations’ (1949, 44), he was reminding us of the patterns of conduct with which we are already familiar: indeed, he insisted that ‘the concepts of learning, practice, trying, heeding, pretending, wanting, pondering, arguing, shirking, watching, seeing and being perturbed are not technical concepts’ (1949, 319). It was not part of his project (any more than Jane Austen’s) to speculate about the underlying structure of the ‘systems’ or of people who exercised these dispositions. Nor did he think that such a scientific project could vindicate – let alone in principle replace – the everyday attributions effected by ordinary mental terms.

IV One used to hear the complaint made by philosophers impressed by Wittgenstein’s teaching that those who tried to treat mental terms as theoretical posits were guilty of changing the subject. This charge was rarely elaborated, and so it was dismissed on the grounds that it struck the opposition as sheer philistinism or brute prejudice against science. Now, this

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charge would sound philistine to those who have already accepted that psychology provides the science behind the ordinary use of mental concepts (together, perhaps, with an attraction to aspects of Quine’s programme). 22 But precisely these assumptions are denied by Wittgenstein and his followers by their insistence on distinguishing between different kinds of explanation. According to them, to ignore what is sense-making and observable in preference to what is underlying and whose nature awaits discovery is to misinterpret or ignore the role mental concepts play in our interpretive practices: to focus on underlying structures would force a change of subject by ignoring the way mental concepts normally discharge their role. The injunction, for example, to accept the observational-dispositional nature of mental terms for everyday use but to insist that their explanatory role depends on how well they interpret states within the system’s underlying structure does not make sense on the view I am recommending. This is because the explanatory function of reason concepts may be fully discharged by the placement of the action to be explained within the appropriate circumstances or wider context, or, as Anscombe suggests, so that a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application. For philosophers such as Melden, Anscombe and Ryle what it is to describe an action as one performed for such-and-such reasons or with such-and-such intention may simply involve an attempt to redescribe what in the context was puzzling with what in the new context is no longer puzzling. Insofar as the causal hypothesis forces us to construe the reason- or intention-ascription as functioning to designate an event, property, state, fact or condition of a person the mysterious nature of which is open to investigation, it mis-assigns the concepts’ explanatory role.23 In any case, the complaint of prejudice can be turned around against those who suppose that the role of truly explanatory concepts must be capturable in a language suitable for the aims of mathematics and logic. Quine, for his part, suggests that ‘amiable’ and ‘reprehensible’ are disposition terms that should draw on intuitive kinds. Why not suppose with the Wittgensteinians that mental conduct terms are like those?24 I have argued that it may be the familiarity, unsurprisingness or sensemaking aspect of the context, pattern or circumstances that perform the function of explaining the action and it is this pattern that is illuminated when the content of the reason, motive or intention is ascribed. This ‘sense-making’ criterion is closely related to, but sometimes conflicts with, another criterion we use for ascribing intentions, motives and reasons: namely, that which the subject herself says or would say about her reasons (etc.) for acting. 25 A fuller treatment of this will have to wait another time; a few brief (and no doubt provocative words) will have to do. Suppose we have recourse to ask Melden’s driver what he was doing: was he signalling or waving to a friend? Sometimes his answer will satisfy us; sometimes it

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will not. But in answering us, he, too, is attempting to place his action within a sense-making context, for according to the view I am attempting to reintroduce, he will have mastered the relevant concepts – acquired the various skills – in the same way as everyone else. What if his answer does not make sense of his action? We have a choice. We may accept his answer because in asking for his reasons for acting, we may be seeking (on this occasion) his own conception of what he is or was doing, whether or not it satisfies us. When our way of making sense of him conflicts with his understanding of himself, or with his memory reports of what he was thinking at the time, we may reject his answer as inadequate. That is to say, this second (‘self-conception’) way of understanding the expression ‘his reason for acting’ may be set aside in favour of the other (‘sensemaking’) one. After all, what a person has to say is not always authoritative: as Anscombe reminds us, there are controls on someone’s proffered reasons, motives or intentions.26 Nonetheless, there may come a point when these controls have been exhausted: there is nothing occurring either before or after the action to check on an agent’s truthfulness, sincerity or lack of self-deception in declaring her reasons for acting. Where there is nothing in the circumstances either before or after the action to enable us to pinpoint her reason any better than she has been able to do, then perhaps we reach a point, says Anscombe (‘after much dispute and fine diagnosis of her genuineness’), when only the agent can say why she acts as she does. But this is not, as the traditional Cartesian would have it, because she has access to an intention, motive, or reason – now conceived as something interior – that is forever hidden from anyone else, but rather because no one else has any grounds for correcting her. As I shall put it on behalf of Wittgenstein, what the agent says is, in such (unusual) circumstances, the only criterion available – the only sense that can be given – to ‘her reasons for acting’. The arguments of this essay are intended to support the idea that the explanatory role of mental concepts is different from that supposed in contemporary philosophy of mind. The crux of the debate centres not only on whether mental concepts can be assimilated to theoretical terms: I have suggested that a full treatment of the Wittgensteinian position would involve denying that the predicative expressions in which mental concepts figure must involve the very notion of a reference or an extension that is at the root of the Carnap-Quine-Davidson programme. The arguments I put forward here call into question the idea that mental terms purport to function in the general case as referring expressions: that is, that their primary use or the way by which they discharge their explanatory role is to designate or name an event, state, object, property or relation.27 If I am right, then it would seem that a natural way of conceiving the dispute between mental realists and irrealists is based upon a category mistake from the outset.

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Notes An ancestor of this essay was presented in January 2004 to the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) in Paris for a workshop on commonsense psychology. Thanks to Sandra Laugier, Daniel Andler, Pierre Henri Castel, Ruwen Ogien and Jean-Jacques Rosat for helpful discussion and to John Flower, Edward Harcourt and Richard Norman for their comments. A recent version was presented in 2007 as a Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture at the University of Keele. Thanks to Sorin Baiasu, Geraldine Coggins, Giuseppina d’Oro and James Tartaglia for their penetrating questions which have helped improve the text and to Constantine Sandis for suggestions that have helped me clarify the argument. 1. This is the root idea of functionalism. Originally, functionalism was proposed as a theory about the meaning of mental terms that are used everyday in non-theoretical discourse (Lewis 1972, 249–58). Our common sense or everyday concept of pain, on this account, is thought to pick out an (unspecified) inner state of an organism or system that occupies a certain causal role in mediating between other inner mental states, input and behavioural output. This causal role is to be specified by common sense platitudes: for example, that pain is likely to be caused by tissue damage and result in avoidance behaviour. Another version suggests that the role is rather to be found by the traditional methods of a priori philosophical analysis (Shoemaker 1984). This approach would, like the first, dovetail with the idea that mental concepts’ primary domain is common sense explanation but only if the methods of a priori philosophy are to make explicit what is already implicit in our (common) use of mental concepts. Psychofunctionalists, however, attempt to break the tie with ordinary concepts. They agree with other functionalists that ordinary mental concepts function to pick out a causal role realised by some or other inner (physical) state. They also agree that a complete, constitutive account of the second-order or functional states will be given by a story outlining the causal relations between the occupants of such states and their relation to input, output and other mental states. But they believe, not only that the occupants of this role, but the role itself are to be discovered by empirical psychology (Block 1978/1980, 268–305; Rey 1997, 187). 2. The expression is Fodor’s in (1968, xix). 3. Hornsby (2004), McDowell (1998) and Rudder-Baker (1995) are some examples. 4. Compare: ‘Words like “explanation,” “law,” “rule,” “principle,” “why,” “because,” “cause,” “reason,” “govern,” “necessitate,” etc. have a range of typically different senses. Mechanism seemed to be a menace [to the possibility of free will] because it was assumed that the use of these terms in mechanical theories is their sole use; that all “why” questions are answerable in terms of laws of motion’ (Ryle 1949, 76). Substitute ‘physics’ and ‘physical’ for ‘mechanism’ and ‘mechanical’ and ‘physical laws’ for ‘laws of motion’ and you have a nice statement of what we might call, with a nod to Ryle, the ‘bogey of physicalism’. 5. I think Anscombe (1983) is right in saying that the concept of causation is as general as the concept of a factor, so that it is misleading to talk about ‘the’ causal relation. Thus, like Melden, I am not particularly interested in defending Hume’s account, which has been disputed from every angle. It has, for example, been doubted whether causation is best seen as a relation between events (Hume said between two ‘objects’); it has been questioned whether necessity is involved, whether a singular causal statement implies a pattern or regularity of any kind, and so forth. But it is roughly this use of ‘cause’ which Davidson had in mind

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

when he argued that reasons are causes and is, for example, accepted by Fodor. (See the text below for more discussion.) And it is this use which tempts one to construe verbs such as ‘believes’, ‘thinks’, ‘wants’ as picking out mental events or occurrences conceived as hypothetical or theoretical entities. This latter picture is my quarry. This formulation allows us to concede that the concept of intention, for example, may be correctly applied, on some occasion, to designate an event that can legitimately be classed as ‘mental’: a state of a person or an event in her history that can form part of an intuitively plausible causal chain issuing in action (see text below and examples in note 11); it denies, pace Davidson, that the concept of intention’s explanatory value depends on the existence of any such causal relation. Note that these are reasons why the thesis I am defending here is not aptly described as denying either mental causation or the ‘reality’ of the mental: though of course it does deny aspects of mental realism as this is commonly understood. It should be noted, further, that on this view I am recommending the distinction between reasons and causes is not always a firm one. Following Anscombe we can agree that my hanging up my hat because my host said ‘Hang up your hat’ is one in which the intuitive distinction starts to vanish: it depends on the circumstances whether we would call this a cause or a reason (1957, §15). See (Davidson 1980, 12) where he suggests a number of candidates for such an event. The student may have construed it as the writing of the word ‘cat’ or as the writing of the sequence of letters ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. The performance may have been puzzling on either construal. If part of Davidson’s challenge here is to say how writing ‘catalyst’ on the board ‘belongs to’ or ‘is at home in’ a chemistry class, then it must be admitted that not much more can be said (except one that issues reminders about the kinds of things one studies in chemistry); at least there is no answer that can be given in more fundamental terms. One of the convictions of the position I am defending is that the ability to see actions as fitting into familiar patterns comes about through training and through a shared form of life and not in general through explicit instruction or through prior theoretical (rule-following) operations. Anscombe’s account of an intentional action as one for which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application is a sophisticated attempt to describe in more detail what ‘belonging to’ or ‘being at home in’ involves in relating the action to the agent’s motives and reasons but it, too, appeals to our (considered) judgements about what makes sense without attempting to explain this. For a discussion of the process of acculturation that enables us to see actions in new ways, see the final chapters of Melden (1961). For an argument against explaining this ability in terms of prior theoretical operations, see Tanney (2000). See Anscombe (1957) for such an elucidation; see Tanney (2002) for my own attempt. Anscombe (1983) gives an example of such a story. She imagines a case in which she has a long-standing resolution never to grant interviews with members of the media. When someone asks why she refused to see the representative of Time magazine, he is told of this long-standing resolution, which ‘makes her reject such approaches without thinking about the particular case’. This explanation, involving the expression ‘makes her ...’ is causal, says Anscombe, in the sense

108 Reasons as Non-causal, Context-placing Explanations that it derives the action from a previous state. Or, to borrow an example of Rogers Albritton, my recognition of someone’s character, for example, might cause me to break off relations with him. But, warns Anscombe, [i]t is one thing to say that a distinct and identifiable state of a human being, namely his having a certain intention, may cause various things to happen, even including the doing of what the intention was an intention to do; and quite another to say that for an action to be done in fulfilment of a certain intention (which existed before the action) is eo ipso for it to be caused by that prior intention. In other words, an event (say) in an agent’s history that can legitimately be classed as mental (e.g. his having made the decision, in the light of various factors, that he must do such-and-such) may feed into a causal story of a subsequent action that is performed in execution of that intention. But it should not be inferred from this that what it is to act in execution of that intention is a matter of there being some causal relation between this event and the action. One unhappy consequence of making this inference would be the supposition that there must have been such an event – possibly hidden or non-conscious – even when there is no obvious, conscious candidate. The following closely related idea may be useful in helping to understand this point. It may be that in some particular performance that counts as following a rule, a person consults an expression of that rule and then acts as it mandates. But it should not be inferred from this that what it is to follow a rule is a matter of there being some (overt or hidden) consultation of a rule. I discuss this further in (2000) and (2008a). 12. In Davidson’s Actions, Reasons, and Causes, acting for a reason consists merely in having a belief and pro-attitude with the right sort of content, which cause the action. Davidson responds to Melden’s challenge to find the mental event that constitutes the reason (understood thus) by declaring: Of course there was a mental event; at some point the driver noticed (or thought he noticed) his turn coming up, and that is the moment he signalled. ... To dignify a driver’s awareness that his turn has come by calling it an experience, or even a feeling, is no doubt exaggerated, but whether it deserves a name or not, it had better be the reason why he raises his arm. (1963, 12–13) Thus the idea that the relevant concept’s function is to designate some kind of mental event is in place early in Davidson’s work. Incidentally, the driver’s noticing his turn coming up would (at best) be a reason why he chose that moment to signal. 13. Consider David Velleman: In order to have acted autonomously, the agent would need to have been actuated not only by the desire and belief mentioned in the story but also by the story itself, serving as his grasp of what he was doing – or, in other words, as his rationale. He would need, first, to have been inhibited from acting on his desire and belief until he knew what he was up to; and then guided to act on them once he had adopted this story. He would then have acted autonomously because he would have acted for a reason having been actuated in part by a rationale. (2000, 28) Michael Bratman’s (2001) claim that (full-blown) actions are caused by higher order reflexive policies is similar to Velleman’s. 14. I have suggested elsewhere (Tanney 1995) that what Davidson is really after is ‘causal cement’ for what he takes to be a logical gap between reasons and actions. (I have also suggested that his adherence to a Hempelian nomological-deductive

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15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

model of explanations looms large in the background here.) On the view I am recommending this logical gap must not be closed. Reason does not determine, or provide a sufficient condition for, the action that it explains. Nor does a performance guarantee that a rationalising, reason-explanation is on offer. The relation between reason and action is more the relation between warrants and moves than the ‘determinate connection’ suggested in the causal, nomologicaldeductive account. See Tanney (1995, 2005a) for extended arguments for these claims. See Fodor (1968) and Putnam (1968) for early attempts to argue that mental concept should be construed by analogy with the concept of a gene. The discussion up until now has concerned intentions, reasons and motives whereas this paragraph introduces beliefs (and propositional attitudes in general). This is not the place to defend or elucidate the idea that the relation between these concepts and the concepts of reason, intention and action is a (logico-) grammatical one, but see Tanney (2005a) for one such discussion and the last chapters of Melden (1961) for a different discussion of how the concepts of agency, want and belief are thus connected. Note that to say that the concepts’ function is to explain in the way described above is very different from saying that the concepts discharge their role by designating a state, relation or process which is to be identified by its functional/ causal-explanatory role. I argue for this in more detail in Tanney (2005b, 2007). See Mumford (1998) who argues for a particular (functionalist) version of realism about dispositions. Quine’s claim that a serious scientific theory must be expressed in an extensional language bodes ill not only for unreconstructed dispositional statements but also, notoriously, for content and meaning in general. See, for example, Rey (1997). Compare: How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise? – The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.) – And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them. (Wittgenstein 1953, §308) The Quinean motivation for reducing dispositions to underlying structures is dubious in any case. Even if they could be accommodated by logical and mathematical methods, these methods themselves would have to rely on intuitive notions of similarity: this is, after all, the lesson of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules. See Wittgenstein (1953, §§143–55, §185ff). For an admirable discussion of this point, see Dilman (1978/1979, 35–58). This may involve either a pronouncement on her motives, intentions or reasons construed as her own way of making sense of her action, or as a (memory) report of events that may be accompanying or have preceded the action (e.g. a sudden decision or realization), or both.

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26. Anscombe (1957, §25). 27. See Ryle (1971) for his explorations on this theme. A number of moves made in metaphysics, epistemology and in philosophy of language and mind in the 1960s and 1970s – ones that are presupposed in most of the work in these fields today – would be thrown into question as well if this idea is correct. If they are not referring expressions, then the construal of them by scientific realists on the analogy with natural kind of terms such as ‘gold’ or ‘tiger’ – whose essence is a matter for science to discover – is a non-starter. This is, for example, the treatment that (early) Putnam (1968, 1–19) suggests for the concept of pain. The diagnosis would also cast doubt on Armstrong’s (1980, 16–17) characterisation of conceptual elucidation and ontology as the investigation of second- and firstorder questions, respectively. So too, of course, would it help to define the real trouble with functionalism. The functionalists (and conceptual-role theorists) were right to focus on the importance of function, role or use. But the explanatory role is played, I have argued, by the way the concept is wielded in redescribing the behaviour of a system. It is not played by referring (however obliquely) to the system’s internal (first- or second-order) states. And finally the view that ‘criteriological’ investigations modelled after Wittgenstein’s are about justification and therefore about epistemology and not metaphysics would founder as well. See the Preface to Shoemaker (1984) for a biographical account of how his acceptance of this distinction led him to abandon criteriological investigations for causal accounts.

References Anscombe, G.E.M. 1957. Intention, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Anscombe, G.E.M. –1983. ‘The Causation of Action’, in Knowledge and Mind: Philosophical Essays, C. Ginet and S. Shoemaker (eds), Oxford University Press, New York, 174–90. Armstrong, D. 1980. The Nature of Mind, University of Queensland Press, Queensland. Block, N. 1978. ‘Troubles with Functionalism’, reprinted in Block, 1980. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Block, N. –1980. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bratman, M. 2001. ‘Two Problems about Human Agency’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 101, issue 3, 309–26. Davidson, D. 1963. ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, originally published in Journal of Philosophy 60 and republished as essay 1 in Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 3–19. Davidson, D. –1976. ‘Hempel on Explaining Action’, originally published in Erkenntnis 10, 239–53 and republished as essay 14, in Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 261–75. Davidson, D. 1978. ‘Intending’, originally published in Philosophy of History and Action, Yirmiaku Yovel, ed. (D. Reidel and The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University). Reprinted as essay 5, in Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 83–102. Davidson, D. 1980. Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Dennett, D. 1978. Brainstorms – Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Bradford Books, Montgomery VT. Dennett, D. 1987. The Intentional Stance, A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Julia Tanney 111 Devitt, M. and Sterelny, K. 1999. Language and Reality – An Introduction to Philosophy of Language (2nd edn), Blackwells, Oxford. Dilman, I. 1978/79. ‘Universals: Bambrough on Wittgenstein’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. LXXIX. Fodor, J.A. 1968. Psychological Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology, Random House, New York. Hornsby, J. 2004. ‘Agency and Actions’, in Agency and Action, John Hyman and Helen Steward, eds, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 55, Cambridge University Press. Lewis, D. 1972. ‘Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 50, no.3. McDowell, J. 1998. ‘Might there be external reasons?’, in Mind, Value, and Reality, Harvard University Press. First published in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, ed., 1995. World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 387–98. Melden, A. I. 1961. Free Action, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Mumford, S. 1998. Dispositions, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Putnam, H. 1968. ‘Brains and Behaviour’, in R.J. Butler, ed. Analytical Philosophy, vol. 11, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Quine, W.V.O. 1977. Originally published as ‘Natural Kinds’, in Essays in Honour of Carl G. Hempel, ed. N. Rescher, et al. The page reference is to the republication in Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds, ed. by Stephen P. Schwartz, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Rey, G. 1997. Contemporary Philosophy of Mind – A Contentiously Classical Approach, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK. Rudder-Baker, L. 1995. Explaining Attitudes – A Practical Approach to the Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, London. The references are to the republication by Penguin, London, 2000. Ryle, G. 1971. Collected Papers, vol. 1, Hutchinson, London. Shoemaker, S. 1984. Identity, Cause, and Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tanney, J. 1995. ‘Why Reasons May Not be Causes’, Mind & Language, vol. 10, nos. 1,2, 103–26. Tanney, J. 2000. ‘Playing the Rule-Following Game’, Philosophy vol. 75, no. 292, 203–24. Tanney, J. 2002. ‘Self-Knowledge, Normativity, and Construction’, Logic, Thought and Language, (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 51), Cambridge University Press, 37–55. Tanney, J. 2005a. ‘Reason-explanation and the Contents of the Mind’, Ratio, vol. XVII, no. 3, 338–51. Tanney, J. 2005b. “Une Cartographie des Concepts Mentaux”, Critical Introduction to Gilbert Ryle’s La Notion d’Esprit (The Concept of Mind), Payot, Paris, 7–70. Tanney, J. 2007. ‘Gilbert Ryle’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/ Tanney, J. 2008a. ‘Real Rules’, Synthese, xxxx. Velleman, D. 2000. The Possibility of Practical Reason, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Blackwells, Oxford.

7 Interpretative Explanations G. F. Schueler

Commonsense explanations of actions, in terms of the agent’s reasons, hopes, desires and the like, are on their face frequently teleological in form. They specify the goals, purposes or points of the things we do. In this they seem sharply different from other sorts of commonsense explanations of events, as well as from the sorts of explanations found in sciences such as physics and chemistry, all of which are causal, and of course not teleological. But actions are often simply constituted by events involving the agent of the action. And these events are obviously open to causal explanation as long as we describe them in terms of their physical or chemical makeup. So there is a puzzle here. How can commonsense explanations of actions, which are apparently teleological and hence not causal in form, actually explain these actions? In this essay I will argue that what I will call ‘interpretative explanations’ are both central to explanations of human action and irreducibly different in form from other commonsense explanations of events, as well as from explanations found in paradigm ‘hard’ sciences such as physics. If this is right it turns out that, as a consequence of this different form, it is a mistake to think that interpretative explanations are somehow reducible to (or explicable in terms of) causal explanations. What I mean by an ‘interpretative explanation’ will be brought out in the course of the discussion. But we can start with an example.

