Abstract
The natural first step on the road to an adequate systematic understanding of intending, taken in Chap. 6, is a discussion of intention’s relation to belief. This is natural for two reasons. First, the linguistic means of intention expression have a grammatically assertoric form and second, belief may appear to be precisely what needs adding to optative attitudinising in order to generate intention. After discussing forms of intention’s expression, and noting that the English language provides different means of expressing intention’s formation and its possession, I discuss and reject attempts to understand intention’s “supra-optative” commitment component in doxastic terms, which take the assertoric form of typical intention expressions literally. I also reject the positions of Anscombe and Velleman, for whom intention can be identified with either an epistemic or doxastic attitude. Rather, intention, I claim, in agreement with Bratman and Mele, has only an extremely weak negative doxastic condition. What is decisive is, however, the explanation of this condition. Here I follow Aristotle, for whom the doxastic condition on prohairesis derives from the identical doxastic condition on the practical deliberation through which the attitude is generated. The key here is the practical character of practical deliberation, that is, its performance in order to generate an action-controlling attitude. This, I claim, accounts for closely related conceptual and rational doxastic conditions on deliberative intending. These are then distinguished from intending’s typical doxastic symptoms, which, according to social psychological studies, may be at least in part caused subpersonally by our decisions or by our planning to implement decisions. I conclude that the discussion of belief, rather than uncovering the completing conditions that transform an optative into an executive attitude, on the contrary, indicates that the step into commitment will have to be explained by different means.
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Notes
- 1.
Hobbes doesn’t distinguish between the two criteria.
- 2.
The irreducibility thesis is advanced in Hampshire (1970, 131), Harman (1975/76, 432; 1986a, 78ff.; 1986b, 367), O’Shaughnessy (1980II, 310), Brand (1984, 126f.; 1986, 221), Bratman (1987, 10, 20, 110, 121; 1999a, 110), Heckhausen and Gollwitzer (1987, 103), Bishop (1989, 113ff.), Mele (1992a, 154ff.; 1995a; 71ff.), McCann (1986b, 128ff.), Tuomela (1995, 54) and Holton (2009, 17ff.). The introduction of the irreducibility thesis into contemporary philosophy of action seems in part to have resulted from the reception within the mainstream causal action theory inaugurated by Brandt and Kim (1963), Davidson (1963) and Goldman (1970) of the orthogonal conceptions of Sellars (1966, 17) and Castañeda (1975, 274, 290). According to Sellars and Castañeda, desires or wants are definable as dispositions to intend, intending being the primitive, genuinely practical attitude that can be most closely seen to parallel belief. Both Brand and Bratman contributed early essays on intention to a volume presented to Castañeda (Tomberlin 1983). Cf. also Brand’s defence of Sellars against Davidson in (Brand 1989, 424ff.).
- 3.
Von Wright (1971, 96ff.), Harman (1975/76, 438; 1986a, 94; 1986b, 368ff.), Kim (1976, 255f.), Bratman (1985, 223; 1987, 4, 10, 15ff., 27, 61f., 108ff.; 1999a, 2), Heckhausen and Kuhl (1985, 150ff.), McCann (1986b, 131; 1991, 197f.), Velleman (1989, 111f.; 2000b, 25), Gollwitzer (1990, 57; 1996, 292; 1996, 493), Mele (1992a, 158ff.; 1995a, 71f.; 2000 100) and Wallace (2001, 107).
- 4.
- 5.
The most straightforward theory of this kind was advanced by Monroe Beardsley (1978, 176ff.), for whom an intention is “a co-referring want-belief pair”. A more complex proposal is that of Robert Audi (1973b, 64f.; 1986, 18; 1991, 362), who sees the basic intention-constitutive attitudes as the agent’s belief that she will perform the relevant action and a want to do so that is motivationally unrivalled, except where the status of some motivationally equal or stronger want is epistemically obscured. A third “belief-desire” reduction, proposed by Wayne Davis (1984, 147), sees intention not as a conjunction of the two attitude types, but as an expectation concerning one’s future action caused by a desire to perform that action.
- 6.
