![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
It is commonly assumed in the philosophical literature that in order to acquire an intention, the agent has to settle a question of what to do in practical deliberation. Carruthers, P. (2007, “The Illusion of Conscious Will.” Synthese 159: 197–213) has recently used this to argue that the acquisition of intentions can never be conscious even in cases where the agent asserts having the intention in inner speech. Because of that Carruthers also believes that knowledge of intentions even in first person cases is observational. This paper explores the challenge Carruthers’ argument throws up for accounts that also rely on the notion of settling a question for intention acquisition, but who also want to maintain at the same time that knowledge of intentions in the first person case is not observational.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Tillmann Vierkant took his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich. He works now as a Senior Lecturer at the Philosophy Department of the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in theory of mind, mental action, and the nature of conscious volition.
Notes
1. And other propositional attitudes, but there is a large and specific literature on intentions. For this reason, this paper focuses on intentions, but similar arguments could be made for, for example, beliefs.
2. This seems very intuitive, but it has been challenged in the philosophical literature. Some philosophers argue that we can directly perceive the mental states of others (e.g. Gallagher Citation2008; Gallagher and Varga Citation2014).
3. Even the name reflects the worry. The debate used to be known as the theory of mind debate, but people were worried that this seemed to prejudge that mindreading really is a theoretical activity.
4. Or at least very shallow. Theory theorist Alison Gopnik (e.g. Gopnik & Wellman, Citation1992) explains the intuition of the self-other gap with the fact that we are experts about our own mentality. Like chess experts might feel that they can directly see mate in three, when we know that this seeing is built on the intense practice of the relevant inferences it seems to us that we directly know which mental states we are in, when in reality we know this because of highly automatised inferences.
5. Mele argues that this is because in Libet's veto experiments subjects are clearly settled on not moving, so the conscious urge to move they have before they abort the movement cannot be an intention to move, because subjects were always settled on not moving.
6. Hieronymi discusses the structural similarity at length in her 2008 Reason for Believing.
7. Thanks to Mike Ridge for reminding me to clarify the akrasia point.
8. To be clear: I am emphasising here the point that Carruthers does argue that self-knowledge of intentions is observational just as the knowledge of the attitudes of others and that is the critical point under discussion here. However, he does argue as well that in the case of self-knowledge the system has access to more material to make the inference, because we are, for example, introspectively aware of our inner speech.
9. Shepherd (Citation2013) runs the argument that confabulating the motives for your decision does do nothing to show that you were not aware of the decision. While the findings discussed under the zombie challenge might show that it is possible to modulate a decision with unconscious influences this does not show that the decision itself was not conscious. While it, for example, might be possible to influence a moral decision like whether to help a stranger or not by priming them unconsciously this does not mean that the decision of whether to help or not is unconscious (see Bayne Citation2013 for a similar argument). That is an important clarification, but these studies are not therefore unimportant, because they undermine the idea that these conscious states are real decisions, because decisions are supposed to cause action, but here it looks as if the state that the agent is not aware of produces the action (whether to help or not) and the conscious event seems to have little influence. Obviously, this is no knock-down argument, because the conscious events could play an important role, but it puts the onus on the consciousness defender, if it looks as if the story could also work without it.
10. In The Opacity of Mind, Carruthers makes the further evolutionary observation why this outward directedness also predicts that humans would have understood other minds first. Humans live in highly complex social environments, where one crucial element of the environment that the individual has to cope with is the other human. Being able to predict the behavior of conspecifics is here clearly a great advantage (p. 64–66).
11. But not uncontroversial see, for example, Keren and Schul (Citation2009).
12. Shepherd (Citation2014), for example, argues that being able to form an intention on whether or not to continue to deliberate is an important advantage of conscious decision-making.
13. Carruthers has a very elaborate account of what he sees as the right cognitive architecture for this self-interpretation process involving, for example, an unconscious mind reading module. But as far as I see the argument does not depend on accepting this architecture. As the argument is stronger anyway if it does not require a specific and highly contested architecture I do not discuss this architecture here.
14. Obviously, these results are controversial and even if we were to take them at face value they would still not show that neuroscientists could know of all intentions before the subject. Thanks to Leon de Bruin for pushing me on this point. Still it might seem worrying enough that neuroscientists know about a large class of intentions earlier than the conscious subject and at least for those intentions Carruthers claim seems to be borne out by empirical studies already. Carruthers argument is supposed to give us a reason to suspect that this holds not only for those limited cases but for all intentions.
15. So if Carruthers is right, then the point that Kloosterboer (Citation2015) makes for emotions actually would hold for intentions as well. Knowing about our intentions does at least have a self-referential component.
16. For a very similar point, see Shepherd (Citation2013).
17. However, it might actually fit quite nicely with recently quite popular mind-shaping accounts. The idea that our folk psychology provides us with a normative framework that orients our behaviour (Pettit and McGeer Citation2002; Zawidzki Citation2008) fits quite nicely with Carruthers’ implementation idea that our conscious inner speech assertion of having an intention leads to the relevant behaviour via a desire to act according to these assertions because they are norms.
18. There seems also to be neuro-scientific evidence to back up such a view. The neuroscientist Gerhard Roth (Citation2003), for example, claims that all voluntary actions go through unconscious censorship that is concerned with two questions, whether the action is better than any other action and whether the intended action is appropriate.
19. See, for example, Bayne (Citation2006) for a similar point.
20. Thanks to Dave Ward, Josh Shepherd and Suilin Lavelle who all raised this important issue.
21. Importantly, Hieronymi does not think that any assertions or other intentional actions can be what settles a question. Settling a question is according to Hieronymi an evaluative not an intentional activity. So, asserting an answer to a question is a way of finding out whether a person has settled a question. It is not the question settling itself.
22. That is, the crucial characteristic of intentions is that they are directly linked to the execution of the action, in contrast to other attitudes such as beliefs and desires whose role in practical deliberation can be detached from any potential behaviour.
23. It would however be still possible that we have special agentive unconscious knowledge of our intentions. This would have interesting consequences for the importance of those unconscious states for moral agency. I explore this option in a forthcoming paper.
24. Schwitzgebel in fact makes this point in the context of self-knowledge of beliefs in a Citation2011 paper. While I am happy to accept his pluralist approach for belief, intentions with their executive dimension seem to demand a special treatment.
25. Obviously, there is also a different conclusion that one could draw from this paper. If it is the case that the notion of settling a question is less clear than we thought it was, then perhaps it was a mistake in the first place to rely too much on it. It might, for example, be the case that there are different types of intentions and perhaps the idea of settling a question applies only to some or even none of them. The idea of motor intentions as suggested by Pacherie (e.g. Citation2006) looks like a prime candidate here. I am happy to accept that that is a possibility. But given how important the notion is in the philosophical literature from Anscombe through to Bratman and Mele I think that would be also a very significant result. Thanks to Leon de Bruin for pressing me on this.