1 We sometimes misinterpret what others are doing. Many years ago Andy Griffith did a comic routine where he described something he had witnessed on a college campus. Two groups of students, each dressed in colourful costumes, were performing some sort of ritual in a cow pasture. Each group would have a short meeting to discuss and vote on some topic, and then the ones selected to present the conclusions of the group would line up facing the other group. After a brief moment of silence, one person on each side 112

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would yell out its opinion and then a fight would break out which had to be broken up by people in striped shirts. Then the whole thing was repeated. The title of Griffith’s piece was ‘What It Was, Was Football’.1 Griffith was just being funny, of course, but the possibility of misunderstanding in this way is a real one. Finding out that ‘what it was, was football’ would explain the events on the field to a foreigner who really was unaware that this was what was being witnessed, in a perfectly ordinary sense of ‘explain’. It is that sense of this term that I will say involves giving an interpretation and that this essay will explore. In his routine, Griffith describes the actions of the players as if he does not know that they are playing football, but he knows they are doing something. That allows him to pretend to understand the players as performing intentional actions, just not the ones characteristic of football. He pretends to misinterpret what they are doing. But we can imagine an observer who does even worse than that. Suppose that the observer is unaware not just that it is a game that is being played but even that the organisms she is watching are performing any intentional actions at all. She is, let’s suppose, an alien from outer space (flown in especially to work in philosophical examples) who sees the events on the field simply as very complex interactions of some of the local fauna.2 Of course these events really are complex interactions of some of the local fauna. So this will not prevent her from describing with complete accuracy, and to any level of detail her observational powers allow, everything that happens on the field. It is just that she won’t describe them as intentional actions. She won’t interpret what she sees in this way. This suggests that there are at least two rather different kinds of mistakes one could make here. In the case satirized by Griffith the observer sees that he is observing people who are performing intentional actions. He simply fails to realize what actions they are performing. But one might also make the more serious mistake of not realizing that intentional actions were being performed at all. This would be to understand the behaviour being observed in the way we often look on the behaviour of lower animals, insects for instance: complicated behaviour produced by complex brain responses to the environment but not intentional actions. If that were the only correct way to look at behaviour, as some philosophers have held, it would follow that the mistake satirized by Griffith would not be any more mistaken than any other interpretation. If absolutely no intentional characterizations correctly apply to anything, then those students on the field are no more playing football than they are having brief discussions and then fighting with each other. On such a view both characterizations of what is going on are equally mistaken. Rather than pursuing this issue now,3 however, I will start by assuming the reality of the mistake satirized by Griffith, where the form of the mistake seems to be that the observer misinterprets the actions she is observing while realizing that they are indeed intentional actions.

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So what would have gone wrong if an observer, seeing what is in fact a football game, takes it as some sort of ritualized debate followed by fisticuffs, in the way Griffith pretended to? Some of the errors Griffith pretended to make can just be set aside. We need to distinguish errors of interpretation from those based on mistakes about the underlying facts being interpreted. Here is an example. Suppose I am at what seems to me a very boring party. I manage to catch the eye of my wife, who is across the room, and she gives me the sort of ‘rolling back of the eyes’ look that I take to mean that she can hardly wait to leave. So I invent an excuse to give the hosts and drag her away. Once we are out the door though she is incensed; she was having a great time. I was mistaken in thinking she wanted to leave. One of two things might have happened. It could be that she rolled her eyes all right but she wasn’t thereby signalling that she wanted to leave. (Maybe she just at that moment noticed the chandelier above her head.) The other thing that could have happened is that she didn’t roll her eyes at all. A trick of the light only made me think she had. It was not that I misinterpreted what I saw. Rather I did not see what I thought I did. This second sort of error, where she did not in fact roll her eyes, is not an error of interpretation on my part but a factual error about what I saw. The first sort of error though was an error of interpretation. The most straightforward way to draw this distinction is by saying that the first sort of error involves misattributing at least one intentional state, such as my wife meaning something by rolling her eyes, while the second sort need not. The second sort might involve only misattributions of nonintentional states, such as whether her eyes moved in a certain way. Our outer space visitor, who never attributes any intentional states to the objects she observes on this backward planet, might still make no mistakes of the second sort. Depending on her observational powers, she might be completely accurate in her description of non-intentional states, properties and the like. As I described Griffith’s story, it involves lots of errors of the second, noninterpretative sort. The football itself for example, does not even get mentioned.4 So to have an example of a purely interpretative mistake of the sort I want to discuss we will either need to do some re-working of Griffith’s story or just use another example, such as my misinterpreting my wife’s rolling of her eyes, or perhaps Wittgenstein’s example of a set of yells and foot stampings, performed by members of some foreign culture, which can be interpreted as moves in a chess game.5 I am just going to assume here that at least sometimes all the non-interpretative mistakes can be eliminated by adjusting the alternative story. That is I am going to assume for now that there can be purely interpretative mistakes.6 The question I want to ask is what has gone wrong when the observer makes such a completely interpretative mistake, that is, where she gets none of the underlying facts wrong but still misinterprets what is going on.

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An interpretive mistake of this sort will at least involve misattributions of some intentional states to the people on the field. For two teams to be playing a game of football, the players must have many of a very large but indefinite set of intentional states. Similarly, for two groups to be engaging in a ritualized form of debate which involves short statements of position followed by fights, a very different set of intentional states is required. In specifying that only interpretative errors are involved I am supposing that none of the ‘underlying’ physical states, movements and the like have been mistaken by the observer. So none of the things our space alien observes, such as the movements the players make, or the sounds that come from their mouths, are in dispute between the correct interpretation and the mistaken one. Though what actions these movements constitute and what these sounds mean will be of course different in the two interpretations. What the football interpretation holds is the quarterback calling signals, for instance, the ritualized-debate interpretation presumably will have to say is some sort of reference to a text or debate position. So I am assuming that the two competing interpretations are consistent with, and intended to be based on, exactly the same set of ‘underlying’ facts, events, states of the players and so on Of course while much of each interpretation will involve assigning different intentional states to the people involved, there will also be other intentional states of the various agents that are the same in each of the two interpretations, such as beliefs about the colour of the grass. That is, both interpretations will assign them (though of course not the space alien, who doesn’t assign any intentional states to the objects she sees). But the point is that the various beliefs, actions and thoughts ascribed to the players, coaches and officials by each of these two interpretations will be claimed to supervene on the same set of underlying facts, which will include only movements, sounds and the like.7

2 I will explain below why I think this is not problematic, indeed not even uncommon, that is, why it is not always the case that a mistake about one or another underlying fact will serve to distinguish the correct from the mistaken interpretation. But first it might be worth examining whether what I am assuming violates the principle of supervenience as philosophers have used it. Even if that were true I cannot see that it affects the argument I want to make, but in any case it is not true. To say that one state supervenes on some other states, as when a mental state is claimed to supervene on some physical states of the brain, is to say that there can be no difference in the supervening state without some difference in the underlying states on which it supervenes. ‘A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without differing with respect to their B-properties.’8

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Someone might think that this means that the elements of the football interpretation and the elements of the ritualized debate interpretation could not possibly be held to supervene on the same underlying facts. Since the first interpretation is correct and the second incorrect, the thought would be, there must be some difference in the underlying facts that distinguishes the two. But that would be a mistake. It is true that there can’t be two sets of events which are exactly the same in all relevant respects but one of which is correctly described as a football game and the other of which is not. But we are not dealing with two (correctly interpreted) sets of events here, only one set, interpreted in two different ways, one of which is mistaken. To see that this difference is important it might help to recall that a claim of supervenience is not the same as a claim of entailment, or indeed of any other regular connection such as would hold if the underlying properties were connected to the supervening property by a scientific law. A claim that one set of properties supervenes on another set is merely a claim about a certain relation between those sets of properties. It says nothing about why this relation holds. As Kim says at one point, the mere fact of ‘supervenience leaves open the question of what grounds or accounts for it ... Supervenience is not a metaphysically deep, explanatory relation; it is merely a phenomenological relation about patterns of property covariation.’9 If there is a nomological connection, or even a logical entailment, between the underlying and supervening properties, then of course that would be explanatory as well, but such connections go beyond mere supervenience. And if there is no such definitional or nomological connection between underlying and supervening facts, the mere claim that the one supervenes on the other carries with it no requirement that denying a supervening fact one must deny one of the underlying facts. The requirement is there, when it is, only because of the connection that explains the supervenience, not because of the supervenience relation itself. On exactly these grounds, I want to claim that so far as the relation of supervenience goes someone can without logical or nomological error deny, for instance, that what she is observing is a football game and yet accept all the underlying facts on which its being a football game supervene. If she is making an error, which in this case she is, it need not be that error. It might help to take a different sort of case, one where it seems clearer that there really is no logical or nomological connection between the underlying facts and the supervening one. So suppose that you and I both find ourselves in court, facing the same judge, charged with the same crime. Discussing our cases, we discover that the various circumstances of our crimes are exactly the same in all relevant respects. Each of us is charged with doing something unfair to a student, lets suppose, and it turns out to be exactly the same sort of thing in exactly the same sort of class to exactly the same sort of student (etc.). Your case is called first, all the relevant facts

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come out, and you are found not guilty. My case is next, all the relevant facts are brought out again, but I am found guilty. Considerations of ‘cosmic’ or ‘poetic’ justice aside, something must have gone wrong. The judge has been inconsistent. If all the relevant facts are the same in both cases then either both of us have been unfair to our student or neither has been. Fairness and unfairness supervene on the facts. There cannot be a difference as to the fairness of how we treated our students without some difference in the relevant facts of our two cases. Notice however that this tells us nothing about whether what you and I have done is actually unfair. The fact that fairness and unfairness supervene on the facts, and that the facts are the same in each case, entails that either we both treated our student unfairly or that neither of us did. But nothing in this says which it is. The judge would have been consistent, and not violated any consideration of supervenience, whichever decision she had made, as long as she decided both cases the same way. By the same token, two judges, both looking at exactly the same set of underlying facts, and in complete agreement as to what those facts are, can still disagree as to whether the correct interpretation of the law and of the applicable principles of fairness require a verdict of ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ in our two cases. The judge hearing our cases is mistaken about one case and since the facts of our two cases are the same what makes the one ruling mistaken and the other one correct cannot be a mistake about any of those facts. That is what I am assuming to happen between the football and ritualized debate interpretations of the events Griffith witnessed. Some have held that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, and the resulting possibility of such disagreements in moral evaluations, argues for non-cognitivism about the ascriptions of moral concepts.10 But that doesn’t seem at all plausible if, as I am claiming, exactly the same thing applies to football games.11 This assumption about the two interpretations by itself yields an interesting conclusion, which is part of the reason it will be worth looking at it more carefully below. Since the underlying states and events will of course be held to interact causally in exactly the same way under both these interpretations, the difference between the two interpretations – what makes one true and the other false – cannot be any causal factor, any more than it can be a physical or chemical one. Just as both interpretations will be consistent with exactly the same number of people on the field, the same colours of clothing, and the like, so both will be consistent with, because they will be claimed to supervene on, exactly the same set of underlying causal relations among the various events that take place. What the ritualized debate interpretation sees as part of a fight, the football interpretation will see as tackling the tailback for a three-yard gain. But the causal interactions between the events involving the participants will be the same under each interpretation. So the picture is this. We have two completely different interpretations of exactly the same set of underlying facts. One, the correct one, says that a

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football game is in progress. The other one says that it is a ritualized series of debates, each of which is followed by fighting. We are supposing that there is no disagreement at all about the underlying facts. And my claim is that, given all this, since the elements of both interpretations will be claimed to supervene on exactly the same set of underlying facts, the difference between the correct interpretation and the incorrect one cannot be found in those underlying facts. In particular it cannot be found in any of the causal relations included in those underlying facts. The elements of both interpretations are claimed to supervene on exactly the same set of facts, which include exactly the same causal interactions between the same events and so on. So whatever it is about these two interpretations that makes the one correct and the other incorrect, that is not where we will find it.

3 Of course, at this point I am really only assuming this is possible in this case, even though it seems a plausible assumption. Still, how could it be so? It will help to contrast the interpretative explanations we are discussing with a situation where it is not so, that is, where a different explanatory theory requires some difference in the facts on which it is based. So consider the difference between two theories supposed to describe the motion of some object through space. Suppose we are technicians looking through the records of radar scans taken on some remote island, covering some part of the sky for the last few minutes. The radar is part of an environmental monitoring programme and our job is to check these records. We notice markings indicating that the radar has detected something, but we don’t know what. Maybe it is a weather balloon, maybe a rocket, maybe only a bird flying in front of the radar. That is what we need to figure out. At first we have recorded only a relatively small number of observations of whatever this object is, four or five. So all we really know is the object’s position at those times. On the basis of these observations we formulate two theories of this object’s motion based on what it might be, theory R, that the object is a rocket, with a smooth path (which, unknown to us, is correct) and theory B, that it is a bird, with a much more erratic path. Since both these theories are consistent with all the observations of this object that we have when we start trying to figure out what it is, there is no evidence from these observations that supports theory R over theory B, or vice versa. So in that respect these two theories are analogous to our football versus ritualized debate interpretations of what is happening on that football field. At the same time, both theories R and B will of course be ‘underdetermined by the data’ which supports them. Both theories make far more predictions about the position of the object in question than anyone has yet actually checked or, really, could ever check, since there will never be more than a finite number of observations and each theory makes predictions for

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the positions of the object at every point in time, not just the times when actual observations are made. To see which theory is correct we have to look at the predictions each theory makes about the as yet unobserved positions of each object. Both theories are consistent with all observations so far. But the predictions the two theories make about where the object will be observed apply to all possible observations, not just the ones already made. When a new observation is made, say by making another pass with our radar, the position of the object is consistent with the predictions of theory R but not those of theory B. Of course it will always be possible to add a new feature to theory B, an ‘epicycle’ for instance in which the alleged bird flutters into just that position, which adjusts it to the new observation. The resulting, adjusted theory (B2) will once again be consistent with all the observations yet made but it will have the same fate as B when yet another observation is made. And then it too will have been refuted, or at least it is no longer consistent with the observations. This process can continue, of course, but if we stick with any one of these theories, we keep finding we have to abandon or revise it as soon as new observations are made. Contrast this with our two interpretations of what is happening on the football field. Here too both interpretations are underdetermined by the data, that is, there are lots of facts that are ‘brute’ relative to these interpretations but that have not yet been observed. Each interpretation makes predictions about what will happen, say, in the next minute. But, if I am right, in contrast to the two theories of the object detected by our radar, none of these facts, either the ones already checked or the ones ‘predicted’ by the two interpretations, need be inconsistent with either interpretation. How can that be? I suggest that it is because, unlike our two theories of the moving object, neither of the two interpretations of the events on the football field is completely determinate with respect to the underlying facts on which it is based. Both the theories of the object moving in front of the radar and the interpretations of the events on the football field are underdetermined by the data that supports them. They make predictions about much more than has yet been observed. But, unlike the theories of the moving object, the interpretations of the events on the football field are indeterminate with respect to some of the underlying facts on which they supervene. Each leaves lots of possibilities open, even for the underlying facts relevant to the interpretation. That is quite different from the two theories of the moving object. Both theories R and B make predictions about the exact positions of the moving object for every point in time. That is because, whether that object is a rocket or a bird, there will not be any ‘gaps’ in its movement. Because of that, when conjoined to the initial observations about the positions of the object, each theory entails that the object will occupy a specific portion of space. And so each will entail specific, though of course different, claims about what observations will be made. In short, within the parameters

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of the theory, each of these theories is determinate in its predictions. For each area of space, each point in time and so on each theory either predicts the object occupies that part of space or that it does not. Nothing like this is true for the two contrasting interpretations of the events on the football field. Even though each will claim to supervene on the same set of actual underlying events, each interpretation is indeterminate within a range of possible events. Each leaves plenty of things ‘open’. For each interpretation there are lots of underlying facts, relevant to the interpretation, which can either obtain or not without affecting the truth of the interpretation. If that sounds mysterious, think of how many open choices there are for those participating in either a football game or a debate tournament. Whether the team on offence calls a running play or a pass play, whether the player with the ball cuts to the left or the right, whether the defence rushes all its linebackers or drops them back in pass coverage, it is still a football game between two specific teams and so on. Similarly for the sort of debate tournament we are supposing for the alternative interpretation. Which specific debate position gets supported by the vote of the team members, for instance, would be a matter of how the members choose to vote. So for each of these two opposing interpretations there will be plenty of underlying facts, facts on which the interpretation in question supervenes, with respect to which the interpretation is indeterminate. Whether the quarterback decides to run or throw the ball, whether the receiver gets tackled or manages to score, it is still a football game. So there is a difference between saying that some theory is underdetermined by the data and saying that an interpretation is indeterminate. Being underdetermined by the data just means that the implications of the theory go beyond the evidence for it. The theory entails claims about the world for which as yet there is no evidence one way or the other. This is as true of both the two sets of cases we have looked at, the theories about the moving object and the interpretations of what is happing on that field. In saying that the two interpretations of what is happening on that field are indeterminate, however, I am saying something different. An interpretation is indeterminate if so far as the interpretation is concerned the underlying facts being interpreted can be of various different sorts without being evidence against the interpretation. Suppose you have a complete physiological theory of how human bodies work. In order to be complete your theory will have as a consequence the proposition that under some circumstances the muscles in the running back’s legs will cause him to move to the right rather than the left. If in the course of a football game these exact circumstances obtain for some running back and yet he moves to the left, your theory will be refuted, or at least have significant evidence against it. Like theory B in the radar example, it will need some revision. But the interpretation of these same events that says that this is a running back carrying the ball in a

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football game has no such problem. It is indeterminate as to which way the running back moves. Of course to say that an interpretation is indeterminate is not to say that anything goes. It would be better to say that an interpretation specifies a range of possible facts, with things inside that range consistent with the interpretation, things outside inconsistent with it. If it is a football game, ball carriers can run to the left or to the right but they can’t sit down and start working crossword puzzles. But it can still turn out that each of the two interpretations of some specific set of events leave open underlying facts within some range and that the actual events at issue fall into that range for each interpretation. If that happens, then whatever exactly these facts turn out to be, they are consistent with both interpretations. That is what we are assuming for the two interpretations of what happens on that football field. That is why it is unobjectionable to assume that both the correct, football, interpretation and the incorrect, ritualized debate, interpretation can agree completely about the underlying facts on which each supervenes. Both interpretations can supervene on the same set of underlying facts because, as we can put it, their ranges of indeterminacy happen to overlap in such a way that the actual sequence of events on the field falls within both. That won’t always be the case with any two interpretations. Saying there is indeterminacy in interpretations does not mean that nothing falls outside the range of indeterminacy. If that were true then every interpretation would be consistent with every possible set of underlying facts. Suppose that Griffith, instead of interpreting what he saw on the field to be a ritualized debate tournament, had thought he was witnessing a horse race. Horse races are indeterminate in the same sense football games or debate tournaments are since jockeys can manoeuvre their horses in different ways, for instance. But for these two interpretations it is hard to see how the ranges of indeterminacy could overlap. There will be some underlying facts that are allowed by one interpretation and not by the other. Interpreting some set of events as a horse race, for instance, is not consistent with a complete lack of horses, though that is allowed by a football game interpretation. So if Griffith had thought he was witnessing a horse race rather than a football game, his mistake could have been traced to a mistake about this underlying fact.

4 In the football example the indeterminacy arises from the fact that the events being interpreted involve groups of people and numerous choices on the part of those involved. At those places where a choice is possible for someone, each interpretation allows alternatives, each of which is consistent with the interpretation. That is why the underlying facts are neither nomologically, nor definitionally, connected to either interpretation. But it would be a mistake to think that indeterminacy only arises where the events

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being interpreted involve groups of people. This indeterminacy is equally characteristic of any explanation that appeals to an agent’s reasons for doing whatever she did. Explanations of actions in terms of agents’ reasons are also interpretative explanations in my sense. The football example is only a special case that happens to involve more than one person. To see this, consider cases where the agent needs to make a choice but can see no reason for choosing one way rather than another (so-called Buridan cases). Suppose I am running some evening, being chased by some bad guys, and I come to a fork in the road. I can see no reason for going left rather than right or vice versa. Still, I need to keep running. I don’t want to get caught. So I just make a choice and go, lets say, left. Clearly in this situation turning left is something I do intentionally but it seems false to say that I have a reason for doing it. I might neither have, nor think I have, reason to go left rather than right, though I have reason for continuing to run. And to do that I must go one way or the other. So I have a reason for choosing one or the other direction. But though I intentionally turn left, it is not true that I have a reason for turning left rather than right. So not all intentional actions are done for reasons. Explanations of actions in terms of the agent’s reasons do not cover everything agents do intentionally. There are some choices one makes, and sometimes in fact must make, where one does not oneself think one has a reason to choose one way rather than another. And Buridan cases of this sort are common. Most cases of doing things for reasons ‘contain’ intentional actions of this sort. When I turn down the road to the left I am of course doing something for a reason. I am running away from those bad guys. But that would also have been my reason had I turned down the road to the right. My action of ‘running away from the bad guys’ itself involves other intentional actions some of which, like turning down the road on the left rather than the one on the right, involve choices between different things which are, relative to my goal, equally ‘reasonable’. And in all such situations the choices of each of those things are typically not done for reasons. Many of the so-called ‘basic actions’ by which one performs the (less basic) actions which one performs for reasons are still intentional actions.12 But there are often numerous possibilities and for the most part the choice of one of these rather than another is not something one does for a reason, like the choice to turn left rather than right. So explanations of actions in terms of the agent’s reasons are frequently indeterminate in the same way an interpretation of those events on that field as a football game is indeterminate, and for the same reason. In each case the explanation (or interpretation) is consistent with various choices on the part of the agents involved. Within some range these choices can go in quite different ways and still be consistent with the interpretation in question. All this argues that the same conclusions about the possibility of an alternative interpretation supervening on the same set of underlying facts can be

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drawn for explanations of actions generally that we saw followed for the interpretation of the football game. Suppose Andy Griffith sees me running, turning left at the fork in the road, and interprets what he sees as just another jogger, out to get some exercise. He would have misinterpreted what he saw. What I am really doing is running away from those bad guys. So here again we would have two interpretations, each of which is (or at least could be) consistent with the underlying facts on which its elements supervene, because each is indeterminate with respect to numerous open choices the agent in question can make, including the choice of whether to turn left or right at that fork in the road. This means that, as before, the difference between the correct and the incorrect interpretation may not be found in any of the underlying facts on which the elements of these two interpretations supervene. In particular it may not be found in some causal connection which one interpretation uses or presupposes and the other does not. The difference between the two interpretations is not ‘causal’ in this way since each interpretation might supervene on exactly the same set of underlying facts, including facts about the causal connections among the various events involved, such as the muscle contractions in my legs that propel me to the left rather than the right when I arrive at that fork in the road.

