Intention, belief, and wishful thinking: Setiya on "practical knowledge"

Ethics

Volumn 119, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 546-557

  Paul, Sarah K ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 69249122448     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/599312     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Kieran Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", Ethics 118(2008):388-409, 397.
2. The depiction of belief theories of intention as requiring wishful thinking is originally due to H. P. Grice in "Intention and Uncertainty", Proceedings of the British Academy 57(1971):263-79.
3. See Donald Davidson's "Intending" (1978; reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events [Oxford: Clarendon, 2001]);
4. Michael Bratman's Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);
5. and Al Mele's Springs of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For present purposes, I will not be concerned with the details of these respective views, which differ in some aspects.
6. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).
7. As will presently become clearer, "cognitivism about intention" is meant to encompass both strong and weak versions of the thesis that intention constitutively involves believing you will do what you intend. According to the strong version, intentions just are a special kind of belief, while according to the weak version, the belief is merely a constitutive component of intending, presumably conjoined with some practical component.
8. J. David Velleman, Practical Reflection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 56-57. To be clear, the "leap of faith" problem is not the same as the wishfulthinking problem. Rather, the "faith" worry arises in response to Velleman's solution to the wishful-thinking problem. The charge is that on Velleman's view, the wishful leap to an intention-belief is underwritten only by one's faith that the belief will be supported by evidence once formed. The criticism that Velleman makes intending into a leap of faith comes from Rae Langton in "Intention as Faith", in Agency and Action, ed. John Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 243-58.
9. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 401.
10. Davidson, "Intending", 92.
11. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 390. It is interesting to note that in the formulation of (B) Setiya defends in Reasons without Rationalism, he rules out the possibility that the only thing one believes one is doing is trying to φ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, 26). Here, this possibility is not ruled out, leaving it open that the only belief the agent may have concerning his φ-ing is that he is trying to φ.
12. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 390.
13. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 391.
14. Setiya, Reasons without Rationalism, 48. Velleman also holds a Strong Cognitivist view, although, for him, intentions are just ordinary beliefs, rather than a special kind of motivating belief.
15. Richard Holton argues that we should admit a notion of partial intention into our moral psychology ("Partial Belief, Partial Intention", Mind 117[2008]:27-58). However, Holton's idea is not that the degree of the intention simply co-varies with the agent's degree of confidence of success; rather, an intention is partial "iff it is designed to achieve a given end E and it is accompanied by one or more alternative intentions also designed to achieve E" (41). That is, the intention is partial if the agent has a competing plan for accomplishing the same end. This is a different idea than the notion of degrees of intention I am objecting to here.
16. Of course, we would tend to qualify the expression of this intention by saying that he intends to try to clench his fist. But this is no reason to think that what he intends is something other than simply doing what it normally takes to clench one's fist if nothing prevents it. David Pears points out that evidence for this is provided by the fact that if his fist does not clench, he would not say that he had done what he intended, as he should if his intention was merely to try to clench his fist ("Intention and Belief", in Essays on Davidson, ed. B. Vermazen and M. Hintikka [Oxford: Clarendon, 1985], 86).
17. But why could we not simply say that we intend whatever we are most confident we will do? This would allow one's degree of confidence to vary, while maintaining that intention is bivalent-one either intends or one doesn't. The problem here is that the agent may well be more confident that he will not do what he intends. If intention is bound up with the agent's goals-what the agent is disposed to track with his action and practical reasoning-then there is nothing to rule out intending an action one is less than 50 percent confident one will perform. Perhaps this is the state the recently paralyzed agent is in; he is committed to the end of clenching his fist and thereby to doing what it normally takes to clench his fist and nothing else incompatible with that. But his doubt that he will raise it may exceed his confidence. Plausibly, one must believe it possible to perform an action in order to intend it, but I know of no independent reason why one must believe one's odds are at least even-and if they are even, does one intend both to φ and not to φ? Essentially, the above proposal requires that we make intention supervene on the agent's confidence level, whereas the independent grasp we have on the functional role of intention does not appear to have such a requirement. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this question.
18. Grice, "Intention and Uncertainty", 278.
19. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 393.
20. As noted, this is essentially Velleman's strategy. Setiya is not persuaded that the promise of post hoc support can justify the formation of an intention, but if intentions are self-fulfilling, this at least shows why we should expect the belief to be true.
21. "And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall" (William James, "The Will to Believe", in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy [New York: Longman, 1897], 1-31, 25).
22. One might have a Weak Cognitivist view on which the belief involved in intending is evidentially based on the practical component of the attitude. This was Grice's view; he thought that the belief component of intention was justified by the agent's knowledge of his willing, plus his knowledge of what he is able to do if he wills it and is not prevented.
23. For a comprehensive review of the symptoms associated with this disorder, see C. M. Fisher, "Alien Hand Phenomena: A Review with the Addition of Six Personal Cases", Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences 27(2000):192-203. This example is loosely adapted from a scenario of Christopher Peacocke's (Holistic Explanation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 89). Peacocke's example does not concern Alien Hand Syndrome but, rather, a hypothetical disorder in which the subject's intentions ordinarily get scrambled unless a certain substance is fortuitously present in his brain. Thanks to Michael Bratman for pointing me to this example.
24. As I have argued in other work, this kind of view need not claim that our beliefs about what we are doing (or will do) intentionally are observational, in the sense that would conflict with Anscombe's idea that we tend to have "nonobservational" knowledge of what we do intentionally ("How We Know What We're Doing", unpublished manuscript, Stanford University). Though they would be based on evidence, the evidence would not be observational evidence concerning what one's body seems to be bringing about; it is the evidence provided by one's intention. I am not claiming that this kind of inferential view is the only alternative to cognitivism about intention; there may be other possible views that do not fall into the category of either cognitivism or inferentialism. I do think it a very natural alternative, given the independent appeal of the Distinctive Practical Attitude view of intention and the acknowledgment that there is some plausibility in Anscombe's claim (though not precisely as either she or Setiya formulates it).
25. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 404.
26. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge", 407. Notice that something peculiar arises when this hypothesis about the epistemic warrant for intention-beliefs is conjoined with the possibility mentioned in note 10 of this article-that what the agent believes about his intentional action might be limited to the fact that he is trying to φ. Presuming that intending to φ is not sufficient for trying to φ, the formation of this belief would not be exempt from requiring justification, and yet it does not seem that knowledge how to try could be what is at issue there.
27. As Bratman suggested in his comments on an earlier version of Setiya's paper at the 2006 Wake Forest Conference on Agency and Action.