Irreducibility theorists with a position along these lines with regards to belief are Bratman (1987, 37ff.) and Mele (1992a, 140, 146ff.), both of whom claim that there is at most a weak doxastic requirement on intending. Holton (2009, 47ff.) suggests that intention irreducibly conceived may require no belief condition at all.
- 7.
The former position is illustrated by Harman (1975/76, 432ff.; 1986a, 90ff.). Fishbein and Ajzen (1975, 12f.), Davis (1984), Velleman (1989, 109ff.) and Setiya (2007, 664) all suggest that intentions can be identified with beliefs with a specific function, content or genesis. Anscombe (1957, 87), Hampshire and Hart (1958, 11ff.) and Hampshire (1970, 134) see intention as intimately bound up with a form of “knowledge”. Hampshire sees the relevant knowledge as possessed “in virtue of having formed firm intentions” (Hampshire 1975, 53) and thus as presupposing intention. He takes the concept of intention as “fundamental and unanalysed” (Hampshire 1970, 131). Anscombe, in contrast, may be identifying practical knowledge and intention (cf. Anscombe 1957, 87), although she thinks of neither as mental states.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
John Broome claims that the possibility of using the same indicative sentence to express a belief or an intention is sufficient evidence that expressing an intention is also expressing a belief (Broome 2009, 80). This is much too quick.
- 11.
David Velleman has claimed that a cognitive conception of intention is supported by the fact that hearing an agent express an intention licenses the hearer to expect a corresponding action (Velleman 2007, 207). Such license need, however, by no means depend on a conceptual connection. On Velleman’s particular brand of cognitivism, see Section 6.3.1 below and Roughley (2007b).
- 12.
As with other optative attitudes (cf. Sect. 5.2.1), we cannot read off the expressive or ascriptive character of an utterance referring to intentions from mere linguistic form. The distinction between the linguistic means of intention expression and self-ascription only concerns characteristic cases.
- 13.
In Gollwitzer’s use (1996, 287ff.; 1999, 493ff.), “planning” seems to be more or less equivalent to the formation of subordinate intentions of a highly specific type: what he calls “implementation intentions”. These are intentions whose content is indexed with fairly concrete specifications of the conditions – in particular the time and place – under which the superordinate intention is to be realised.
- 14.
Michael Bratman’s analysis of the concept of intention runs under the heading “the planning theory of intention”, according to which to intend is necessarily to plan. Bratman (1987, 29) defines plans as “mental states involving an appropriate sort of commitment to action”. At the same time, he sees plans as more complex than “relatively simple intentions”. These two claims are compatible from a functionalist perspective, for which the essence of intending consists precisely in its characteristic involvement with farther-reaching dispositional – and, in Bratman’s conception, normative – structures seen as constitutive of the commitment at the core of plans.
A second sense of “plan”, in which plans are sometimes claimed to be constitutive of intentions is that of a representational structure involving both an aim and a way of realising that aim. According to this suggestion, one of the peculiarities of intentions is precisely that their contents are necessarily plans. In other words, the representation of the way or means in which the aim is to be achieved is not the content of a further subordinate intention. For this use, see Brand (1984) 153f., (1986) 213ff. Mele (1992a, 144) follows Brand. However, he also claims (1992a, 136) that the “plan” component that constitutes an intention’s content can be the mere representation of a basic action. This would seem to make “plan” simply the term for intention’s content, whatever that might be.
- 15.
W. Sellars (1966, 105ff.) proposed the technical use of “shall” as an expression of what he took to be the irreducible attitude of intention, which he contrasted with “will” as the expression of a predictive belief (cf. Grice 1971, 271). In both points – that is, in the combination of the technical device for intention expression and the irreducibility thesis – Sellars has been followed by McCann (1986b, 134) and Brandom (1994, 245ff.). Using “shall” as the general expression for the state of intending is, however, somewhat misleading because of the fact that it is characteristically used to express intention formation, whereas we use other devices to express or refer to antecedently formed intentions.
- 16.
Cf. note 7 above.
- 17.
- 18.
The personal pronoun in the content of the agent’s belief refers directly, unmediated by the representation of properties, to the attitude’s bearer. This is the same representational format at work in being motivated (cf. Sect. 2.3.2).
- 19.