5 An obvious question remains. The correct and incorrect interpretations are both consistent with the same set of underlying facts and yet one is correct and the other not. How can that be? The answer, I suggest, is that what the correct interpretation includes, and the mistaken one misses, is the actual point or purpose of what the agent or agents are doing. Consider the running example again. Even if all my movements, even all my thoughts, would be the same whether I were merely out jogging or trying to escape some bad guys, the point of what I am doing would be quite different in the two cases. I am not merely trying to get some exercise; I am trying to save my skin. Perhaps when I first encounter those bad guys I reason that prudence is the better part of valour and decide to run away, heading with my usual opening sprint down the road I ordinarily take, in exactly the way I have begun my evening run every day for months. A few blocks along, just as I come to a fork in the road, I pass Andy Griffith, who thinks I am out for my usual evening run. But he is mistaken, even though he is correct about all the facts about my leg movements, speed, direction and so on. That is, the elements of his incorrect interpretation of what I am doing supervene on exactly the same set of underlying facts as do the elements of the correct interpretation, which is that I am running away from those bad guys. (They are exactly the elements that our space alien, had we enlisted her at this point, would have observed.)

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Nor can we say that because my conscious decision would be different in each case there must be a difference in the underlying facts for the two interpretations. Even leaving aside the fact that I need not have made any conscious decision, the purpose of what I am doing is not always the same as the explicit decision I come to, or even my belief I have about what I am doing. Akrasia and self-deception are always possible. Not only all my physical movements but even my conscious reasoning and resulting decision, in fact even my own belief as to what I was doing, might be the same whether I was just jogging or was actually running away.13 The difference would be that my real purpose was to get away, no matter what I or anyone else thought I was doing. The possibility of weakness and self-deception shows that both the correct and incorrect interpretation of what the agent is really doing are consistent with any explicit reasoning or choice the agent makes. If the purpose of the action is what determines whether an interpretation is correct, we can see at least one reason why interpretations are indeterminate. I have been arguing that interpretations are indeterminate, whether they are about the actions of individual agents or about events that involve cooperation among several agents. They supervene on the underlying facts but they allow ranges of facts, rather than specifying specific underlying facts at every point, as determinate theories do. That is why there is no nomological connection between the underlying facts and the supervening, interpretive claim. Different interpretations can be perfectly consistent with the same set of underlying facts. And in the cases we have considered so far this is apparently because both interpretations allow open choices for the agent or agents in question. If this is right it tells us how the sort of indeterminacy I am claiming for these interpretations is possible, what it consists in so to speak, at least in these cases. But it does not explain why these, or any, interpretations have this feature. The answer to that question, I think, is to be found in the same thing that makes one interpretation correct and another one mistaken. The difference is that the correct interpretation includes, and incorrect ones miss, the actual purpose (or purposes) of the action or actions. Purposes necessarily involve the sort of indeterminacy we have seen in the interpretations we have looked at. It may be easiest to see this, and to see that having further open choices is not essential, if we shift for a moment from actions that have purposes to objects that do. So consider the large rock that rests at the corner of my friend Steve’s driveway, just where it meets the road. This rock has a purpose. Steve’s house is on a hillside and his driveway is rather steep. It crosses a ditch (via a culvert) as soon as it leaves the road and then immediately makes a left turn downhill. The driveway is also narrow enough that if you drive in then, when you want to leave, you have to back out, since it is very difficult to turn around. The purpose of the rock is to keep people who are backing out of the driveway from accidentally going off into the ditch.

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There are a few things to notice here before explaining how indeterminacy enters into this story. First, obviously this rock has this purpose only because Steve has a purpose for it. In this it differs from what biologists sometimes call ‘functions’, which are a result (roughly) of the evolutionary history of the ancestors of the thing that has the function.14 Such functions can be discovered but they are not assigned. Even non-sentient things such as flower petals can have them. Rocks can’t have functions of that sort, not being organisms or parts of organisms.15 But they can have purposes, because people can have purposes for them. Purposes involve indeterminacy in at least three ways. First, there are plenty of features of that rock that have nothing directly to do with its purpose of keeping people from driving into that ditch when backing out of Steve’s driveway. To serve its purpose of course it must have some colour, for instance. But within limits, it probably does not matter what colour the rock is. Similarly for size and shape. In general when objects have purposes those purposes are served by specific features of the objects, such as, in the case of this rock, the fact that it might do some damage to one’s car to hit it. But objects always have plenty of other features than the ones which serve the purpose in question, and (perhaps within some limits) those can be anything at all and the purpose will still be served. Second, nothing about a thing’s purpose by itself specifies how it is going to be achieved. Even for that rock, its purpose might be achieved in more than one way. People might see it in their mirrors and turn slightly to miss it. Or they might hit it with a tire and change course slightly. If either happens the rock will have served its purpose. But, so far as this purpose is concerned, it does not matter which happens. Nothing about a thing’s purpose requires that it be achieved in a specific way.16 But, third, the fact that something has a purpose in no way insures that this purpose will actually be achieved, or even that it can be. The fact that the purpose of that rock is to keep people from driving into the ditch is perfectly consistent with its having no effect whatsoever on the people backing out of Steve’s driveway. Imagine that it is in fact a very small rock that no one even notices. Its purpose could still be to keep people from driving into the ditch. All these sources of indeterminacy are, I think, consequences of the fact that purposes are ‘intentional states’ in something at least very like the way beliefs and desires are, which is why inanimate things such as rocks can have purposes only if someone has a purpose for them. But, given that, the rock still has a purpose and that purpose creates an ‘intensional’ context in the sentences in which it is referred to, just as any other intentional state does. For example, the purpose of that rock is to keep people from going into the ditch when backing out of Steve’s driveway. It is also true as a matter of fact that keeping people from going into the ditch when backing out of Steve’s driveway is a saving of the amount of gasoline needed to hitch them up to

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Steve’s pickup to pull them out. But it doesn’t follow that the purpose of that rock is to save this gasoline, though of course it might have been. If we return now to actions and the events that constitute actions, we shouldn’t be surprised that we find these same sorts of indeterminacy. Human actions are events that have purposes supplied by the agents of the actions.17 So for actions, or at least for most of them, figuring out what the purpose of the action is or was is essential to figuring out what the action is or was. To do that is to give what I am calling an interpretative explanation.

6 Purposes, I am claiming, explain actions but always involve indeterminacy. More than one purpose or set of purposes is always consistent with the actual underlying facts about the objects or events on which the purpose supervenes. That is the fundamental reason why the underlying facts for any interpretation need not entail or even be nomologically connected to just one interpretation. But the question remains, what makes one assignment of purposes correct and another not if it is not the underlying facts being interpreted? I think the straightforward answer is simply that the action or actions being interpreted really do have the purposes assigned by the correct interpretation. To see what this comes to it will help to distinguish two different sorts of questions. There is a difference between asking how we know what purposes are (at all, so to speak) and asking how we know when people really have certain purposes. These can get conflated if we think that figuring out when others really have a certain purpose must be in the end a matter of reducing purposes to their constitutive elements and then doing an investigation of when the actions of others possess those elements. But this is not how it is. We should distinguish between saying that some concept ‘applies to’ some data and saying that a concept is ‘based on’ certain data. Consider some theoretical entity, such as an electron. How do we know that there is any such thing as an electron? The answer is that electrons are hypothesized by empirically very well-established physical theory. And the evidence for the theory is also evidence for electrons, in fact this is all the evidence for electrons that there is. Electrons have precise, detailed roles in explanations of lots of physical phenomena, including electricity, chemical bonds and many others. They contribute to these explanations, that is, the idea that there are electrons is empirically applicable. But at the same time electrons are only known to exist because of their place in these explanations. So the idea of an electron, besides being applicable to phenomena, is also based on exactly the same phenomena in the sense that electrons are essentially theoretical entities. If different theories which do not use the concept of an electron are found to do a better job explaining the same phenomena, that will be taken to

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show that we were wrong to think that there ever were any such things as electrons. Or we might in that case end up saying that there turned out to be several different sorts of electrons, perhaps, or that, besides electrons, there were other particles that were previously thought to be electrons but were not. The point is that there is no other reason to think that there are electrons at all beside their usefulness in the theories in which they appear. If that usefulness turns out to have been illusory, so will electrons. The fate imagined here for the notion of an electron is in essence the fate predicted by eliminative materialism for all intentionalistic and purposive concepts. The idea is that once the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms are understood, the much cruder ‘folk’ theoretical concepts such as purpose and intention used in commonsense explanations of action will be seen to have been illusory. This claim presupposes that these concepts, like that of an electron, are not only applicable to the phenomena with which they deal but also that they are based on these phenomena in the sense that we have no further reason to think the things they refer to actually exist beyond that provided by whatever evidence supports the theories in which they appear. But not all concepts that are applicable to the phenomena they explain are like this. In particular the idea of the purpose of an action is not like this. Our grounds for having these concepts, that is, for thinking that they apply at all, are not based on the phenomena to which they apply but arise independently of the explanations in which they are used. Think about our space alien again. She suspends judgment as to whether the complex organisms she encounters on this planet have any intentional states, including any aims or purposes. But that does not mean she needs to suspend judgment about whether she herself has goals or intentional states, and she need not suspend judgment about this even if she goes on to accept the version of solipsism that actually denies there are any other minds than her own. Such a solipsist would simply deny the applicability of intentional or purposive predicates to others than herself. This is, or at least seems to be, a coherent position. (It is for instance the position dualists seem forced into by ‘other minds skepticism’). It is not incoherent even if it seems very implausible. The thought would seem to have to be that one knows directly from one’s own case what, for example, purposes and intentions are, while for others one only knows for sure about the various movements and sounds their bodies produce. There are two things to notice about this position. First, this position is very implausible. Once one agrees that there are such things as intentional states, purposes and the like, the evidence that others have these states is overwhelming. Someone who refused to make use of purposive explanations of others, including, importantly, purposive explanations of what they are doing in making sounds come from their mouths, would find it virtually impossible to make any sense at all of human activities. She would thus find it impossible to engage in any sort of distinctively human interactions. At

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the same time, regarding these activities as purposive, intentionally contentful and the like would completely solve this problem.18 So, while coherent, this form of solipsism would seem to be profoundly unempirical. Once one sees that it is possible for something to have purposes and other intentional states, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the claim that others do indeed have them. The second thing to notice here is that the coherence of this form of solipsism presupposes that concepts such as ‘purpose’ can be known from, and applied to, oneself independently of their applicability to others.19 If it is coherent to suppose that one might oneself be the only purposive agent in existence, then the concept of a purposive agent is not dependent on having a place in theories explaining the behaviour of other people. So if this is right the knowledge of what purposive agency is, and the knowledge that there are purposive agents at all, could survive the discovery that a complete explanation of the behaviour of others, by neurophysiology for instance, had no place for the concept of purposive agency. But of course neurophysiology (eventually, when complete, etc.) is supposed to explain the behaviour of everyone, oneself included, not just of ‘others’. So the form of solipsism that holds that I know from my own case that I myself have purposes, intentional states and the like, but I don’t know whether anyone else has such states, cannot be allowed by eliminativists of the sort mentioned at the beginning of this essay. An eliminativist will have to hold that the form of solipsism we are considering here is in fact not coherent since it does not apply neurophysiological explanations to everyone it should apply to, oneself as well as others. It tries to make an exception for the first person case. An eliminativist will have to hold that observing oneself no more reveals, or provides grounds for hypothesizing, purposes or intentions than observing others does. This is the heart of the issue. When I ‘learn from my own case’ that, say, my purpose in running down the street is to get away from those bad guys, does that mean that I somehow ‘observe’ myself internally and then on some grounds or other attribute such a purpose to myself, more or less in the same way someone else who is observing or thinking about me might? An eliminativist, who holds that purposive concepts are (supposed to be) based on the evidence they (try to) explain, will have to answer yes to this question. For an eliminativist, purposes are simply crude or defective empirically based concepts. But the answer has to be no. Having a purpose, acting with some purpose, is itself a ‘state’ of an agent, frequently perfectly conscious, different from merely attributing such a state to someone, even oneself. And given the sort of state it is, there has to be an element of selfawareness involved. In the normal situation at least, someone who is acting with some purpose must by the very fact of acting on it, realize what this purpose is. Being an agent, acting with some purpose, is itself a certain sort of ‘mental’ state. So ‘having a purpose’ is not a theoretical concept, like

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‘electron’, that depends for its use (and one might say, existence) completely on some explanatory theory. Thinking that notions such as purpose, intention and the like are theoretical concepts analogous to ‘electron’ is similar to the mistake pointed out long ago by J. L. Austin of thinking that all language use is descriptive. Not all mental states have their content exhausted in being ‘about’ something else in the way beliefs and desires are about something else. In particular doing something intentionally is not like this. The paradigm first person example of purposes is surely not just describing one’s own purposes to oneself, that is, thinking that one has a purpose of some sort. It is actually having that purpose. Otherwise, if ‘purpose’ were a purely third person, explanatory concept the content of which was unavailable to whomever actually had the purpose just in virtue of having it, while we could interpret or think about our actions, it is hard to see how we could actually perform actions. It would be as if we were condemned to being merely internal observers of the motions and sounds we were making, forever trying to figure out what we ourselves were doing. This is not just comical; it is incoherent. If it were correct then it is hard to see how anyone could ever actually do anything at all, since just having a purpose, without also reflecting on it, wouldn’t by itself be enough to let the agent know what her purpose actually was. So it is hard to see how she could actually be pursuing it. At best she would, like everyone else, have to try to figure out what she was doing by thinking about the movements and sounds she was making. But of course ‘trying to figure out what I am doing’ is itself a purposive activity. That is why this picture is incoherent. It has to presuppose that the internal observer is herself acting with some purpose of which she is aware, that is, in trying to figure out the purposes of the motions and sounds she observes herself making. If this purposive activity, trying to figure out the purposes of the motions and sounds she is making, isn’t something the content of which is available to her just by having it then presumably yet another observational level will be needed to try to figure out the purpose of this one. But obviously this does no good since exactly the same issue would arise in exactly the same way all over again. It follows that just having a purpose includes, typically at least, awareness of that purpose, automatically so to speak, without the need for further interpretation and without anything analogous to ‘observation’. The idea that I have to interpret my own actions (or movements) in the way I interpret those of others is not coherent. It leads to a regress, since interpretation is itself a purposive activity. This is a way of saying that ‘purposiveness’ is not a theoretical concept, used in and dependant on explanations of behaviour. It is indeed applicable to behaviour but it is not based on behaviour. It is a concept we bring to explanations of behaviour from the fact of our own agency. These last two points together give us at least the basic elements of an answer to the question of what makes an interpretation, an assignment of

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purposes, correct. The answer is that this is an empirical issue that turns, like any such issue, on the explanatory power of the interpretation proposed, but the essential concept involved, that of purposiveness, is not itself based on evidence in the way other theoretical concepts are. We understand purposiveness, acquire the very idea so to speak, from the fact that we are ourselves purposive agents. Once we have that idea, however, we can apply it like any theoretical concept to the events and behaviour that confront us.

Notes 1. The original version included lots more detail and was of course much funnier. It is available at http://www.carolinafan.com/ar/02/020926_what_it_was.html 2. She is probably a relative of the Martian described by Daniel Dennett in ‘True Believers’, in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1987), pp. 13–42. 3. We will return to this issue below. 4. Though this is true of my version of the story, all these elements are in fact included in Griffith’s actual routine. 5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 200. 6. This assumption will be defended below. 7. This is the actual claim, but I will sometimes abbreviate this by saying that the two interpretations supervene on the same underlying facts. 8. McLaughlin, Brian and Karen Bennett, “Supervenience,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . 9. Quoted in Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism (Cambridge, MIT, 2005), p. 117. 10. See for instance, Simon Blackburn, ‘Moral Realism’ in Morality and Moral Reasoning ed. J. Casey (Methuen, London, 1973) reprinted in his Essays In Quasi-Realism (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993). 11. On the general question of whether there can be supervenience without either logical or nomological ‘reduction’ see Sehon (2005), Chap. 8. Sehon gives several examples, based on making the supervening property a noncomputable number, where there is supervenience but no possibility of entailment of the supervening facts by the underlying facts no matter what extra scientific law is supposed to connect the two. 12. A ‘basic action’ is something one does, such as raising ones arm, but not ‘by means of’ doing something else. To take the earlier example, one might signal one’s boredom by means of rolling one’s eyes back. So signalling boredom would not be a basic action but rolling ones eyes back presumably is. 13. According to Wittgenstein, ‘It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate mental accompaniments’ (Philosophical Investigations, § 200). 14. I am simplifying things here since there is another account of function which doesn’t depend on evolution, roughly the ‘causal role’ account. Though using that account would complicate the argument here, so far as I can tell it makes no essential difference. See my Reasons and Purposes (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), Chap. 1 for a fuller discussion of these two accounts. 15. Even a rock could have a function in the ‘causal role’ sense though. A rock might function to keep moisture in the soil under it from evaporating for instance.

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16. Of course whoever gave the object its purpose might have believed or even intended that the purpose would be achieved in a specific way. But that is not strictly required for a thing’s having a purpose. 17. I don’t intend this to be a definition. It seems to me to be true, but if there are actions of which it is not true, then obviously what I say here won’t apply to them. Of course ‘supplying’ a purpose need not be, in fact cannot be, an intentional action, since that would just lead to a regress. 18. Dennett imagines a ‘predicting contest’ between a human using the ordinary, purposive interpretations and an outer space alien such as the one imagined above who knows all the underlying physically described facts but uses no purposive or intentional concepts. Without the intentional and purposive concepts, the outer space visitor of course losses badly. See Dennett (1987). 19. This of course was famously questioned by Wittgenstein and his followers.

8 Anscombe on Expression of Intention Richard Moran and Martin J. Stone

Of course in every act of this kind, there remains the possibility of putting this act into question – insofar as it refers to more distant, more essential ends ... . For example the sentence which I write is the meaning of the letters I trace, but the whole work I wish to produce is the meaning of the sentence. And this work is a possibility in connection with which I can feel anguish; it is truly my possibility ... tomorrow in relation to it my freedom can exercise its nihilating power. Sartre, Being and Nothingness1 There might be a verb with the meaning: to formulate one’s intention in words or other signs, out loud or in one’s thoughts. This verb would not be equivalent in meaning to our ‘intend’. There might be a verb with the meaning: to act according to intention; and this would also not mean the same as ‘to intend’. Yet another might mean: to brood over an intention; or to turn it over and over in one’s head. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Philosophical Psychology I2

I The Problem Anscombe begins her monograph Intention by recalling three familiar contexts in which, as she says, we ‘employ a concept of intention’ (§1): (Case 1) Someone says ‘I’m going to walk to the store’: An expression of intention, she says. (Case 2) Someone is walking (or has walked) to the store: An intentional action.

