Intentional action and the frame-of-mind argument: new experimental challenges to Hindriks

Abstract

Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgements about intentional action, Knobe [(2003). “Intentional Action and Side-Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] has claimed that these judgements are shaped by our moral judgements and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action – the “frame-of-mind condition”, according to which judgements about intentional action are about the agent’s frame-of-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this intuition Hindriks [(2008). “Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry.” The Philosophical Quarterly 58: 630–641; (2014). “Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives.” Mind & Language 29: 51–72] has proposed an alternate account of the Knobe Effect. According to his “Normative Reason account of Intentional Action”, a side-effect counts as intentional only when the agent thought it constituted a normative reason not to act but did not care. In this paper, I put Hindriks’ account to test through two new studies, the results of which suggest that Hindriks’ account should be rejected. However, I argue that the key conceptual insight behind Hindriks’ account can still be saved and integrated in future accounts of Knobe’s results.

Keywords:

• folk psychology
• Frank Hindriks
• Knobe effect
• intentional action
• NoRIA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Florian Cova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, and principal investigator in the research project “Towards an experimental philosophy of aesthetics”, funded by the Cogito Foundation. Outside of aesthetics, his main interests lie in ethics, free will, philosophy of action and philosophy of emotions. He also has a particular interest in the use of empirical methods to address traditional philosophical issues.

Notes

1. This asymmetry is also called the “side-effect effect”, for Knobe’s original experiments only bore on side-effects. Since then, the effect has been shown to hold in case of means towards one’s goals. However, since most of the literature on the topic has continued to focus on side-effects, so will this paper. Though it is not easy to give a precise definition of a side-effect, I have argued elsewhere (Cova and Naar 2012a) that one criterion to distinguish means from side-effects could be the following: an event E is a means to my goal G only if E is a necessary component of the causal explanation of my bringing about G. If it is not a component of the causal explanation, but is still an effect of my reaching G, then it is a side-effect.

2. The only known paper that directly tests for NoRIA is a paper by Lanteri (2009). However, Lanteri’s criticisms to NoRIA do not apply to the current version, which takes into account the agent’s attitudes (desire or reluctance).

3. The first case is obviously inspired from the famous “trolley dilemmas”. The inspiration for the second case comes from the Dog case in Machery (2008).

4. In Bystander, 56.8% of participants gave an answer superior to 4, against 32.6% in Saviour.

5. For example, Hindriks (2014) argues that evaluative accounts of the Knobe Effect cannot explain the famous Nazi Law pair of cases, while NoRIA can. However, in a third study I have not the space to report in this paper, I have found that NoRIA cannot explain the Nazi Law cases either: in both cases, very few participants agreed with the claim that the chairman believed that fulfilling/violating the law constituted a reason not to start the new programme. Moreover, there was no significant difference between the two cases in participants’ agreement ratings.

6. In the Harm case, 80.0% of participants gave an answer superior to 4, against 3.9% in the Help case.

7. Because these questions have already been debated at length, I admit that I rush through them here. For in-depth discussion of these accounts, see Knobe (2010) and Cova (2016).

8. I have argued elsewhere that the second and third solution are compatible (Cova 2016). Indeed, it might be the case both that “intentionally” has different meanings and that each of this meaning has a semantics similar to the semantics of gradable predicates.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) in Affective Sciences financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation [n8 51NF40-104897] and hosted by the University of Geneva.