Most of the positions that are logically possible have been advanced. For B1: see Sellars (1966, 126), Kaufman (1966, 39), Chisholm (1970, 644ff.), Grice (1971, 278), Fishbein and Ajzen (1975, 12), Harman (1975/76, 432ff.; 1986a, 90ff.), Kim (1976, 259f.), O’Shaughnesy (1980, II, 305), Pears (1985), Velleman (1989, 109; 1996, 195; 2007, 204ff.), Setiya (2007, 663f.), Broome (2009, 79ff.); for B2: Audi (1973b, 65; 1986, 25ff.; 1991, 362), Davis (1984, 134ff.); for B3: O’Shaughnessy (1980II, 305), Adams (1986, 288); for a weakened variant of B3, “the belief that it may be possible to” φ: Peacocke (1985, 71); For BA: Armstrong (1968, 149f.), Hampshire (1970, 134) and Wallace (2001, 105f.); for BM: von Wright (1971, 101ff.) (who doesn’t differentiate between BA and BM). For negative conditions, see Mele (1992a, 146ff.), Bratman (1987, 17f.; 38ff.; 1999a, 241) and Brand (1986, 214ff.).
- 20.
- 21.
These are the kinds of case that led Grice to introduce the pragmatic concept of implicature (Grice 1967/87, 4, 9). I stated, very briefly, in Section 3.2.1 why I don’t think that the perspective-relative doubt brought into play by talk of trying is merely implicated, rather than conceptually entailed. This will be important in Section 7.2.1.
- 22.
The content of the excluded belief can, alternatively, be thought of as specifying a form of agent-relative modality: the impossibility-for-me of my φ-ing against the background of certain assumptions I have no disposition to question. We will return to this point in the discussion of the intention-consequential requirements in 7.2.
- 23.
The same is surely true of actions appropriately seen by their agents as tryings. This is argued by O’Shaughnessy (1980II, 40), Hornsby (1980, 40f.) and Adams (1986, 288). Mele apparently believes this is not so: he thinks that an agent can (intend to) try to hit each of two targets, where he knows it is technically impossible to hit both, as in Bratman’s video arcade case (Mele 2003b, 130).
- 24.
For an explanation of the difference that I am appealing to intuitively at this stage, see Section 8.5.3.
- 25.
The “unconscious inferential mechanisms” discussed in Section 5.1.6 should thus not be seen as driving forms of practical deliberation. There is inference without deliberation.
- 26.
As the bulk of recent research here has focussed on the effects of detailed planning, there is some unclarity as to how many of these effects result from the mere decision that sets the end, the means to which are subsequently planned. The “implemental mind set” is “induced” through mere decisions in the early studies Heckhausen and Gollwitzer (1986, 1073), Heckhausen and Gollwitzer (1987, 104), Beckmann and Gollwitzer (1987, 265ff.) and Gollwitzer and Kinney (1989, 532ff.).
- 27.
This point is neglected in the otherwise perspicuous use Richard Holton makes of the data on “illusory optimism” (Holton 2009, 6f.).
- 28.
It should be noted that the same body of literature contains formulations that suggest the opposite view. Take the claim of Taylor and Gollwitzer (1995, 213): “The implemental mindset is assumed to induce participants to muster motivation, resources and cognitions in service of goal-directed actions”. If, as I have claimed, the mustering of motivational force is the function of wants*, such a claim can be seen as supporting the thesis that intending is indeed a special kind of wanting*.
- 29.
It is primarily these postdecisional effects, rather than the predecisional doxastic conditions, of intending that play a significant role in the inter- and intrasubjective coordination of our actions that Bratman (1987, 31f.; 38f.) sees as essential to intending. Grice (1971, 277ff.) claims that an inductively formed belief is conceptually required for intending. The belief in question is the belief that one will φ, formed on (i) the evidence of one’s having an “unrivalled” want* (“willing”) to φ, (ii) previous experience that φ-ing results from one’s willing to φ in the absence of any interference and (iii) the belief that nothing will interfere with one’s φ-ing. The conjunction of the unrivalled want* and the belief it causes he terms “intention”.
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Roughley, N. (2016). Intention, Belief and the Irreducibility Thesis. In: Wanting and Intending. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 123. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7387-4_6
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