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(Case 3) ‘Why are you walking to the store?’ – ‘To get some milk’: The question seeks – and the answer provides – the intention with which something is done. 3 This isn’t philosophy yet, only its raw material. Anscombe will shortly suggest the need for a philosophical investigation by suggesting that we have trouble seeing how one concept of intention finds application in these cases.4 This set-up seems straightforward, yet on closer inspection someone might understandably object: ‘What an odd mix of cases!’ Case 1 is a type of act (viz. one of speaking), and, as such, an instance of the second. Doubtless, when performed, it is also done with some further intention (Case 3). So there is overlap here. But apart from this, it might be wondered: Why should expression of intention appear in an initial division of the subject at all? Sure, we put ‘a concept of intention’ to work in this context. But we put ‘a concept of emotion’ to work in speaking of someone’s expressing emotion; and that seems unlikely – save in a world described by Borges – to head the opening divisions in a book called ‘Emotion’. In general, that ‘expressions of Ø’ will be pertinent in studying a psychological concept Ø isn’t simply to be taken for granted. Exceptions would include those concepts taken up in performative verbs, where (e.g.) to command or promise is to formulate something in words, to give it expression. But that to intend isn’t a performative is seen among other ways in this, that we can speak of expressions of it, though not of a command;5 and from this point of view, it seems doubtful that ‘expressing an intention’ has any greater claim to pertinence than, say, ‘brooding over an intention’ or ‘concealing an intention’, and so on. Yet this is Anscombe’s first sentence: ‘Very often, when a man says “I am going to do such-and-such,” we should say that this was an expression of intention’ (p. 1). Anscombe does not pause here to explain why she draws attention to ‘expression’, but instead turns to distinguishing two different uses to which (e.g.) ‘I am going to fail in this exam’ might be put – either (1) an expression of intention, or (2) the speaker’s estimate of her chances, a prediction (p. 2). Distinguishing expressions of intention from predictions suggests that the two were liable to be confused. So it is in fact a particular sort of ‘expression’ which comes up here, a verbal statement of fact. To explain, we express ourselves, and our states and attitudes express themselves, in a variety of ways – through what we do and say, and through how we do these things. Since we are thus bound to be expressing things continuously, a central distinction in this area will be between expression in the impersonal sense (the manifestation of some state or condition) and expression in the personal sense (the intentional act of one person directed to another).6 Evidently, Anscombe is thinking of the personal sense, for her examples are all imperfect statements of fact (‘I’m going to ...’)7 – items which can do double duty for predictions – notwithstanding that intentions are, it would seem, expressed in other ways

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as well. ‘It would seem’: In fact, in a passage occurring just after the opening, Anscombe will be found denying that intentions, in contrast to other states of the person, are ever impersonally expressed (p. 5). (The meaning of this strange and unintuitive doctrine will occupy us in much of this essay.) To say that Anscombe has inherited this focus on ‘expression’ from Wittgenstein, though correct, is obviously not the sort of explanation needed here.8 And in truth, if the idea were merely to locate the topic of intention by remembering some main uses of ‘intention’, something seems forced here. For we don’t really ‘very often’ speak of ‘expression of intention’ in characterizing what people say. Philosophical purposes aside, we don’t generally speak this way unless the context gives special consequence to the distinction between the two kinds of expression – for example, in the law, which sometimes asks whether an intention (e.g. to take possession) has been expressed (the personal sense), and not merely whether it was evident under the circumstances to others. What, then, is the meaning of Anscombe’s initial emphasis on ‘expression’? We aim to show the work this notion is performing throughout Intention. But the background to this task is that Anscombe’s first division – expression of intention – seems incongruous. It seems to belong only to a very different catalogue of divisions, one featuring such items as symptoms or indications of intention, or intentions which are disguised or merely passively revealed; or perhaps in a catalogue of speech-acts – expressions of belief, predictions, commands, promises and so on. Consider now that rather strange and unintuitive passage. ‘Expression’ recurs emphatically here, in the form of a claim made by Anscombe, that while non-human animals (brutes) have intentions, they do not express them: Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which, e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention. For a cat’s movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. One might as well call a car’s stalling the expression of its being about to stop. Intention is unlike emotion in this respect, that the expression of it is purely conventional; we might say linguistic if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conventional meaning to be included in language. Wittgenstein seems to me to have gone wrong in speaking of the ‘natural expression of an intention.’ (Philosophical Investigations (§ 647) (p. 5, original emphasis) Someone might read past this unhindered, because they might understandably take Anscombe’s point to be merely the anodyne one that brutes do not tell us of their intentions (i.e. express them in the personal sense). But that can’t be her point. For clearly what this passage is after is a contrast between intentions and states of emotion with respect to their possibilities of expression

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(‘Intention is unlike emotion in this respect ...’). That anodyne rendering would undo the contrast. For the natural behaviour of brutes does express emotion (or so Anscombe allows), yet brutes do not tell us of their emotions either. So Anscombe’s point is best represented – as she herself represents it – like this: There is no such thing as the natural expression of intention, as there is of emotion; the expression of intention is always conventional or linguistic. First appearances notwithstanding, this is not essentially – but only by application – a point about non-human animals. Anscombe might also have said (she should be committed to saying), ‘The natural behaviour of human beings is no ‘expression’ of their intention either.’ But the question is, why not? Why say this? The problem which emerges here, beyond Anscombe’s making ‘expressions’ one of the topic’s divisions, is what the relevant notion of ‘expression’ might be, such that it has no application to the intentions manifested by an agent’s stalking movements, while still finding purchase on the non-verbal manifestations of other states like emotion.9 The solution to both problems involves seeing Anscombe’s emphasis on ‘expression’ – and more generally her explanation of intention ‘in terms of language’ (p. 86) – as part of a distinctive strategy for elucidating the unity of the uses of intention. We will call this strategy one of immediate elucidation, and will contrast it with ‘connective strategies’. An immediate elucidation exhibits the divisions of intention as inflections of a single form. It thereby also helps reveal how the unity of ‘intention’ has become linguistically submerged, hence lost to a philosophically unassisted view. To explain this, however, it seems best to begin by recalling the shape of a prominent strand in contemporary, post-Anscombian philosophy of action, since connective strategies appear to be the main ones, or the only ones, imagined there.

II Background: the transformation of Intention A familiar homage says that many action theorists follow Anscombe at least in (1) associating acting intentionally with acting for reasons, (2) treating the topic of intention as comprising this and at least two other divisions (‘intending to act’ and ‘intention with which’) and (3) requiring philosophy to explain how these notions are connected. This account of the influence of Anscombe’s work is only roughly correct, however. A sign of inexactness is just the way her first division (expression of intention) is apt to be remembered – for example here, by Davidson, in recounting his own theory: [Earlier] I believed that of the three main uses of the concept of intention distinguished by Anscombe (acting with an intention, acting intentionally, and intending to act), the first was the most basic. Acting intentionally, I argued ... was just acting with some intention. That left intending, which I somehow thought would be simple to understand

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in terms of the others. I was wrong. When I finally came to work on it, I found it the hardest of the three; contrary to my original view, it came to seem the basic notion on which the others depend; and what progress I made with it partially undermined an important theme... – that ‘the intention with which the action was done’ does not refer to an entity or state of any kind.10 Losing reference to ‘expression’, Anscombe’s first division has become ‘intending to act’ – a hard notion for action theory, as Davidson avers, partly because, being potentially free of any contamination by action, it seems to refer to an as yet unanalysed state of mind. Moreover, given the general drift here – an organization of ‘intention’ around a distinction between worldly events and autonomous mental states – one might understandably speak of just two main Anscombian divisions. Thus, Michael Bratman: [W]e use the notion of intention to characterize both people’s actions and their minds. Thus, I might intentionally pump the water into the house, and pump it with the intention of poisoning the inhabitants. Here intention characterizes my action. But I might also intend this morning to pump the water (and poison the inhabitants) when I get to the pump this afternoon. And here intention characterizes my mind. (p. 1) ... [O]ur common sense psychological scheme admits of intentions as states of mind; and it also allows us to characterize actions as done intentionally, or with a certain intention. A theory of intention must address both kinds of phenomena and explain how they are related. A natural approach, the one I will be taking here, is to begin with the state of intending to act. (p. 3)11 And Bratman distinguishes this approach from that of other theorists as follows: Instead of beginning with the state of intending to act [some theorists] turn immediately to intention as it appears in action: [they] turn directly to acting intentionally and acting with a certain intention .... This is, for example, the strategy followed by Elizabeth Anscombe in her ground-breaking monograph, Intention.12 On this reception of Anscombe, the question naturally arises: Which is the more ‘basic’ notion of intention? For Bratman, as for Davidson, it is ‘intending to act’, though in analysing this state Bratman goes boldly (where Davidson had gone only reluctantly) beyond mere ‘desire’ and ‘belief’ to a much richer psychology of states, one more adequate to the complexities of action.13 The significance of this development will come in for interpretation later on.14 What matters for the moment, however, are only two apparent

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commonplaces heard in these passages: first, that ‘intending to act’ is some state of mind; and second, that action theory should explain how this state is related to ‘intentional’ as it characterizes things in the ‘world’ – what people do or cause to happen. We call the framework comprised by these points Transformed Anscombe (TA). The steps leading from Anscombe to TA might be thought of as follows: 1. Noting that Anscombe sometimes calls her first division ‘expression of intention for the future’, and sensing perhaps that the invocation of ‘expression’ is not essential here, the later term is (understandably) factored-out, leaving ‘intention for the future’ (‘prior-intention’ or ‘intending to act’) as the item Anscombe meant to distinguish.15 2. This effect of this – and perhaps one of its motivations too – is to give the list a new sharpness. For occupants of the new category – for example, someone’s intention to fly to Boston next week – seem, as such, to be neither intentional acts nor (supposing the agent has not yet done anything to realize her intention) any intention in acting. Naturally, such an intention may be taken up – or become present in some way – in her flying to Boston, and in the intention with which she does other things, like packing her suitcase.16 But it need not be. For she may change her mind, or something may interrupt her plans, and then her intention to fly to Boston will remain ‘pure’. 3. Given the possibility of ‘pure’ intending, it becomes hard to see how this category could fail to designate a mental state, attitude or disposition of some kind.17 So the divisions of ‘intention’ now take shape around the philosophical polestar of the division between mind and world: two notions of intention find purchase only where there is behaviour causing things to happen; a third refers to a mental state, attitude or disposition which, though in some way present in such behaviour, is also abstractable from it and capable of existing on its own. 4. The theoretical elucidation of ‘intention’ is now apt to be organized around two tasks: (1) an analysis of ‘intention’, conceived as a (potentially ‘pure’) mental state or attitude, and (2) an explanation of the other behaviour-dependant applications of ‘intention’ in terms of (1). Theorists are of course apt to disagree about how to carry out these tasks: What other mental states or attitudes are entailed by intention, whether some reduction – ontological or otherwise – is possible, and the relation between the relevant state of intending and intentional action, are familiar points of controversy. 5. Generally, in TA: (A) An event is an action when it is intentional under some description; (B) an action meets this requirement when it is done for reasons; (C) this means it is susceptible to a form of rationalization (a special sense of ‘He did it because ...’); and (D) such rationalizations elucidate action through a movement from inner to outer: from the

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agent’s beliefs, desires or other states to something happening outside him. (Whether either such a movement or its explanation is – in some previously recognized sense – a causal one, is another hub of controversy.) From within this framework, what differentiates Anscombe is commonly thought to be the ‘methodological priority’ she gives to intention as it appears in action and – curiously, as she does not discuss this – her denying that the relation between the mind and action sides of the rationalizing ‘because’ is a causal one.18 Bratman in fact portrays Anscombe as accepting everything in (5), with one qualification: Her view of whether ‘intending’ is an independent psychological state (not reducible to appropriate desires and beliefs) cannot be made out because she says too little about this state.19 This story of progress within a single framework of action theory has its obvious satisfactions. Nonetheless, a distortion is present when the contemporary theorist credits Anscombe with having discerned the starting points of TA, as described here. This comes out in the following puzzle: While Anscombe does contemplate intending in its putatively ‘pure’ or unworldly form – ‘[A] man can form an intention which he then does nothing to carry out, either because he is prevented or because he changes his mind: but the intention itself can be complete, although it remains a purely interior thing (p. 9)’ – she offers, as Bratman observes, almost no account of it. In fact, returning late in the book to her first division, Anscombe merely remarks briefly that what has been ‘said about intention in acting applies also to intention in a proposed action’ (p. 90). Here a large gap in her account must appear from the contemporary point of view: How can her previous teachings about intentional actions, things done, simply now ‘apply’ to an intention in a proposed action, conceived as something which may remain ‘a purely interior thing’? By TA’s lights, Anscombe’s previous remarks cover 5 A–D. Beyond identifying the central case of intentional action with action for a reason, they explain how when an agent so acts he has a further intention, which often furnishes a wider description of what he is doing – and related matters. But surely some further explanation of ‘intention in a proposed action’ – and not merely an application of these doctrines – was needed, even by Anscombe’s standard of compression. For we cannot understand, say, ‘an agents intention to fly to Boston next week’ merely on the anaemic basis of an agent’s having a reason to do as much, however this notion is analysed. 20 Among the problems, there is the common fact that the agent may simultaneously have a reason not to fly to Boston without it being the case that she both intends to fly to Boston and intends not to. Intentions apparently stand open to contradiction in a way which mere reasons do not. Since what has been said about intention ‘in action’ thus seems

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insufficient to cope with intention ‘in a proposed action’, the question arises: Having distinguished these notions of intention, why would Anscombe omit any significant analysis of the latter? Two answers appear in the literature. First, no reason: Anscombe simply omits to discuss intending, leaving it to us. This seems implausible: One should really choose between making Anscombe the founder of the Three Divisions and having her omit to discuss the first – the combination amounts to philosophical malpractice. Second, her reason is behaviourist: She thinks we will grasp how to explain intending as some function or complication of intentional action, which she takes to be more basic. This too is implausible: and are we really to suppose that Anscombe (a student of St. Thomas, after all) seeks, with the behaviourist, to solve intellectual problems by collapsing spirit into nature? Significant internal difficulties block the attribution of behaviourism, in any case. Anscombe’s forthright talk of intention as ‘a purely interior thing’ is one difficulty. Her pivotal remark that what was said about intention in acting ‘applies also to intention in a proposed action’ is an even greater one. For a genuine behaviourist does not talk that way. He does not say that his account of (e.g.) pain-behaviour applies also to pain! The words ‘applies also’ evidently say that a distinctive kind of unity is available here: that which consists in seeing a group of items as falling under – or engaging application of – a single idea, form or pattern. In contrast, what the behaviourist needs to say at this point is that the relevant mind-characterizing notions can be analysed or explained in terms of other items. Otherwise put, the behaviourist is someone trafficking in the divisions emerging from TA. His problem is therefore to connect the different notions of ‘intention’ through a strategy of explanatory extension; and, in this at least, he will differ from other contemporary theorists only in taking for secondary those notions which they take for basic. But in whichever direction it runs, such a connective explanation will be something different from what Anscombe appears to contemplate: an apprehension of the divisions of intention as instances of a single form.21 This explains why the best evidence of behaviourist sympathies in Intention is bound to be inconclusive. For the best (of the thin) evidence must be what Anscombe says just after mentioning the possibility of pure intention: [T]his conspires to make us think that if we want to know a man’s intentions it is into the contents of his mind, and only into these, that we must enquire; and hence, that if we wish to understand what intention is, we must be investigating something whose existence is purely in the sphere of the mind; and that although intention issues in actions, and the way this happens also presents interesting questions, still what physically takes place, that is, what a man actually does, is the very last

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thing we need consider in our enquiry. Whereas I wish to say that it is the first. (p. 9) ‘Some say A then B, but I say first B then A.’ No doubt, there is a genuine issue of starting points here, of what is to be modelled on what. Anscombe’s remark will suggest behaviourism, however, only to someone already sure of the theoretical options: Either the application of ‘intention’ to what people do will have to be explained in terms of its use to characterize a state of mind, or vice versa. There is another possibility, however. Say that Anscombe’s aim is to exhibit the unity of intention directly, by subsuming the three divisions under a single form. Once properly in view, it should be possible to see what this form applies to, without further complication. On this reading, ‘First B...’ says only that one does not come to see what formally unites the ‘interior thing’ with ‘intention in acting’ by asking first what properties characterize someone’s psychological state as one of intending; it is rather in action that the genus comes most perspicuously into view. While this might prove an unsatisfying thesis about intention, it isn’t exactly novel to suggest that members of a kind have asymmetrical powers of exhibiting it. If you want to see why bad arguments are arguments, for example, it is best to start by examining the valid kind, this being more basic. Or, again, successfully murdering is more basic than attempting the same. To see what kind of wrongdoing unites these, it seems best to start with the infringement of someone’s right in the completed act; and from here, one can discern the wrong in the more attenuated case, without the aid of the sort of theories which would have to say (starting at the other end) that, for example, the wrong in every act of murder is ‘really’ only that of someone’s intention to murder, plus some causal assistance from the world. Similarly, on the present thesis, what kind of entity or state this is – intending to write the word ‘action’ – will best be exhibited in the performance of writing the word ‘action’.22 This needn’t incur any commitment to the behaviourist’s denials. In support of this: Anscombe speaks of ‘intention in a proposed action’ (where TA is apt to write ‘intending’ or ‘future-directed intention’). Her point is that the distinction in question here is one between two intentions in action – items sharing an underlying structure or form, but differing in their positions along a spectrum of presence. On this view, a future intention to write the word action is structurally a variant of writing the word the action; it is distinguished only by its remoteness, by the intended intervention being, as it were, not-yet present. This will need further development: Just what Anscombe takes this common structure or form to be – the one best exhibited by intention in present action – remains to be articulated. But it shouldn’t be difficult to guess that the answer will have something to do with the attention she gives to her special question ‘Why?’ This is evidently the central ‘device’ (p. 80) in her ‘non-connective’ explanation of the unity

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of intention. It also goes hand-in-hand, as will become plain, with her emphasis on ‘expression of intention’. Here, however, we reach ahead. To summarize, the divisions of ‘intention’ being connected in TA aren’t, on their face, Anscombe’s divisions. One can of course ask why Anscombe omits to discuss intending, and offers little analysis of this putative state at just the point – intention in a proposed action – where analysis seems needed. But this problem might also be turned around. Despite the standard homage, few theorists actually find much use for Anscombe’s first heading, at least as she inscribes it. Reading them, one would never suspect that ‘expression of intention’ figured centrally in her discussion.

III Why ‘Expression’: three clues Turning back to the problem of the prominence of ‘expression’ in Anscombe’s initial set-up, we find two explicit clues in Intention: (1) Ignoring the expression of intention in favour of what it is an expression of is apt to lead to wrong notions: ‘e.g., psychological jargon about “drives” and “sets”; reduction of intention to a species of desire, i.e, a kind of emotion; or irreducible intuition of the meaning of “I intend” (pp. 5–6)’. And (2), it is also apt to obscure just how different expressions of intention are from paradigm cases of expressions of states of mind. (1) Anscombe’s reference to Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘I was going to....’ – a ‘pure’ intention again, only the time for action is past – pinpoints at least one ‘wrong notion’: namely that the truth or assertability of “I’m going [was going] to w” consists in some occurrent words, images, sensations, or feelings.23 Against this: A person’s emotions, desires or drives may lead in contrary directions without hint of irrationality; not so their intentions. In addition, one can have an intention over a period of time (e.g. to see a friend) while seldom thinking of it; and, in recalling an intention, whatever ‘scanty’ mental items memory presents as having occurred ‘do not add up to’ – they aren’t necessary or sufficient for – having that intention. (Nonetheless one can easily enough recall what one was going to do – one simply gives the words which express it.)24 All this suggests that (unlike, e.g. ‘I have an itch’ or ‘It feels like going down in a lift’), ‘I intend to ...’ neither reports an experience-content nor requires an experiential vehicle. To adapt a remark of Anscombe’s adapting a remark of Wittgenstein’s: No experience could be an intention, because no experience could have the consequences of intending.25 (2) Considering such paradigm cases of the ‘expression’ of an experience or state as ‘Ouch!’ ‘I’m in pain’, or ‘Foiled again!’, it might be said: Someone who tells us what they are going to do isn’t in that way ‘expressing’ an intention; they aren’t simply venting. Indeed, ‘I’m going for a walk’ no more looks like a communication about the speaker’s inner state than does,

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say, her belief that the store closes at 8:00, as expressed by means of an appropriate declarative sentence. Only in special cases does an expression of belief aim to inform us about the speaker – that is, when it is about her. So too, when someone (actively) expresses an intention, Anscombe says, they give us information – right or wrong – about what is going to happen. (Of course, biographical facts will get passively expressed or manifested as well.) Herein lies one point of likeness with predictions: An expression of intention such as ‘I’m going for a walk’ is true or false according to whether the speaker goes for a walk.26 Hence, like a prediction, it can serve to give someone direct knowledge of what is going to happen.27 It is not a mere indication of the speaker’s psychic condition. These considerations – in brief, the dissimilarity of intention to a psychic state on the model of emotion – do suggest some motivation for Anscombe’s emphasis on ‘expression’. For a personal ‘expression of intention’ clearly makes a kind of claim, and has consequences, recognition of which will serve to place intention outside this model. But without more, these points suggest that Anscombe’s peculiar emphasis might be only a dispensable device for avoiding certain philosophical errors – ‘particular dead-ends’, as she calls them (p. 6). To see why these points do not go far enough, remember that the personal expression of belief is also to be understood as presenting a proposition of fact (an answer to the question ‘What did he/you say?’); it too is no mere indication of mental goings-ons. Yet, presumably, this isn’t likely to suggest that ‘expressions’ will be a main division in studying belief; that wrong notion, should it arise, could simply be dealt with directly. Why then – apart from the pro-active avoidance of errors – should ‘expressions’ figure as one of the main divisions of the topic of intention? That was the problem (§1), and the problem remains. The main clue needed here must evidently concern features of intention which are special to it, and which therefore generate a special problem. And there is such a clue, in the low-level linguistic facts which suggest divisions of the topic in the first place. What matters most is just that applications of ‘intention’ are spread along a spectrum extending from what is, naively speaking, ‘in the mind’ to what is ‘in the world’. Picturing a line, on the far left will be found pure intentions, defined as cases in which the agent intends to do something but hasn’t yet done anything else in order to do that. Moving rightward, the agent has more worldly deeds to show for his intentions: If he is described as Ø-ing or as intending to Ø, then, at this point, it will be correct to say that he is also doing various things in order to Ø, or because he intends (wants, aims) to Ø. At the far right, his performance is fully unfolded and finds description in the past tense: ‘He Ø-ed’ (or ‘He has Ø-ed’) will now be true, and not merely – what holds anywhere between these end points – ‘He was Ø-ing.’ The special problem, as all agree, is that of exhibiting the unity of the notions of intention which appear here.

