Deviant Formal Causation (original) (raw)

Success and Knowledge in Action: Saving Anscombe’s Account of Intentionality

Context Dependence in Language, Action, and Cognition, 2021

According to Anscombe, acting intentionally entails knowledge in action. This thesis has been near-universally rejected due to a well-known counterexample by Davidson: a man intending to make ten legible carbon copies might not believe with confidence, and hence not know, that he will succeed. If he does, however, his action surely counts as intentional. Damaging as it seems, an even more powerful objection can be levelled against Anscombe: while acting, there is as yet no fact of the matter as to whether the agent will succeed. Since his belief that he will is not yet true while his action is in progress, he cannot possibly know that he is indeed bringing about the intended goal. Knowledge in action is not only unnecessary for intentional action, it seems, but-at least as regards success-bound types of action-impossible to attain in the first place. In this paper I argue that traditional strategies to counter these objections are unsatisfactory and propose a new account of knowledge in action which has two core features: (i) It invokes an externalist conception of justification which not only meets Davidson's challenge, but also casts doubts on the tacit internalist premise on which his example relies. (ii) Drawing on recent work about future contingents by John MacFarlane, the proposed account conceives of claims to knowledge in action as assessment-sensitive so as to overcome the factivity objection. From a retrospective point of evaluation, previous claims about future events and actions can not only be deemed as having been true, but also as having been known.

Intention and Mental Causation

2016

Many philosophers nowadays take for granted a causalist view of action explanation, according to which intentional action is a movement caused by mental antecedents. For them, “the possibility of human agency evidently requires that our mental states – our beliefs, desires, and intentions – have causal effects in the physical world: in voluntary actions our beliefs and desires, or intentions and decisions, must somehow cause our limbs to move in appropriate ways” (Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 2000 (1998), p. 31). The main question then is not to know whether there is mental causation at all, but how we should account for it. How can the mind move our body? In her 1983 paper, “The Causation of Action”, Elizabeth Anscombe shows how confused this way of putting things is. For her, if intentions or beliefs can indeed be taken to be causes of action, it is not in any metaphysically problematic sense. Seeing this requires us to distinguish clearly two theses: (1) “to be done in execution of a certain intention” is not a causal relation between intention and action; (2) an intention may be said to cause something: but this pertains to a specific kind of causal history, different from that which is uncovered by physical enquiry. First we will show how the metaphysical problem of mental causation arises from a given conception of action. Then we will turn to Anscombe’s arguments in favour of the two aforementioned theses.

Actions, intentions, awareness and causal deviancy

In Donald Davidson's seminal example of causal deviancy, a climber knows that he can save himself from plummeting to his death by letting go of a rope connecting him to a companion who has lost his footing, but the thought of the contemplated act so upsets him that he lets go unintentionally. Causation of behavior by intentional states that rationalize it is not enough for it to count as acting. Therefore, the behavior must be caused in 'the right way' or by the Right Kind of Cause (RKC). The immediate cause in Davidson's and other examples of causal immediacy is the agent's awareness or contemplation of what he or she is intending or thinking of doing, which is either caused by, or implicit in the agent's awareness of, his or her intentions or beliefs and desires. I argue that RKC can only be a mechanism - the Will - whose operation we are not directly aware of, but only indirectly once the action is underway.

Two Notions of Intentional Action? Solving a Puzzle in Anscombe's 'Intention'

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

What is intentional action? In her (1957) 'Intention', Anscombe appeared to give not one, but two answers: first, intentional actions are actions to which a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ is applicable, and second, they form a sub-class of the things a person knows without observation. It is implausible that she thinks of 'intentional action' as ambiguous, but she gives no explicit account of how these two characterisations converge on a single phenomenon. This sets up an interpretative puzzle which I solve by elucidating her two characterisations in concert with several other key concepts in 'Intention', including, 'practical reasons', the sui generis kind of explanation these provide, the distinction between 'practical' and 'speculative' knowledge, the formal features which mark this distinction, and Anscombe's characterisation of practical knowledge as knowledge 'in intention'.

Knowledge, practical knowledge, and intentional action

Ergo

We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent's control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson's well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this case, offering an initial argument against the knowledge condition, and discussing recent treatments that cover nearby ground, we consider several objections. One we consider at some length maintains that although contemplative knowledge may be disconnected from intentional action, specifically practical knowledge of the sort Anscombe elucidated escapes our argument. We demonstrate that this is not so. Our argument illuminates an important truth, often overlooked in discussions of the knowledge-intentional action relationship: intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances.

Intentional Actions and Final Causes

journal paper, 2023

What distinguishes agents’ intentional actions from those episodes in their life that merely happen to them? This paper argues that the intentionality of agents’ actions is an irreducibly teleological phenomenon. An intentional action is a process that occurs for the sake of an end that we ascribe to the agent who performs it. This intrinsic teleological structure is a precondition, rather than a causal consequence, of human agents’ capacity to mentally represent and consciously initiate their actions. Hence teleology is an intrinsic, and not a derivative, feature of the process in which agents who act participate. More specifically, the paper argues for two major claims. First, whenever agents’ actions are intentional there must be a sense in which what they do is not a mere accident. The paper shows that the sense in which intentional actions are not accidents can only be explained with reference to the actions’ final, rather than their efficient, causes. Second, it argues that it is the intrinsic teleological structure of actions that best explains the sense in which agents always try to do what they do intentionally.

Chapter 2: The normativity of intentional agency

In this Chapter, my aim is to explore three normative aspects of practical commitments, on the one hand, and to suggest an account of the requirements governing rational agency, on the other. Section 2.1 is concerned with the first of these two aims: the analysis of three normative features of practical commitments. The first of them concerns the link between reasons and normative judgements—this is, the normative structure of practical reasoning. I will argue that (i) reasons are facts, and not mental states; and (ii) they have to be possessed by that agent: effective reasons are subjective (or agent‑relative) reasons. Second, I will defend that the conclusion of practical reasoning is a normative belief, and not an intention. Finally, I will discuss the 'bootstrapping objection', proposed by Bratman (1987). The objection can be stated as follows: “you cannot bootstrap a reason into existence from nowhere, just by a forming an intention” (Broome 2001). Section 2.2 is devoted to the analysis of normative requirements. Attributions of irrationality are made on the basis of a violation of some of those requirements. I will first present a recent debate about the appropriate formulation of normative requirements: wide versus narrow‑scope formulations (§2.2.1). I will argue that narrow‑scoped requirements have the advantage of gathering the directionality and agent‑relativity of practical rationality. In Section 2.2.2, I will suggest an alternative formulation of three rational requirements: enkrasia, resolve, and means‑ends reasoning, whose violation is the basis for attributing akrasia and weakness of will (see Section 1.2.3). I will defend that enkrasia is better understood as a restriction, rather than a requirement, and that the means‑end coherence requirement is derived from a more general rationality principle regarding consistency amongst intentional states, which I call resolve.

THE INTERPRETATION OF INTENTIONAL ACTIONS: Three non reducible features

Analítica N° 9 , 2016

In this paper I wish to explore four features that I take to be necessarily present in every possible interpretation of intentional agents. These are the holistic, rational, teleological and normative attribution of mental states and actions. I also want to argue that from these, the latter three features cannot be present in a physical explanatory description, which would prove that intentional interpretation cannot be reducible to physical explanation.