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This progressive structure has no parallel in the case of emotions, desires or beliefs. Generalizing this contrast, we may say: It begins to specify what is meant by a ‘state’ to note that the progressive form of the relevant verb – for example, ‘to believe’, ‘to be hungry’, ‘to be taller than’ – isn’t used. To join a subject to such a verb, no grammatical discriminations of progressive versus perfected aspect (‘was Ø-ing’ vs. ‘Ø-ed’) are needed, only those of tense; and there is always a good inference from the present (‘X is hungry...’) to the perfect (‘X was hungry...’ said at some future time). States, in short, are static; and this exhibits, by way of contrast, two related features of the spectrum of uses of intention. First, with anything an agent does, there are, in principle, any number of purposive sub-parts: things he must do in order to do that. This is because his performance takes time:28 It may be done quickly (taking little time) or slowly, and we can mark its progress – and thereby distinguish further points in our spectrum – by speaking of someone’s ‘just starting to Ø’, ‘being nearly halfway done’, ‘just finishing up’ and so on. Performances unfold: They involve a diminishing future and a swelling past, of what the agent needs to do in order to do, or have done, what he is doing. States, in contrast, merely go on for a time, without unfolding: For example, no one will be found slowly desiring a drink, or almost finished being the tallest boy scout even if his desire is soon to be quenched, or others are about to grow.29 Second, the intentional object of ‘He intends...’ is given by a performance verb (‘to Ø’), so that if someone intends to Ø, then what fits this notional ‘state’ of his is another performance to which the spectrum of the concept of intention in principle applies (viz., his Ø-ing, or his Z-ing in order to Ø), and not, apart from this, any extensionally equivalent state of the world. Hence the object of the attitude of intention is another intention or a performance, whereas what makes a belief true (or satisfies a desire) can be propositionally rendered, and is only in special cases characterizable through another application of these same concepts: Not all beliefs are about other beliefs, as not all desires could be merely for other desires. And whatever their causal contribution to a particular action, beliefs and desires do not come to serve as qualifications of the action itself (e.g. as ‘beliefish’ or ‘desirous’). Here, then, it looks as if ‘intention’ earns its literal, archaic sense – a ‘stretching forward’ – for it is structured as action itself is. Not that this is surprising: It is location on a spectrum of unfolding action which fits an event to be described using concepts of intention in the first place;30 the kind of thing an intention is to be explained in terms of a concept which applies throughout the spectrum. Anything this wasn’t true of – which didn’t characterize both a person’s attitude as well as the object of that attitude – wouldn’t be our (i.e. a) concept of intention. Anscombe asks: Would intentional actions still have the characteristic ‘intentional’, if there were no such thing as expression of intention for the future, or as

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further intention in acting? I.e. is ‘intentional’ a characteristic of the actions that have it, which is formally independent of those other occurrences of the concept of intention? (p. 30)31 And she answers: ‘This supposition [that intention only occurred as it occurs in “intentional-action”] ... carries a suggestion that “intentional action” means as it were “intentious action”... that an action’s being intentional is rather like a facial expression’s being sad.’ This remark traces the consequences of losing the unity of the concept of intention across its different contexts: Cut ‘intention’ loose from its unfolding on a spectrum, consider it only as a qualification of action, and ‘intentional’ becomes ‘intentious’, essentially the name of a state, like sad or angry. By the same token, if TA has recently tended to discover that an adequate account of action must go beyond states of ‘having reasons’ conceived as propositional belief – desire pairs, what it has caught sight of may be structurally expressed thus: No psychology will afford the right materials for explaining action which does not make use of a concept which applies throughout the spectrum of unfolding action, and which thus has same internal complexity as actions themselves. This said, the image of a performance as a line touching points of ‘pure’ and ‘perfected’ intention is to be taken with a grain a salt. What is represented here is not a performance, but only the kind of thing a performance is, its structural possibilities. A few disclaimers will help to bring the spectrum into clearer focus: First, no implication arises that every action touches the right-most point. To the contrary, as J. L. Austin has observed, a mark of any action is its exposure to the risk of failure or incompleteness.32 No inference is available from the progressive (‘He is Ø-ing’) to the perfect (‘He Ø-ed’). Likewise, no implication arises that every action begins at the left-most point. Not all intentional action is the execution of a prior intention. Many intentions – for example, to role out of bed in the morning, to change speed according to traffic – never exist apart from the things one does. Third, where there are pure intentions, no implication arises that they precede acting, except relative to some descriptions of the action in question. To illustrate, someone may have now a pure intention to build a tree house, but only – as is likely – because he is already underway with something else of which building a tree house is a part or phase: for example, he is raising his kids to enjoy the outdoors, or improving the property before he sells it so he can retire and finish writing his novel. Likewise, no implication arises that in achieving the right-most point, there remains nothing virtual or pure about what the agent is doing. To illustrate, even after our agent’s intention to build a tree house has become impure, the point arrives where he forms (what is now) a pure intention to

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buy lumber; failure on this score will mean he never builds a tree house, and perhaps never does the things of which this was a part. From the above, it appears that wherever ‘purity’, as defined here, is used to characterize intentions, it must be possible to apply the term in the same sense to actions themselves. Consider how it is with our agent who, far along in building his tree house, forms an intention to drive in a nail to fasten two boards together. At the moment, his intention is a ‘pure’ one, for he has taken a break and lies on the grass. What is this agent, with his nailand plank-regarding intentions, now doing? Well, among other things, it would be correct to say he is building a tree house (he has been at it since winter), only, at the moment, this action of his remains pure, for he is not now doing anything in order to do that. Any action of significant duration is apt to have moments of pure intending and pure acting among its innumerable parts. Notice that our agent’s nail-regarding intention may at present be pure (just like his action of building a tree house), though his intention to fix together two boards is impure (he has placed them next to each other) – all this, notwithstanding that hammering the nail, fixing the boards, and building a tree house are, as Anscombe teaches, the same action under different descriptions. So although pure intending comprises the left-limit case, and perfected action the right-limit one, this does not entail that what the person purely intends to do isn’t, under a wider description, an action which is already underway and uncertain of completion. Davidson’s own example of a pure intention – writing the word ‘action’ – illustrates the point: I have formed this intention because I’m already engaged in writing a sentence, and this with a view to writing a book, the second in a series, and so on. Further, once we are able to locate impure intentions in this way – by enlarging the frame of pure ones – it should naturally be possible also to find pure ones within impure ones, for the principle is the same. 33 If there is a tendency to think of action in terms of a one-way sequence, beginning with intending and moving through acting to having acted – that is, as something beginning in the mind and ending in a state of the world – an illusion is present which perhaps arises from the philosopher’s focus on unmotivated or point-like actions (the lifting of a finger) strangely abstracted from the vita activa. Now, returning to the question of Anscombe’s divisions, we venture the following thesis. What makes the phrase ‘expression of intention’ look like an outlier in her list – its reference to speech – is also what allows it to stand as a natural example of each division, and thus, in a sense, to subsume the entire list: (Case 1) Someone says ‘I’m buying some shoes’: An expression of intention for the future (perhaps even a pure one).

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(Case 2) Someone says ‘I’m buying some shoes’: An intentional act (e.g. when the speaker is asked what he is doing). (Case 3) Someone says ‘I’m buying some shoes’: A further intention in acting (e.g. when this is the answer to the question ‘Why are you walking out the door?’) Not that this is unexpected, as if ‘expression of intention’ should somehow be proprietary to the special case of pure intending. The spectrum of intention – which exhibits that as a limit case – already suggests this wouldn’t be so. And consider the linguistic facts: One who offers, for example, ‘I intend to take the train to Boston tomorrow’ (a pure intention, let us suppose) might also express themselves thus: ‘I am taking the train to Boston – tomorrow.’ And having begun to pack, they might explain what they are doing by reference to the partial presence of that larger performance – ‘I’m taking the train to Boston’ – but they might also revert to the notionally ‘psychic’ explanation: ‘I intend to take the train to Boston.’ If any of these are ‘expressions of intention’, surely all must be. The principle of this linguistic sharing of labour is seen, according to Anscombe, when the use of the progressive is denied: [T]he less normal it would be to take the achievement of the objective as a matter of course, the more the objective gets expressed only by ‘in order to’ E.g., ‘I am going to London in order to make my uncle change his will’; not ‘I am making my uncle change his will.’ (p. 40) Likewise, the less normal it would be to take the achievement as a matter of course, the more the objective (‘in order to Ø’) gets expressed with ‘because’ followed by a proposition which couples the performance verb (to Ø) with some overtly psychic form (‘I intend ...’, ‘I want ...’, ‘I plan ...’, etc.): ‘I am going to London because I intend [want, will try, etc.] to make my uncle change his will’. Where ordinary language demands them, such ‘psychic’ expressions are markers of absence or remoteness in an unfolding performance. But in this, they are exactly like the idiomatic use of the simple progressive (‘I am Ø-ing’), which itself always conveys imperfect aspect, incompleteness and the risk of failure (only to a different degree). All expressions of intention, then, are such as to explain action by locating it within a larger action in progress. Where ‘psychic’ markers of remoteness are available, however, we can expect the use of the simple progressive to be correspondingly confined to a narrower range of cases exhibiting relative presence or proximity.34 This explains a critical remark of Anscombe’s. After (1) connecting the notion of intentional action to the applicability of a special question ‘Why?’, and (2) showing how an answer can furnish terms for a wider description of what an agent is doing (i.e. just when the question has the right sense), and (3) noting that this leads, chain-wise and eventually, to

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‘a break’, to an act-description characterizable, on account of remoteness, only as something the agent is now going (or – we may add – intending, wanting, planning, etc.) to do, she writes: I do not think it is a quite sharp break. E.g., is there much to choose [i.e., in answer to why someone is putting on the kettle] between ‘She is making tea’ and ‘She is putting on the kettle in order to make tea’ [and, we may add, ‘She intends to make tea’? – our note] – i.e., ‘She is going to make tea’? Obviously not. (p. 40) The implication of this is that the notionally mind-characterizing uses of intention differ from the others only in articulating a greater degree of remoteness or uncertainty. That is, they continue – at a different point in the spectrum – the same form of explanation which was most perspicuously seen in the earlier links of the chain: essentially, the fitting of an action into a larger, presently incomplete whole. Call this the teleological structure of action: Action is the kind of thing which rationalizes its sub-parts (those actions done ‘in order to’ do it). As Michael Thompson has argued, this suggests that it is fundamentally intentional actions in progress which explain actions, and that it is only on the basis of this primitive structure – an action as a space of reasons – that a more sophisticated development becomes possible: namely, the joining of a psychic expression with a performance verb to create an etiolated form of the same structure in the interest of articulating relative non-presence, remoteness or uncertainty.35 In support of this, it bears remembering that the psychological items under consideration are someone’s intending, planning or wanting to do something (to Ø) and not, say, someone’s wanting or desiring that something or other happen or be the case. The progress noted earlier in TA towards more committed or articulated psychological states (beyond belief and desire) was just the recognition that only states of mind having a role in the unfolding of action itself – which means only ‘states’ subject to qualification (i.e. to placement on the spectrum) as ‘pure/impure’ – can effectively explain action by reference to the agent’s attitudes.36 But this just means that such states – intending to, planning to and so on – inherit through their objects (a performance-form: to Ø) the distinctive teleological structure characteristic of intentional action. And this suggests that no matter how rich a psychology we employ, we do not attain to an understanding of the behaviour-characterizing uses of ‘intention’ on the basis of relation to a psychological state, except by helping ourselves to a notion of a ‘state’ informed by a prior understanding of the concept of intentional action (as in intending or planning to do something). To summarize: ‘I intend (plan, want, etc.) to make tea’ expresses the same incompleteness of action seen – at earlier points in the chain of answers, where achievement is more ‘a matter of course’ – in the use of a performance

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verb by itself: e.g., ‘Why are you boiling water?’ –‘I’m making tea’, ‘And why are you making tea?’ –‘I intend to serve the guests.’ Hence all such psychic forms are performance modifiers: Insofar as they are employable in actionexplaining answers to the question ‘Why?’, they express forms of being onthe-way-to-but not-yet having Ø-ed, of already stretching oneself towards this end. So expressions of intention ‘for the future’ are variations on a common theme: They are structurally of a piece with the simple progressive, only further to the left on the spectrum, where they permit a more refined articulation of the imperfection – an agent’s being committedly underway – informing all action explanation. In expressing imperfection, they are just like any other suitable answer to the question ‘Why?’, whether this be a declaration of what one will do, a description of what one is currently doing, an account of the intention with which one is doing something, an explanation of what one desires or is trying or endeavouring to do, or – think of Anscombe’s shopping list (p. 56) – a specification of what one is to do. The logical relations between these expressions of intention aren’t themselves very important. As a matter of ordinary language, they admit of no exact relative placement on the spectrum, though they are of course open to the stipulations of the philosopher whose purposes require more precision.

IV Expressions of intention: the general and the special use Conceived as an answer to the question ‘Why?’, ‘expression of intention’ is clearly a capacious notion (any item on the spectrum can be represented as such an answer),37 and it is this capaciousness (the power to exhibit what is structurally common to any use of intention) which recommends ‘expression of intention’ for Anscombe’s purposes. On this conception, there could be no question of finding out what an expression of intention is by first investigating the properties which characterize a psychological state as one of intention, as if the powers this state might have to rationalize what someone does might then remain open for investigation. Anscombe’s focus makes us take things the other way around: What can and does count as an agent’s ‘expression of intention’ is determined by its availability to enter into an elucidative account of action (fitting it into a whole in progress), its suitability, in other words, to be given to another who asks what is going on. An intention is whatever can be given to another in an expression suited to play this role. The special problem addressed by this account arises from the tendency for the continuity of uses of ‘intention’ to get disguised: ‘Intend’ looks like a state (like ‘believe’) and this sets the problem of its connection to ‘intentional’ as applied to things getting done. Indeed, by at least one criterion, ‘to intend to Ø’ should designate a state, since an inference from the present (‘He intends to Ø’) to the perfect (‘He intended to Ø’) does hold, and since, unlike a performance, intending to Ø does not – notwithstanding the colloquial use

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of the progressive – take time.38 On the other hand, the fact that ‘intending’ (like any psychic verb put to employment in explaining action) takes a performance-form rather than a proposition as its object seems to mark a decisive difference. This is related to two features of ‘intending’ which would make it quite special among states, but which are commonplaces of performances. First, we can ask ‘why’ (for what purpose, with what intention) someone intends to Ø, just as we can ask this about action itself. (All intentions are like actions in this way: they are explained by – and they explain – other actions and other intentions.) Second, intending to Ø, being thus something voluntary, is subject to being commanded, like any action.39 Taking it that such differences are what matter (and not what label one applies), we propose the following account of the significance of ‘expression of intention’ for Anscombe. First, although Anscombe quickly leaves her first division (‘expression of intention for the future’) aside till later, a distinctive form of verbal exchange remains a pervasive feature of her exposition: ‘Why are you lying there?’ – ‘I’m doing Yoga’; ‘Why did you pump water this morning?’ – ‘To poison that lot, don’t you know?’; ‘Why worry about them?’ – ‘Those people have strangled the country long enough, I intend to get the good people in.’ All of the positive answers in such interrogations are ‘expressions of intention’, not just the last answer (an intention for the future): [I]f a description of some future state of affairs makes sense just by itself as an answer to the [‘Why’] question, then it is an expression of intention. But there are other expressions of the intention with which a man is doing something: for example, a wider description of what he is doing. For example, someone comes into a room, sees me lying on a bed and asks ‘What are you doing?’ The answer ‘lying on a bed’ would be received with just irritation; an answer like ‘Resting’ or ‘Doing Yoga’, which would be a description of what I am doing in lying on my bed, would be an expression of intention. (pp. 34–35) So ‘expression of intention for the future’ is one species of a common genus, that of positive or action-elucidating answers to the special question ‘Why?’ Recall the role of that question. It provides a definition of an ‘intentional act’ in terms of the applicability of a question to which the agent can always give some knowledgeable response. Given this, it should be possible to see that ‘expression of intention’ (in the wide, generic sense) works to exhibit the unity of the three, initially disparate-seeming divisions. This is just what Anscombe says: To a certain extent the three divisions of the subject made in § 1, are simply equivalent. That is to say, where the answers ‘I’m going to fetch my camera’ [expression of intention for the future], ‘I am fetching my

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camera’ [intentional act] and ‘in order to fetch the camera’ [further intention in acting] are all interchangeable as answers to the question ‘Why’. (p. 40)40 On this account, the unity of the divisions lies both in the applicability of the question ‘why’ to the material of each, and in the suitability of each to itself rationalize action – that is, to figure in an agent’s answer to the question ‘why’, asked about something else he is doing (in the present example, his going upstairs). That is, the unity of the divisions is seen in the fitness of their corresponding linguistic expressions – ‘I’m going to Ø’, ‘I’m Ø-ing’, ‘ ...in order to Ø’ – to provide elucidatory responses in a special interrogation of the agent. ‘Expression of intention’ thus finds a narrower and a broader use in Intention: narrower, as one of the headings – ‘expressions of intention for the future’ – which brings the topic provisionally into view; more broadly, as the genus – comprising answers to the question ‘Why?’ – which formally unites the three divisions. This way of putting things seems to reverse Anscombe’s better-known formula, according to which an intentional action is one subject to the question ‘Why?’. But the possibility of such reversal is implicit in the chainlike structure of what Anscombe calls ‘the ABCD form’ (p. 45), whereby a positive answer to the question ‘Why?’ is itself the description of an intentional action, and, as such, subject to that question. Starting, then, with an intentional action, we can move forward along the chain by interrogating the action – ‘Why?’ For just when this question has the relevant sense, positive answers to it are themselves expressions of the agent’s intention.41 But, starting from the same point, we can also move backwards along the chain, by remembering that an action, suitably described, is something which can be an agent’s answer to the question ‘Why?’ (i.e. asked about something else he is doing). Anscombe’s ABCD form thus pictures intentional action as both ground and grounded, explanans and explanandum, something both subject to, and responsive to, a distinctive interrogation. And this is represented by saying that the unity of the three divisions lies in their fitness to appear in ‘expressions of intention’ in the generic sense: answers to the question ‘Why?’. Summarizing, Anscombe’s basic idea – her general strategy for discharging the explanatory task set in §1 of Intention – is this: (1) The applicability of the relevant question ‘Why’ is what marks anything out as an expression of intention (p. 90); (2) Any expression of intention thus subject to the question ‘Why’ is fit also to answer a serially related question ‘Why’; (3) The unity of the trinity – intention in a proposed action, intention in a present action and intentional action – is seen in this, that each is capable of being represented in an ‘expression of intention’, furnishing an answer to a question ‘Why’. Thus represented (as answers in the interrogation of action),

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the three divisions are generally interchangeable: Usually, ‘there isn’t much to choose between them’ (p. 40).

V

‘In terms of language’

At this point, a contemporary action theorist might still ask: Why define intentional action ‘in terms of language’ (p. 86) – a chain of questions ‘Why?’ Obviously, the content of such exchanges – for example, ‘Why are you lying on the bed?’ – ‘I’m doing Yoga’ – might always be exhibited, apart from the interrogative context, in a variety of ways. For example, ‘A is lying on the bed because she is doing (she intends/wants to do) Yoga.’ Such actions can and do take place without anyone making any speeches!42 Wouldn’t it be less obscure to factor out reference to questions and answers, and speak instead of intentional action as (e.g.) ‘action for a reason’? ‘Expression of intention’, in that case, need not get any special emphasis. One answer to this challenge lies simply in the fruitfulness of Anscombe’s expository procedure in revealing unity in the otherwise diverse materials of action (cf. p. 80). Still, confidence in this procedure would improve if it became clearer how the specifically linguistic representation of intention really is an aspect of the thing represented. A further answer might run: ‘Intentions, like other conditions of the person, may intelligibly be attributed only insofar as they are publicly expressed.’ This is true enough. But Anscombe’s expository procedure involves ‘expressions’ of a quite special sort, those suited, we may now say, to be a person’s answers to a question addressed to him. No one will be tempted to think of ‘expressions’ in this sense as the only or canonical way in which various other conditions of the person get revealed. Is there a reason to think that intention is different? Return to that strange passage concerning animals (§ I). Here Anscombe does appear to say that intention is different in this respect, and she even pauses to correct Wittgenstein on this point. Wittgenstein had written: ‘What is the natural expression [Ausdruck] of an intention? – Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape. (Connection with propositions about sensations.)43 But this ‘goes wrong,’ according to Anscombe: The expression of intention ‘is purely conventional’ or ‘linguistic’. Animals thus ‘have intentions’ but, lacking language, don’t express them.44 What makes this proposition strange is that while Anscombe (1) recognizes that intentions are manifest in non-verbal behaviour without further gloss;45 and (2) allows the term ‘expression’ application to the natural manifestation of other states (like emotion); she nonetheless (3) challenges Wittgenstein on this point: An animal’s behaviour isn’t any expression of its intention. Taking it that ‘expression of intention’ is a device for exhibiting the unity of ‘intention’,

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this further problem is raised here: Is there a way of seeing Anscombe’s Proposition? AP: There is no such thing as the natural (only the linguistic) expression of intention as informative rather than merely stipulative? A positive answer would make clearer how the representation of intention ‘in linguistic terms’ comes, so to speak, with the matter itself. To begin with, however, a few words about what this question is not. As was said, questions concerning an animal’s capacities are not essential here. We are familiar in the human case with the distinctions – expression versus other indications, natural versus conventional expressions – invoked by Anscombe. Among us, there are both verbal and non-verbal expressions of fear, for instance. So if the expression of intention is purely linguistic, then it must be true of the man, and not just of the beast, that the movements of stalking a prey (or catching it and hauling it back to camp, etc.) are not to be considered ‘expressions’ of intention, notwithstanding that these movements make intentions manifest. Anscombe’s point applies to all animals if it applies to any. Similarly, questions concerning whether non-linguistic creatures can be credited with having intentions at all remain bracketed here. Negative judgments might seem to support Anscombe’s linguistic procedure, since they often derive from a focus on the formation of plans, or standing intentions – cases in which the basis for attributing intentions must go beyond natural behaviour.46 But not all intentions are standing ones or the result of making plans. And Anscombe’s challenge to Wittgenstein, in any case, does not concern some purer type of standing intention, but just the immediate intentional action of the cat stalking the bird. To speak of ‘expression’ in this case would be as inapt – she says – as calling ‘a car’s stalling the expression of its being about to stop’. Unobvious as this thesis is, it expresses no skepticism about the car’s being about to stop, or about the engine evincing this fact. Likewise, Anscombe nowhere denies (rather, she consistently asserts) that the structures of action uncovered in her investigation apply beyond the human world (pp. 86–87). Finally, it is worth noting that Anscombe’s remarks on animals run contrary to recent arguments which enlist one of her ideas – namely, that actions are intentional ‘under a description’ – in recommending the conclusion that neither intentions nor propositional attitudes are possible for creatures without a language. Davidson writes: One can intend to bite into the apple in the hand without intending to bite into the only apple with a worm in it [...] The intensionality we make so much of in the attribution of thoughts is very hard to make much of when speech is not present. The dog, we say, knows that its master is

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home. But does it know that Mr. Smith (who is his master) or that the president of the bank (who is that same master), is home? We have no real idea how to settle, or make sense of, these questions.47 The intensionality of intentions does suggest that the capacity to recognize intentions in others is exclusive to the talking creatures, or those who interpret the talk of others. But if a creature does not recognize intentions, must it therefore have none of its own?48 Notably, Anscombe insists that whatever may be ‘language-centered’ in her account, and whatever the role of particular descriptions in delineating the intentional aspects of action, we do discern intentions in non-talking creatures: It sounds as if the agent had a thought about a description. But now let’s suppose that a bird is landing on a twig so as to peck at bird-seed, but also that the twig is smeared with bird-lime. The bird wanted to land on the twig all right, but it did not want to land on a twig smeared with birdlime. [...] Landing on the twig was landing on bird-lime – we aren’t considering two different landings. So, if we form definite descriptions, ‘the action (then) of landing on the twig’, ‘the action (then) of landing on a twig with bird-lime on it’, we must say they are definite descriptions satisfied by the same occurrence, which was something that the bird did, but under the one description it was intentional, under the other unintentional. That the bird is not a language-user has no bearing on this.49 We say the bird is intentionally landing on the twig (but not on the limetwig) because we can see that ‘landing on a twig to peck at bird-seed’ answers to purposes the bird is assumed to have, whereas ‘...a twig smeared with lime’ does not, even though we are talking about one and the same twig. We seek a description which makes what the bird did comprehensible within what we know the bird is seeking. A reference to the agent and its good does operate as a constraint here, but this need not be a reference to the agent’s psychology narrowly conceived, that is, to what is thought or said. Rather, we apply the descriptions under which the creature’s action is intentional, without supposing that the creature has such descriptions ‘in mind’. In sum, various questions concerning the attribution of intention to animals don’t shed light on Anscombe’s strictures on what an expression of intention can be. What could be at stake for her in refusing to apply the innocuous-sounding phrase ‘the natural expression of intention’ both to humans and other animals? That is the nub of the problem.

VI What natural indications can’t do: contradiction, commitment, impugning the facts One possibility should be ruled out. Anscombe had better not be found saying that by ‘expression’ she simply means expression in the personal

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sense. From this it would of course follow that animals do not express intention, for to express intention (or anything else) you’ve got to use language. But this would be mere stipulation.50 Against this, let it be clear that anyone can call non-verbal manifestations of intention ‘expressions’ if they like – what to call things isn’t the question. The question is what distinction Anscombe seeks to mark by refusing application of ‘expression’ to natural manifestations of intention.51 It looks like the answer must be: some distinction between the verbal and non-verbal manifestation of (1) intention on the one hand, and of (2) emotion (and other states) on the other. But what distinction? If a creature’s stalking its pray is not to be considered an expression of intention, the interest of this thesis – what raises it above empty stipulation – must derive from a distinction we recognize here. But there is a distinction to recognize here: Between natural behaviour which manifests intention and the overt verbal expression of intention, there exists a gap in logical powers, without parallel in the case of emotion or other states. To explain, it seems natural to speak contrastingly of natural and conventional ‘expressions’ of, say, fear, precisely because, in this case, conventional expression can take up or perform the same work as natural expression – there is no gap. Otherwise put, the contrast (natural/conventional) is at home within a space of common functions, where verbal expression continues (while also enhancing and rendering more precise) the same functions more primitively available by natural means.52 The other’s frightened look and his ‘I’m afraid’ can convey the same thing – his fear. This isn’t to say that natural expressions of fear are given to another or meant to inform him. But conventional expressions of fear are not always given either.53 When they are, however – and this is what matters here – what they overtly convey is what might also be read in the speaker’s non-linguistic behaviour. Verbal expressions of intention, in contrast, do not ever stand in for intentional behaviour in this way. Certainly it would be wild to suggest that they are ‘learned as a substitute’ for intentional behaviour – one point subserved by the phrase ‘natural expression’ as applied by Wittgenstein to emotions and sensations.54 And as Wittgenstein himself notes, there isn’t any distinctive behavioural repertoire of intentional action, as there is of emotional states and feelings.55 No, the relation between verbal expressions of intention and intentional behaviour is different from the relation between (e.g.) verbal expressions of fear and natural fear-behaviour. It is this: When an intention is verbalized, it specifies the performance to which the agent is committed in the future, or in which he is already engaged, and that performance may then be judged correct or mistaken in light of what is expressed. So Anscombe is right to mark a difference here. Rather than standing in for performances in either a logical or developmental sense, expressions of intention have a force which no bit of natural behaviour could have.

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Specifically, they make contradictable claims, and they require that something else one does then be regarded as correct or mistaken. Of course, we can sometimes see directly that someone is naturally barking up the wrong tree – say, merely running the brush along the wall when they mean to be painting the room yellow. But here it is important that we grasp a particular description of what they are doing or intending to do, one which a human being could give in answer to the question ‘Why?’56 To develop the implications of this, a number of contrasts, so far mainly implicit in our discussion, may now be made more explicit. The upshot is that a number of related features – contradictability, claiming, commitment and the impunging of performances – can be seen to make intention fit for a notion of ‘expression’ which lacks a non–linguistic counterpart. 1. Intentions are contradicted by other intentions. Midway through the book, Anscombe asks, ‘What is the contradictory of a description of one’s own intentional action?’ and she answers: The contradiction of ‘I’m replenishing the house water supply’ is not ‘You aren’t, since there is a hole in the pipe’, but ‘Oh, no, you aren’t’ said by someone who thereupon sets out e.g., to make a hole in the pipe with a pick-axe. And similarly, if a person says ‘I am going to bed at midnight’, the contradiction of this is not: ‘You won’t, for you never keep such resolutions’, but ‘You won’t, for I am going to stop you’. (p. 55) To contradict an expression of intention is intentionally to oppose the act which the agent declares herself to be engaged in – that is, what the agent is intent upon – rather than to assess the agent’s states, dispositions, or other conditions affecting the likeliness of performance. Verbal expressions of emotions and desires can also be contradicted of course, but what is denied, in that case, is the claim that the speaker has the item in question. Contradicting an agent’s expression of intention to ␸, in contrast, leaves no doubt – indeed, it presupposes – that she has the intention. 2. Like a belief, the expression of intention makes a claim upon the world. From (1), it follows that when Anscombe speaks of ‘expression of intention’ as something that can be true or false, this means a true or false claim about what one is doing or will do, not a good or a bad indication of one’s state of mind. Herein lies the aspect of intention which leads some theorists to see it as a kind of belief. If an ordinary assertion (‘The train just left’) is one canonical form of the expression of belief, its contradiction is the denial of what is claimed (‘No, it hasn’t left yet’), not the denial that this expression manifests the speaker’s state of mind. Expressions of both belief and intention make claims which can be countered by the denial that things are or will be as they are declared to be.

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3. Yet, unlike a belief, the expression of intention can impugn what one does. Against this background, Anscombe distinguishes an expression of intention, not only in terms of the applicability of the question ‘Why?’ (p. 90), but also, initially, in terms of the impugning of performances: If I don’t do what I said, what I said was not true. [ ... ] But ... this falsehood does not necessarily impugn what I said. In some cases the facts are, so to speak, impugned for not being in accordance with the words, rather than vice versa. This is sometimes so when I change my mind; but another case of it occurs when, e.g., I write something other than I think I am writing: as Theophrastus says, the mistake here is one of performance, not of judgment.’ (pp. 4–5). Putting this in terms of the previous point concerning contradiction, we may say: To contradict a prediction (or other expression of belief) is merely to deny a proposition of fact; to contradict an expression of intention is also to oppose what someone is doing or will do. This specifies a discontinuity between expressions and mere behavioural ‘indications’ of intention. Anything which serves to indicate something (like the animal’s intention to escape) will itself be the thing faulted or impugned when it fails to conform to what was putatively indicated. Where there is a clash between an indicator and what it purports to indicate, it is the indicator which stands to be corrected. 4. Practical knowledge: expressions of intention are distinguished by the possibility of ‘mistakes in performance’ and not otherwise by their ‘direction of fit’. The last point touches on a larger theme of Anscombe’s: No statement will count as an expression of intention unless it expresses ‘practical knowledge’. If, for example, the speaker says ‘I’m going to crush the snail’ (or ‘I am crushing the snail’) on the basis of his observation of forces impelling him to move, then this is no expression of his intention. Now in speaking of expressions of intention as expressing practical knowledge, Anscombe might be taken to mean, in part, that the fit between such knowledge and what is known runs in the opposite direction than it does in cases of belief. This comes out when the speaker is not in fact doing what he takes himself to be doing. Here, if the speakers words are an expression of intention (rather than, e.g. a prediction), then the mistake will lie not in what the speaker thinks or says, but in what he is doing (‘the mistake here is one of performance not of judgment’).57 Understandably, then, an enduring legacy of Anscombe’s monograph is the idea of ‘direction of fit’. The only disappointing aspect of this legacy is that the phrase ‘direction of fit’ doesn’t actually occur at its source – and for good reason: While any talk of ‘knowledge’ must find room for application of an idea of fit or accord, the fit present in cases of practical knowledge (or

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absent in cases of its failure) isn’t simply a matter of reversing the priority between the same two items which figure in cases of speculative knowledge; practical knowledge involves a distinctive class of items known. Unsurprisingly, then, Anscombe’s distinction bears little resemblance to the contemporary one between the functional roles of belief and desire, defined in terms of different directions of fit between such states and ‘the world’. Instead of ‘two directions’, Anscombe speaks of a difference between a mistake in what was said and a mistake in performance. What turns on this? Three things: (A) From expression of intention to desire. The ‘fit’ which concerns Anscombe involves conformity between an expression of intention – something said – and what the person actually does. In the contemporary functionalist account, by contrast, the focus is no longer on verbal expressions, but on states of belief and desire, the later being defined by the requirement of the world (or ‘the facts’) conforming to fit it rather than vice versa. (B) From action to ‘the world’. With this shift in focus from intentions to desires goes naturally a transformation in how the other side of the relation – the world – is understood as well. When Anscombe speaks of ‘the facts [being] ... impugned for not being in accordance with the words’, the facts in question are someone’s performance. But in the contemporary account, instead of a ‘mistake in performance’ – an action characterized as needing correction – we are referred to some state of the world itself (e.g. the absence of the cool drink I am longing for) that is to be altered, made to conform to the state of desire. (C) Disappearance of the notion of ‘mistake’. With the foregoing shifts in the nature of the relata (a person’s state rather than his statements, this state’s relation to some state of the world rather than to the person’s actions), the idea of ‘mistake’ or ‘correction’ disappears from the analysis. For there is no mistake on anyone’s part, mine or God’s, when something I desire is out of reach; and the facts comprising this aspect of the world are in no way impugned by my desire or its expression. Rather, my having this desire simply means, other things being equal, that I will strive to alter these facts in order to satisfy my desire. Given this, it is perhaps easy to see why the contemporary functional account of desire in terms of ‘direction of fit’ between a person’s state and the world – does not appear in Anscombe, though it is widely attributed to her. Very simply, it is difficult to see how we are to apply normative notions to either item. In contrast, the application of ‘mistake’ to actions and statements – things done and said – remains straightforward: These are the very things to which notions of mistake, correction, rightness and so on primarily apply.58

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5. Commitment. Various theorists have seen in intentions a form of ‘commitment’, even though ‘I’m going to...’ is not a performative utterance, and the relevant notion of commitment is different from promissory commitment. (Anscombe’s denial that there are natural expressions of intention would be straightforward if expressions of intention were performatives, speech-acts dependent on conventional means). But although expressions of intention are not performatives, there is nonetheless a sense in which all intentions involve performances. For from (1) above – to contradict an intention is to oppose an agent’s action – it follows that an agent’s expression of intention is itself a kind of engagement to act, not a mere revelation of his state of mind. (Contradiction is symmetrical.) Self-contradiction in intentions exhibits the same pattern. If my intention to fly to Boston conflicts with my intention to stay home this weekend, this is not because these two intentions characterize my state of mind as one which dooms me to some frustration whatever happens (as happens with conflicting desires). It is rather that I engage myself in both doing and not doing the same thing. The way even pure intentions involve commitment is thus perhaps best understood in terms of the commisive aspect of action itself. Consider someone now engaged in writing the word ‘action’. That is how someone who merely intends to write the word ‘action’ is also engaged: He stretches himself toward the act, awaits himself in its successful completion.59 The structure of intending to act, this is to say, is that of a performance, and, as such, something continuous with intentional action itself. Of course, an intention for the future may be cancelled, blocked or otherwise never realized. Hence an objection arises here. What sort of ‘commitment’ is it which can be unilaterally rescinded by the agent, without penalty, simply by a change of mind?60 This argument proves too much, however. If it implies there is no sense of ‘commitment’ independent of obligation, it will follow that even someone now doing X – say, conducting a war in a foreign country – hasn’t committed themselves to anything. For this action may also be cancelled or blocked at any stage before its perfection. The completion of any extended action requires the agent’s continuing assent; as Sartre puts it, there always remains the possibility of ‘putting [the] act into question’.61 So the fact that an agent may change his mind does not distinguish the commisive quality of pure intending from those paradigmatic commitments which are his temporally extended actions. Remembering the idea of spectrum at work here, we therefore affirm that a good analogue of ‘intending’ can be found in someone’s doing something.62 Less metaphorically, the point is just that intention in a future action does not differ fundamentally from intention in (a present) action, or from intentional action. All alike, as Anscombe taught, are fit to be taken up in ‘expressions of intention’, conceived as answers to the question ‘Why?’. All alike are

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engagements of agency, and enter into the structure of commitment, contradiction and impugning which characterizes performances as opposed to paradigmatic ‘states’. All involve an agent stretching towards a describable future which is not-yet.63 To summarize: With the verbal expression of intention a discontinuity with natural manifestation arises, and it is this which Anscombe seeks to mark. Such expressions introduce something new: a characterization of what one is doing – what larger action one’s actions are part of or toward which they are aimed. Expressions of intention are thus ‘world-directed’, but not just in the way that expressions of states like belief or hope are: They make possible the application of the notion of ‘mistake’ to performances, and they express practical commitments.

VII

Homage revisited

In conclusion, (1) three overlapping ways of making more precise the necessity of representing intention in terms of its verbal expression, and (2) a comment on one prominent theme. (1) First, it might be said that only verbal expressions of intention exhibit the responsiveness of the person to the special question ‘Why’. This question may apply to the bird pecking at the lime twig as much as to the man putting on his coat. The man, however, is in a position not only to answer the question, but also to refuse its application in a given formulation, as when he says that, as described in those terms, he was not aware he was doing that. (The bird is not expected to play any role in refusing application to the question ‘Why?’) Both acknowledging and refusing application of a certain question ‘Why?’ are part of the agent’s understanding of his action as goal directed. Refusing one application of the question makes the agent subject to some other application of it. (‘If you weren’t intentionally sawing the last plank of oak, then what were you doing? What did you take yourself to be doing?’) The answer to such a question gives the terms in which the action is to be seen as intentional (the point of the activity, the good of it, what is being pursued). The role of the refusal of application to a particular ‘Why?’ question marks the fact that an action will have conditions of success or failure only as described in certain ways and not others. In answering this question, an expression of intention spells out the aim that some piece of behaviour is guided by and to which the person is seeking to conform the rest of his action (i.e. the larger actions in Anscombe’s ABCD structure). Aims have a linguistic structure in this sense, that the objects we handle in the world (and the movements we make in handling them) are multiply describable, and only a fraction of these descriptions will be relevant to what makes the results something aimed for.

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Second, only when intention is not merely indicated, but verbalized as a statement of what one is doing, do we see how its expression could be something in light of which a performance might be mistaken or corrected. For only a statement – a claim upon the world established independently of the regularities it seeks to track – could be in a position to impugn the facts. The content of an expression of intention will have to be conventionally or linguistically determined if it is to serve as an independent standard of this sort. Finally, only a verbal expression of intention can directly display the unity of ‘intention’ as it occurs in ‘intending to X’ and ‘an intentional action’. For what is needed here is essentially the notion of expression we see at work in the description of what one is doing as, for example, replenishing the water supply. When it comes to human actions, ‘the description of what we are interested in is a type of description that would not exist if our question ‘Why?’ did not’ (p. 83). Developing this formula, we might say: For every answer to the special ‘Why?’ question there is a complementary answer to a special question ‘What?’, applied to someone’s performance. That is, because ‘intentional’ applies to action itself (and not just to something in the mental history of the agent causing action), a true and positive answer to the question ‘Why?’ tells us not merely why some event is taking place, but also what is happening, in terms of an action being performed. Thus, building on Anscombe’s remark that there isn’t ‘much to choose between [the answers] “She is making tea” and “She is putting on the kettle in order to make tea’ – i.e., ‘She is going to make tea’?,’ we might add: There often isn’t much to choose between the questions ‘Why are you messing about with the kettle’ and ‘What are you doing messing about with the kettle?’. The answer to either question will be an expression of intention in the sense canvassed here in terms of the predicates of ‘contradictability’, ‘commitment’, ‘world-directedness’ and ‘mistake in performance’. That the concept of intention applies across the performative spectrum, on the one hand, and that the answer to the special question ‘Why?’ tells us also what is happening, amount here to the same thing. In action, the What appears together with – is already made for – an answer to the question ‘Why?’. This serves to distinguish action from other phenomena in nature, where the identification of <What is to be explained> is independent of how its interrogation in terms of ‘Why?’ may turn out.64 (2) Anachronistically put, Anscombe shows what is at best optional in the contemporary view that we understand what intention is only by asking what the mental state of intending is and how it could causally contribute to the production of intentional action. In place of this, she stresses the conceptual unity of a certain trinity: a single concept at work along a spectrum of cases, including ‘pure’ intending, intentions in action and intentional action. There is irony in the fact that one of her aims was to break up the sense of sharp distinctions among the divisions she is credited

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with having discerned. There is also a danger that recognition of this point will involve attributing to Anscombe the thesis that ‘intention’ isn’t a mental state at all, as happens in the behaviourist reading. But what Anscombe denies is only that we understand how to apply the notion of a ‘state’ here, on the basis of its application in other contexts like those of belief and desire. In fact, TA inches towards the same conclusion, for its more recent discoveries might be represented like this: No psychology will afford the right materials for explaining action which does not make use of a concept which applies throughout the spectrum of unfolding action, that is, which has the same internal complexity as action itself. Intuiting this, it becomes natural, within the framework of TA, to seek an enhanced psychology of states, one which might include such items as intending, planning or even believing or wanting in some special sense. No doubt, there are such states of mind, in the anodyne sense that human agents do intend, plan, want and so on. But the point to grasp is that leading one’s sense of the psychological materials needed (for connecting the various uses of intention) is a prior understanding of what intentional action is. To make that understanding explicit was Anscombe’s problem. To elaborate, suppose the contemporary action theorist inspired, by the felt necessities of his material, to introduce a special psychological state called ‘intending’ or ‘planning’ (call it X-ing: the name does not matter). His avowed task is to analyse it and to explain the behaviour-involving uses of intention on the basis of their relation to it. But if X-ing is even to seem to be fit for this employment, it had better admit of internally nested relations (parts and wholes) of the sort exhibited in explanations like, ‘A is X-ing to Ø because he is ␸-ing’ (A is planning to buy lumber because he is building a tree house: the ‘state’ of X-ing explained in terms of a larger whole of action.) ‘A is X-ing to Ø because he is X-ing to C’ (A is planning to buy lumber because he is planning to build a tree house: the ‘state’ of X-ing explained by reference to a different occurrence of X-ing, one directed upon a wider description of the action.) ‘A is V-ing because he is X-ing to Ø’ (A is getting his car keys because he is planning to buy lumber: an action explained by reference to the ‘state’ of X-ing.) The nature of the pressure to endow action theory with an enhanced psychology of states can be represented concisely, in Anscombe’s terms like this: However we wish to understand the relevant action-theoretic state of X-ing, it ought to be the sort of thing about which it makes sense to ask ‘why’ (i.e. for what purpose) one is X-ing-to-do-something, and to answer

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this by reference to other things one is X-ing-to-do or other things one is doing. And of course the expression of this ‘state’ will have to partake of the structure of contradiction, action-characterization and correction of performances (as identified through X-characterizing descriptions). ‘Intending’ and ‘planning,’ in idiomatic employments, do fit this special bill of requirements. But, as our discussion should make clear that is because the basic psychological item needed must be: X-ing to do something. That is, X-ing, whatever it is, must inherit through its object (a performance), just the distinctive structure characteristic of intentional action. And as Anscombe’s problem was just to make that basic structure explicit, this suggests a route by which TA – after discoveries about the enhanced psychology of states it requires – might at length pay a more unqualified and accurate homage to Anscombe.

Notes A special thanks to Mathew Boyle and Doug Lavin for a series of conversations about action at the Garden of Eden in Boston, and for their comments on an earlier draft; to Jonathan Lear, Candace Vogler and Constantine Sandis for their comments on an earlier draft; to David Velleman, for his comments at the 2006 Central Division APA, and to members of workshops at University of Chicago, University of Pittsburgh and University of Southern California, where this essay was discussed. 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956), Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes (1993) (Washington: Washington Square Press) p. 74. 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell) §830. 3. Or a ‘further intention in acting’. These divisions play a structuring role in Anscombe’s discussion. They explicitly appear at p. 1 (statement of the headings), p. 9 (the transition from ‘expression of intention’ to ‘intentional action’), p. 40 (the unity of the three divisions) and p. 90 (return to ‘expression of intention for the future’). And they are drawn on elsewhere in Anscombe’s discussion. 4. ‘Where we are tempted to speak of “different senses” of a word which is clearly not equivocal, we may infer that we are in fact pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept which it represents.’ Intention, p. 1. In this essay, we approach Anscombe’s ambitions in Intention in light of her sense of why the concept of ‘intention’ calls for philosophy at all. The answer evidently refers to a submerged unity in our otherwise familiar employments of ‘intention’. What makes these all cases of ‘intention’ does not immediately appear. 5. Cf. Intention, p. 5. 6. On this distinction, see Richard Moran, ‘Problems of Sincerity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 105, pp. 341–361 (December 2005). 7. Or future statements of fact – for example, ‘Nurse will take you to the operating theatre’: p. 3. 8. With Anscombe’s discussion of expression of intention versus prediction, compare, for example, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 224. 9. A similar claim – though perhaps on different grounds – is made by Keith Donnellan, ‘Knowing What I am Doing’, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 60, No. 14 (1963), pp. 401–409 at p. 409. But Anscombe’s passage is obscure, even by

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Anscombian standards. The term ‘expression’ is idiomatically multivalent enough to embrace Wittgenstein’s talk of natural behaviour as ‘expressions’ of intention. So it is hardly obvious that what Anscombe wishes to deny must be the same thing Wittgenstein is asserting. Further, Anscombe herself, turning to the question of ‘how ... we tell someone’s intentions’, will point out that intentions are often legible in someone’s behaviour: ‘You will have a strong chance of success [at this] if you mention what he actually did or is doing’ (pp. 7–8). This only makes more pressing the question of what could be stake in her denial that natural behavioural manifestations of intentions are proper ‘expressions’ of it. See §§ V–VI below. Donald Davidson, ‘Introduction’, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. xiii. Michael Bratman, Intention, Plans and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 1, 3. Bratman’s footnote attributes this distinction between ‘mind-’ and ‘world-’ characterizing uses of intention to Anscombe. Ibid., p. 5. Cf. H.L.A. Hart, ‘Intention and Punishment’, in Punishment and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 117: ‘Intention is to be divided into three related parts ... The first I shall call “intentionally doing something”; the second “doing something with a further intention,” and the third “bare intention” because it is the case of intending to do something in the future without doing anything to execute this intention now’. ‘Reluctantly’: Cf. Davidson, ‘Intending’ in Essays on Actions and Events, p. 88. If reasons, conceived as belief/desire pairs, seem adequate to explaining what it is to act intentionally, they appear immediately hopeless when it comes to ‘intending to act’. One main problem is that the familiar conflicts which are present among an agent’s desires seem intolerable when it comes to her intentions; intentions seem to ‘commit’ the agent in a way which mere desires do not. This and other difficulties with belief/desire psychology in the theory of intention are discussed by Bratman in Intention, Plans and Practical Reason (Ibid.). On the apparently commissive aspect of ‘intending’, see Bratman’s discussion on pp. 4–5, and our discussion infra, §VI. Davidson’s reluctance, as opposed to Bratman’s boldness, will comprise only a superficial difference here. For the reluctance is only about recognizing ‘intention as a sui generis state of mind (one not ‘ontologically reducible’ to beliefs and desires: see Davidson ‘Intending’, pp. 88, 83). Both take for granted, however, the explanatory framework described in this section. See infra, pp. 144, 147, 161–162. We shall generally use ‘intending’ or ‘intention to act’ for this category. ‘It would be astonishing if that extra element were foreign to our understanding of intentional action’. Davidson, Intending, p. 88; and see p. 89: ‘[T]here is no reason not to allow that intention of exactly the same kind is also present when the intended action eventuates’. See Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events p. xiii, and ‘Intending’, pp. 87–88. See Bratman, op. cit., pp. 5–6. Anscombe says almost nothing in Intention about whether action explanations mention causes, save for an occasional suggestion that the relevant notions of ‘a cause’, and ‘causal’ would have to be made clearer for us to understand what this question is about. See e.g. §§ 5, 9–11. Bratman, Intention, Plans and Practical Reason, p. 7. Nor can we understand this on the basis of the agent’s having done something for such a reason (say bought a ticket); for, by hypothesis, the intention in question may remain pure, the action merely proposed.

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21. Cf. Intention, p. 84: ‘[T]he term “intentional” has reference to a form of description of events’ (Anscombe’s emphasis). 22. One feature of this analogy seems worth highlighting. Someone who, endeavouring to understand ‘wrongful’, started with the case in which it characterizes an agent’s plan would find themselves having to connect this to other cases through a story about such a plan bringing about –’in the right way’ of course – a situation in which a different, world-involving notion of wrongful finds application (e.g. to another’s loss or injury). (And they might feel puzzled over how applications of the world-involving notion of ‘wrongful’ – for example, wrongful injury – could involve a greater degree of culpability, given the fortuitous role which factors beyond the agents control are bound to play in this extended story; but this is a distinguishable problem.) Starting at the other end, one sees what makes a plan wrongful by seeing what happens when it succeeds. This does not occlude the possibility of causal explanations, but it suggests that the unity of the divisions can and perhaps must be grasped before they get under way. 23. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §§629–660 (esp. 635, 645–646), pp. 216–217; Zettel 44. Anscombe alludes to this discussion on p. 6 of Intention. 24. For a related discussion, see Anscombe, ‘Events in the Mind’ in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Papers Volume II, esp. pp. 57–61. 25. Cf. Intention, p. 77 on the absurdity of accepting both the empiricist idea of pleasure as an impression of some kind and seeing it as ‘quite generally the point of doing anything’. Anscombe is adapting Investigations §218: ‘Meaning is not a process which accompanies a word. For no process could have the consequences of meaning’. 26. Cf. Intention, p. 92: ‘Nor can we say: But in the expression of intention one isn’t saying anything is going to happen! Otherwise, when I had said “I’m just going to get up,” it would be unreasonable later to ask “Why didn’t you get up?.” I could reply: “I wasn’t talking about a future happening, so why do you mention such irrelevancies?” ’ On Anscombe’s account, an expression of intention differs from a prediction in not being founded for the speaker on evidence or observation, as well as in the particular notion of ‘mistakenness’ we apply in connection with it. 27. ‘Direct’: that is, knowledge not merely on the basis of an inference from how it is with the speaker. Cf. Intention, p. 3: ‘[N]or does the patient normally infer the information from the fact that the doctor said that; he would say that the doctor told him’. 28. See Michael Thompson, ‘Naive Action Theory’, in Life and Action (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, (forthcoming). Our presentation of the spectrum of intention owes a general debt to Thompson’s paper. 29. On the contrast between states and performances (and taking time vs. going on for a time), see A. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), Chapter 8, to which we are indebted here. 30. The use of intention which arises in considering how to understand a speaker (especially when the speaker is absent, for example, – ‘the author’s intention’) would appear to call for separate treatment, as it does not involve a notion of unfolding action. In light of this case, it appears that Anscombe’s divisions are neither exclusive nor exhaustive. 31. Anscombe is exploring here the disabling consequences of isolating one of her divisions – intentional action – from the others. However, her overall point is

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more general: Other distortions would arise from the isolation of any of the divisions. See J.L. Austin, ‘A Plea For Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961). Thus, someone writing the word ‘action’ may have a pure intention, at this moment, to write the letter ‘c’. But asking why they intend to write ‘c’ will disclose this intention to be grounded in an action already underway: the pure intention to write ‘c’ stands to writing the word ‘action’ (once they have begun on the ‘a’) as writing the word ‘action’ does to writing the sentence ‘An intention can exist ...’ and so on. So pure intentions are everywhere. But that is because actions, underway but not yet completed, are everywhere; such actions are their grounds. See Michael Thompson, ‘Naive Action Theory, op. cit.; on the ‘openness’ of the progressive, cf. Kevin Falvey, ‘Knowledge in Intention’, 99 Philosophical Studies, pp. 21–44, esp. p. 26 (2000). Thompson, ‘Naive Action Theory’, op. cit. Michael Bratman’s master term – planning – fits the bill of particulars here. Unlike beliefs and (appetitive) desires, plans are wholes which rationalize their subparts, can be pure or impure, take a performance from as their object (‘I plan to Ø’), are subject to the question ‘why’ in the relevant sense (‘for what purpose?’), can be commanded (‘Plan to be there at 4:00!’) and so on. Planning, in short, shares in the structure of action. Nothing this wasn’t true of would even seem to be a good candidate for an intention-explaining psychological state. The instructive exception to this is the right-limit case, which, by definition, does not express imperfection and hence does not enter into action-explanation: For example, in answer to ‘Why?’ never the past-perfect (I Ø-ed), but only the past progressive (I was Ø-ing). See the previous discussion above, p. 143. This is sometimes missed because there is no imperative-form (‘Intend to Ø!’). However, nothing is easier than making someone’s intention – for example, to return the book – the object of a command: One simply orders them to return the book. It might be objected that, were intending really an etiolated form of performance, it ought to be possible to command someone to ‘intend to return the book’ in perfect purity, that is, ‘Plan to return the book, but don’t actually return it!’ But the answer to this is that it is also impossible to command someone ‘to go ahead with returning the book without actually returning it’. Intending to Ø stands to the progressive Ø-ing just as Ø-ing (or doing things in order to Ø) stands to successfully Ø-ing or having Ø-ed: None can be commanded apart from the others. The italics are our notes. The relevant sense of the question ‘Why’, and the fact that positive answers to it are themselves expressions of intention, are mutually defining notions for Anscombe. Cf. Intention, p. 80: Like Aristotle’s ‘practical reasoning’, the ‘order of questions “Why”? can be looked at as a device which reveals the order’ in the diverse materials of action. But Anscombe also points out: It is ‘as artificial as Aristotle’s [construction]; for a series of questions “Why?”... with the appropriate answers, cannot occur very often.’ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §647. This point appears twice in Intention: pp. 5, 86–87.

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45. Cf. p. 8: ‘[I]f 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.’ If intentions were not so legible, their personal expression would lack much of its point. Such expression gives another warrant to expect behaviour of a certain describable shape, and this implies a general capacity to recognize another’s behaviour, when the time comes, as satisfying (or frustrating) those expectations. 46. See, for example, Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action, pp. 97–98. Relatedly, it is sometimes said that only linguistic creatures initiate action by deciding on it from among a range of alternatives. And, no doubt, we speak of ‘decisions’, just where someone has, in effect, answered a question, or resolved their intentions against the background of other prospects. But these points are moot here, for the reasons explained in the text. 47. Davidson, ‘Thought and Talk’, in Truth and Interpretation, p. 63. 48. Indeed, Michael Tomasello’s reading of the empirical research on non-human primates defends just this position: While brutes have intentions, they fail to recognize intentions – and hence to distinguish ends from means, and both from the upshots of what is done – in others. See The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001). 49. Anscombe, ‘Under a Description’, in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, pp. 208–219. This is in further explanation of her remark in Intention, pp. 86–87: ‘[W]e certainly ascribe intention to animals. The reason is that we describe what they do in a manner perfectly characteristic of the use of intention concepts: we describe what further they are doing in doing something ... . We do this although the cat can utter no thoughts, and cannot give expression to any knowledge of its own action, or to any intentions either.’ 50. This is just what is happening, according to Donald Gustafson, one of the few commentators to notice the problem. Concerned mainly to defend Wittgenstein, Gustafson criticizes Anscombe for overlooking this: ‘[T]hat a person’s face has a determined look, while it does not imply that he expressed determination in the sense that his saying he is determined does so, is [nonetheless] an expression of determination or a determined expression’ The implication must be that AP joins no issue, since the impersonal sense in which Wittgenstein is asserting that the stalking cat expresses an intention isn’t the personal sense in which Anscombe would be denying it. This resolution comes at the cost of making Anscombe incoherent, however. For if her point were merely that animals do not express their intentions in the personal sense – that is, don’t tell us of them – then she ought to have said the reverse of what she does: Intention is just like emotion in this respect, for animals don’t tell us of their emotions, or of their hopes and fears, either. 51. In point of fact, ordinary usage gives AP some support. One can express one’s intention to turn right by making a hand gesture (since this is a ‘bodily movement with a conventional meaning’: p. 5); but someone who begins to turn right is not ‘expressing an intention’ to do so, even though that same movement might express his determination or his fear, and even though it may make his intentions (e.g. to turn right, to confuse the enemy, etc.) apparent to an observer. We need to see more clearly, however, what distinction language is harbouring here. 52. Of course, numerous states of the person – for example, a dull throbbing in one’s right knee, a slow, spreading fear in the pit of one’s stomach – are manifested

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only in creatures who have the linguistic means to differentiate and report them. So conventional expression goes beyond natural expression. But the present point isn’t that conventional expression only deputizes for what is already expressible by non-verbal behaviour, only that it sometimes does. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 189. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 242, Zettel §545. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, § 179: ‘There is no cry of intention’ – that is, as there is a cry of pain, joy, grief and so on. Even God’s intentions, in so far as they are not expressed but merely revealed by history, do not impugn anything. For example, the regularity of the seasons does not afford a basis – as a verbal expression would – for regarding unseasonable rain as a divine mistake. See Anscombe, ‘Rule, Rights and Promises’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers Vol. III (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 99: ‘God himself can make no promises to man except in a human language.’ The point of Anscombe’s denying that an incipient course of action expresses intention (as a face or tone of voice expresses anger) might be approached another way, by considering what might serve to distinguish impersonal ‘expressions’ from other signs or indications of a person’s state. As Anscombe elsewhere remarks, ‘A man could be said not to have given expression to his anger at all – he merely brought it about that the man who had offended him was ruined or hanged.’ ‘Pretending’, in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 88. According to this, an expression is not a mere sign or indication, but what exactly is the difference? It seems correct to say: An expression allows for the possibility of retaining the concept in cases where what is expressed is absent; a mere sign or indication does not. Thus, we may say that the relation ‘X expresses Y’ excludes cases in which the truth of the statement depends on the truth or actuality of Y. To illustrate: Ruining him is not an expression of anger, for it is not anger which is expressed at all unless the person really is angry. In contrast, if X expresses Y, then Y is itself present in the expression X, as for example, anger is present in the angry furrows in the face, whatever the person’s state of mind. Hence it is possible to be surprised that (e.g.) a face expresses anger (e.g. since this person has no cause for complaint), whereas – since a person’s action only manifests an intention to do what they are really doing or intending to do – there can’t be any surprise that a bit of behaviour manifests an intention to do such and such. Considered apart from their verbal expressability, intentions are sunk in facticity. This is why Anscombe suggests an analogy between the movements of the cat (as a basis for attributing intentions) and the car’s stalling engine. Just as the engine’s behaviour indicates that the car is going to stop only if the car is going to stop, so the movements of the cat indicate only what it actually goes on to do. For more on the notion of practical knowledge, see Richard Moran, “Anscombe on ‘Practical Knowledge’,” in Agency and Action, eds. J. Hyman & H. Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 43–68 (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 55). The source of the phrase ‘direction of fit’ as attributed to Anscombe seems to be Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 256–257. The transformation of her idea is already complete in this short passage, which re-writes her original thought about the relation between an expression of intention and what the person does as a claim about the relation between a state (desire) and the world: ‘Miss Anscombe, in her work on inten-

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Anscombe on Expression of Intention tion, has drawn a broad distinction between two kinds of mental state, factual belief being the prime exemplar of one kind and desire a prime exemplar of the other (Anscombe, Intention, § 2). The distinction is in terms of the direction of fit of mental states with the world.’ See Luca Ferrero, ‘Intending and Doing’ (manuscript), which stresses the active quality of such ‘waiting’ (monitoring for interferences, commitment of resources, etc.) in the usual case. See Donald Davidson, ‘Intending’, in Essays on Actions and Events, p. 90. See the opening quotation from Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 74. Or better, their ‘being engaged in doing something’: the word ‘engaged’ straddles the sense of (1) doing something and (2) being committed – in a non-promissory sense – to doing something. We agree with Ferrero’s conclusion (note 51 above) that intending is a kind of performance which is continuous in structure with intentional action, so that to intend to F to is be (already) engaged in F-ing. As Ferrero puts it, ‘[F]uture directed intending is not a truly separate phenomenon from either the intending in action or the acting itself. Ultimately, all intentions are in action, or better still, in extended courses of action.’ In this connection, see recent work of Pamela Hieronymi, where actions as well as attitudes are not only understood as embodying reasons, but more specifically where the relevant notion of ‘reason’ is the more articulated one of ‘a consideration that bears on a question’, as distinct from the more primitive one of ‘a consideration in favor of’ (which might apply equally to considerations in favor of having some belief as well as to considerations in favor of its truth). In ‘The Wrong Kind of Reason’, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 102, No. 9 (September 2005), pp. 437–457; and ‘Controlling Attitudes’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 45–74, the appeal to the applicability of a certain range of questions as constituting the action or the attitude is motivated in part by reference to Anscombe’s ‘Why?’ question. The systematic unity of action’s ‘what’ and ‘why’ might be thought of as Anscombe’s central theme. She shows that: (1) An expression of what an agent is doing characterizes an intentional action only insofar as there is an answer to the question of why she is doing it (in the relevant, reason-involving sense); (2) positive answers to the interrogation why themselves characterize what the agent is intentionally doing (at least up to the point where use of the progressive gets linguistically denied); and (3) any expression of what an agent is doing is itself the answer to a question why, directed at something else she is doing.

9 Can One Act for a Reason without Acting Intentionally? Joshua Knobe and Sean D. Kelly

Since the important work of Elizabeth Anscombe (1957), philosophers have been almost unanimous in accepting the claim that every behavior performed for a reason is performed intentionally. We develop and discuss here an apparent counterexample to this claim—a case in which people are inclined to say that an agent has performed a behavior for a reason, but are not inclined to say that he has performed that behavior intentionally.

I It is widely agreed that the concept of acting intentionally is closely linked in some way to the concept of acting for a reason, but there has been a certain amount of disagreement about the precise nature of this link. We therefore begin by distinguishing two related theses: (Davidson’s Thesis) Every behavior that is performed intentionally is performed for a reason. (Anscombe’s Thesis) Every behavior that is performed for a reason is performed intentionally.1 Taken together, Davidson’s Thesis and Anscombe’s Thesis entail the biconditional conclusion that a behavior is performed intentionally if and only if it is performed for a reason. This is a conclusion of great theoretical power and simplicity, and it has probably been discussed more widely than either of the two individual theses taken separately. Still, it is important to remember that the two theses are logically independent. Arguments against one of the two theses will not usually count as arguments against the other. Although Davidson’s Thesis has received vigorous support from a number of philosophers of action (e.g. Davidson 1963; Goldman 1970; Mele 1992), it has also occasionally been called into question. Hursthouse (1991), for example, claims that spontaneous expressions of emotion are not performed 169

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for any reason but still count as intentional actions. Consider the agent who gets very angry and ends up punching the wall. It seems clear that such an agent has punched the wall intentionally, but on Hursthouse’s view at least, he or she has not punched the wall for any reason. Here, however, our primary concern is not with Davidson’s Thesis but with Anscombe’s. This latter thesis has not been particularly controversial. It is upheld by Goldman (1970), Malle, Knobe, O’Laughlin, Pearce and Nelson (2000), Mele (1992) and, of course, Anscombe (1957). We know of no arguments against it.2 A key source of evidence for Anscombe’s Thesis is our ordinary practice of giving reason explanations. Specifically, it is thought that people do not ordinarily accept reason explanations for behaviors that they do not regard as intentional. If a speaker thinks that Jane bumped into Bob unintentionally, that speaker will not normally find it acceptable to use a reason explanation like “Jane bumped into Bob in order to get his attention.” As long as Jane’s bumping into Bob is regarded as an unintentional behavior, it will be felt that Jane did not bump into Bob for any reason at all and hence that it would be wrong to say that Jane bumped into Bob “in order to” fulfill any kind of purpose. Similarly, with many other types of unintentional behavior. If Jane unintentionally shivers or trips or starts crying, it will be felt that she is not performing these behaviors for any reason and that it would therefore be wrong to explain her behavior using phrases like “in order to” that are ordinarily reserved for reason explanations. But, of course, accidental behaviors and uncontrollable reflexes are only the simplest forms of unintentional behavior. The true test of Anscombe’s Thesis is its ability to handle more complex cases—cases in which a behavior would normally be considered unintentional even though it was foreseen and produced by a deliberate choice.

II We turn, therefore, to the difficult problem of side effects. An outcome can be considered a side effect if and only if (1) an agent chooses to perform a behavior, foreseeing that she will thereby (probably) bring about the outcome, but (2) the agent does not actually perform the behavior for the purpose of bringing about the outcome. Thus, suppose that the chairman of the board of a company decides to implement a particular program. He knows that the program will lead to some outcome x. But he does not care at all about outcome x; he has only chosen to implement the program because he thinks that he can thereby

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increase profits. Here we can say that outcome x is a “side effect” of the chairman’s behavior. A question now arises as to whether side effects can ever be brought about intentionally. Here, opinions differ. Adams (1986) says that side effects are never brought about intentionally; Ginet (1990) says that side effects are always brought about intentionally; Harman (1976) and Bratman (1984; 1987) say that some side effects are brought about intentionally and others are brought about unintentionally. As we shall see, people’s ordinary use of the word “intentionally” follows this third view. People are willing to apply the word to some side effects but not to others. Thus, there can be no single general answer as to whether or not people think that the chairman intentionally brought about “some outcome x.” People’s answers will depend in a crucial way on what outcome x happens to be. This fact about people’s use of “intentionally” gives us a valuable opportunity to put Anscombe’s Thesis to the test. We can check to see whether people’s use of reason explanations fits with their use of “intentionally” in the way Anscombe’s Thesis seems to suggest. Of course, Anscombe’s Thesis could potentially be true even if it does not comport well with ordinary language, but it seems clear that ordinary language provides at least prima facie evidence regarding difficult questions like this one. Suppose we found that people were sometimes willing to accept reason explanations when they felt that a side effect had been brought about intentionally but that they were never willing to accept reason explanations when they felt that a side effect had been brought about unintentionally. Surely, this finding would provide a kind of evidence for Anscombe’s Thesis—not conclusive evidence, of course, but evidence nonetheless. And now consider another possible result. Suppose we found that people sometimes accepted reason explanations for side effects that they regarded as unintentional. We would then have a very strong argument against Anscombe’s Thesis. Indeed, the only way to defend Anscombe’s Thesis against the argument would be to show either that ordinary English speakers were mistaken in their use of the word “intentionally” or that they were mistaken in their use of reason explanations. Although it might be possible to show that ordinary speakers are mistaken in one of these ways, we take it that there is a very strong presumption in favor of the view that ordinary speakers are speaking correctly. With these issues in mind, let us consider two specific cases in which an agent brings about a side effect. First, a case in which the side effect is environmental harm: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, “We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.”

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The chairman of the board answered, “I don’t care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed. And now consider what happens when we modify this case by replacing “harm” with “help”: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, “We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, and it will also help the environment.” The chairman of the board answered, “I don’t care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped. It has been shown experimentally that these two cases yield two radically different patterns of intuition about whether or not the agent acted intentionally (Knobe 2003). Most people who receive the first case say that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment, but most people who receive the second case say that the chairman unintentionally helped the environment. Presumably, the key difference between these two cases has something to do with the normative status of the two outcomes. Because people see environmental harm as a bad thing and environmental help as a good thing, they end up concluding that the former was brought about intentionally, the latter unintentionally. As of yet, there is no consensus on the question as to why normative considerations affect people’s responses to this pair of cases. Some researchers say that normative considerations actually play a role in people’s concept of intentional action (Knobe forthcoming; Mele 2003); others say that people are being unduly influenced by feelings of blame (Alicke forthcoming; Malle & Nelson 2003; Nadelhoffer forthcoming); and still others say that the effect can be explained in terms of conversational pragmatics (Adams & Steadman 2004a; 2004b).3 We will make no attempt to resolve this controversy here. Instead, we will focus on the question as to whether people’s intuitions about intentional action—however these intuitions might have arisen—end up fitting with their intuitions about reason explanations in the way that Anscombe’s Thesis seems to suggest. Assuming that people’s intuitions accord with Anscombe’s Thesis, they shouldn’t feel that the chairman helped the environment for a reason.

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Recall that Anscombe’s Thesis states that every behavior performed for a reason is performed intentionally. If the chairman helped the environment unintentionally, as subjects’ judge he did, then according to Anscombe’s Thesis he did not help the environment for a reason. In the case of harming the environment, Anscombe’s thesis makes no prediction. It does allow, however, that the chairman may have harmed the environment for a reason. In fact, people’s intuitions fit this pattern perfectly. Experimental results show that people think it sounds right to say “The chairman harmed the environment in order to increase profits” but that people do not think it sounds right to say “The chairman helped the environment in order to increase profits” (Knobe 2004). This is truly an impressive victory for Anscombe’s Thesis. Indeed, it might be thought that Anscombe’s Thesis provides the only natural way of explaining the asymmetry in people’s use of “in order to” in these two cases.

III The careful reader may by now have surmised that our argument takes the form of a trap. We began by describing a phenomenon that seems to provide evidence in favor of Anscombe’s Thesis, but it will later become clear that this very phenomenon, when properly understood, actually provides evidence for the view that a behavior can be performed for a reason even if it is not performed intentionally. If one accepts what we have said thus far and takes the data presented above to be legitimate evidence in favor of Anscombe’s Thesis, it will be extremely difficult to resist the conclusions we draw below. Anticipating this turn of events, a defender of Anscombe’s Thesis might offer certain objections to the argument presented in the previous section. We should emphasize, however, that no such objections have actually been put forward in the existing philosophical literature. Philosophers have offered competing explanations of the findings described above, but all of the philosophers who have discussed these findings have concluded that people’s use of reason explanations is sensitive in some way to moral considerations and that this sensitivity is to be understood in terms of people’s tacit grasp of the relationship between reason explanations and intentional action (Adams & Steadman 2004b; Knobe forthcoming; Nadelhoffer 2006; Turner forthcoming). In other words, nothing in what we have said so far is actually controversial among philosophers working on these issues. Still, it may be helpful to pause briefly here to allay some lingering doubts.

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We turn now to the first potential objection: In the cases under discussion, one finds three basic elements—a behavior, an aim and a side effect. These three elements can be depicted as follows: Aim

Side effect

Behavior

Now, the phrase “in order to” is used to indicate a means-end relationship. In other words, it is used to indicate the kind of relationship that can only obtain between a behavior and an aim. Strictly speaking, then, the phrase cannot be applied to the bringing about of a side effect. So what people really mean to say is not that “the agent brought about the side effect in order to bring about the aim” but rather that “the agent performed a behavior (namely, the behavior that brought about the side effect) in order to bring about the aim.” To the extent that people sometimes fail to express this point with sufficient precision, it is only because they are being sloppy. Nothing of importance is thereby revealed about the nature of reason explanation itself. The key claim behind this objection is that the phrase “in order to” can only be correctly applied in cases that meet a specific criterion. But what the data show is that people sometimes use that phrase in cases that do not meet this criterion. So the objection posits a standard of “correctness” that departs in certain respects from ordinary usage. One way to make this objection compelling would be to show that people find it difficult to keep track of all the complex conceptual distinctions that seem to be in play here. For example, it could be argued that people have a hard time getting a handle on the distinction between saying “The agent brought about the side-effect in order to ...” and saying “The agent performed a behavior (namely, the behavior that brought about the sideeffect) in order to...” But the data seem to suggest that people actually are capable of using this distinction. In particular, people seem not to be willing to say that the agent brought about a side effect for a reason when that side effect is a good one. The objection therefore faces a major hurdle. It seems unlikely that people are able to make all of the necessary conceptual distinctions as long as the side effect is a good one but that they somehow find these distinctions too difficult when the side effect is a bad one. A more plausible explanation would be that they make all the necessary

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conceptual distinctions in both cases but that, when the side effect is a bad one, they regard reason explanations as acceptable. Of course, there are various strategies one might use to argue for a standard of “correct” use that diverges in certain respects from the use one finds among ordinary speakers. But we take it that there is at least a strong presumption in favor of the view that native speakers of English are speaking English correctly. The burden of proof thus seems to be on those who would deny that it is correct to use sentences similar to the ones people deemed acceptable in the studies described above. We turn therefore to a second objection: The sentence “He harmed the environment in order to increase profits” involves an important ambiguity. On one interpretation, the sentence means something like “There exists a behavior that is a harming of the environment, and he performed this behavior in order to increase profits.” On this interpretation, the sentence is true. After all, the behavior of harming the environment simply is the behavior of implementing the policy. (What we have here are two descriptions of the very same behavior.) Moreover, it is clear that he implemented the policy in order to increase profits. So there is a sense in which the behavior of harming the environment was a behavior performed in order to increase profits. But there is also an interpretation on which the sentence comes out false. On this latter interpretation, the sentence says that the behavior was specifically performed for a reason under the description “harming the environment.” But this is clearly not the case. The behavior was not performed for a reason under that description but rather under the description “implementing the policy.” In short, it can be correct to regard a sentence like this one either as true or as false, depending on which interpretation one happens to adopt. This objection takes us into difficult territory in the theory of action. Some theories of action do indeed imply that the harming of the environment and the implementing of the policy are the same behavior under two different descriptions (Anscombe 1957; Davidson 1967), but others imply that what we have here are two distinct behaviors that just happen to involve the same bodily motions (Goldman 1970). We cannot hope to resolve this issue here. Fortunately, however, it is possible to address the central questions of the present essay without taking any stand on the difficult issue of action individuation. In fact, it seems to us that that whole issue is a red herring in the present context. What needs to be explained is the asymmetry between people’s judgments regarding good side effects and their judg-

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ments regarding bad side effects. The alleged ambiguity here seems not to provide an explanation of that phenomenon unless we assume that there is a systematic pattern whereby people resolve the ambiguity differently depending on the goodness or badness of the side effect. We see no grounds for positing such a systematic pattern. In the remainder of the essay, we therefore ignore these objections and proceed on the view that has become the consensus among researchers working on this issue. That is to say, we will proceed on the view that a certain kind of normative judgment—a judgment about the goodness or badness of a side effect—really does play a role in people’s use of reason explanations.

IV Although the cases we have just discussed seem to be evidence for Anscombe’s Thesis, there is even stronger evidence that the thesis is false. One can construct cases in which subjects judge that an agent has performed an action for a reason even though they also judge that he did not perform it intentionally. In the cases of the chairman and the environment, as we have seen, judgments about acting for a reason and acting intentionally line up nicely. But this is only because in these cases there is no radical divergence between two different kinds of normative evaluation that the subject can make. When we devise examples that pull these normative evaluations apart, we get robust evidence against Anscombe’s Thesis. The two normative evaluations in question are the evaluations of the moral goodness of the side effect as understood by the subject, on the one hand, and as understood by the agent, on the other. In the cases discussed in Section II, these evaluations line up fairly well; or at least they do not diverge radically. To see this, consider the actions of helping and harming the environment from the point of view of normal subjects and of the chairman in the two scenarios. We may assume that in general subjects think that helping the environment is better than harming it. This is a fairly prevalent view in our society, and it seems reasonable to think that most subjects have something like this as a background assumption. (In future experiments, of course, this is the kind of thing that might be tested for explicitly.) Likewise, in the two chairman scenarios there is no strong reason to think that the chairman believes that harming the environment is actually better than helping it. He is, of course, at the very least callous in the case in which he goes ahead and harms the environment for profit. But he is not malicious; he is not represented as taking any joy in harming the environment, and indeed he says that he doesn’t care one way or the other about it. But it is possible to devise scenarios in which the agent’s evaluation of the moral worth of a side effect is represented as explicitly contravening the subject’s (assumed) evaluation of the very same act. This will work best if

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the agent is represented as someone with moral values that are diametrically opposed to our own. Consider, for instance, the following scenario. A terrorist discovers that someone has planted a bomb in a nightclub. There are lots of Americans in the nightclub who will be injured or killed if the bomb goes off. The terrorist says to himself, “Whoever planted that bomb in the nightclub did a good thing. Americans are evil! The world will be a better place when more of them are injured or dead.” Later, the terrorist discovers that his only son, whom he loves dearly, is in the nightclub as well. If the bomb goes off, his son will certainly be injured or killed. The terrorist then says to himself, “The only way I can save my son is to defuse the bomb. But if I defuse the bomb, I’ll be saving those evil Americans as well... What should I do?” After carefully considering the matter, he thinks to himself, “I know it is wrong to save Americans, but I can’t rescue my son without saving those Americans as well. I guess I’ll just have to defuse the bomb.” He defuses the bomb, and all of the Americans are saved. In this scenario, the side effect is that the Americans are saved. Unlike in the chairman cases, however, it seems here that the agent’s evaluation of the moral worth of this side effect explicitly contravenes the evaluation of normal American subjects. For although we can assume that a typical sample of American subjects will judge that it is a good thing to save the lives of innocent Americans, the terrorist is represented as believing that this side effect is morally bad. Now we can ask two distinct questions about this side effect. First, does the terrorist intentionally save the Americans? And second, does the terrorist save the Americans for a reason (namely in order to rescue his son)? Among ordinary speakers of the English language the answers to these questions diverge dramatically. Most people judge that the terrorist saved the Americans in order to save his son, but that he did not save them intentionally. (This claim about people’s responses strikes us as correct on an immediate and intuitive level, but we ran a quick experiment to verify it.4) The divergence of responses in the two conditions is striking. They seem to provide an example in which it is considered acceptable to say that an agent has acted for a reason but in which it is also considered acceptable to say that he has not acted intentionally. In other words, they provide an apparent counterexample to Anscombe’s Thesis. In the following section we will analyze these results.

V We have seen that normative judgments influence people’s intuitions about the application of two distinct action-theoretic concepts: the concept of

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acting intentionally and the concept of acting for a reason. But we have also seen that a subject’s intuition about how to apply each of these concepts is influenced by a different normative judgment: (1) Intuitions about whether a side effect was brought about intentionally are influenced by the subject’s judgment about its normative status. (2) Intuitions about whether a side effect was brought about for a reason are influenced by what the subject believes to be the agent’s judgment about its normative status. Although different normative judgments are relevant to subjects’ intuitions about acting intentionally and acting for a reason, there is a general principle about how the normative status of a side effect influences the application of action-theoretic concepts. This principle is general in the sense that it applies to both of our action-theoretic concepts—acting intentionally and acting for a reason. Once we have determined which normative judgment is relevant, the principle predicts whether or not a subject will attribute the corresponding action-theoretic concept to a given side effect. The general principle in question is: Principle of Un-charity: A subject is more willing to attribute the action-theoretic concept to a side effect if the side effect violates the relevant norm. When combined with (1) and (2) above, the Principle of Un-charity yields definite predictions about whether or not a subject will attribute each of the action-theoretic concepts to a given side effect: if the side effect violates the subject’s norms for behavior, he will judge it to have been brought about intentionally; if it violates the agent’s norms for behavior, he will judge it to have been brought about for a reason. In determining whether a side effect was brought about intentionally or for a reason, the subject seems to go through a two-step process. First he chooses the normative evaluation of the side effect that is most relevant: his own or the agent’s. Next, he uses that normative evaluation in accordance with the Principle of Un-charity: if the side effect violates the relevant norm, he is more willing to attribute the action-theoretic concept in question. Let us consider each of these steps in turn. First, the choice of the relevant norm. Suppose the subject is considering whether a side effect was brought about intentionally. Why should the subject’s normative evaluation be relevant in this case? There are many possible explanations here, but one plausible account goes like this. When a subject is trying to determine whether a behavior was performed intentionally, it is often because he is trying to decide whether the agent deserves praise or blame for that behavior. In determining whether a behavior is praiseworthy

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or blameworthy, moreover, the subject’s normative evaluation of the behavior is the most salient one. (Would you really praise an agent for performing an action that you yourself didn’t believe was good?) For this reason, the subject’s normative evaluation of the behavior is the most salient one in determining whether the behavior was performed intentionally. Suppose, now, that the subject is considering whether a side effect was brought about for a reason. We have seen in this case that the subject considers the agent’s norm to be the relevant one. Why should this be so? Again, there are many possible explanations. Consider the following plausible account. When a subject is trying to determine whether a behavior was performed for a reason, it is natural for her to look at the behavior from the agent’s point of view. The question whether the behavior was done for a reason is understood as a question about the agent’s reasons for performing it. Therefore, the agent’s normative evaluation of the behavior is the most salient one in determining whether the behavior was performed for a reason. Let us turn now to the Principle of Un-charity. As we have seen, this principle states that a subject is more willing to attribute certain actiontheoretic concepts to a side effect if that side effect violates a relevant norm. The principle seems to apply both to the concept of intentional action and to the concept of acting for a reason. Why should it apply to both of these concepts? First, the case of intentional action. The Principle of Un-charity implies an asymmetry here: side effects that the subject regards as bad are judged to have been brought about intentionally while side effects that the subject regards as good are judged to have been brought about unintentionally. One plausible explanation for this asymmetry in people’s judgments about intentional action ties it to a prior asymmetry in judgments of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Subjects are generally more willing to assign blame for side effects that they regard as bad than they are to assign praise for side effects that they regard as good. This may be a purely contingent fact about our assignments of praise and blame; but it is a conspicuous and notable fact nonetheless. Recall the scenarios from Section II. Subjects are much more willing to blame the chairman when he harms the environment (a bad side effect) than they are to praise him when he manages to help it (a good side effect). Similarly, subjects do not regard the terrorist as worthy of praise, even though his behavior brings about the good side effect of saving the Americans.5 As we have seen already, there are a variety of different theories that attempt to explain the interaction between judgments of praise and blame on the one hand, and judgments of intentional action on the other. But all of these theories admit that there is an interaction between these judgments, and on all of these theories the asymmetry that we have noted between judgments of praise and blame can be used to explain the asymmetry in judgments about intentional action.

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Finally, the case of acting for a reason. We need to explain why subjects are more willing to say that a side effect was brought about for a reason when the side effect violates the agent’s norms. We have seen that the question whether the side effect was brought about for a reason amounts, in this case, to a question about the agent’s own reasons for bringing it about. The agent will feel especially compelled to provide such reasons when his behavior brings about a side effect that he considers bad. Reason explanations, in cases like this, can serve to justify the side effect that the agent’s behavior brings about. A subject who is trying to determine whether a behavior was performed for a reason will naturally think of the situation from the agent’s point of view. She will therefore be more willing to provide reason explanations in cases in which the agent needs to justify his action.

VI The experiments reported here suggest that subjects are sometimes willing to say that an agent has performed a behavior for a reason even though they are not also willing to say that he performed the behavior intentionally. We believe that these results count as evidence against Anscombe’s Thesis—the thesis that every behavior performed for a reason is performed intentionally. If subjects are systematically willing to use the expression “in order to” in cases in which they are not also willing to use the expression “intentionally,” then subjects’ use of these terms seems to be evidence against Anscombe’s Thesis. How might an objector reply to our claims? If our experiments have been conducted properly, they do seem to establish an interesting fact about normal linguistic use. It remains open to an objector, however, to insist that facts about normal linguistic use are no sure guide to the truth of Anscombe’s Thesis. The thesis that every behavior performed for a reason is performed intentionally, the objector might say, is not a thesis about how people use the relevant expressions but a thesis about what is true of our behaviors. Take, by analogy, the case of arthritis. If we want to understand the true nature of this disease, it would be folly to proceed by investigating the ordinary use of the term “arthritis.” So too, the objector will say, facts about the ordinary use of expressions like “in order to” are simply irrelevant to questions about the true nature of human action.6 An objection like this does present a legitimate challenge to our view. In particular, it shows that our argument against Anscombe’s Thesis is not conclusive. Still, we believe that the evidence we have presented here serves at the very least to shift the burden of proof. For now a person who wants to hold on to Anscombe’s Thesis needs to tell a convincing story about why normal linguistic use diverges from it so systematically. Such a story might be forthcoming, but in its absence, the evidence from linguistic use seems hard to ignore.

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Notes 1. See Anscombe (1957, §5), Davidson (1963, p. 3). The key difference between the views of these two authors arises in cases where the agent might respond to a request for reasons by saying, “No particular reason. I guess I just felt like it.” In cases of this type, Anscombe (1957, §17) says that the agent does not act for a reason even though the behavior is fully intentional, whereas Davidson (1963, p. 3) says that the agent is simply indicating that she has no further reason but that she nonetheless has a certain kind of reason, namely, a desire to perform the behavior. 2. However, for an argument in the general area see Mele (1992). Mele claims that in some lucky achievement cases—cases of simple luck and cases of causal deviance— people may have middling opinions on average about whether the action was done intentionally but be strongly inclined to see the action as done for a reason. For example, in a deviance case subjects may have middling opinions about whether the shooter hit the bull’s-eye intentionally but be strongly inclined to say that he hit it in order to win the prize. It would be interesting to test such cases. 3. Note that although some of these theories assert that people incorrectly classify immoral behaviors as intentional, none of them asserts that people incorrectly classify morally good behaviors as unintentional. The counterexample we propose in Section III involves the classification of a certain behavior as unintentional. Thus there is nothing in any of these theories to suggest that that classification is incorrect. 4. To demonstrate this we conducted a simple experiment. Subjects were 62 people spending time in New York City parks. All subjects were asked to read the above scenario and fill out a brief questionnaire. We randomly assigned subjects either to the “reason” condition or to the “intentionally” condition. Subjects in each condition were asked to evaluate a certain sentence. In the “reason” condition, subjects evaluated the sentence “The terrorist saved the Americans in order to rescue his son.” In the “intentionally” condition, subjects evaluated the sentence “The terrorist saved the Americans intentionally.” Evaluations consisted in rating the sentence on a scale from –3 (“sounds wrong”) to +3 (“sounds right”), with the 0 point marked “in between.” Subjects in both conditions were also asked to evaluate two sentences concerning the normative status of the terrorist’s actions. These sentences were (1) “The terrorist deserves praise for saving the Americans” and (2) “The terrorist deserves blame for violating his own moral code.” The average rating for the sentence “The terrorist saved the Americans in order to rescue his son” was 1.8. The average rating for the sentence “The terrorist saved the Americans intentionally” was –0.5. This difference was highly statistically significant, t (61) = 4.13, p